Aspects of the Novel

Citation

Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Free official edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70492

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Aspects of the Novel prints the Clark Lectures that E. M. Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927; a prefatory note says their talkative tone has been kept. The lectureship asked for "some period or periods of English Literature", and Forster refuses both halves of the brief: he will not ignore Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust, and he will not proceed by chronology. Instead he imagines all novelists writing at once in a single circular room, under the motto "History develops, Art stands still", which he admits is only a partial truth.

He takes seven "aspects" in turn: the story, people, the plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm. The idea running through the course is that every novel contains two forces, human beings and "a bundle of various things not human beings", which the novelist must reconcile. Each aspect is defined partly by what it asks of the reader: curiosity for story, a sense of value for people, intelligence and memory for plot.

Chapter I: Introductory

Forster adopts Abel Chevalley's definition of the novel as a prose fiction of a certain extent, adding a lower limit of 50,000 words. Three unattributed pairs of passages (Richardson and Henry James, Wells and Dickens, Sterne and Virginia Woolf) show writers centuries apart sharing an angle of vision. He mocks "pseudo-scholarship" that classifies novels by date or subject, including a manual that sorted fictional weather into nine kinds.

Chapter II: The Story

The story is a narrative of events in their time-sequence, whose only merit is making the reader want to know what happens next: the lowest literary organism, yet the factor common to all novels, as Scheherazade shows. Forster separates the "life in time" from the "life by values" and argues that no novel can abandon time. A paraphrase of Scott's The Antiquary shows a storyteller at work, and Gertrude Stein's attempt to abolish time is judged instructive but doomed.

Chapter III: People

Forster compares Homo Sapiens with Homo Fictus through five facts of life: birth, food, sleep, love and death. In novels babies arrive "like parcels", sleep is perfunctory and love is far more prominent than in life. Unlike the historian, the novelist can reveal the hidden life, so characters can be known completely, which is why novels console. Moll Flanders is the example of a novel in which one character is everything.

Chapter IV: People (continued)

This lecture turns to characters' relation to the rest of the book. Flat characters are built around a single idea and can be summed up in one sentence (Mrs Micawber); round ones pass the test of surprising "in a convincing way". A close look at one sentence about Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park shows Austen moving a character from flat to round and back. On point of view, Forster argues against Percy Lubbock that what matters is the novelist's power to "bounce" the reader, as Dickens does in Bleak House.

Chapter V: The Plot

A plot is a narrative with the emphasis on causality: "The king died, and then the queen died of grief." It invites "why?" rather than "and then?" and needs intelligence, memory and mystery. Forster praises Meredith's contrivances, argues that Hardy sacrifices his characters to causality, and notes that most novels "go off at the end" because the plot must be wound up. Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs closes the lecture as a deliberate attack on plot.

Chapter VI: Fantasy

Fantasy and prophecy cut across the earlier aspects "like a bar of light". Fantasy asks the reader to "pay something extra" and accept the supernatural or its absence; Tristram Shandy, whose hidden god is Muddle, is the central case, followed by Flecker's Magic, Zuleika Dobson and, under parody or adaptation, Joseph Andrews, Lowes Dickinson's The Magic Flute and Ulysses.

Chapter VII: Prophecy

Prophecy is "a tone of voice" that demands humility and the suspension of the sense of humour. Contrasting a prison scene in Adam Bede with Mitya's dream in The Brothers Karamazov, Forster separates the preacher from the prophet. He names only four prophetic novelists, Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë, and gives most space to Moby Dick and Billy Budd.

Chapter VIII: Pattern and Rhythm

Pattern, borrowed from painting, lets the reader see a book as a whole: Anatole France's Thaïs is an hourglass, and so is James's The Ambassadors, analysed at length, where Strether and Chad change places. Its cost is that James cuts away most of human life, a point supported by Wells's parody in Boon. Rhythm, borrowed from music, is "repetition plus variation", illustrated by Vinteuil's "little phrase" in Proust. Forster closes with "expansion", not completion, as the ideal, citing War and Peace.

Chapter IX: Conclusion

Declining to forecast the novel's future, Forster asks only whether human nature, and so the creative process, might change if people learn to see themselves in a new way.

Key Concepts

Chapters I–II: Introductory; The Story

• The circular room: all novelists imagined writing at the same moment, a device for setting aside chronology and influence.
• Pseudo-scholarship: classifying books by period or subject instead of reading them.
• Life in time and life by values: the two allegiances of daily life, both of which a good novel honours.

Chapters III–IV: People

• Homo Fictus: the fictional human being, who can be known more completely than any real person.
• Flat and round characters: types built around one idea, as against characters able to surprise convincingly.
• "Bouncing" the reader: the novelist's power to make shifts of viewpoint acceptable, which Forster ranks above consistency.

Chapter V: The Plot

• Plot: a narrative with the emphasis on causality, asking "why?".
• Mystery: a "pocket in time" the reader must hold in memory until it is explained.

Chapters VI–VII: Fantasy; Prophecy

• Fantasy: the aspect that asks the reader to accept the supernatural or its absence.
• Prophecy: a bardic tone in which characters reach out towards the universal.

Chapters VIII–IX: Pattern and Rhythm; Conclusion

• Pattern: the shape of a book as a whole, which may cost the novel much of its humanity.
• Rhythm: repetition plus variation, stitching a book together from within.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A durable vocabulary. The distinctions between story and plot and between flat and round characters are each stated in a sentence and tested on concrete cases, short enough to remember and flexible enough to use.
• Argument through examples. Each lecture works from passages: the paired extracts, The Antiquary, the Lady Bertram sentence, Adam Bede against Karamazov, The Ambassadors. Students see a critic reading closely and can test his claims.
• Freedom from the period survey. Setting chronology aside lets Forster compare Richardson with James and Sterne with Woolf while keeping the Russian and French novelists in view.
• A practising novelist's questions. How to end a book, how to keep characters under control, how far to explain them: these are a writer's problems, discussed openly.

Limitations

• Personal by design. Many judgments are matters of taste (the dismissal of Scott, the severity on Ulysses, the preference for Wells over James) and should be read as positions, not findings.
• Few systematic definitions. Fantasy, prophecy and rhythm are illustrated more than defined; Forster admits he can name only four prophets and cannot find a fictional equivalent of a symphony's rhythm as a whole.
• A 1927 frame of reference. Several examples were then recent, Proust's novel was not yet fully published, and the corpus is mainly English with French and Russian comparisons.
• Assumes wide reading. Readers who do not know Austen, Dickens, Meredith, James, Tolstoy or Proust will follow the argument but miss much of its force.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the course on the novel, Forster pairs naturally with David Lodge's The Art of Fiction: both are novelists' guides to technique, but Lodge's short essays each take one device and illustrate it with a passage, so Forster supplies the large categories and Lodge the finer mechanics. Marina MacKay's The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel is a modern, structured overview with a glossary and further reading, useful as a map before or after Forster.

The historical and theoretical books address what Forster deliberately refuses. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel explains the form's emergence in eighteenth-century England through social and economic history, exactly the "period" approach Forster sets aside. Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination and Lukács's The Theory of the Novel are philosophical accounts of the genre and are easier after the concrete categories Forster provides.

How to Use This Book

The lectures suit first-year students of the novel, general readers and writers of fiction. No theory is needed, but some acquaintance with the novelists Forster uses most (Austen, Dickens, Defoe, Meredith, Henry James, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Proust) makes them far more rewarding.

• Core: Chapters II–V (story, the two lectures on people, plot), read in order, since each builds on the last.
• Next: Chapter VIII, which returns to the main scheme after the two interludes and contains the analysis of The Ambassadors.
• Optional at first: Chapters VI–VII, which Forster calls interludes; read them alongside Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights.
• Frame: Chapters I and IX explain the method and its limits and repay rereading at the end.

Test each concept on a novel in hand: write the one-sentence formula for a flat character, turn a stretch of story into plot by asking "why", or follow a recurring motif to see whether it works as rhythm. Comparing his view of point of view with Lubbock's shows that his categories are arguments, not settled definitions.

Edition and Sources

This guide is based on the full text of Aspects of the Novel in Project Gutenberg eBook #70492 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70492), which reproduces the first American edition (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927) from HathiTrust scans. The prefatory note, the contents and all nine lectures with Forster's footnotes were read in full. The Penguin Classics edition listed on this page (2005) prints the same lectures with Oliver Stallybrass's editorial introduction and appendices and a preface by Frank Kermode, which were not consulted. Project Gutenberg notes that the text is free in the United States and that readers elsewhere should check local copyright law.