aspects of the novel

E.M. FORSTER ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL ble and delightful reflection of the mind." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW F orster's renowned guide to writing sparkles with wit and insight for contemporary writers and readers. With lively lan- guage and excerpts from well-known classics, Forster takes on the seven elements vital to a novel: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. He not only defines and explains such terms as "round" characters versus "flat" characters (and why both are needed for an effective novel), but also provides examples of writing from such literary greats as Dickens and Austen. Forster's original commentary illuminates and entertains without lapsing into compli- cated, scholarly rhetoric, coming together in a key volume on writing by a novelist Graham Greene called a "gentle genius." "Forster's casual and wittily acute guidance transmutes the dull stuff of He-said and She-said into characters, stories, and intimations of truth." —JACQUES BARZUN. Harper's "A shining epitome Potent, daring, explicit, and personal." —PAUL WEST, author of r Ihe Secret Lives of Words EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER was born in 1879 in London and attended King's College, Cambridge, where he later became an hon- orary Fellow. After leaving Cambridge, Forster lived in Greece and Italy as well as Egypt and India. He is the author of six novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice, A Passage to India, and The Longest Journey, as well as numerous essays and short-story collections. He died in 1970 in Coventry, England. Cover photograph © Stone/Paul Taylor Cover design by Claudine Guerguerian A HARVEST BOOK HARCOURT INC www. HarcourtBooks. com ISBN 0-15-609180-1 $13.00 51300> 9"780156"09180 ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL E. M. Forster, one of England's most distinguished writers, was born in 1879 and attended King's College, Cambridge, of which he was an honorary Fellow. He was named to membership in the Order of Companions of Honor by the Queen in 1953. He wrote his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, at twenty-six, fol- lowed by A Room with a View in 1908, Howards End in 1910, and other novels and critical essays. These in- elude A Passage to India (1924), Aspects of the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for Democ- racy (1951), The Hill of Devi (1953), and Marianne Thornton, the biography of his great-aunt (1956). Two books have been published since his death in 1970: Maurice (1972) and The Life to Come and Other Stories O973)- E. M. FORSTER Aspects of the Novel A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC. SAN DIEGO NEW YORK LONDON Copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc. Copyright renewed 1955 by E. M. Forster All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970. Aspects of the novel. "A Harvest book." 1. Fiction. 2. English fiction-History and criticism. I. Title. PN3353.F6 1985 808.3 84-22498 ISBN 0-15-609180-1 (pbk.) Printed in the United States of America XX YY ww To CHARLES MAURON [...]... 1848 T h e novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the prenovel, the ur -novel, the novel of the future Classification by subject matter—sillier still T h e literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women's Movement, beginning with Shirley; 11 ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Cru­ soe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues— dreariest of all,... shelf Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader In other words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells A n d there are other parallels—for instance their method of drawing character,... and bows of black in the best possible taste She tied up the knocker with black crêpe, and put a large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and swathed the bust of Mr Gladstone that had belonged to the deceased with inky swathings She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli and the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes were hidden and only the plain... dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex (perhaps the most de­ voted of the Home Counties); improper books—a serious though dreadful branch of inquiry, only to be pursued by pseudo-scholars of riper years, novels re­ lating to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the weather I include the weather on the authority of the most amazing work on the novel that I have... tradition of Trollope, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley." T h e fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that "after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again," none of them understand... the only way of dis­ covering what they contain A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west T h e reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudoscholar will not do He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some 13 ASPECTS OF. .. take a flutter from it, and settle on it again They combine a humorous appre­ ciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty There is even the same tone in their voices— a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they *9 ASPECTS OF T H E NOVEL are going No doubt their scales of value are not the same Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia... edifices, and we shall see and respect them for what they are if we stand them for an instant in the colonnades of War and Peace, or the vaults of The Brothers Karamazov I shall not often refer to foreign novels in these lectures, still less would I pose as an expert on them who is debarred from discussing them by his terms of reference But I do want to emphasize their great­ ness before we start; to... writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most They may decide to write a novel 20 INTRODUCTORY upon the French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions, rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they re­ read, someone else seems to have been holding their pen and to have relegated their theme to the back­ ground... are describing them from the same point of view and even using the same tricks of style (cf the two vases and the two decanters) They are, both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details and whisking the page over irritably They are generous-minded; they hate shams and enjoy be­ ing indignant about them; they are valuable social reformers; they have no notion of confining books . and other novels and critical essays. These in- elude A Passage to India (1924), Aspects of the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for Democ- racy (1951), The Hill of. ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL 4 now not only taken Orders but become Public Ora- tor, and he was, above all, travelling with Dr. Thompson, the then Master of the college, who was not at all the. you think of an alternative defini- tion, which will include The Pilgrim's Progress, Marius the Epicurean, The Adventures of a Younger Son, The Magic Flute, The Journal of the Plague,