The Books: Aspects of the Novel: ‘Introductory,’ by E.M. Forster

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Aspects of the Novel, a series of lectures by E.M. Forster.

In 1927, novelist E.M. Forster gave a series of lectures on the English novel at Trinity College in Cambridge. The lectures were so popular they were compiled into a book, and it’s still in print today. It’s a slim little volume, and it’s one of the books in my library I reference all the time. If I’m writing something on, say, Melville, or Jane Austen, or whatever … I’ll just flip through his words on the subject, to see if it jogs anything loose, or if there’s a quotation I can use, or some element I might be missing. They’re wonderfully concise, these lectures, and he has a unique attitude, one that is extremely refreshing, especially in our post-post-post-modern world. Here he was, giving lectures in the first post-modern phase … and people like Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were bursting forward as new and important voices. (Proust, too … but since Forster focused on English-speaking writers, we’ll leave Proust out. Forster has a lot to say about novelists from other traditions, and how the English hold up next to them. They do not fare particularly well, according to Forster. He seems almost relieved to leave Dostoevsky or Tolstoy out, because nobody can compare to them, in his estimation.)

Forster expresses mild irritation (everything is somewhat mild with him) at the categorization of literature, or the over-categorization, more like. Chronology is the first problem, as he sees it: novels get grouped together by their publication date, and then scholars (or “pseudo-scholars” as he calls them) pontificate on what the time period meant, and how literature “was” in that time period, and it’s all just so neat and tidy and perfect, and so the grand sweep of literature is lost. Forster also lampoons the categorization impulse, scholars who group together books that have to do with certain topics: religion, industry, love, small-town life, whatever. (It’s so insanely out of control at this point that the canon has no coherence whatsoever. Everything is compartmentalized into its own grouping.) Scholars like the categorization impulse because it neatens out the playing-field (and justifies their own jobs.) In the film critic world, the whole “auteurist” thing sometimes goes in that direction, and entire film-makers or actors or films are basically ignored because they don’t fit into the auteur narrative. It drives me insane. But moving on.

Forster opens with an introductory lecture on how he wishes to proceed. He realizes that the common way to discuss literature is through chronology and categorization. He does not want to do that and he wants to challenge his listeners to resist the impulse as well. He wants to discuss the seven different “aspects” of the novel: story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. These “aspects” exist in every great novel, in all different chronologies, in comedies, tragedies, realism, farce, etc. I suppose you could say these “aspects” are Forster’s way of categorizing, but he takes an interesting tactic. Throughout the lectures, he reads two excerpts from two different novels, back to back. He does not reveal the authors of each, although sometimes it is immediately apparent. It’s basically a blind sample. After he reads the two excerpts, he reveals the authors/novels from which the excerpts came, and moves onto a discussion. Often, the books excerpted from have 150 years or more between them. But Forster’s point is that if we could resist chronology, we could start to see English literature as a whole. I tend to agree with him. I was not an English major, I was an Acting major. I grew up in a family that loved books, and I had very good English teachers in high school. But I probably would have come to all the great books even if I hadn’t had great English teachers, merely because my parents were well-read and books were a part of our lives. My point is that I did not come to literature through academia. Once I left high school, I barely took an English class. I took a couple of poetry classes in college, and a Shakespeare class. I read on my own. I read widely and wildly, veering from Stephen King to Thomas Hardy. I still do that. I love it. And that type of anarchic reading list brings forward connections that might be missed in a more academic or compartmentalized context. That seems to be part of Forster’s point. It’s been a while since I’ve read the book in its entirety, although his lecture on Moby Dick is one of the best things I’ve ever read on that novel, and I have quoted from it often.

Forster’s book is well worth checking out: it’s a little book, you could read it in a couple of days, and it’s a refreshing outlook, vigorous and vital. There’s much to argue with here too, as Forster acknowledges. You may say, “Hey, but I like that book” that he dismisses, or “I hate that book” that he loves. If total agreement is your only measure of whether or not a human being is worth listening to, or if you veer away from “discredited tropes” because you don’t want to sully your precious post-post-modern enlightenment, you’ve got some problems. Forster doesn’t seem to be a big Dickens fan, for example. I’m like, “DUDE. COME ON.” But still, he brings some interesting analysis to the table, things well worth considering. (The same is true for George Orwell’s magnificent huge essay on Dickens. It’s really good stuff, but he also looks at it from a purely Socialist standpoint in many respects, missing the humor entirely. Like, can’t these books just be fun, George? No? Still: well worth reading!) Forster’s feelings on Joyce are well-documented: he admits Ulysses‘ massive status (and remember, these lectures were in 1927, when the novel was still banned in most places), but he finds the whole thing rather distasteful. To quote the final line of Some Like It Hot:

Here, in his introductory lecture, Forster lays out how he would like to proceed. The image he mentions repeatedly is that the authors he is going to discuss are not to be seen as falling along a timeline at different markers. The way he would like to view them is as sitting in a room, all writing their books at the same exact moment in time.

Exciting, yes?

I also like these lectures because you can hear him speaking. They are chatty.

Excerpt from Aspects of the Novel: ‘Introductory,’ by E.M. Forster

That is why, in the rather ramshackle course that lies ahead of us, we cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and which (we shall discover next week) is sometimes their enemy too. “Oh, what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men,” cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death but in the byways of literary creation and criticism. Let us avoid it by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words, because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the furniture of the method we are discarding.

They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. We approach the first pair, and read as follows:

1. I don’t know what to do – not I. God forgive me, but I am very impatient! I wish – but I don’t know what to wish without a sin. Yet I wish it would please God to take me to his mercy! – I can meet with none here. – What a world is this ! – What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And one half of mankind tormenting the other and being tormented themselves in tormenting.

2. What I hate is myself – when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the loves of others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat one’s self and to stop one’s mouth – but that is only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making us somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. It’s what plays you least false.

It is obvious that here sit two novelists who are looking at life from much the same angle, yet the first of them is Samuel Richardson, and the second you will have already identified as Henry James. Each is an anxious rather than an ardent psychologist. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice; each falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made. A sort of tremulous nobility – that is the spirit that dominates them – and oh how well they write! – not a word out of place in their copious flows. A hundred and fifty years of time divide them, but are not they close together in other ways, and may not their neighborliness profit us? Of course as I say this I hear Henry James beginning to express his regret – no, not his regret but his surprise – no, not even his surprise but his awareness that neighborliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he add, in relation to a shopkeeper. And I hear Richardson, equally cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside England can be chaste. But these are surface differences, are indeed no differences at all, but additional points of contact. We leave them sitting in harmony, and proceed to our next pair.