MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Literary Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster

fantasyfan · 03-01-2017, 11:27 AM

Since I included this in my selection of choices, I should give some of my personal feelings about Aspects of the Novel.

I first read it shortly after I entered College at a time when my reading was predominately in science fiction. I found Forster’s book very exciting and it stimulated me to the point where I began reading more widely and finally became an English major.

Well, time has passed since then and my views have moderated somewhat though I still think this is a book anyone interested in the novel should look through at least once.

The first two chapters are quite engaging and help explain why these lectures were such a public success. Immediately afterwards Forster was offered a three year Cambridge Fellowship and later on was made an honorary life Fellow and given a permanent home in Cambridge.

The book shows its age more in Chapters 3 and 4 which deal with people. Forster’s use of “flat” and “round” characters is clever and may be useful but they probably oversimplify the complex art of characterization in a novel.

I would agree with those who feel that he sells Dickens short. I would also certainly agree that it is true that in the creation of subtle characters with psychological depth, Jane Austen is the greater artist. However, that certainly does not mean that she is a greater novelist than Dickens as Forster seems to imply. The world of Austen may be meticulously created and the characters in it superbly drawn but that world is very much a tiny slice of eighteenth century society. Only in Mansfield Park does Austen give us a glimpse of the lower classes.

On the other hand, Dickens presents an incredibly vivid panorama of Victorian England. The characters may, in Forster’s terms, be “flat” but they stand out with striking power and frequently convey an energy that helps to vivify the human condition in a way that we never see in an Austen novel. I am not saying that Dickens is a greater novelist than his predecessor, but he is certainly as great.

I think that Forster here is echoing a complaint about Dickens’s characterization technique that was common at the time and which we see repeated in F.R. Leavis as well. In fact, Dickens is capable of using a highly sophisticated narrative approach—as in Bleak House.

A great deal of work has been done on this topic since the time of Forster and you can download a free twenty-page Chicago Short by Wayne Booth entitled “What Every Novelist Needs To Know About Narrators”.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Every-Novel...ds=Wayne+Booth

Chapter Five “The Plot” is more successful. Even Leavis, who didn’t at all like the lectures, later praised the “demolition” (Leavis’s term} of Forster’s analysis of George Meredith.
More generally, Forster here begins to weave in the aesthetic dimension of the novel through the mechanism of the plot. He states:

“We come up against beauty here—for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if does not achieve it.”

This aesthetic quality will be later developed in the final chapter “Pattern and Rhythm”,

Chapter Six “Fantasy” is another relatively weak area. Forster considers the Fantasy novel to be equivalent to a side-show in a Circus. True, he does defend it in terms of what Tolkien would later elaborate as a “secondary world”:

“We all know that a work of art is an entity, etc. etc.; it has its own laws which are not those of daily life, anything that suits it is true, so why should any questions arise about the angel, etc., except whether it is suitable to its book? Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker?”

Forster’s rather dismissive attitude to fantasy is indicated by his choice of examples. Three full pages are spent on Flecker’s Magic by Norman Matson--now remembered primarily for The Passionate Witch--a completion of an unfinished novel by Thorne Smith. How many have read Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm? Well, another few pages are devoted to it.

Forster was writing before the explosion of heroic fantasy that came with Tolkien but surely Chesterton was worth mentioning? He wrote fantasies considerably better than anything in that field that either Beerbohm or Matson produced and even developed a theory of literary fantasy.

Chapter Seven has the odd title: “Prophecy”.

“Prophecy,” for Forster, “is a tone of voice.” The novelist is not making an attempt to foretell the future rather he is involved with “the universe or something universal”. Is this really a useful term for a particular type of thematic approach in the novel? I’m not sure that it is but the chapter is well worth reading for some excellent insights on the novels Forster chooses such as Eliot”s Adam Bede which is contrasted with The Brothers Karamazov. There are insightful references to D.H. Lawrence and Herman Melville—especially interesting are the comments about Billy Budd.

The chapter ends with a discussion of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. F.R. Leavis spends 18 lines on this novel in his The Great Tradition. He decides it is merely a “sport” that had no connection with the"Tradition" he outlines. His wife, Q.D. Leavis (also a respected literary critic) said: “Wuthering Heights is not and never has been a popular novel (except in the sense that it is now an accepted classic and so on the shelves of the educated).” But Forster in a few pages writes with genuine excitement, even passion about this quite remarkable book. He anticipates both Lord David Cecil’s Children of Storm and Calm approach and Dorothy Van Ghent’s brilliant essay “Dark ‘otherness’ in Wuthering Heights” (found in her study The English Novel, Form and Function. 1953).

Here is a snippet from Forster:

. . . emotions . . . function differently to other emotions in fiction. Instead of inhabiting the characters, they surround them like thunderclouds, and generate the explosions that fill the novel . . . Wuthering Heights is filled with sound—storm and rushing wind—a sound more important than words and thoughts.”

The final chapter is “Pattern and Rhythm” and I think this is the finest chapter in the book. Here, the aesthetic beauty that is generated in the plot is most completely realised in Forster’s concept of Pattern. Pattern is the plot element that “appeals to our aesthetic sense, as it causes us to see the book as a whole”. Forster analyses The Ambassadors by Henry James as an example of the complex beauty created by it. I would add that it is also very evident in the structures developed in Jane Austen’s novels.

Rhythm uses a repetition of an image of some sort throughout the novel to develop the theme. Forster uses the work of Proust to develop this idea. Personally I see its use through the recurring “crowd” scenes in Huckleberry Finn through which Twain develops the theme of the darkness in the human soul. Forster seems a bit nervous about the concept of Rhythm and spends less time on it than he does on Pattern. Probably this is because Pattern is relatively easy to analyse whereas Rhythm tends to be seen as a poetic device. Yet, I feel it is equally important.

This journey through Aspects of the Novel was highly enjoyable. Of course, that initial excitement of the first reading was largely gone but I think that I see the book with a greater clarity now. Inevitably time has taken its toll and some of its ideas seem dated. But I still think it is a great book with marvellous insights by a major novelist. Remarkably, perhaps a fitting tribute to him comes from F.R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit:

“A Passage to India, all criticisms made, is a classic: not only a most significant document of our age, but a truly memorable work of literature. And that there is point in calling it a classic of the liberal spirit will, I suppose, be granted fairly readily, for the appropriateness of the adjective is obvious. In its touch upon racial and cultural problems, its treatment of personal relations, and in prevailing ethos the book is an expression, undeniably, of the liberal traditional and it makes the achievement, the humane, decent and rational—the ‘civilized’—habit, of that tradition appear the invaluable thing it is.

“On this note I should like to make my parting salute. Mr Forster’s is a name that, in these days, we should peculiarly honour.’

03-01-2017, 11:27 AM	#8
fantasyfan Wizard Posts: 1,376 Karma: 28116892 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Ireland Device: Kindle Oasis 3, iPad 9th gen. IPhone 11	Since I included this in my selection of choices, I should give some of my personal feelings about Aspects of the Novel. I first read it shortly after I entered College at a time when my reading was predominately in science fiction. I found Forster’s book very exciting and it stimulated me to the point where I began reading more widely and finally became an English major. Well, time has passed since then and my views have moderated somewhat though I still think this is a book anyone interested in the novel should look through at least once. The first two chapters are quite engaging and help explain why these lectures were such a public success. Immediately afterwards Forster was offered a three year Cambridge Fellowship and later on was made an honorary life Fellow and given a permanent home in Cambridge. The book shows its age more in Chapters 3 and 4 which deal with people. Forster’s use of “flat” and “round” characters is clever and may be useful but they probably oversimplify the complex art of characterization in a novel. I would agree with those who feel that he sells Dickens short. I would also certainly agree that it is true that in the creation of subtle characters with psychological depth, Jane Austen is the greater artist. However, that certainly does not mean that she is a greater novelist than Dickens as Forster seems to imply. The world of Austen may be meticulously created and the characters in it superbly drawn but that world is very much a tiny slice of eighteenth century society. Only in Mansfield Park does Austen give us a glimpse of the lower classes. On the other hand, Dickens presents an incredibly vivid panorama of Victorian England. The characters may, in Forster’s terms, be “flat” but they stand out with striking power and frequently convey an energy that helps to vivify the human condition in a way that we never see in an Austen novel. I am not saying that Dickens is a greater novelist than his predecessor, but he is certainly as great. I think that Forster here is echoing a complaint about Dickens’s characterization technique that was common at the time and which we see repeated in F.R. Leavis as well. In fact, Dickens is capable of using a highly sophisticated narrative approach—as in Bleak House. A great deal of work has been done on this topic since the time of Forster and you can download a free twenty-page Chicago Short by Wayne Booth entitled “What Every Novelist Needs To Know About Narrators”. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Every-Novel...ds=Wayne+Booth Chapter Five “The Plot” is more successful. Even Leavis, who didn’t at all like the lectures, later praised the “demolition” (Leavis’s term} of Forster’s analysis of George Meredith. More generally, Forster here begins to weave in the aesthetic dimension of the novel through the mechanism of the plot. He states: “We come up against beauty here—for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if does not achieve it.” This aesthetic quality will be later developed in the final chapter “Pattern and Rhythm”, Chapter Six “Fantasy” is another relatively weak area. Forster considers the Fantasy novel to be equivalent to a side-show in a Circus. True, he does defend it in terms of what Tolkien would later elaborate as a “secondary world”: “We all know that a work of art is an entity, etc. etc.; it has its own laws which are not those of daily life, anything that suits it is true, so why should any questions arise about the angel, etc., except whether it is suitable to its book? Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker?” Forster’s rather dismissive attitude to fantasy is indicated by his choice of examples. Three full pages are spent on Flecker’s Magic by Norman Matson--now remembered primarily for The Passionate Witch--a completion of an unfinished novel by Thorne Smith. How many have read Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm? Well, another few pages are devoted to it. Forster was writing before the explosion of heroic fantasy that came with Tolkien but surely Chesterton was worth mentioning? He wrote fantasies considerably better than anything in that field that either Beerbohm or Matson produced and even developed a theory of literary fantasy. Chapter Seven has the odd title: “Prophecy”. “Prophecy,” for Forster, “is a tone of voice.” The novelist is not making an attempt to foretell the future rather he is involved with “the universe or something universal”. Is this really a useful term for a particular type of thematic approach in the novel? I’m not sure that it is but the chapter is well worth reading for some excellent insights on the novels Forster chooses such as Eliot”s Adam Bede which is contrasted with The Brothers Karamazov. There are insightful references to D.H. Lawrence and Herman Melville—especially interesting are the comments about Billy Budd. The chapter ends with a discussion of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. F.R. Leavis spends 18 lines on this novel in his The Great Tradition. He decides it is merely a “sport” that had no connection with the"Tradition" he outlines. His wife, Q.D. Leavis (also a respected literary critic) said: “Wuthering Heights is not and never has been a popular novel (except in the sense that it is now an accepted classic and so on the shelves of the educated).” But Forster in a few pages writes with genuine excitement, even passion about this quite remarkable book. He anticipates both Lord David Cecil’s Children of Storm and Calm approach and Dorothy Van Ghent’s brilliant essay “Dark ‘otherness’ in Wuthering Heights” (found in her study The English Novel, Form and Function. 1953). Here is a snippet from Forster: . . . emotions . . . function differently to other emotions in fiction. Instead of inhabiting the characters, they surround them like thunderclouds, and generate the explosions that fill the novel . . . Wuthering Heights is filled with sound—storm and rushing wind—a sound more important than words and thoughts.” The final chapter is “Pattern and Rhythm” and I think this is the finest chapter in the book. Here, the aesthetic beauty that is generated in the plot is most completely realised in Forster’s concept of Pattern. Pattern is the plot element that “appeals to our aesthetic sense, as it causes us to see the book as a whole”. Forster analyses The Ambassadors by Henry James as an example of the complex beauty created by it. I would add that it is also very evident in the structures developed in Jane Austen’s novels. Rhythm uses a repetition of an image of some sort throughout the novel to develop the theme. Forster uses the work of Proust to develop this idea. Personally I see its use through the recurring “crowd” scenes in Huckleberry Finn through which Twain develops the theme of the darkness in the human soul. Forster seems a bit nervous about the concept of Rhythm and spends less time on it than he does on Pattern. Probably this is because Pattern is relatively easy to analyse whereas Rhythm tends to be seen as a poetic device. Yet, I feel it is equally important. This journey through Aspects of the Novel was highly enjoyable. Of course, that initial excitement of the first reading was largely gone but I think that I see the book with a greater clarity now. Inevitably time has taken its toll and some of its ideas seem dated. But I still think it is a great book with marvellous insights by a major novelist. Remarkably, perhaps a fitting tribute to him comes from F.R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit: “A Passage to India, all criticisms made, is a classic: not only a most significant document of our age, but a truly memorable work of literature. And that there is point in calling it a classic of the liberal spirit will, I suppose, be granted fairly readily, for the appropriateness of the adjective is obvious. In its touch upon racial and cultural problems, its treatment of personal relations, and in prevailing ethos the book is an expression, undeniably, of the liberal traditional and it makes the achievement, the humane, decent and rational—the ‘civilized’—habit, of that tradition appear the invaluable thing it is. “On this note I should like to make my parting salute. Mr Forster’s is a name that, in these days, we should peculiarly honour.’ Last edited by fantasyfan; 03-01-2017 at 03:57 PM.