An enjoyable read that has as much value for readers as writers, I think.

Like many exponents of "literary" fiction, Forster has no appreciation for the craft, difficulty, or art of story. Consider this ridiculous observation:

"Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. The man who beings by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have, is never a sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year’s time he will probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult to be friends with such a man, and for two inquisitive people to be friends must be impossible. Curiosity by itself takes us very little way, nor does it take us far into the novel — only as far as the story."

Although this comes from the chapter on plot, the chapter on story basically paints those who crave story as primitive, simian louts. His fiction may be great, but his elitist snobbery is entirely unjustified and off-putting.

Quick read, worthwhile, maybe because I agreed with most of his opinions haha.

I first read "Aspects of the Novel" 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 last 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....

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 and 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.’

Review: http://abt.cm/1LUrpMe

Holds the fuck up; no one can say what a novel “is” anyway and Forster knew.

EDIT: the pattern and rhythm section is unbelievably waffly, but I guess we have plenty of craft books for that now…

Not as entertaining or enlightening as I had hoped

I went into this book with what now seem like outsized expectations. It was cited in the previous two writing books I read, and I recognized its lessons in other books I'd read before those, so I was hoping it would teach me the secret formula of plotting a top-quality novel. But glad as I am that I read it, I felt it only reinforced what I already knew, and the same tasks of writing that scared me before still continue to scare me.

I loved much of what he had to say, but he was also critiquing some classic giants - like Dickens! - so it was hard to relate. E.M. Forster may have the clout to criticize Dickens, but Kressel Housman surely doesn't, and to be honest, it smacked of professional jealousy on his part. (Besides, he was critical of George Eliot, too. Harrumph!)

If you're serious about writing, this book is a must-read. Many contemporary writers on writing have followed in Forester's footsteps. But I do prefer those contemporary voices. Forester's tone is too professional; the others are more like friends.

Forster on the cover providing an excellent representation of myself this reading week.

I enjoyed it to some extent, especially the laugh-out-loud moments where he points out how utterly ridiculous a plot is, or quotes a parody of Henry James by H G Wells. But many of the books of which he speaks are ones I have never even heard of and so I must confess that there were times when he lost me and I would rather have been elsewhere.

Forster displays a remarkable resistance to his position as critic. He sees himself as primarily an author. Even without the Introduction to contextualise his reluctance to embark on these lectures, one senses in his tone a his consistent withdrawal.

Forster limits himself to an ahistorical view focusing mainly on Anglophone writers, while reserving the highest praise for Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He splits his discussion between analyses of passages and meagre forays into theoretical provinces where he lays out what are (from our perspective today) rather rough judgements about the plot versus the story, fantasy versus prophesy, flat characters versus round characters.

In the final chapter he gestures at 'pattern' and 'rhythm' in storytelling—a section I had great hopes for—but ends up not really saying that much of substance. In the final few pages we are granted some tantalising glimpses of how rhythm might be conceptualised through the reappearance of a motif (in Proust), through repetition and variation (in fiction), and though 'expansion':

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off by opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in 'War and Peace'? [...] as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item — even the catalogue of strategies — lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

Forster calls 'rhythmic' the relation between orchestral elements in Beethoven's Fifth. He asks whether there is any effect comparable in literature. The best he can offer is expansion, as outlined above. It's too quick a gloss, too easy a getaway. More on rhythm could have given these lectures that philosophical and crucial flourish of an ending — and given us more to think about, even today.

While I suppose it was worthwhile to read the various opinions of E.M. Forster on the old great authors of English literature, I don't really feel that he had very much unique to say about the actual aspects of novel writing.

I think that the most unique, interesting statement in the entire book was in the introduction at Ch 1. Forster feels that authors should not be judged by the chronological categorization of literature over time, but rather be viewed as though they were all simultaneously creating their works at the same time in one big room. As I have been spending a lot of time lately skipping around within the literary canon, filling in books on my list that I have not yet read but not really sticking to the timeline of when the works were created, I can appreciate this idea. I can see how the English language has changed over time, but change in the usage of words aside, the art of storytelling itself really has not changed very much.

As for the other chapters, however, the idea he was trying to express can be summed up neatly in just a sentence or two, if the meaning of the chapter is to be understood at all.

Ch 2 & 5 (Story and Plot): A story is a sequence of events which runs through time, from points A to B and onwards. You do not need to relate the events to each other to have a story. A plot is a series of events which tie together to express cause and effect, and the events should all tie together in resolution.
Ch 3 & 4 (People): A story contains flat, undeveloped characters which are most useful to add comedy. Well-rounded characters are needed to express serious drama, but a plot works well when using a combination of both.
Ch 6 & 7 (Fantasy and Prophecy): I'm still not entirely certain what he was trying to express here. His idea of "fantasy" seems to correspond to the postmodern idea of "magical realism", and his idea of "prophecy" seems to indicate a greater moral message that is learned by the protagonist but can be appreciated by the audience as well, but I'm not entirely certain about this. I think these chapters could have been better clarified by more than just the examples he chose.
Ch 8 (Pattern and Rhythm): The change that takes place within a well-written novel has a certain symmetry from beginning to end, but sticking too closely to that framework can make a work dull. Rhythm refers to items or lines of text that reappear within the story which tie unrelated events together.

I can't help but feel like I know most of this information already, and Forster is difficult to read at times, so I felt like I really had to tease out what little information there was by rereading paragraphs at times. Obviously, I still don't understand what he was trying to say with the chapter on Prophecy and just barely understood the one on Fantasy. What is left after the main points are examples of various (mostly English) authors and his opinions as to whether one author is good at accomplishing his point or another is bad at doing so. However, I have yet to read a number of the books he references, so I can only follow along from the descriptions he gives of what the plot is about. Perhaps I would enjoy this book more after a course of reading all the authors and works he mentions and becoming less of a "psuedoscholar."