3.5/5 Stars

I had to read this series of lectures by E.M. Forster for one of my classes and I found it quite interesting, especially in some parts. I also really appreciated how clear he was in his explanations and how every aspect was touched upon and not left unresolved. If you're interested in fiction in general and its main aspects, you might want to read this.

very good but he predicts the moon landing and the atomic bomb in the last chapter and nobody is talking about it

Rating: 5* of five

One of the best books I've read about writing novels. A truly inspirational guide to a complex and daunting effort. It is scary enough to make the decision to write a novel. To face the prospect without a reliable guide? UNTHINKABLE!!

Как лектор и критик Форстер — вполне балагур и клоун, местами ядовитый, местами остроумный, очень английский (в ушах его лекции звучат почему-то голосом Стивена Фрая). Он в этом курсе лекций пытается наложить свою матрицу на «роман» — зверя, которого за столько веков так и не поймали. И ему в начале ХХ века это поначалу вроде бы удается, когда он полемизирует с той вульгарной «теоретической моделью» чтения, которой нас, я подозреваю, до сих пор по большей части учат в школе: эта «псевдонаука», выступлениями против которой Форстер так знаменит, протянула свои щупальца от Белинского до Дерриды. А Форстер читает роман как, в общем, нормальный умный человек. Традиционный роман XIX века то есть.

Потому что книжка хороша до определенного предела. Когда он принимается ругаться на Джойса, которого не понял (как не понял, я подозреваю, и «Фальшивомонетчиков» Жида, которых я не читал и судить не могу, но они уж очень напоминают источник вдохновения для «Распознаний» Гэддиса (кстати)), потому что для него это слишком уж адский модернизм… так вот — когда начинаются глупости про Джойса, понимаешь, насколько Форстер пылен. К нему теряется всякий интерес, сказать правду, и уважение. Потом уже как-то не важно, что еще он нам имеет сказать. Становится понятно, там все будет ограничено викторианскими углами и чинцем в лучшем случае, а говоримое им окажется лишь чуть-чуть лучше методичек по соцреализму. Лучше, но недостаточно лучше, чтобы не забыть его на полке. А может быть, дело во мне.

Some timeless insights on novel writing from my favorite. Witty, observant. I agree with his takes on Dickens and Jane Austen (hint; he’s more impressed with the latter!) and many others. My favorite part was when he said he thinks of novelists from 200 years ago, the present (for him, early 1900s), and 200 years in the future, all sitting down in the same room and writing together, all embarking on the same project. More of a lecture series than a book.

Schöner kurzer teilweise ironischer Einblick in den Aufbau eines Buches. Obwohl er der Überzeugung ist, dass solche “Einleitungen” wenig Sinn ergeben, da die jungen Schreiber*innen nicht einer Einleitung folgen sollen, oder besondere Aspekte in ihren Text einbauen sollen.. versucht er mit Hilfe seiner Lieblingswerke zu erklären wie es gemacht werden könnte und wo sich Romane unterscheiden. Wenn du jedoch einen eigenen Roman schreiben wollen würdest, dann lass deine Kreativität nicht von solchen “Rahmen” begrenzen.

I liked the book. it is really helpful for those who are interested especially in literature.
i liked the language . It's simple, in the same time, it has some sophisticated vocabulary.

Well, E.M.Forster talks about the aspects of the novel. there are about 5 chapters; each chapter contains a certain aspect:
1 story
2 people (A&B)
3 plot
4 fantasy & prophecy
5 pattern & rhythm

I'm about to demonstrate the general idea in each of them:

STORY:
the story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence. it ask us '' What happens next''. it contains life in time and life in values. the story appeals to curiosity.
PEOPLE:
A novelist reveals the hidden life and the shown one of his characters so that you can know every single character unlike the daily life that you can't know others' hidden lives.
The main facts of human life are: birth; food; sleep; love; death.
Flat characters are simple people, simpleton. whereas round characters are the ones who are surprising in a convincing way.
Characters ask us: '' to whom it happened''
PLOT:
The plot is a narrative of events that emphasis. It asks us:'' Why it happened''.Mystery is essential in the plot,and it needs intelligence. so, part of the mind should be left behind while the other part goes on. Plot appeals to intelligence.
FANTASY:
Fantasy asks us:'' to pay something extra''. it compels us to add an additional adjustment to a work of art. It accepts the supernatural.
PROPHECY:
Prophecy asks us:'' for humility & even for a suspension of the sens of humour.
PATERN &
Pattern causes us to see the book as a whole, it's connected to atmosphere.
rhythm is the musical expression. It should not be there all the time like the pattern, it's better to be from time to time.

thanks

This book consists of a series of lecutres that E.M. Forster gave in the spring of 1927. Its style is modest; not dogmatic. This is literary criticism in the days before capital-T "Theory". Nor does Forster speak, as those Theoreticians do, through invented concepts, but through plain English.

Forster is convinced that the novel is a means of connecting with other minds. These are lines of sympathy across time: we enter into a chain of allyship according to various individual dispositions:

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. Sentimentality - to some a worse demon than chronology - will lurk in the background saying, "Oh but I like that," "Oh, but that doesn't appeal to me," and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not tob e avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. p. 30-1

Forster first takes issue with professional literary criticism when it tends to views novels and authors through the lens of history and historical "movements", following "the method of a true scholar (without having his equipment)." As far as he is concerned, to attempt to study literature in this historical way is the approach of a mere pedant.

In the following block quote, he describes the "pseudo scholar":

Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard. Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often does well in examinations (real scholars are not much good) and even when he fails he appreciates their innate majesty.

They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of of the same name. It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say "That's the use of knowing things, they help you to get on."

The economic pressure he feels is more often sub-conscious, and he goes to his exam merely feeling that a paper on King Lear is a tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely real one. And whether he be cynical or naïve, he is not to be blamed. As long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider. p.18

I think he would like us to remember that the qualities of a good scholar do not make for the same qualities of a good reader

The worst way of reading novels is to mistake the study of the subject of literature (i.e. literature studies) with the matter that makes up the proper subject of literature (i.e. like how Mona Lisa was the subject of the painting, "The Mona Lisa"). Put simply, literature is supposed to open our horizons and give us things to think about for ourselves. It must be more than merely a way of showing status and getting ahead in life, like the pseudo-scholar.

Forster asks us to imagine a sort of heavenly space where all authors, dead and alive, are together in a room, sitting side by side - writing. He gives us three pairs of examples of what authors might be connected by, despite half a dozen generations seperating them:

They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. The first pair write 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. [...]" 2."What I hate is myself - when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then [...]." 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 tremendous nobility - that is the spirit that dominates them - and oh how well they write! [...]

A hundred and fifty years of time divide them, but are not they close together in other ways, and may not their neighbourliness 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 neighbourliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he add, in relation to a shop-keeper. And I hear Richardson, equally cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside of England can be chaste. p.23

And having set out his argument, he begins the first of the eponymous "aspects": "Story", or rather, as he would have it, the "function of linear time" in a novel. In the following block quote he writes that, no matter how metaphysically questionable linear time is, it cannot be replaced in a novel. Forster seems almost regretful to write that "yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story": it is "the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist," no matter how much the priorities of the novelist lie elsewhere.

The allegiance to time is imperative: no novel could be written without it. Whereas in daily life the allegiance may not be necessary: we do not know, and the experience of certain mystics suggests, indeed, that it is not necessary, and that we are quite mistaken in supposing that Monday is followed by Tuesday, or death by decay. It is always possible for you or me in faily life to deny that time exists and act accordingly even if we become unintelligible and are sent by our fellow citizens to what they choose to call a lunatic asylum. But it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tape-worm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder. p.37

For me, Joyce's "Ulysses" seems like such a novel which best "denies time inside the fabric of the novel". But only later is the novel mentioned: mere "fantasy" and "parody," according to Forster, though not because of how it deals with time. Forster rather takes issue with its deliberate ugliness, and it might surprise you how summarily Forster rubbishes Joyce's experimentalism:

Parody or adaptation have enormous advantages to certain novelists, particularly to those who may have a great deal to say and abundant literary genius, but who do not see the world in terms of individual men and women - who do not, in other words, take easily to creating characters.

How are such men to start writing? An already existing book or literary tradition may inspire them - they may find high up in its cornices a pattern that will serve as a beginning, they may swing about in its rafters and gain strength.

That fantasy of Lowes Dickinson, The Magic Flute, seems to be created thus: it has taken as its mythology the world of Mozart. Tamino, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night stand in their enchanted kingdom ready for the author's thoughts, and when these are poured in they become alive and a new and exquisite work is born.

And the same is true of another fantasy, anything but exquisite - Jame Joyce's Ulysses [... which] could not have been achieved unless Joyce had, as his guide and butt, the world of the Odyssey. [...]

It is of course more than a fantasy - it is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, and attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell. All simplifications are fascinating, all lead away from the truth [...] p.126

Forster's dissection of the novelist's art is, until chapter 5, very comprehensible, and free from theoretical pretensions. Things that we are probably apt to take for granted, such as, say a third person narrator is omniscient becomes, through Forster's >Weltanschauung, a statement of human longing:

Human intercourse (...) is haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from him own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well - he has tried. p.70

After chapter 5, the book gradually gives way to the mystical on the remaining themes, "plot" (by which he means "intrigue") "fantasy" "prohecy" and "rhythm."

In this excerpt from the "prophecy" chapter, Forster describes Lawrence as a "preacher" who can become violent to his congregation.

Forster never explains exactly what he means by this, but his metaphor rolls on throughout the remainder of the book. In addition, there is the metaphor of Moby Dick (called "an easy book" on p.141!) being "a contest" and the repeated insistence that Dostoyevsky's characters are asking us "to share something deeper than experiences" (from p.138 - presumably the spirit of Christianity). I can gleam little more than that Forster feels that something deeply important unites these works. Judge for yourself:

[Lawrence is] an excessively clever preacher who knows how to play on the nerves of his congregation. Nothing is more disconcerting than to sit down, so to speak, before your prophet, and then suddenly to receive his book in the pit of your stomach.

"I'm damned if I'll be humble after that," you cry, and so lay yourself open to further nagging.

Also the subject matter of the sermon is agitating - hot denunciations or advice- so that in the end you cannot remember whether you ought or ought not to have a body, and are only sure that you are futile.

This bullying, and the honeyed sweetness which is a bully's reaction, occupy between them the foreground of Lawrence's work; his greatness lies far, far back, and rests, not like Dostoyevsky's upon Christianity, nor like Melville's upon a contest, but upon something aesthetic. The voice is Balder's voice, though the hands are the hands of Esau. The prophet is irradiating nature from within so that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could not otherwise be obtained. p.146-7

I sensed an increasing inclination to the idiosyncratic and esoteric. Another example of this growing mysticism appear in the lectures when he discusses Henry James.

The beauty that suffuses The Ambassadors is the reward due to a fine artist for hard work.

James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself, with modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain.

But at what sacrifice! So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in [Henry] James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects.

They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel. p.161

At first he presents the case of his detractors, such as H.G. Wells (though he recounts Wells's precise attacks rather poorly), and then goes on to describe the true intentions of his works, which are in "the rhythm" of the plotting.

I find the adaption of "rhythm" confusing, and the conclusion that James's novels' "premise ... that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel" contradictory to the parts I liked so much that I quoted from p. 23 and 30-1.

So all in all I liked half this book immensely, and was disappointed by the second half. It is true that I am no novelist myself, so perhaps the second half of this book is merely speaking a language that I cannot understand.

فک می‌کنم واسه زمان خودش خوب بوده. خیلی هم مجمل و خلاصه‌س؛ نصف ِ بیشترش مثال و تحلیل آثار موفّق دیگه‌س. درسته که گاهی باید از مثال استفاده کرد. ولی نه این‌که نصف بیشتر کتاب، همین‌مثال‌ها باشن. تازه‌، من خیلیاشونو نخونده بودم و صرف ِ تحلیل ِ مولّف، نمی‌تونستم باهاش همراهی کنم. شاید نکاتش به‌زور چل صفحه هم بشن.

Great insight if you love writing theory as much as I do.

The introduction was FANTASTIC and I wish it existed as a single article because I want to recomend it to everybody. The chapters about plot, story, characters, were also useful and very observant and I liked how he constantly used examples, and how significative some of these examples are to the times he was writing in (despite him claiming atemporality). HOWEVER, he sort of lost me when he started talking about fantasy and prophecy, I must admit. I don't think I got his meaning completely, or if I did, couldn't tell if this was an actual aspect of the novel since he himself admited only some novels had them. It was interesting, but more on a metaphysical than real plane. It made me think how interesting it would be for him to read the novels we have today, what would he do with all the genres there are now (I know genres existed, but now they can be considered literature when done well) and with the postmodernist novel, and what new aspects would they uncover for him. The closing was great again, but... Yeah, I got confused for a moment there.

One of my favourite quotations:

Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here – or if applied their results must be subjected to re-examination. And who is the re-examiner? Well, I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

I regret not coming across this book sooner, for I find it delightful. I disagree with Forster about almost everything, but such is the pleasure of listening to him talk about books he loves that I don't mind.

I don't know that I would call it useful, either for novelists or critics, because Forster's way of looking at novels is extremely individual (he's right about Tristram Shandy, though), but it was thought-provoking, and I like how much he's able to extract from a single sentence of Mansfield Park.