Aspects of the Novel

“A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.”

The metaphor of the mirror is one of several extended metaphors that Forster uses to clarify and concretize his points about the form of the novel. Here, the metaphor shows the value of the novel in contrast to history. Though history is valuable, the novel’s ability to evoke emotion makes it more fundamentally human and powerful.

“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.”

The reader’s relationship with the novel is a testament to its quality, which emphasizes The Innate Humanity of the Novel. Forster draws a connection between the reader’s novels and friends, showing that people can become emotionally attached to a novel in the same way that they can become attached to other people.

“Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense—the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.”

The primary element of story, which is the simplest aspect of the novel, is suspense. Forster’s reference to Scheherazade underscores both the power and the shallowness of suspense. Although it will hold an audience’s attention, it is suited more for “tyrants and savages,” which demonstrates its lower worth.

“Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and at the very moment of doom, when the clock collected in the tower its strength and struck, they may be looking the other way.”

Time is an essential element of story—the chronology of a fictional world matters. However, time is only an undergirding of the power of the novel, as Forster shows in this passage. The ability of the imagination to transcend time is an element of the power of the novel.

“Scott's fame rests upon one genuine basis. He could tell a story. He had the primitive power of keeping the reader in suspense and playing on his curiosity.”

Despite Scott’s popularity and generally positive reputation as a novelist, Forster believes that Scott focused his novels on the element of story, to the detriment of the other elements. As a result, Scott’s novels fail to rise to greatness—he relies primarily on readers’ curiosity rather than on the memory and intelligence required of plot.

“We need not ask what happened next, but to whom did it happen; the novelist will be appealing to our intelligence and imagination, not merely to our curiosity. A new emphasis enters his voice: emphasis upon value.”

Forster links ideas between chapters (or lectures) by actively building on his previous ideas. When moving from the subject of story to the topic of people, he contrasts the shallow demands of time and story with the increased meaning associated with people. The dichotomy of the novel is that it contains both time and value, and story only offers time, while all the other aspects of the novel that Forster mentions are the building blocks of value.

“When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.”

Forster regularly uses pairs and dichotomies to illustrate his points. Here, his explanation of the treatment of love in the novel is enhanced by his explanation of the double-sided nature of love. The nature of love in the novel also reflects The Innate Humanity of the Novel, as love is a uniquely human experience, in contrast to the other elements of people that Forster discusses.

“The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other—even in writers called robust like Fielding—is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity at moments—yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger.”

Forster shows that Homo Fictus, his pseudo-scientific term for a character in a novel, is more human than any real person can be. By dint of being fictional, the characters in a novel have the space to feel connections more deeply and to pursue relationships more single-mindedly than real people.

“Nothing matters but the heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that she seems absolutely real from every point of view, we must ask ourselves whether we should recognize her if we met her in daily life.”

The primary example of Homo Fictus that Forster uses is Defoe’s Moll Flanders. This description illustrates how a novel can delve so fully into a single character that that character becomes the entire essence of a human experience. However, that precise intensity and depth of description creates a person who challenges the reader’s suspension of disbelief because she is more whole and complete than any real person can be.

“She cannot be here because she belongs to a world where the secret life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be ours, to a world where the narrator and the creator are one. And now we can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is real when the novelist knows everything about it.”

This discussion of the contrast between real and fictional characters highlights The Conflict Between Reality and Fiction. The only way a character can feel real to the reader is if the novelist knows that character’s entire interior and exterior life. However, that depth of knowledge is impossible in reality, and as a result, it intensifies the conflict between reality and fiction.

“In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well—he has tried.”

The novel has the capacity to transcend realism and resolve The Conflict Between Reality and Fiction. Since the novel reaches beyond realism to try to depict truth, it reflects a universal human truth that facts and evidence cannot reach.

“Miss Bates and Emma herself are like bushes in a shrubbery—not isolated trees like Moll—and any one who has tried to thin out a shrubbery knows how wretched the bushes look if they are transplanted elsewhere, and how wretched is the look of the bushes that remain.”

Forster uses a vivid metaphor to capture the audience’s attention and increase their understanding of the different approaches to character in a novel. Moll Flanders is the entirety of the novel that bears her name, while, in contrast, Jane Austen’s characters are so integral to the plot and story of her novels that they cannot be separated from the plot. The nature metaphor Forster uses provides an image that intensifies the understanding of these different approaches.

“Good but imperfect novelists, like Wells and Dickens, are very clever at transmitting force. The part of their novel that is alive galvanizes the part that is not, and causes the characters to jump about and speak in a convincing way. They are quite different from the perfect novelist who touches all his material directly, who seems to pass the creative finger down every sentence and into every word.”

Forster’s comparisons between novelists advances The Mission of the Novelist theme. He says there are those novelists who are “good but imperfect,” and they serve parts of their mission; however, the perfect novelists complete their mission and imbue their novels with a fire of creativity.

“And by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization and harmonizes the human race with the other aspects of his work.”

The discussion of the novelist as a creator of characters joins The Mission of the Novelist with The Innate Humanity of the Novel. In bringing into unity flat and round characters to serve the larger purpose of the novel, the novelist captures the depth of humanity that is only possible in the novel.

“Indeed this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge:—I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life.”

Although all of Forster’s discussion is focused on the form of the novel, this is a rare moment where he directly addresses the unique capabilities of the novel. The length of the novel and its fictional nature allows the novelist to shift point of view to accomplish a mirror of lived human experience, which advances The Innate Humanity of the Novel.

“If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public.”

The primary means by which Forster defines terms and explains the separate aspects of the novel is through comparing pairs. Although the discussion of story is separated from the discussion of plot by two chapters, he uses his previous discussion of story to begin to define plot as being more advanced and distinct from story.

“She looks a little surprised at being there but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers.”

The personification of beauty reflects both the nature of beauty itself and the unexpected connection of beauty to plot. Forster values plot more than story, or indeed people, so, according to him, it is the first aspect of the novel that is capable of evoking beauty, transforming the novel from a craft to an art.

“In the novel, all human happiness and misery does not take the form of action, it seeks means of expression other than through the plot, it must not be rigidly canalized.”

As with all the other aspects of the novel, Forster provides the limitations of plot. Though it is a higher aspect than story or character, it has drawbacks and limitations. Forster regularly cautions the potential novelist, and perhaps the aspiring scholar, to remember that the novel requires all the aspects to achieve success, and certainly to achieve greatness.

“Perhaps our subject, namely the books we have read, has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right—it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right—it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground.”

Forster uses the bird’s shadow as a metaphor for the subject of the book itself. This is one of several vivid metaphors Forster employs to strengthen his argument and hold the attention of the audience. The amorphous nature of a developing subject defies direct description, but Forster’s use of metaphor allows him to make his subtle point clear without confusing academic language. In this passage, he warns of the danger of over-theorizing, which, like the shadow, will grow too distant from the subject matter (represented here by the bird) to even be recognizable as coming from that source.

“The power of fantasy penetrates into every corner of the universe, but not into the forces that govern it—the stars that are the brain of heaven, the army of unalterable law, remain untouched—and novels of this type have an improvised air, which is the secret of their force and charm.”

Forster evocatively describes the element of fantasy in a novel, and the poetic language he uses evokes the sense of fantasy that he describes. In contrast to the clear definitions he offers for most other aspects, he defines fantasy using a fantastical language that channels poetry, mimicking his subject matter.

“In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.”

Forster turns to the spiritual to define and describe prophecy and sketch the inarticulable profundity that the greatest novels achieve. According to Forster, prophecy is the highest art of the novel, so only religious language can begin to accurately describe its effects.

“My answer is that the emotions of Heathcliffe and Catherine Earnshaw function differently to other emotions in fiction. Instead of inhabiting the characters, they surround them like thunder clouds, and generate the explosions that fill the novel from the moment when Lockwood dreams of the hand at the window down to the moment when Heathcliffe, with the same window open, is discovered dead.”

As in other areas of the book, Forster uses comparison to refine his definition of an aspect. Here, as in the discussion of characters earlier, Forster uses Brontë’s unified character and setting to demonstrate how prophecy can be imbedded in characters rather than reaching out to the universals of Dostoevsky’s prophetic voice.

“That then is the disadvantage of a rigid pattern. It may externalize the atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing-room.”

As with the other aspects, Forster shows the drawbacks of pattern. Although it offers satisfaction, to rely too heavily on pattern can result in a stifled plot. Again, Forster turns to metaphor to enhance his discussion and clarify his explanations, painting the humorous picture of a novelist who is too invested in creating patterns shutting “the doors of life” and meaning while “doing exercises,” which emphasizes the unmeaningful, unexciting nature of a novel that solely emphasizes the aspect of pattern.