Aspects of the Novel

Summary

Aspects of the Novel is E. M. Forster's book of lectures on the art of fiction. He delivered them as the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927, and published them the same year, keeping their informal, talkative tone. Forster, by then the author of A Passage to India, does not offer a history of the novel. Instead he imagines all novelists, from different centuries, writing side by side in one circular room, and asks what they share. He organizes the book around seven aspects: the story, people, the plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm. The story is the most basic aspect, a narrative of events in time order that makes the reader ask what happened next. Forster admits, with mock regret, that the novel tells a story, and he treats this as necessary but primitive. In two lectures on people he distinguishes flat characters, built round a single idea and summed up in a sentence, from round characters, whose test is whether they can surprise in a convincing way. He draws examples from Jane Austen, Dickens, Defoe and others, and argues that a novelist can know characters completely, as we never know real people. Plot, he says, differs from story because it stresses causality: the king died and then the queen died is a story, but the queen dying of grief is a plot. Plot asks why, and demands memory and intelligence from the reader. Fantasy and prophecy describe novels that reach beyond ordinary life. Fantasy asks the reader to accept the supernatural or the strange, as in Tristram Shandy; prophecy, which Forster finds in Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Bronte, gives a novel a tone of song and a sense of something beyond the story. The last lectures take up pattern and rhythm. Pattern is the shape of a whole book, like an hourglass in Anatole France's Thais or a grand chain in Henry James's The Ambassadors, and Forster warns that strict pattern can cramp life. Rhythm, which he finds in Proust, is repetition with variation that helps a novel expand. A brief conclusion declines to predict the future of the novel. The book became one of the most widely read discussions of fiction in English, and its terms, especially flat and round characters and story versus plot, remain standard in schools.

Top Lessons

• Story and plot

  Forster separates story, events in time order, from plot, events joined by cause. Students can test the distinction on any narrative they know, including the narratives of Scripture, where cause often lies in God's purpose.

• Flat and round characters

  Flat characters are built around a single idea; round characters can surprise in a convincing way. The distinction gives students a precise vocabulary for describing how authors reveal persons.

• Knowing persons

  Forster argues that in a novel we can know people more fully than in life. Students can compare this claim with the Christian teaching that only God knows the heart completely.

Verified Quotes