Back to the Classics #15

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Nonfiction Classic. Forster’s dates are 1879 to 1970. He was a novelist for about 20 years but a public intellectual (remember those?) for about 40 years. It seems incredible - how many other well-known Edwardian writers were still in the public eye and ear in 1960? Only Wodehouse maybe?

Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster

This is the text of a series of lectures delivered in 1927 at Cambridge by the author of A Room with a View and  Howards End. Forster’s goal is to examine different aspects of the novel: the story; the people; fantasy and prophecy; pattern and rhythm.

Literary theory from giants of criticism like Mikhail Bakhtin or Julian Barnes makes my brain bleed. I dare not go as far as to agree with the hyper-intellectual, hyper-fluent Rebecca West when she dismissed Forster with “a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head.” But I will gently suggest that a more methodical book about how to approach literary fiction would be How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

A problem is Forster’s failure to give examples. Take his famous distinction about the two types of characters. There are flat characters, without capacity for change  and round characters, such as the heroines of Jane Austen's novels. Maybe the lecture format didn’t give him enough time and elbow room to provide lots of examples.

Also inadequately explained are the chapters on Fantasy and Prophecy, two elements that come into play when the story narrated transcends the ho-hum events that will happen to us in the course of daily life. Fantasy implies the supernatural as in pixies and ghosts and monsters.  Prophecy is the theme in which “the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them….”  Forster had great respect for prophet-like D.H. Lawrence. But not a word about Lawrentian insights along prophetic lines. The chapter on Fantasy and Prophecy remains opaque and mysterious to me, though I read it three times.

Nor do I understand what Forster means by the last pair of topics Pattern and Rhythm but at least he does apologize for the vagueness of the concepts. One who gapes when trying to understand an article in The Baffler, I’m not anybody that can throw stones here. But I humbly conclude that Forster is a novelist, but not a novelist like Ford, Woolf, Orwell, West, Burgess, Lodge or Updike who’ve got the intellectual proclivity and power to be an instructive critic.

Julian Barnes writes:

Forster and [Ford Madox] Ford met at a country-house weekend in the summer of 1914, at which Ford seems to have been the only person present to see clearly that war was inevitable. Afterwards Forster snootily noted in his diary that Ford was “rather a fly-blown man of letters”. That was a bad call.

Bad calls abound in this book. Although Forster gives the impression that he thinks the novel as of 1927 needs some shaking up with new techniques, he seems wary of innovation. He is unenthusiastic in his treatment of Henry James (too artificial) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters (too odd). James Joyce’s Ulysses is a “dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.” He does not even nod in Conrad’s direction. Forster merely quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf with little comment though the two were real-life friends for 30 years and he liked, for instance, To the Lighthouse. Though Forster must have heard of them, he does not cite experiments with time shifts in Ford Madox Ford’s novels such as The Good Solider (1915) or Parade’s End (1924). One shudders to think what he would’ve made of Faulkner.

In The Edwardian Turn of Mind, Samuel Hynes tells the story of Forster leaving an exhibition of Post-impressionists, saying "Some of it is too much for me altogether." He also said in a letter, “My equipment is frightfully limited, but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.”  Hiding behind a critic's puzzling jargon or cryptic utterances would not occur to a modest man like Forster ("and a lot to be modest about too" we can hear an Oxbridge man of letters sniffing). Not an intellectual (was Dickens? Tolstoy?), Forster has zero interest in theories or systems or paradigms, and that’s fine, in my amateur’s eyes. But I will quietly if urgently point to How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.