ontological setting: yellow

descriptive poetics: red

prescriptive poetics: blue
poetics of reception: green

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the novel:
0. Principles: vague definition; humanity as its ultimate core; history does not
matter;
1. Story: suspense (evaluation: wanting to know what happens next);
definition of story: arrange of events in time sequence; the distinction of life
by time and life by values; story is not plot; p. 27: distinction between
"weaver of plots" and "storyteller"; end of page 28: about the "supernatural"
that does not matter in Walter Scott's Antiquary: Forster sometimes uses the
same procedure in "Where angels fear to tread"; Forster criticizes in Walter
Scott the lack of concision: characters entering to the story just for the sake
of suspense; the exacerbation of logic (Time as a major god) in the
development of the story is, nevertheless, criticized in Arnold Bennett: the
"of course" is not enough for greatness; War and Peace: Time and greatness;
"Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time"; the importance of voice (and
of loud reading, and, de pasada, of author's personality); Important statement
about when personality is showed: page 32; the voice of the tribal narrator,
the poetics of Isak Dinesen, the smashing intolerance atmosphere provoked
by the joined force of, first, story, and then, voice (the author's personality
matters more when speaking about the life by values); the failure of Gertrude
Stein trying to abolish time (Forster could not read Beckett); the novel that
only expresses values inevitably fails;
[But the voice of the novelist is something that flies over every aspect of the
novel: it is part of the dynamis of the storytelling, not only of the specific
form of the novel. Motor of the story reception: curiosity. Motor about
people: intelligence and imagination.]
2. People: what matters is the difference between real people and people in
the novel; the duty of the novelist is to reveal the hidden life of a character;
the external-historic and the internal-novelesque; we know everything about
novel characters, but not about real people; the five main things: birth, food,
love, sleep, death, considered them in real life (or History) and in novels:
where is more important or noticeable; love as the experience of wanting to
receive or give something; these five features are the main things that
novelists deal with; novels are not used to dealing "earthly" with birth
matters; novelists do not deal with babies until they can take part in the
action (p. 40); and, in History, we do not remember birth nor have certain
knowledge about death; but there is liberty in the depiction of death, just
because "imagination"; food is always a social thing, and it remains hidden
unless we call upon it; the novelist does not have the short spectrum of the
historian, but yet he has not copied or created sleep; predominance of love,
reasons: author, and since love ends a novel conveniently; "They usually end
their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our
dreams"; Moll Flanders as a "character" novel; difference between daily life
and novel character; a character in a novel is real when it lives according to
the rules of the work of art called novel; Moll Flanders (novel character)
belongs to a world where the secret life is visible; important: a character of
the novel is real when we can know everything about it, everything is
explicable, although everything has not been necessarily chosen to be
explained by the author; this knowledge can work as a compensation of life;
fiction might be truer than history, since it tries to go beyond the evidence
["over"philosophical Forster]; novels give us the illusion of perspicacity,
power, a more comprehended world.
[The big premise of the study is to avoid historized conceptions in the
attainment of novels, but so as to explain characters Forster is all the time
recurring to authors' life, judgements, and so on.]
3. People [2]: attempt to examine the relations between characters and the
novel, from inside, whereas taking a character of Jane Austen is more useful
because they generally depend more on the threads of the novels of that
author, and are more inter-dependent; instinctive devices as the approach: a)
different kinds of characters, b) different points of view; there are flat
characters and round characters; the flat character can be expressed in one
sentence; the use of flat characters: they are easily recognized by the reader,
by their emotional eye; easy use of the flat characters by the writer; easy to
be remembered by the reader; permanence is a universal desire, the
unsophisticated attribute attached to the work of art, the desire of non-
changing, and this is a way to justify flat characters; some critics complain
against flat characters. One of them, Norman Douglas, builds a case against a
biography written by D. H. Lawrence; it is necessary for the novel to deal
with flat characters, and even in that fashion it resembles life; all of Dickens'
characters are flat; Dickens as a counter example of the common sense that
suggests that flat characters should not work; Wells also belongs to the
dickensian way of designing characters: the force of the novelists give vitality
to the characters; comic flat characters are better than serious or tragic ones,
which are commonly boring; only round characters have the right to the
tragic; Forster had failed to understand that every Jane Austen's character is
round; praise of Jane Austen in spite of Dickens: she was a real artist, her
characters are more highly organized; Jane Austen's characters are prepared
for dealing with everything! (although her novels are certainly not); p. 56:
"the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a
convincing way"; the mention of the taxonomy of Percy Lubbock for the
points of view; Forster shall not go through the path of method, but through
the intuitive path of "the power of the writer to bounce the reader into
accepting what he says"; p. 57: the remark on how after shifting from one
point of view to another, logically Bleak House is broken down, but the
reader has been effectively bounced; other two examples of shifting points of
view: Gide's Les faux monnayeurs [personal favorite]; again, War and Peace,
remarking that Lubbock may not like it, but the novels work extraordinarily;
on the other hand, the shifting of points of view also resembles our ability, in
life, to read minds, in the Carruthers' sense; it is not good for the writer to
create intimacy with the reader by discussing characters with him, therefore
destroying the illusion; writers must be censured if we catch the procedure of
writing [VLL style of 19th century novel]; the danger lies in the intimacy
that reveals about the characters, not about opinions that the writer might
have about the universe;
4. The plot: again against Aristotle (Poetics), about how characters are more
important than the plot; justification on how the novelist has access to the
insights of the characters, and that is a right that cannot be taken out of his
hands; the Aristotelian plot of the drama cannot be applied as such to the
novel; the plot, as the story, is an arrange of events, but it emphasizes
causality; as such, the plot demands not only curiosity, based on the effect of
suspense, as the story, but also intelligence and memory; the element of
surprise or mystery (wrongly called detective) is fundamental in the plot;
memory too, because without memory we cannot understand; every action
should matter because memory is efficient: we remember everything, nothing
is loose; p. 63: about the general logic of the reading of the novel, as
unweaving of the plot through intelligence and memory; fine novels have a
final sense, something that can be expressed straight away; novels should not
aim to beauty, but without it they are a failure; the always surprised beauty;
praise of George Meredith's plot [that procedure of despising many features
of a writer to, subsequently, praise another one maybe more important]; p.
65: "a plot ought to cause surprise"; p. 66: a moment if a novel of George
Meredith in which either character or plot suffers, so that a character is
concealed to keep the mystery; the same example about "Villette" of
Charlotte Bront; example of how the plot can subdue characters: the novels
of Thomas Hardy; p. 67: "In other words the characters have been required
to contribute too much to the plot; except in their rustic humours, their
vitality has been impoverished, they have gone dry and thin; even with such
considerations, moral is not aristotelian because happiness and sadness do
not appear only in the plot, but in the insights of the characters; the novel
has to roung things off at the end; "If it was not for death and marriage I do
not know how the average novelist would conclude"; p. 68: inherent
difficulties of ending novels: two causes; against the open endings; the
discussion of the modern solution of Gide in Les Faux Monnayeurs
[Forster's nemesis], finding the centre of the novel not in the brothers, nor
in Bernard, nor in Edouard, but in the metafictional level of Edouard diaries,
especially when discussing about the novel --also, mention of the diary
carried and published by Gide about the writing of the novel; the centre of
the novel is therefore the discussion about truth of life and truth of art, and
the procedure taken by Gide is to roll the writer over by the novel several
times...; "As a critic he is most stimulating, and the various bundles of words
he has called Les Faux Monnayeurs will be enjoyed by all who cannot tell
what they think till they see what they say, or who weary of the tyranny by
the plot and of its alternative, tyranny by characters." [condemn of the
purely reasoned-philosophical novel, similar as when condemning Gertrude
Stein.
5. Fantasy: p. 74, "The idea running through these lectures is by now plain
enough: that there are in the novel two forces: human beings and a bundle of
various things not human beings, and that it is the novelists business to
adjust these two forces and conciliate their claims."; Sterne and Melville
bring the new: the fantastic-prophetical axis; fantasy requires much more
from the reader than "realistic" novels; the difference between the fantastic
and the prophetic: in the fantastic, the logic of life still remains; best example
of the fantastic: Tristram Shandy; Hermes is the general god of fantasy:
arriving finally, after weird stuff, to a safe or not so bad place; Muddle is the
particular god of Tristram Shandy; fantasy implies the supernatural, but does
not need to express it; limited set of fantastic devices that must not grow
stale, showing that the beam of light can only be manipulated in certain ways
(p. 79); p. 83, the fantasist uses old material to build his story; the examples
of Max Beerbohm and Henry Fielding; p. 84: parody or adaptation suitable
for genius without good view of human beings, so that they can use
preexistent material; Ulysses is interesting as parody-adaptation example,
but it is an anti-victorian attempt to cover the world with mud; Ulysses still
in the category of fantasy.
6. Prophecy: the prophetic novelist does not say things, but sings; prophecy
is a tone of voice; common sense is useless to read this kind of novels; this
novel demands two qualities of the reader: humility and suspension of the
sense of humour; George Eliot and Dostoevsky; George Eliot is a preacher,
and Dostoevsky is a prophet: his characters are connected to the Infinity; the
universal aspect of Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov: not through veil or
allegory, but through fiction, not taking the individuality out of Mitya;
reaching the limit of the subject; p. 94: "Regarded merely as a novelist the
prophet has certain uncanny advantages, so that it is sometimes worth
letting him into a drawing-room even on the furnitures account. Perhaps he
will smash or distort, but perhaps he will
illumine. As I said of the fantasist, he manipulates a beam of light which
occasionally touches the objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common
sense, and renders them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity.";
"When they have past, the roughness is forgotten, they become as smooth as
the moon."; several neat differences between fantasy and prophecy; Moby
Dick; the wisdom of Billy Budd; D. H. Lawrence; prophetic features:
christianity in Dostoevsky, contest in Melville, aesthetic vision in Lawrence,
emotions in Bront; Bront's characters, as Moby Dick's world, could only
exist in literature; on the eclectic mind, that is away from the prophetic spirit.
7. Pattern and rhythm: borrowing categories from painting and music,
because as arts evolve, they lend each other terms for analysis; novel with
pattern of an hourglass: Thais, by Anatole France; the hourglass pattern
appeals to our aesthetic: considering the book as a whole [Milorad Pavic,
The inner side of the wind]; Roman Pictures, by Percy Lubbock, for the
grand chain pattern [Ribeyro, El carrusel]; pattern is connected to the
beauty of logic; when beauty is not there, we talk about rhythm; Henry James,
The Ambassadors, again the shape of an hourglass [Patricia Highsmith, The
talented Mr. Ripley]; The Ambassadors is extremely similar to Where
angels fear to tread; Henry James sacrifices a lot of human stuff to design the
novel; the heavy price of the aesthetic effect gained by Henry James;
therefore, a conflict that needs election: whether the pattern (unity of the
novel) is more important than the wholeness of human beings world and
possibilities of feeling and representation: the parody made by Wells, Boon,
and then how Wells and Forster are on the side of humanity; the novel is not
able of such artistic development as the drama: humanity must win; two
different kinds of rhythm: the easy, short length one, and the whole harmony
one; p. 113: example for the first one, Marcel Proust; p. 115: "this seems to
me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern,
but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and
hope."; definition: repetition plus variations; the rhythmic relation that
produces an aesthetic remembrance, such as after listening the Fifth
Symphony; p. 116: the ideal of the novel is expansion, not completion; the
aeternal example of War and Peace.
8. Conclusion: the method can apply to novelists of the future: history may
change, but not art; question about changes of human nature: art of the novel
changes if human nature changes; few people are in that enterprise, few
novelists, institutions do not want it, but eventually it could happen, and, as I.
A. Richard says, that could be the end of imaginative literature (p. 118); from
that would emerge a new way to contemplate oneself, and therefore the novel
could continue; vision of history: it carries people, and thus it carries
novelists, but novelists do not have an active participation in history; the
approach of Forster implies that the novel does not change because human
kind does not change (essentialism), but he states that a wider and more
knowledgeable approach could detect the real changes of humanity and
thereore the "development of the novel".


The eminent French writer, Andr Gide, has published a novel called Les
Faux Monnayeurs for all its modernity, this novel of Gides has one aspect
in common with Bleak House: it is all to pieces logically. Sometimes the
author is omniscient: he explains everything, he stands back, il juge ses
personnages; at other times his omniscience is partial; yet again he is
dramatic, and causes the story to be told through the diary of one of the
characters. There is the same absence of view point, but whereas in Dickens
it was instinctive, in Gide it is sophisticated; he expatiates too much about
the jolts. The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can
never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and
summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the
emotional thermometer results. Les Faux Monnayeurs is among the more
interesting of recent works: not among the vital: and greatly as we shall have
to admire it as a fabric we cannot praise it unrestrictedly now.