Aspects of the novelForster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
History
Aspects of the novel
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
English fiction -- History and criticism; Fiction -- Technique
The novelist, we are beginning to see, has a very mixed lot of
ingredients to handle. There is the story, with its time-sequence of
"and then ... and then ..."; there are ninepins about whom he might
tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell
his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well
as the life in time. The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the
spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people
like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently
often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They "run
away," they "get out of hand": they are creations inside a creation, and
often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they
kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they
revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.
These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of
ingredients to cope with--the actors and actresses--and they appear to
side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the
play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both. The
weight they throw is incalculable, and how any work of art survives
their arrival I do not understand. Concerned with a lower form of art,
we need not worry--but, in passing, is it not extraordinary that plays
on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the
introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women
should add anything to our understanding of Shakespeare and Tchekov?
No, the novelist has difficulties enough, and today we shall examine two
of his devices for solving them--instinctive devices, for his methods
when working are seldom the same as the methods we use when examining
his work. The first device is the use of different kinds of characters.
The second is connected with the point of view.
i. We may divide characters into flat and round.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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