Love Just Ain’t Enough, Part II
The Final Four Aspects of the Novel
Welcome back to Shelf Life where it is time for the final four. I believe this is a basketball reference but I’m actually not sure. I am brain dead from looking at scientific abstracts. I have been blinded with science, so to speak. But I’m never too tired or stupid to talk about my favorite dinosaur fossil, EM Forster, whose Aspects of the Novel was the subject of Tuesday’s Shelf Life and now today’s.
Since Tuesday I’ve been thinking about why I like The Aspects of the Novel even though it’s old. Let me preface this by saying: I generally don’t enjoy reading things that are older than I am. I don’t like reading Brontë (any of them) or Austen or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Beowulf or anything by Homer. I can tolerate The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and I do enjoy Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose best works are slightly older than I am. Mostly I only like contemporary stuff from the last forty or fifty years.
This goes for nonfiction, too, because writing styles go in and out of fashion and I don’t particularly enjoy older writing styles and, further, books on the craft of writing written during a time when a different style of writing was fashionable will not be very useful to me, usually.
I do read older books, but not for enjoyment. I have a college degree in English literature so please don’t at me with the “but have you read [insert a classic book here]?” because the answer is probably so and I probably didn’t like it.
Anyway, I think enjoy The Aspects of the Novel because it doesn’t read like a book. The book was compiled from the Clark lectures that Forster delivered at Cambridge in 1927 and, therefore, reading it feels more like listening to a lecture on writing. It’s very conversational for the time it was written. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel too dated almost 100 years later.
The Aspects of the Novel is EM Forster’s treatise on the seven aspects all novels contain—according to him—and at which a novel must succeed to be a satisfying and beautiful work of literature.
So on Tuesday I wrote about story, people, and plot, the first three of Forster’s aspects and the most obvious and concrete ones. Today I’m going to give a brief overview of the other four he covered in his book, which are fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. For what it’s worth, Forster attacked “people” (or character) in two lectures and then tackled “pattern and rhythm” together in one lecture. There are seven aspects, and seven chapters (or lectures), but they don’t correspond one to one. Since Forster addressed pattern and rhythm together, I’ll do the same and keep them in one section.
Fantasy
Fantasy is that aspect of fiction that couldn’t happen in real life or, perhaps, that is unlikely to happen in real life. Listen, I have a friend who will not read anything if it contains elements that couldn’t happen in real life. Science fiction/fantasy/supernatural/paranormal and most horror are right out for her. No way, no how. She’s not interested. That’s not necessarily what Forster means by “fantasy,” though.
But Forster argues that fantasy is an aspect of even the most literal books. He cites Ulysses by James Joyce, which is literal in the extreme to the degree that the book was maligned for descriptions of the main character’s bathroom visit. But it’s still fantastic in its own way, as a retelling of Homer’s ancient Odyssey featuring Odysseus’s strange and supernatural journey from Troy back to his home in Ithaca.
Another example cited is Tristram Shandy, which is supposedly a chronicle of the narrator’s life, but begins with his narration of his own birth—which is obviously a fantastic interpretation of autobiography.
Forster writes,
The stuff of daily life will be tugged and strained in various directions, the earth will be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spot lights will fall on objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them, and tragedy herself, though not excluded, will have a fortuitous air as if a word would disarm her.
In other words, even the most mundane part of life are made fantastic when they’re included in a novel—they have to be, or no one would read a novel. The telling of events, even if those events are as ordinary as a visit to the pub (and the pub’s restroom) on June 16, must be fashioned in such a way as to contain the fantastic.
This is why things go right (or wrong) for your protagonist, why fate pulls the couple together in a romance novel, why the hardboiled PI in a detective novel always cracks the case, why the unlikely hobbits make it all the way to Mt Doom with the Ring, and so on. That’s what Forster means by the element of fantasy that all novels must contain—even when they’re not fantasy novels.
Prophecy
I will come out and say that the chapter on prophecy has a lot to do with religion and I have to gloss over those parts lest I burst into flame. I do believe there’s worthwhile information in the chapter on prophecy even for heathens like myself.
Forster talks a lot about Christian preachers and prophets (he says “prophets and non-prophets, which I find hilarious) but what he is getting at, at the end of the day, is narrative voice. A preacher and a prophet, each in their own way, have a powerful voice that transforms their words into something that is more than language. The writer, likewise, can describe something, or tell a story, in such a way that it “renders them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity”—more meaningful and powerful than simply seeing that same thing would be in reality.
In fact—and this goes with fantasy, above—it’s the writer’s job to portray the ordinary as extraordinary and imbue it with more color and luster than the subject has in real life. There’s no reason to read about a family’s domestic life (I’m thinking of Anna Karenina) if the author doesn’t suffuse that life with interest and intrigue. Whaling (Moby Dick) is a dirty and exhausting and gross job and no one would care to read about it if the author didn’t invest the endeavor with more importance than the hunt for one specific whale or whatever that book was about, I never read Moby Dick. Maybe Moby Dick is the one old book I might actually enjoy. Guess we’ll never know.
Pattern and Rhythm
Pattern and rhythm, per Forster, are the aesthetic or beautiful aspect of a novel: “Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not I shall call it rhythm.”
Pattern is Forster’s word for the shape of a novel. Almost like the logic of the novel. Forster used some examples that I guess Cambridge students would have known in 1927 but nobody in their right mind would know today, so I’ll make some new ones to illustrate the idea.
Forster describes a book (Roman Pictures by Percy Lubbock) as being shaped like a grand chain. A grand chain is a chain that forms a circle. Nobody alive today has read Roman Pictures so consider One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that is older than me but that I enjoy reading somehow. This section contains major spoilers for One Hundred Years of Solitude but it’s past the statue of limitations on spoilers by now so I’m only telling you as a courtesy.
One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the formation and eventual dissolution of the Buendía family. José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, his wife and cousin (series comma intentionally omitted; Úrsula is both José Arcadio’s wife and his cousin), leave their hometown and start a new town called Macondo. Although (or perhaps because) Úrsula is a blood relative of her husband’s, she has a pervasive fear of incest and of babies being born with pigs’ tails (as a result of incestuous relations). Each generation succeeds the next until, a hundred years after the founding of Macondo, two descendants of Úrsula and José finally produce a child with the tail of a pig through an incestuous relationship and the story returns to where it began.
Thus, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a story told in the shape or pattern of a grand chain.
Novels all have some kind of shape, whether the author puts them into that shape intentionally or not. Novels require some kind of symmetry, like an inkblot, to be satisfying. One of the shapes Forster describes is an hourglass and I kind of think of the Harry Potter series, which kind of rides a seesaw, with Harry Potter’s fortunes on one side of it and the big bad guy’s fortunes on the other. The two unstoppable forces have to meet in the middle and clash. That’s an hourglass-shaped series.
Rhythm is harder to describe; more ephemeral and thus harder to grasp. Forster describes a symphony as having several movements but a unifying rhythm throughout that has nothing to do with actual tempo of the music, but which may as well be described for the purpose of literary novels as repetition plus variation. Another word for this is motif, which Forster didn’t use, but I would have recommended it if I were workshopping his lectures with him.
Sometimes the beauty of a novel isn’t expressed in the shape of it (its complexity and symmetry) but instead in the rhythm, the unifying repetition of and variation on a theme throughout a novel. A great example of this in contemporary fiction is The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, in which a monk catalogs a collection of physical objects in a house where a monarch once lived, while a servant in the house explains to the monk the significance of each object in the monarch’s complicated rise to power. The repetition of the interplay between the monk’s descriptions (the dimensions, color, nature, and condition of the object) and the servant’s (the history of the object, the use it was put to, and by whom, and for what purposes) are repeated through the cataloging process to weave the story together.
Hilariously, I said I wasn’t going to work very hard on this week’s Shelf Lifes because I have so much going on and then I chose a topic that required not only rereading The Aspects of the Novel, an endeavor for which I did not have time, and then translating the denser or outdated parts of it into a digestible blog format.
Next week I will phone in your Shelf Life, I promise. This week I tried but I couldn’t do it and a genuine effort was made instead. For this, you have my sincere apologies.
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