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 Brontë; 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 novelist’s 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 furniture’s 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 Brontë; Brontë'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, André Gide, has published a novel called Les Faux Monnayeurs —for all its modernity, this novel of Gide’s 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.