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 nonchanging, and this is a way to justiy 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 suprising 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 shiftingfrom 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 efficeint: 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 procedre 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." [condem 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.