Excerpts from

“Aspects of the Novel”

E. M. Forster

. . . The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is
sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of
criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but
a bunch of words.
And I have chosen the title “Aspects” because it is unscientific and vague, because it leaves
us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the
different ways a novelist can look at his work. And the aspects selected for discussion are seven in
number: The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy and Prophecy; Pattern and Rhythm.

We shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect . . . That
is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all
novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of
the truth, not this low atavistic form.
For the more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it
from the finer growths that it supports, the less shall we find to admire. It runs like a backbone—or
may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. It is immensely old—goes back to
Neolithic times, perhaps to paleolithic.
The story is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence—dinner coming after
breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit:
that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one
fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two
criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary
organism. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seemed convenient to entitle this aspect
People . . . Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity between him and his
subject-matter which is absent in many other forms of art.
We have discussed whether people could be taken out of life and put into a book, and
conversely whether they could come out of books and sit down in this room. The answer suggested
was in the negative and led to a more vital question: can we, in daily life, understand each other?
Today our problems are more academic. We are concerned with the characters in their relation to
other aspects of the novel; to a plot, a moral, their fellow characters, atmosphere, etc. They will have
to adapt themselves to other requirements of their creator. It follows that we shall no longer expect
them to coincide as a whole with daily life, only to parallel it. . .
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.

. . . In most literary works there are two elements: human individuals, whom we have recently
discussed, and the element vaguely called art. Art we have also dallied with, but with a very low form

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of it: the story: the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time. Now we arrive at a much higher
aspect: the plot, and the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to its requirements, as
they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like
an iceberg. In vain it points out to these unwieldy creatures the advantages of the triple process of
complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded by Aristotle. A few of them rise and
comply, and a novel which ought to have been a play is the result. But there is no general response.
They want to sit apart and brood or something, and the plot (whom I here visualize as a sort of higher
government official) is concerned at their lack of public spirit: “This will not do,” it seems to say.
“Individualism is a most valuable quality; indeed my own position depends upon individuals; I have
always admitted as much freely. Nevertheless there are certain limits, and those limits are being
overstepped. Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste time running up and down
ladders in their own insides, they must contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised.” How well
one knows that phrase, “a contribution to the plot”! It is accorded, and of necessity, by the people in a
drama: how necessary is it in a novel?
. . . We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is
also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died”
is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved,
but the sense of causality overshadows it.