49 pages • 1 hour read
Aspects of the Novel
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Fantasy”
Forster begins by clarifying the unifying idea behind this series of lectures. He says there are “two forces” at work in the novel: “human beings and a bundle of things not human beings” (156). Through these lectures, Forster aims to analyze how the novelist can balance the sometimes contrasting pulls of these two forces. He uses the metaphor of a bird ascending into the skies, leaving its shadow increasingly distant, to illustrate these dual forces that run into the danger of becoming so separate that they no longer resemble one another. He says the next step to defining and illuminating this idea is to turn from story, character, and plot, all of which are building blocks of the novel, to fantasy and prophecy, which are the web holding the novel together as art.
The novels Forster chooses to illustrate the move from plot to fantasy are Jules Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. As with the other aspects of the novel, Forster first turns to reader expectations as he begins to define fantasy. Given that the innate nature of fantasy is that it depicts the impossible, he says the reader must be willing to accept impossible things in a novel if they are to experience the elements of fantasy. Some readers, Forster shows, are simply never going to be willing to do this, and though they can still love literature and the novel, he cannot speak to them in his discussion of fantasy and prophecy.
Forster distinguishes between fantasy and prophecy by placing fantasy in the realm of smaller or lower deities from mythology like fairies or dryads and prophecy in the realm of major deities like Zeus or Osiris. However, the novel with elements of the fantastic doesn’t have to contain direct references to anything overtly supernatural. Tristram Shandy, for example, has no direct supernatural events or imagery, but the entire story contains an element of the impossible, which leads critics to label it as strange. Foster’s definition of fantasy, then, is a novel that points toward the supernatural, the impossible, or the extremely unlikely.
The overt fantasy novel has a limited pool of inspiration from which to draw. Forster describes Norman Matson’s Flecker’s Magic, a novel about a boy who is given a magic ring that grants wishes. While Forster found the novel compelling, a friend he recommended it to didn’t enjoy it. Although the magical premise of the novel is a common trope, Forster argues that a fresh mind can take an old fantasy trope and add new twists that make the old new again. Another example is Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm, which weaves realism and the supernatural together.
In addition to overt or suggested supernatural influence, Forster adds adaptation and parody to elements of fantasy. Since there are a limited number of fantasy plots available, he says that one approach to crafting fantasy is to take an old story and refresh it. The possible result could be sweet and reflective, as in Fielding’s parody of Pamela, Joseph Andrews, which emerges as an independent work in the process of fantasy. Another option is James Joyce’s Ulysses, a modernized interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey set in Dublin. Ulysses exposes the ugliness of life via Homer’s structure and initial fantasy.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Prophecy”
Rather than define prophecy as a direct prediction of the future, Forster portrays novelistic prophecy as the novel’s particular tone of voice that evokes the grandeur of religion or universal human truths. The reader is required to have humility and suspend humor while considering the aspect of prophecy—this is different from the suspension of disbelief that readers need to accept the element of fantasy. The novelist’s challenge lies in combining the seemingly disparate aspects of the “song” of prophecy with the “furniture of common sense”—namely, the building blocks of the novel: story, character, and plot.
Forster makes a distinction between the prophet and non-prophet using George Eliot and Dostoyevsky as examples of these two types of novelists. Though both writers’ works have grandeur and deep emotion related to faith and salvation, Eliot’s turn to sin and God in Adam Bede is situational and dependent on the setting of the novel; in contrast, Dostoyevsky embodies the voice of the prophet when he expands a similar moment in The Brothers Karamazov to universal human truth. In other words, Forster is saying that Eliot talks about God while Dostoyevsky speaks with the voice of God. Dostoyevsky’s characters, acting as elements of prophecy, transcend simple symbolism and “reach back” to an echo of depth in human experience.
In beginning a discussion of Melville’s Moby Dick, Forster adds another element to prophetic fiction: “spasmodic realism” (197). By this, he means that the descriptions of seemingly mundane things—like furniture or natural scenes—in a prophetic novel ground the profundity of the prophecy in real, lived experience. Importantly, realism must not be the controlling element of the novel in order to achieve prophecy; instead, the realism contrasts with the universal, creating what Forster refers to as the “song” of the novel.
Forster shows the song he perceives in the prophetic novel by focusing on two scenes from Moby Dick: the sermon on Jonah, and Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg. These scenes resonate with the ending of the novel, and Forster shows that they are more than symbols—instead, they form the “song” that elevates Moby Dick from a sailor’s story to a profound exploration of evil.
Forster discusses Melville beyond Moby Dick, examining Melville’s short story Billy Budd to trace Melville’s development of his treatment of evil. In Billy Budd, which is realistic fiction, evil is personified in a single character; but the advancement of the depiction of evil into the form of the white whale, Moby Dick, carries the same topic from realistic fiction to prophetic novel.
For the first time in the book, Forster turns to discussing the novelists themselves, rather than focusing on their works. While some novelists may only write a single prophetic novel, Forster discusses Melville, D.H. Lawrence, and Emily Brontë as prophetic novelists. His description of D.H. Lawrence portrays him as a novelist who so embodies the prophetic that he resists the reader’s humility, even while requiring it for the work to succeed. The discussion of Brontë is entirely rooted in the auditory imagery from Wuthering Heights—the stormy wind of the moors—which Forster argues is the song of the intensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s emotions. That intensity creates the prophetic element of the novel.
Forster closes the discussion of fantasy and prophecy by pointing out that his previous discussion was wholly concerned with a singular vision of the novel. In taking up the question of fantasy and prophecy, that singular vision—that set of tools—had to be set down, which is indicative of the eclectic nature of the human mind. In the ensuing chapters, Forster will return to the singular approach, but that approach is now affected by his departure into “fantasy” and “prophecy.”
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
In Chapter 6, Forster states that the unifying idea running through all of his lectures is finding a balance between the human and non-human aspects of the novel, which recalls the theme of The Mission of the Novelist. Forster defines the novelist’s responsibility as convincingly combining human beings with a created world. In previous chapters, Forster has already shown that the novelist has a responsibility to their created characters—to depict them accurately and to give them a world in which they belong. He now adds to this that the novelist must also “conciliate” the characters with all the non-human elements of the novel—not merely the created world, but the plot, the story, and the elements of artistry: fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.
Forster relies on metaphor to illuminate his discussion and definitions, especially in the bird metaphor in Chapter 6 and the furniture metaphor in Chapter 7. The bird is only an element of the metaphor, of course. The actual metaphor is the bird’s shadow which stands in for the overall subject of the course Forster is constructing. The bird’s shadow is changed by what it encounters, and as a result, it shifts and changes form, just as Forster’s subject is beginning to change form. The bird’s shadow reflects the bricks of the foundation of the novel: the plot, story, and characters. However, to engage more complex works, Forster acknowledges that “the bird and shadow are too far apart” (158), and he must adjust his approach to describing the novel. In chapter 7, Forster crafts the metaphor of “the furniture of common sense” (181) to stand in for the largely understandable and simple structures that he began his lectures with. Furniture is solid and unmoving, it serves a clear and logical purpose, and it is necessary. However, when Forster shifts his discussion to prophecy, that furniture “gets broken” by the move to universality embodied in the concept of prophecy.
The discussion of fantasy and prophecy evolves The Conflict Between Reality and Fiction. Fantasy is the depiction of the impossible, and it therefore highlights the separation between the real world and the world of the novel. Fiction, by definition, is not real, and the impossible is something that cannot exist in the real world. However, the fantasy of the novel acts on the imagination of the reader to create a sense of the possible within the impossible. Moreover, when Forster explains the impact of prophecy, the divinity of the prophetic tone reflects universal truths that are abstract, yet absolutely real. The universality of the prophetic voice in the novel allows impossible things to reveal deep truths. Thus, even while highlighting the conflict between reality and fiction, the novel also blurs the line between reality and fiction.
Forster’s conclusion to the chapter on “Prophecy” advances The Innate Humanity of the Novel. He has already shown that the human element of the novel can impede its ability to rise to the level of other art forms in terms of profundity. However, the introduction of prophecy as an aspect of the novel shows that the novel can transcend the banality of humanity to move into the stratosphere of more profound art. Forster mentions that he has “a reservation” about this claim “which some will make more strongly while others will not make it at all” (211). In laying aside the approach of the first five chapters to discuss fantasy and prophecy, he wonders if he can achieve the understanding he’s pursuing. He wonders whether a “single vision” (211) would be a wiser course—it would certainly be a more scholarly one. However, he says that “the human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism” (212). It is from the human mind that both the novel and the scholarship of the novel grow; the human mind crafts and perceives the prophetic voice. It is, therefore, the fundamental humanity in the novelist, the novel, the reader, and in Forster as a scholar of the novel that allows the novel to reach beyond the primal element of humanity to the divine element of prophecy.
Unlock all 49 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By E. M. Forster
