Literary Profile: E.M. Forster
Forster begins by asserting that the fundamental, inescapable aspect of the novel is its story-telling function. However, different readers and critics view this aspect with varying degrees of respect. He illustrates this through three distinct hypothetical voices:
"Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story. 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..."
Literary Interpretation & Contextual Significance: Forster establishes a critical tension: while he values high-art elements like melody and truth, he acknowledges that the novel is structurally bound to the primitive mechanism of chronological storytelling. This creates a dualism between the "low" necessity of plot and the "high" aspiration of art.
Forster strips the story of its artistic embellishments to examine its raw, biological function in human culture, comparing it to a backbone or a tape-worm .
Storytelling is immensely old, dating back to Neolithic or Palaeolithic \times. Forster imagines primitive humans ("shock-heads") gathered around a campfire, exhausted from fighting mammoths, kept awake solely by the suspense of "What would happen next?":
Forster uses the legendary narrator of the 1001 Arabian Nights to illustrate suspense as a survival tool:
Forster provides a precise definition of a story and explores how human life is divided between two competing frameworks of experience.
A story is defined as: "a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence" (e.g., dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death).
Forster argues that daily human life is composed of a double allegiance:
While mystics, dreamers, and artists can occasionally deny or escape the "tyranny of Father Time" in daily life, a novelist cannot. The novel must pay allegiance to both: the story narrates the life in time, while the deeper elements of the novel capture the life by values.
Although a novelist must remain anchored to the chronological sequence of time to remain intelligible, great writers have attempted to hide, subvert, or manipulate the "clock" within their works:
Despite these brilliant artistic manipulations, Forster emphasizes that none of these devices contravene the basic thesis: the fundamental basis of a novel remains a story, and a story is always bound to a sequence in time.
The following table analyzes key vocabulary and metaphorical expressions used by Forster to critique the nature of storytelling:
| Literary Device / Colloquial Phrase | Exact Textual Example / Quote | Contextual Meaning & Subtext | Pedagogical / Stylistic Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atavistic (Adjective) | "...not this low atavistic form." | Relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral; primitive. | Emphasizes that storytelling appeals to our most basic, unevolved instincts of curiosity. |
| Tape-worm (Metaphor) | "It runs like a backbone—or may I say a tape-worm..." | An interminable, parasitic, unlovely internal organism that stretches through the body. | De-romanticizes the plot, highlighting its raw, repetitive, and potentially tedious nature when stripped of artistic value. |
| Shock-heads (Noun) | "...an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire..." | People with rough, unkempt, shaggy hair; primitive cave-dwellers. | Creates a vivid, slightly humorous historical caricature of early human audiences. |
| Qua (Preposition) | "Qua story, it can only have one merit..." | In the capacity of; as being; from the standpoint of. | Allows Forster to isolate the story element from other literary qualities like characterization or style. |
| Ingenious (Adjective) | "...ingenious in her incidents..." | Clever, original, and inventive. | Highlights the intellectual skill required to construct plots that maintain suspense. |
The three voices represent different tiers of literary appreciation: the casual reader (the bus driver) who vaguely accepts the story; the anti-intellectual reader (the golf-course man) who aggressively demands only a plot; and the critical writer (Forster) who reluctantly acknowledges the story as a necessary but primitive foundation.
'The finer growths' refer to the artistic, intellectual, and emotional dimensions of a novel—such as character development, thematic depth, moral philosophy, atmosphere, and aesthetic style ("melody" and "perception of truth")—which are built upon the basic framework of the plot.
Forster traces it back to Neanderthal \times, where primitive humans gathered around campfires were kept awake solely by the suspense of "what happens next." This basic curiosity was a matter of life and death for the storyteller, establishing suspense as our oldest literary tool.
Time is the inescapable sequence of narrative. A story, by definition, is events arranged chronologically. While daily life allows us to focus on "value" over "time," a novel cannot exist without a chronological thread; denying time entirely makes a narrative unintelligible.