EM Forster on character: Novels are for telling · 6:03pm Apr 24th, 2014
Aspects of the Novel
E.M. Forster, 1927
(Tagged to the story "Experience" because I use it as an example at the end.)
E.M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and Howards End, wrote a book about novels. It isn't a how-to book, but you could use it as one. This isn't for the beginning writer; it tackles questions such as "What is the purpose of the novel?" and "What is the relationship between character and plot?" Forster attacked these questions using his skills as a novelist, illustrating abstract ideas with concrete metaphors and poetic language. I haven't finished it, but I can already tell it's going to go on my short list of "books writers should read". There's a neat summary of chapters 2-5 here, and I'd guess the rest is summarized somewhere nearby in web-space. Forster's writing is so good that it's a shame to read just an outline, though.
He has two chapters on characters. The first of them presents a theory about characters that amounts to a theory about the purpose of the novel. Forster doesn't see the novel and the play as alternative ways of telling a story. The distinctive thing about the novel, he says, is that the author can tell us what characters think and why they do things, and so we understand them better than we understand people, even ourselves, in real life. The purpose of the novel is to show (or pretend) that people make sense:
They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
He contrasts this with plays and movies, which he finds comparatively vulgar spectacles of incompletely-realized characters who are pushed around by a story-line that does not aspire to the level of a plot, but is merely a chronologically-ordered spectacle pulling the viewer along with "What next?" He argues in other chapters that most people want only an endless string of events that pique and then satisfy their curiosity, while a novel requires memory and thought, and so appeals to only a few:
A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan [a reference to 1001 Nights] or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by "and then—and then—" They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties.... The man who begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have is never a sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year's time he will probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head.
Aristotle said that all emotion in a drama must be expressed through action. This brings us back to our old chestnut, "Show, Don't Tell," which also comes from Aristotle. We've had arguments over "show, don't tell." The greatest counterexample in drama is Shakespeare, who expresses most emotion in his dramas through dialogue, or even monologue. You could find many other counter-examples, like Death of a Salesman; you could point impishly to Waiting for Godot, in which emotion is expressed through inaction. Yesterday I saw A Raisin in the Sun, which is a good play but given to Shakespearian-length monologues, and so seems fake to ears more used to Tarantino.
But Forster ignores all this and cedes the point: "Show, Don't Tell," and the rest of Aristotle, is good for plays but bad for the novel. (He would perhaps say the telling plays listed above should have been novels. A literary realist certainly finds a stink of unreality about them, but on the other hand, the demand for realism in our artificial spectacles is a modern dogma.) Forster believes some stories should be plays or movies, and some should be novels, but none should be both:
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.
This leads to a surprising conclusion: Novels must tell, and not merely show. Showing is fine, but doesn't enable an author to describe a character hyper-realistically, in more detail than is possible in life, and so a story that can be only shown, should be, as a play or a movie.
I don't agree entirely. I think, first, that most things can be shown, given enough length. The novel doesn't give us a qualitatively new way of looking at people so much as it makes it possible to condense a character, through telling, so that more can be said in fewer words. Today's movie-makers have tricks Forster never saw in 1927 that let them convey a surprising depth of character visually. Forster's contrast of drama with novels is so stark that it would make it impossible to make a movie from a novel, or a novel from a movie, since he says a novel requires a completely different kind of plot. When he wrote, there were no good movies made from books AFAIK, but today he'd have to say that Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Apocalypse Now, and all the critically-praised movies made from his own books, were bad.
The movies are different from the books. Apocalypse Now takes the themes of Heart of Darkness and expresses them in spectacle (surfing under artillery fire, choppers with loudspeakers blasting "Flight of the Valkyrie"). The sequence of events is entirely different, yet the plot is the same. A movie has to take a different route, but might end up at the same place.
Second, even when you're showing, not telling, words can focus more precisely and nimbly than a camera. My recent story "Experience" had to be completely shown, not told, yet it would have been difficult in a movie. A movie could show a sunrise photo-realistically, but couldn't as easily romanticize it, and couldn't direct the viewer's attitude through word choice. Did Mirkwood and Moria seem more threatening in the book, or in the movie?
Later, Forster argues that the requirement to bring things to a conclusion might possibly also not be needed in a novel, and ruins most novels because the characters are too much alive for the writer to rein them in at the conclusion. He didn't know how to do without it. He described a recent French novel which had different subplots that resolved independently, in a very self-conscious, meta-fiction way that he didn't say was a general solution, but at least showed the thing could be done. This foreshadows the contemporary literary short story, which is not allowed to have a conclusion, but comes to a kind of resting place instead.
And then it just ends.
Where's my slow clap gif...
Anyway, speaking from a (somewhat limited) perspective in film, I'm not sure that Experience couldn't be done in movie form. Film has a whole subtle language of frame and angle and light, content, placement, alignment and focus that isn't available in text, though sadly it's also largely ignored by the modern industry. How a shot is framed can completely change the emotional context of the scene.
It would be impossible to replicate Experience, but it would certainly be possible to create a filmic equivalent.
Always a pleasure to read your posts. My questions for you would be how will you apply what he talked about to your stories?
Speaking of novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died last week, which makes me sad. 100 years of solitude is one of my favorite novels, (And one of the few novels I read for pleasure) and my love of its magic realism strongly foreshadowed by a good three years my love of MLP.
Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share you short list of books writers should read?
Having reached the end of its argument the blog post came to a.
(Apologies to Sellar & Yeatman)
> This foreshadows the contemporary literary short story, which is not allowed to have a conclusion, but comes to a kind of resting place instead.
Your quote about TS Eliot and "Prufrock" and modernist barbarians and breaching of the gates springs to mind. Which is a strange thing to accuse him of, because he's arguing strenuously for vast and impregnable walls between the disciplines, but I can't help but read your summary of Forster's thoughts and see a man out to lay waste to an art form.
Organization of a story has always been my nemesis. I like to think of them on three levels: Big, Medium, and Small.
Big is easy. When I'm doing something I don't want to do (i.e. work), the Muse tends to wallop me upside the head with An Idea (which I quickly scribble down).
Small is fairly easy, if you concentrate on it. A good Small paragraph is a lot like real life: you focus on a point, then sweep your vision to something else that draws your attention, then are reminded of something else by that, which makes you go and do something, and so on. Small should chain thoughts together into a stream (Geek point: It's a linked-list for IT people) of points that is driven by the reader's curiosity and desire to see what is going on. (don't turn left when the reader is expecting a right turn please)
Medium is where the meat of the story lies, and where you get into characterization, flow, and purpose, or in my case, mischaracterization, incoherence, and purposeless wandering.
Sounds like I'm buying a book soon. Anything that can help is welcome.
It might just be me, but I sort of feel like this contradicts the point made earlier:
To me, an ending is just a natural part of a manageable human race. In the same way that writing gives thoughts and motivation form, which means a beginning, middle, and end, it should also give a story form. That being said, I do think that people generally care more about written characters than movie characters and usually hunger for a sequel to any book they've enjoyed. While Hollywood is more than ready to supply sequels to movies, very rarely have I finished a movie and thought "I wish there was a sequel to this!" (I may be alone in this.) So, I think books should have an ending, almost as a matter of principle, even if it often fails.
All in all, I find myself agreeing with Forster here. Even with the idea that movies don't make good books, and books don't make good movies, but that depends a lot on what you think a "book" or a "movie" is. You talk about Apocalypse Now being effective in maintaining the themes of Heart of Darkness, but is a novel only its plot?
I know in the case of Gone With the Wind the movie is a very good telling of the story, and does a good job of getting across the central themes, but loses a number of lesser themes from the novel that give the characters and the plot an added complexity and place the setting within history in a way that gives it a larger statement on humanity. What made it to the screen is a better movie than the book would have been, and what's left on the page is a better book than the movie would have been, but they aren't the same thing to me.
To that end, I'd rather that people who are writing for the page take advantage of its capabilities to add complexity to theme and characters. Give me the history. Give me the thoughts and feelings. If you want to show and not tell, you'd better make sure the context you give to the showing (through word choice and selection of images) is doing that work. (It seems unnecessarily hard to me, but that's a matter of taste.) Otherwise, you might as well be writing a play.
Good post, Bad Horse. I have a comment about this:
That is similar to what I would say about plays. However, my reasoning is that play (screen and stage) is a medium with a visual component. There has to necessarily be more showing. Visuals and imagery are the very essence of showing.
I would argue that his issue with characters in plays and films comes from the conventions of conventional play writing. Plays and films tend to focus around a single episode, so to speak. This is because plays are often told in a rigid 3-5 act structure. There is only so much that can be accomplished in the limited space and time. Characterization is competing with everything else which needs to happen in that frame. The structure comes as much from tradition as it does from practical concerns. After all, in theater, you have to take the endurance and memories of the actors into account, especially in many traditional forms, which took place either in open air or under some sort of roof. The audience also needs breaks; theater is a form of entertainment, and if a play is an unrewarding test of endurance, the audience is going to walk out. There are exceptions, such as traditional Japanese Noh theater, but most plays only last a few hours at most. Most people are only going to be able to willingly sit in one place for about three hours at most.
Films are similar, but they also have to be made with consideration for how they fit into cinema and television timetables. Because films do not have to be performed live all at once, the limiting factor is the endurance of the audience. Again, not too many people are willing to sit still and pay attention to anything for more than about three hours at most. There is also the fact that films get treated like a shot form of entertainment; you don't go spend your entire evening watching a Bong flm like you would spend an entire evening going to a Broadway production of Les Miserables.
I would agree with Forster's assertion that character and plot are secondary concerns in theater. Although the nature of both live and recorded performance drama explains why these things are deferred, that still neither excuses the results nor condemns the art.
The strength of drama is that it can show from the outside, from a more objective perspective. What the audience knows is only what is shown and said. Themes can be shown and addressed without having to directly discuss them or necessitating the writer has to pick a side. For example, the film, Nirgendwo in Africa hits upon themes like racism, change, and imperialism. It shows these things, but only ever really talks about Racism. Because plays do not need to take a side, more is left open for interpretation by the audience. I took away from the film that life seldom has a "good" or "evil" choice. Instead, there are smart decisions and dumb decisions. For example, insisting that all the black Kenyan ranch hands speak German, rather than you learn the local language, is going to cause you a lot of trouble. Also, racism was not portrayed as being as inherently evil or bad, but rather stupid and ironic; when in a strange land, take the friends you can get. It was also interesting to see a German Jewish woman treat the black africans the same way that the Nazis had treated her. It wasn't depicted as being a moral failing. Rather, it was treated as an allowable choice, and whatever good or ill came from racist behavior or came from embracing the new country were treated as the logical outcomes of how the characters decided to deal with the world around them.
Lastly, the spectacle nature of films and plays means that the story has to appeal to and be understandable for a sufficiently high number of people with little explanation. Aiming for niche audiences really is not an option except in arthouse productions. It also means that introspective and psychological productions tend to be extremely boring.
The strength of the novel is that it can be as long as the writer can make it, or as short. The novel is not bound by limits of human endurance or the logistics of showings. Characters tend to be strong in novels, because characters are the usual focus of a novel. It is borderline impossible to make a novel without some sort of viewpoint, lead, or protagonist character. Print is also not a visual medium, so there is no need to create a spectacle to enrapture the audience. Introspective scenes can be very engaging, because the author can directly write out what characters are thinking without having to break the atmosphere to deliver a monologue, such as in a film or a play. This gives the novelist time and space to dedicate towards building complexity and depth in their narratives and characters.
I would not argue, however, that novels are form of entertainment specifically for intelligent people. In much the same way, I would not advocate that video games (essentially interactive films/plays) are entertainment specifically for dumb people. Any piece of media can be as stupid or as intelligent as its maker has the capability to convey. For example, Spec Ops: The Line is a modern military shooter which critiques violence in video games, false choices, and the reasons why people play video games, especially modern war shooters, all while deconstructing its own genre. It also examines what the psyche would have to do in order to cause destruction like an action game hero and still be able to unironically claim that it is a heroic figure without malice in spite of the facts. And then there are novels like the Twilight series...
I think I've made a point. At least I hope I did.
This man sounds like a dreary snob not unlike the literary critics you were deriding an entry or two ago. Why should I read his work in spite of this?
He wrote excellent books, though. (All of which had pretty conventional endings.) Can you be more specific?
Good catch. I think you're right. But I think he just chose his words poorly. In context, I don't think he really wanted to say that novels claim humans are manageable. Or even if he did, we can revise him and say something more like, Novels claim that humans make sense, that there are reasons they do what they do, that human society is causal and, in theory, manageable.
2042754 A reasonable question.
1. His views aren't easily predicted by a simple formula. The literary snobs I dislike are clockwork men who produce long, complicated-looking arguments from just one or two gears endlessly grinding out the same themes, usually something along the lines of "Everything old is bad", "Everything new is bad", "Unpredictability is good", "Beauty is truth", "Literature is an extension of class warfare", or some other one-sentence dogma.
2. He wrote great books.
2042696 Bong flm = Bond film?
You make a lot of good points, but in my perverse way, I'll comment only on the things I disagree with:
It sounds counter-intuitive, but I don't think showing from outside vs. inside makes a story objective vs. subjective. Commercial fiction and movies take one character's or team's side; literary fiction and art films don't. A novel can show us the internal thought of many different characters, giving them all equal time. Or it can show one person's internal thought in a way that critiques that thought. Or it can show us a complete enough picture of one person that we see the good and the bad, the base and the noble, combined, and the pointlessness of being "for" or "against" that person.
I'm not aware that novels have a lead character, or take one side over another, any more often than fiction movies do.
Would you want to write a blog post to explain that to people like me who've never played it?
2043087
Sure, I can write a post about that. Are you serious about this?
2042909
I was exaggerating a bit (probably unfairly) for dramatic effect, so I should specify: I have no grounds to diss Forster's writing. In fact, I don't doubt it was good, if we're reading it after a century.
But, in the same way as you saw TS Eliot paving the way for modernism in poetry and thus ringing its death knell, by taking established norms for form and defenestrating them; I have an equal level of distaste that Forster pivots from the unobjectionable idea that "novels can do storytelling in ways other disciplines struggle at" into the notion that "Novels Must Fit In This Here Box, And No Other Storytelling Forms Can, Because Screw All Those Other Guys", and I think that his advice if followed would lead to the same death-by-turning-inward that you lament ended up consuming poetry.
I mean, wow. "Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties." How can you write something like that and still be in a creative discipline? I do see the distinction he's trying to draw, but what a strange word to turn into a scapegoat — in service of a theory that history hasn't borne out, no less.
2043147 I mean it. Not sure what you're implying by asking whether I'm serious. I'm not offering to help. It just sounded interesting.
2043383 Yeah, you're right. I was irritated when he said people who are curious are usually stupid (I didn't quote that part), but I was feeling charitable and tried to re-interpret it in the most-favorable way.
Everyone wants to have a theory of literature, so they can feel justified when they say a story is good, but theory always leads to disaster.
Aside from Forster's work that you just talked about what other books are on that list?
2043861
Okay. I'm sorry, it's just that other people would say that sarcastically, like 'sure, go ahead, that's great.'
2042978
Fair enough. Ray Bradbury had a similar opinion, having intended Fahrenheit 451 to be anti-television instead of anti-censorship (or so I've been told). But I still enjoyed that book and The Martian Chronicles anyway.
2043922 2042359 What I meant was "the short list of books writers should read that I should be writing down somewhere but haven't".
I've read dozens of books on writing, but I don't remember now what they said. I have a terrible memory. My recollection is that the most popular ones, like "Writing down the bones" and "Bird by bird", were the least useful to me because they were more cheerleading than technique.
I liked "Reading like a writer" by Francine Prose.
I liked the Paris Review interviews, which go on forever (there are maybe 12 volumes now).
Donald Maass' The Breakout Novelist is surprisingly good so far.
Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! is worth reading, though you shouldn't take anything it says as an absolute.
On the one hand, I agree that literature's primary advantage lies in its ability to tell when necessary. On the other, it's hard to argue that "they were sad" is ever better than "they wept".
Aaand he lost me.