EM Forster, Aspects of the Novel, chapter 6: Fantasy · 3:56am Apr 26th, 2014
Aspects of the Novel
EM Forster, 1927
Chapter 6: Fantasy
Chapter 7, "Prophecy", is a remarkable chapter. It illustrates why literary critics should be writers: Forster posits an elusive quality of some novels that has no name, and that he isn't entirely sure even exists. A critic striving to understand what a novel means or how it fits into the writer's biography wouldn't even sense its presence, and would certainly not be able to describe it if he did. Forster is at his limits as an author just finding the metaphors to explain it. This shouldn't surprise us. If the essence of a novel could be communicated in a straight-forward manner, without metaphor, analogy, connotation, or drama, that novel should have been an essay instead.
But to understand what Forster means by prophecy, you must first understand what he meant by fantasy; otherwise you may think that's what he means by prophecy. So this post will talk about chapter 6: Fantasy.
Forster senses something strange and outside the elements of character, plot, setting, etc. Yet he finds this mysterious fifth flavor in works of drastically different sorts; so he divides it into "fantasy" and "prophecy":
Perhaps our subject, namely the books we have read, has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right—it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right—it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground. Criticism, especially a critical course, is so misleading. However lofty its intentions and sound its method, its subject slides away from beneath it, imperceptibly away, and lecturer and audience may awake with a start to find that they are carrying on in a distinguished and intelligent manner, but in regions which have nothing to do with anything they have read. ...
The novels we have now to consider all tell a story, contain characters, and have plots or bits of plots, so we could apply to them the apparatus suited for Fielding or Arnold Bennett. But when I say two of their names—Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick—it is clear that we must stop and think a moment. The bird and the shadow are too far apart. A new formula must be found: the mere fact that one can mention Tristram and Moby in a single sentence shows it. What an impossible pair! As far apart as the poles. Yes. And like the poles they have one thing in common, which the lands round the equator do not share: an axis. What is essential in Sterne and Melville belongs to this new aspect of fiction: the fantastic-prophetical axis. ...
When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly. It is not possible, after it, to apply the old apparatus any more. There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by “more” I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.
Forster does not intend either word, fantasy or prophecy, to denote the supernatural. "Fantasy," he writes, "implies the supernatural, but need not express it."
The supernatural is absent from [Tristram Shandy], yet a thousand incidents suggest that it is not far off. ... There is a charmed stagnation about the whole epic--the more the characters do the less gets done... facts have an unholy tendency to unwind and trip up the past instead of begetting the future... and the obstinacy of inanimate objects, like Dr. Slop's bag, is most suspicious. Obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him.
I'm sure he'd say that Tolkien wrote fantasy, but I'm almost as sure he would not consider Game of Thrones to be fantasy at all. It's merely a world in which magic does certain things, as electricity does certain things in ours. I doubt that he'd call Harry Potter fantasy either. In chapter 3 Forster wrote:
If we were to press her [Moll Flanders] or her creator Defoe and say, “Come, be serious. Do you believe in Infinity?” they would say (in the parlance of their modern descendants), “Of course I believe in Infinity—what do you take me for?”—a confession of faith that slams the door on Infinity more completely than could any denial.
I think that Forster would like to capitalize Magic as he capitalized Infinity, and if, when asked about Magic, you nodded and said, "Yes, yes; you can do magic if you have the right genes and a good wand from Ollivander's," he'd say that the Magic had become engineering through familiarity. Magic was Star Wars before Midichlorians. Magic is what you find in The Last Unicorn:
But he had judged them too easily. They applauded his rings and scarves, his ears full of goldfish and aces, with a proper politeness but without wonder. Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them; and when a spell failed — as when, promising to turn a duck into a duke for them to rob, he produced a handful of duke cherries — he was clapped just as kindly and vacantly as though he had succeeded. They were a perfect audience.
Cully smiled impatiently, and Jack Jingly dozed, but it startled the magician to see the disappointment in Molly Grue's restless eyes. Sudden anger made him laugh. He dropped seven spinning balls that had been glowing brighter and brighter as he juggled them (on a good evening, he could make them catch fire), let go all his hated skills, and closed his eyes. "Do as you will," he whispered to the magic. "Do as you will."
It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret — in his shoulderblade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding. Weak with power, he sank to his knees and waited to be Schmendrick again.
I wonder what I did. I did something.
If he called My Little Pony fantasy, it wouldn't be because of the unicorns and levitation. It would be because Equestria is built more along the plan of Keats than of Newton: Something of our hopes and dreams are built into its physics.
He tries to distinguish them:
The general tone of novels is so literal that when the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect: some readers are thrilled, others choked off: it demands an additional adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject matter—like a sideshow in an exhibition where you have to pay sixpence as well as the original entrance fee. Some readers pay with delight, it is only for the sideshows that they entered the exhibition, and it is only to them I can now speak. Others refuse with indignation, and these have our sincere regards, for to dislike the fantastic in literature is not to dislike literature....
So fantasy asks us to pay something extra.
Let us now distinguish between fantasy and prophecy.
They are alike in having gods, and unlike in the gods they have. There is in both the sense of mythology.... On behalf of fantasy let us now invoke all beings who inhabit the lower air, the shallow water, and the smaller hills, all Fauns and Dryads and slips of the memory, all verbal coincidences, Pans and puns, all that is mediæval this side of the grave. When we come to prophecy... it will have been to whatever transcends our abilities, even when it is human passion that transcends them, to the deities of India, Greece,Scandinavia and Judæa, to all that is mediæval beyond the grave and to Lucifer son of the morning. By their mythologies we shall distinguish these two sorts of novels.
To demonstrate fantasy, he cites a passage from Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm--one with nothing definitely supernatural in it; you'll have to click on the link to read it--then writes:
Has not a passage like this—with its freedom of invocation—a beauty unattainable by serious literature? It is so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound. Criticisms of human nature fly through the book, not like arrows but upon the wings of sylphs.
Humor has something to do with his distinction between fantasy and prophecy. Fantasy can be humorous; prophecy cannot. He compares fantasy to a flute, prophecy to a song, probably an operatic aria in a foreign language. The fantasist knows what he is doing, and if he's trying to make a point, he makes it, like Tolkien with his message that the world and Man were created perfect and have both gone downhill ever since. The prophet wants desperately to tell us something, but doesn't know what it is.
If it still isn't clear what he's talking about--and I don't think it is--you can read the whole thing here. It might become more clear when I go over chapter 7, but honestly, I doubt it will.
My guess is that he thinks fantasy is when the world itself has a personality or an attitude. The real world is unromantically steadfast; apples fall regardless of their consequences for people. Fantasy worlds take an interest in their inhabitants and take some side. A pegasus will never die in a crash, even if it bores a hole through a tree trunk. The Everfree Forest takes the opposite side; you will have bad luck if it doesn't like you.
- The King of Elfland's Daughter spends a lot of words describing the personalities of Elfland versus the human world, and unlike in the real world, which we reshape according to our wants, the characters from Elfland inherit their personalities from their world.
- The worlds of Equestria, or of Tristram Shandy, can't be driven just by physics, because some kinds of things happen more often than they should, and the opposite kind doesn't happen at all.
- Tolkien's worlds have themes running through them that are consistent, but contradict Earthly physics. It is a created world, made right in the beginning, but that only decays and runs down as time goes on, like a person growing old. It's a place with no food chain, where a host of equally-dangerous, mutually-hostile things somehow co-exist in close proximity, in numbers greater than the land could possibly support, where a troll, goblin, dragon, or spider could easily satisfy its hunger by going over some hills to Hobbiton yet does not because something in the world says this kind of thing must be in this kind of place.
- You get the sense that Wonderland isn't just a place that happens to be full of crazy people—Wonderland itself is crazy, or a practical joker; it changes to frustrate or rescue you, according to its own impish logic.
Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but I definitely think that novels--or stories in general (especially the very good or powerful ones)--have a level of mystique about them. There's something in how they touch our hearts or make us think or realize or feel some idea or truth or emotion, that's difficult to grasp. There's a magic that seems to allows stories to be bigger than themselves, to feel as if they're encompassing the entirety of the universe. They're contained within the covers of a book, and yet their scope can be grand.
Whether this mystique is real or perceived--a mere result of our ignorance--I don't know.
Though I do know this: it's great for readers, and a pain for writers.
Man, I am just barely hanging on to what this guy is trying to say. I got the idea that this version of fantasy is sort of an unrepentant sense of whimsy?
2048300 My guess is that he thinks fantasy is when the world itself has a personality or an attitude. The real world is unromantically steadfast; apples fall regardless of their consequences for people. Fantasy worlds take an interest in their inhabitants and take some side. A pegasus will never die in a crash, even if they bore a hole through a tree trunk. The Everfree Forest takes the opposite side; you will have bad luck if it doesn't like you.
- "The King of Elfland's Daughter" spends a lot of words describing the personalities of Elfland versus the human world, and unlike in the real world, which we reshape according to our wants, the characters from Elfland inherit their personalities from their world.
- The worlds of Equestria, or of Tristram, can't be driven just by physics, because some kinds of things happen more often than they should, and the opposite kind doesn't happen at all.
- Tolkien's worlds have themes running through them that are consistent, but contradict Earthly physics. It is a created world, made right in the beginning, but that only decays and runs down as time goes on, like a person growing old. It's a place with no food chain, where a host of equally-dangerous, mutually-hostile things somehow co-exist in close proximity, in numbers greater than the land could possibly support, where a troll, goblin, dragon, or spider could easily satisfy its hunger by going over some hills to Hobbiton yet does not because something in the world says this kind of thing must be in this kind of place.
- You get the sense that Wonderland isn't just a place that happens to be full of crazy people—Wonderland itself is crazy, or a practical joker; it changes to frustrate or rescue you, according to its own impish logic.
I'm going to add this to the post.
2048552 I see. Okay, that makes sense. And yeah, Equestria definitely falls into this catagory. I'd argue you could also throw the ideas of fate and destiny into the mix, since in the real world those don't really exist, we just wish they did. Hell, cutie marks are a great example. Twilight was destined to be a powerful user of magic ever since she got her cutie mark, following a narrative arc that the world of equestria sort of guaranteed would happen.
Fantasy is the result of blurring character and setting. Prophecy is what theme would be if theme were a premise of the story rather than a conclusion.
Is this the same as how you think of it?
Forster seems to be talking around something Tolkien said, that a fantasy world is one in which moral and magical law have the force of physical law.
2052243
Such as one in which Friendship is Magic and Magic is a high-powered ray gun that metes out punishments as it sees fit (I've always imagined that the effect of the Elements on a target is unpredictable--that it is a wild, primal magic that does what it does for a damn good reason but doesn't bother to tell the users what that reason might be. I suppose that's my way of introducing more of the fantastic to combat Twilight's inexorable quest to systematize magic and turn Equestria into a Prophecy world instead. And now my parenthetical has entirely taken over the comment.)
2048566 Yes, fate & destiny & cutie marks are (Forster's) fantasy.
2049465 Sounds like a nice summary of "fantasy". I'm still confused about "prophecy". Did you read that chapter?
2052243 That's a great way of putting it, at least the moral law part.
2055709 Yes, "Friendship is Magic" means "The morals of friendship are part of this world's physics".
2055962
I just read it, but my ideas of prophecy haven't changed at all. The theme of a story is the conclusion in the sense that it's what the story is set up to say. But that story has assumptions, and those assumptions that the author wants understood are the prophecy.
I think I'm starting to understand the problem with describing prophecy. It's difficult to pin down because, unlike proofs, stories are not directed, so it's easy to confuse prophecy as something that's part of the story or concluded from the story. Also, it's difficult (impossible?) to recognize a premise if you can't recognize a more general version of your proof. I can only think of one method to identify them: if people don't understand a thing you think you've stated clearly, then there's a premise involved. If it's something you wanted to convey (like a theme... damnit, how do I get rid of this clause?), it's a prophecy.
Is this one of your prophecies? Interestingly (for some approximations of "interestingly"), it's much harder to find support for "Good people desire to understand others" in
your ficspretty much anything ever written.2059779 I think you're defining prophecy by content, while Forster defines it more by style. Prophetic to him implies opaque, emotional, mysterious, unconscious.
I don't consciously believe that good people desire to be understood, though I'm unlikely to think that people who deceive others are good.
Good people care about others, and that implies that good and smart people desire to understand others. My fics demonstrate this by showing that good people care about others (20 minutes, moments, long distance, pony play, ATPPP, a carrot for miss fluttershy, and more), try to understand others (friends), and that good desires are frustrated when people don't understand each other (alicorn cider, long distance, carrot for miss f, big mac reads), or even that terrible things happen when people don't try to understand each other (corpse bride, fluttershy's night out, burning man brony).
2060438
When I say "understand others", I mean "why others do the things they do / feel the things they feel". You're right about Friends doing this, and it did it really well. You have a lot of negative examples, but those seem to show characters with a limited capacity to understand others rather than a lack of desire to do so.
Now that I think about it, there are a few more fics with positive examples.
2052243
BTW, I spent a long time finding the reference for this. It's from (Helms p. 79):
Randel Helms, 1974. Tolkien’s World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
5574685
Wow. Seven years, four months and three days, to be precise.
Back in the 70's Larry Niven wrote a short story called "The Magic Goes Away." In it, magic was mana and the world had a finite supply of it. And it was running out. This was intended as a metaphor for the "energy crisis" of the 70's, a political-economic interruption in the oil supply from the Mideast that convinced most of the Western creative community that oil itself was running out and that civilization would soon collapse.
Which was bullshit but it gave us Mad Max: The Road Warrior.
At the time it occurred to me that there were two schools of fantasy: the British school and the American school. In the British school magic was a metaphor for morality; in the American school magic was a metaphor for technology. Only they're really the same because in America, technology is morality.
Neither the British nor the American school exists any more. Magic in current fantasy is something out of D&D--Mr. Helms seems to presage it with his formulae. Gary Gygax died in obscurity, but we all live in his world now.
Anybody find a way out?
5574685
Hey, here's a source from the same guy, 3 years earlier:
The Structure and Aesthetic of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings