The Story

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E.M. FORSTER

**E.M. Forster (1879–1970)** was a renowned English novelist, short-story writer, and literary critic whose works significantly influenced 20th-century English literature. His major novels include *Where Angels Fear to Tread* (1905), *Howard's End*, and *A Passage to India*. The essay "The Story" is an excerpt from his critical work **Aspects of the Novel**, which consists of informal lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in spring 1927. These lectures were transformed into a book while maintaining their conversational tone, employing colloquial language and personal observations to discuss the novel as a literary form.

**Exam Point**: Forster's approach to literary criticism is democratic and accessible—he avoids pretentious analysis and instead speaks directly to readers about how novels function.

---

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT AND CONTEXT

The Three Voices: Responses to "What Does a Novel Do?"

Forster introduces **three distinct perspectives** on the purpose of novels through three imaginary speakers, each representing different attitudes toward story-telling:

**1. The First Voice (The Motor-Bus Driver)**

Characterized by vagueness, good-temperedness, and indifference

Response: "A novel tells a story" (stated casually, without conviction)

Attitude: Neither passionate nor dismissive; literature merits minimal attention

**Forster's view**: He respects this speaker for his honesty and lack of pretension

**2. The Second Voice (The Golfer)**

Characterized by aggression, briskness, and defensive certainty

Response: "A novel tells a story—give me a good story, and I have no use for it if it doesn't"

Attitude: Openly rejects literary art, music, and experimental forms; demands straightforward narrative

**Forster's view**: He detests and fears this speaker for his arrogance and closed-mindedness (note the phrase "mind" repeated twice—a marker of stubborn insistence)

**3. The Third Voice (Forster Himself)**

Characterized by reluctance, regret, and philosophical resignation

Response: "Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story" (delivered in a drooping, regretful tone)

Attitude: Acknowledges this truth but wishes novels could aspire to higher qualities like melody or perception of truth

**Forster's view**: This is Forster's own position—he accepts story as fundamental while wishing it were something more refined

**Exam Point**: These three voices establish the central tension of the essay: **the novel's story-telling function is universal and necessary, yet artistically primitive compared to other literary aspirations**.

---

THE FUNDAMENTAL ASPECT: STORY AS BACKBONE

Definition of Story

**Story** is defined by Forster as **a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence**, where one event follows another chronologically (breakfast before dinner, Monday before Tuesday, death before decay). It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms, yet the highest common factor among all novels.

The Two Merits and Faults of Story

**Merit**: A story has only one merit—**making the audience want to know what happens next** (suspense).

**Fault**: A story has only one fault—**failing to make the audience want to know what happens next** (loss of interest).

**Exam Point**: These are the only two valid criticisms that can be applied to story in isolation. A story either succeeds or fails in maintaining narrative curiosity.

The Primitive Origins of Story

Forster traces the human love of story back to **prehistoric times**, suggesting that **Neanderthal man** (judged by skull shape) was an audience for stories. The primitive audience consisted of "**shock-heads** gaping round the campfire," exhausted from hunting mammoth or woolly rhinoceros, kept awake only by **suspense**.

If the audience could predict what would happen next, they either fell asleep or killed the storyteller

The novelist's primary tool was therefore **suspense**—the only literary device effective against "tyrants and savages"

**Literary Reference**: The example of **Scheherazade** from *The 1001 Arabian Nights* illustrates this principle. Despite being "exquisite in descriptions, tolerant in judgements, ingenious in incidents, advanced in morality, vivid in delineations of character," Scheherazade survived execution only through her mastery of suspense. Each night, at dawn, she stopped mid-sentence, leaving the king desperate to hear the ending. The phrase "At this moment Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, discreet, was silent" is identified as **the backbone** of the entire narrative collection—the tape-worm that held her stories together and ultimately saved her life.

**Exam Point**: Scheherazade's success demonstrates that technical excellence and moral sophistication are secondary to the fundamental mechanism of suspense in maintaining audience engagement.

---

TIME SEQUENCE AND THE TAPE-WORM METAPHOR

Story as Tape-Worm

Forster uses the metaphor of a **tape-worm** to describe story structure:

Like a tape-worm, a story has **arbitrary beginning and end**

It runs linearly through the novel, binding disparate elements together

When isolated on "forceps," the story appears "wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time"—both unlovely and dull

Time as Inevitable Structure

The novel is bound to **chronological sequence** in a way that daily life is not. A novelist cannot deny time within his narrative fabric; he must "cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story" or become unintelligible.

**Evidence from Literary History**:

**Emily Brontë** (*Wuthering Heights*) attempted to hide the clock through non-linear narrative

**Laurence Sterne** (*Tristram Shandy*) turned the clock upside down through digressions and fragmentation

**Marcel Proust** (most ingenious) kept altering clock hands, depicting his hero simultaneously entertaining a mistress at supper and playing ball with his nurse in the park

**Key Distinction**: Though these authors manipulated time's presentation, **none actually denied the time sequence**—all devices are legitimate variations within the framework of temporal narrative.

---

THE DOUBLE ALLEGIANCE: TIME VS. VALUES

Life in Daily Experience

Daily life is composed of **two distinct dimensions**:

**1. Life in Time**

Events arranged in chronological sequence

Monday followed by Tuesday, decay following death

Governs much of our talk and action

Based on the time sense

**2. Life by Values**

Measured by intensity, not minutes or hours

Memories pile up into "pinnacles" rather than stretching evenly

Future appears as "wall, sometimes cloud, sometimes sun, but never a chronological chart"

**Artists, dreamers, and lovers** are partially delivered from Father Time's tyranny

**Example from Text**: "I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it"—this single sentence reveals **both allegiances** simultaneously. The five minutes (time) is outweighed by the intensity of the experience (value).

The Novel's Double Allegiance

**A good novel** includes both dimensions:

The story provides the **life in time** (chronological narrative)

Other literary devices provide the **life by values** (emotional intensity, thematic resonance, character depth)

**Critical Distinction**:

In daily life, the allegiance to time is **optional**—mystical traditions suggest time may not be fundamental to human experience

In a novel, allegiance to time is **mandatory**—without it, the novelist becomes unintelligible, which is a fundamental blunder

**Exam Point**: This explains why experimental novels that seemingly reject chronology still maintain an underlying temporal structure—the time sequence is inescapable for coherent narrative.

---

THE ESSAY AS FORMAL LECTURE

Features Marking This as a Talk Rather Than a Formal Essay

The **Note to Aspects of the Novel** (at the essay's end) explicates Forster's stylistic choices:

**Conversational Elements**:

Frequent use of first-person pronouns: "I," "you," "we"

Colloquial interjections: "curiously enough," "so to speak," "only imagine," "of course"

Informal expressions: "I don't know," "oh dear yes," "mind"

Direct address to the audience

Hesitant phrasing and self-correction

**Purpose of This Tone**: Forster argues that **colloquial language may reveal literary secrets that formal criticism misses**. The novel itself is often colloquial; therefore, formal academic discourse ("graver and grander streams of criticism") may obscure insights accessible through "backwaters and shallows" of informal speech.

**Exam Approach**: When answering questions about the essay's features or tone, cite specific phrases from the text and explain how they mark this as spoken discourse rather than written analysis.

---

VOCABULARY AND LITERARY DEVICES

Key Terms to Master

**Atavistic**: Primitive, ancestral; reverting to earlier evolutionary form. Forster uses this to describe story-telling as a "low atavistic form"—ancient and fundamental, if not elevated.

**Shock-heads**: Wild, unkempt hair; primitive people. Used to characterize prehistoric audiences around campfires.

**Ingenious**: Clever, inventive. Forster praises Scheherazade's ingenious management of narrative suspense.

**Qua**: In the capacity of; as being. Example: "Qua story, it can only have one merit..." (story considered solely as story, without other literary qualities).

Literary Devices Employed

**Metaphor (Tape-worm and Backbone)**: The story is compared to both a tape-worm and a backbone—parasitic/skeletal imagery suggesting story as simultaneously life-supporting yet primitive.

**Analogy (Scheherazade)**: The entire narrative of Scheherazade serves as an extended analogy for how story functions: through suspense, survival depends on continuing narrative.

**Irony**: Forster's tone is deeply ironic—he admits story is "low" and "atavistic" while affirming its absolute necessity. The phrase "oh dear yes" captures this resigned acceptance.

---

THE 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS: CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE

**Scheherazade's Story**: The collection is narrated by Scheherazade, daughter of the vizier, who must marry a king notorious for executing each wife after the wedding night. She survives by:

Telling engaging stories each night

Stopping at the most suspenseful moment at dawn

Creating continuity that makes the king unwilling to execute her

Eventually establishing herself as queen after many nights

**Structural Significance**: The entire 1001 stories are held together by the frame narrative of Scheherazade's desperate scheme—demonstrating that **narrative suspense is the universal glue of fiction**.

---

EXAM-IMPORTANT SUMMARY POINTS

1. **Definition and Function**: Story is the narrative of events in time sequence; its sole merit is maintaining suspense, its sole fault is losing it.

2. **Universality**: Story is ancient (prehistoric origin) and universal (all humans want to know "what happens next").

3. **The Paradox**: Though primitive, story is essential to the novel; without it, the novelist becomes unintelligible.

4. **Time Structure**: Novels must maintain chronological sequence, even when authors attempt to disguise or manipulate it (Brontë, Sterne, Proust).

5. **Double Life**: Good novels balance "life in time" (story) with "life by values" (literary qualities like imagery, theme, characterization).

6. **Tone and Method**: Forster's informal, conversational style models how colloquial criticism may reveal insights formal analysis misses.