CAAF: Loose notes

“If you ask one type of man, ‘What does a novel do?’ he will reply placidly: ‘Well–I don’t know–it seems a funny sort of question to ask–a novel’s a novel–well, I don’t know–I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.’ He is quite good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor bus at the same time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply: ‘What does a novel do? Why, it tells a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.’ And a third man he says in a sort of dropping regretful voice, ‘Yes–oh dear, yes–the novel tells a story.’ I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story . . . The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone–or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary . . . It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence–dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story . . . When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps–wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time–it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it.”
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, as quoted and elided by Samuel R. Delany in About Writing