Elements of the Novel:

Chapter 3: PEOPLE; THE INNER LIFE

The aspect of the novel that Forster is most interested in is people, or character. This contrasts sharply with literary criticism since World War II, when almost no one has been the least interested in character. Right after the war, New Wave novelists like Allain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute deliberately tried to eliminate people from narrative fiction. Robbe-Grillet made his characters little more than markers to keep one’s place in a game he hoped was purely "objective," specifically eschewing psychological issues and what he called "the archaic myth of depth" (For a New Novel, 31-33). Sarraute sought to "plunge" the reader into a "pre-human" dimension "as anonymous as blood, in a magma without name, without contour" and keep him/her there (The Age of Suspicion, 74). "What is obsolescent in today’s novel," said Roland Barthes, "is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name" (Critical Essays, 95).

Levi-Strauss’s Structuralism, too, doesn’t need character, certainly not personality. You only need an Oedipus to make or not make a choice. You do not need values, you need events.

Many of us Modernists are baffled by such Post-Modern positions, for we are fond of saying that one of the most important keys of Modernism is that it made the inner life a part of the Real.

The Real in the age of realism that had just preceded Forster’s age had been a matter of external sensory perceptions, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to defining reality; Forster himself refers to this as the "furniture" of experience.

The modernists did not throw out the furniture nor the spiritual. But, from about the time of the Renaissance, and certainly with the development of the English novel, another dimension had been growing steadily in literature, a dimension Forster calls "the inner life." By Forster’s time, Freud, Adler, and Jung, among others, had pretty well defined the outlines of that dimension.

Freud had "proved" to us that the unconscious exists and that the dreams, nightmares, anxieties, neuroses, passions, aversions, motivations, the traumas that live in the unconscious and creep out in our dreams and deviant psychological behaviors are as much a part of Reality as the table and plates at breakfast.

Adler suggested that a craving for power (as a compensation for perceived inferiorities) dominated personal reality; this notion became so well accepted that articles on "One-Upmanship" could and did appear in The New Yorker.

Jung had put words like introvert, extrovert, and complex into the vocabulary and was well on his way to his demonstration that archetype and myth are aspects of psychological reality.

Subjective experience became as Real as the objective. The inner life became part of the Real. We were suddenly in the age of "scientific" psychology.

Another aspect of modernism is its emphasis on causality, a primary tenet of the scientific movement. Freud, Adler, and Jung were conscious of themselves as inventing the "science" of psychology.

In this context, it is no accident that Freud’s very first assumption is that behavior is caused. In Freud’s thought, there are no accidents. Motivations and behavior are directly linked. His notions of the sub-conscious made it necessary for him to assert that some of the causes of behavior were hidden, even repressed, from conscious view -- repressed because they were psychologically negative and posed a serious threat to the conscious part of the psyche.

These negative psychic valences then expressed themselves in disguised form, as neurosis, psychosis, and other psychological disorders. That’s why analysis became a necessary treatment for mental illness. His assumption is that uncovering repressed psychic material, i.e., making it conscious through analysis, discharges the psychic threat that made it necessary to repress the material to begin with. Much of the efficacy of his psychoanalysis lies in this neutralizing of negative psychological forces. For problems of the unconscious, asking makes the answer.

Of course, their scientific method was based on case studies of disturbed people -- rather different from the experimental methods of chemistry and physics. Different, too, from the after-the-fact macro-speculations of sociology and economics, which were also asserting that they were scientific. One might note that study in the social sciences of what-has-happened is almost the opposite of experiment-and-replication in the hard sciences. And neither of them is concerned with the control groups and statistical analysis that made academic psychology what it is.

Post-Modernists are fond of pointing out that there is no such thing as scientific method, but many scientific methods, so many as to belie the thrust toward coherence and order that scientific method strives for to begin with, and, consequently, we might as well throw out the whole notion of order and certainty, because order and certainty are not possible. I don’t go along with this throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath approach.

Many of us who are modernists see weird contradictions in much contemporary thought. Our linguists will tell us with one breath that language is impossible, because sounds, words, sentences change their meanings as the contexts around them change; then with the next breath, they will be searching for a universal grammar. The dual thrusts of Structuralism were to deny that motivation and behavior were intimately connected -- and to formulate a universal poetics of narrative.

But, perhaps, what bothers us most is that contemporary thought has shifted away from people. The philosophy of Existentialism, faced with a breakdown of order and certainty in behavior, focuses upon the individual’s necessity to invent and live his/her own ethics. But in the process, emphasis is so shifted away from personality, motivation, and character to issues of ethics and morality that Existentialism ceases to be experiential and becomes abstract, an expository exercise. It is about thought, rather than people.

People in fiction cannot be substituted for people in life, because "they are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible." (Forster, p.64)

It’s a little surprising to hear Forster being so literal. He knows the difference he says every British schoolboy (45-6) knows from his Aristotle: History records what has happened; poetry invents what can. Poetry, by which Aristotle meant any literary invention, thus deals in other kinds of truth than the literal -- with representative truth, conceptual truth, generalizing truth, symbolic truth.

We go to fictions, says the modernist, not because we expect to see real people, but because we expect to see people who are like real people, people who hold values and have an inner life that we recognize as true in their own way, in a way we cannot know about real people.

Moll Flanders is a good example. She loves to eat and make love like the rest of us; if she has to pick a pocket now and then to make her life possible, it’s only in the spirit of her joy of life. She has a moral sense, says Forst