adapted from The Work of the Living: Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Public Craft of Criticism
When E.M. Forster took to the lectern to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, from January to March of 1927, he was a novelist dispirited. Writing and drawing from the deep wells of his youthful experiences had drained him of content and inspiration, of the liberating gifts of youth. For Forster, youth was “a time of innocence, but also a time innocent of self-criticism”—and that innocence had lapsed1. Forster was haunted by critics who questioned his attachment to outmoded Edwardian literary fashions. He was isolated by choice from the intellectual orthodoxies that swept away his peers. He wanted no part in the collective imagination of his fellow literary critics, possessed and titillated by the unknown, the uncanny, the subconscious lurkers conjured by the post-Freud rise of psychoanalysis.
After the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, Forster abandoned the art of fiction. Even his posthumous novel Maurice (1971) was largely drafted in the 1910s.
But like H.G. Wells once wrote, an artist can live on as a critic2. Forster’s artistry and craft had prepared him for this stage, had prepared him to speak on the novel, its history, and its construction from the position of both the artist and the critic, the creator and the analyst. To outline the task of his lectures, he resorted to the pulpit of his predecessor in the Clark lectures, fellow artist-critic T.S. Eliot:
Mr. Eliot enumerates, in the introduction to The Sacred Wood, the duties of the critic. […] “It is part of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; […] to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time.”3 […] But we can visualize the novelists as sitting in one room, and force them, by our very ignorance, from the limitations of date and place. I think that is worth doing, or I should not have ventured to undertake this course.4
Forster’s direct address to the listeners—to the “we”—is not accidental: he is with them, communicating with them, and confiding in them. In his lectures, Forster seeks only to furnish a space in which he and his listeners might commune with the spirits of literature past and present and yet to come, for the short span of an afternoon’s lecture.
Forster’s modest aim is steeped in the somewhat bitter brew of his old creative ambitions, its taste of resignation honeyed over by a nostalgia for the artist’s craft. He informed his audience that he selected for these lectures “the title ‘Aspects’ because it is unscientific and vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work.” The function of the lectures was to provide shelter for readers and writers alike in a temporary and informal public space, liberated from the demarcations of time and physical borders, through which novels and their readers and their discourses circulate.
It was the very transience of this moment, the impermanence of it, that guaranteed its afterlives—but for different and ever-shifting publics5.
The difficulty in defining what constitutes a “public” stems from the fact that publics are neither static nor perpetual, but are socially conditioned and adaptable. This occurs because the public itself can shift and transmute from one era to the next, from one context to another. In contending that publics are “self-organized,” Michael Warner argues that a public “exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.”6
The original audience of Forster’s Clark Lectures assembled because a novelist was speaking on the novel, its aspects, its form, and its character. This public did not exist prior to the inaugural lecture, but came into being when Forster’s delivery of the lecture itself initiated a discourse.
When Forster revised the sequence of eight talks into book form, he retained the title Aspects of the Novel. However, he added a note to acknowledge a different public—contemporary readers of novels, who couldn’t attend the talks. The lectures “were informal, indeed talkative, in their tone, and it seemed safer when presenting them in book form not to mitigate the talk.”7 Forster describes this as an homage to the novel as a literary form, “since the novel is itself often colloquial.”8
This would not be the final public that would encounter Forster’s lectures. However, the publication of the text launched two of its afterlives: a record and replica of an irretrievable moment that becomes available to future generations, and a contribution to the discussions and deliberations of a more abstract public (namely, the future writers and critics who cite, debate, and invoke Forster’s Aspects).
These two afterlives are a gift entailed by Forster to an ever-shifting pool of inheritors: the publics of future readers, future novelists.
When Warner describes a public as “self-organized,” he refers only to the nature of publics as groups constellated around and through a discourse. We should expand “discourse” beyond the narrow parameters of language, so it includes all media: the publics of video game franchises exist because players insert cartridges into their consoles and power them on. The publics of art galleries on college campuses exist because faculty, peers, and family went to see the canvases or fabricated collages or sculptures or so on.
The term “self-organization,” though, is a mite too rigid. Perhaps it’s the presence of “organization” in this compound noun, which carries with it a Pine-Sol whiff of the scrubbed hallways of a nonprofit or the institutional corridors of academia. “Organization” implies a degree of intentionality, a laser-focused scrutiny of a text, film, painting, and so on.
But Warner intends a more general, broad-reaching vision of “organization.” “The existence of a public is contingent on its members’ activities,” Warner observes, “however notional or compromised.”9 Strict focus is not a prerequisite. Overhearing a lecture or reading about a text is sufficient to become part of an artwork’s public.10 People don’t have to be particularly fixated on what occurs within that discourse. Scoffing at John Gardner’s notion of the “continuous fictional dream,” William H. Gass argues that most readers aren’t as actively engaged as scholars and writers assume: the reader is “going to, in fact, stop, brush a fly off his nose, go back to the first page, read it over, skip, look around for the juicy parts.” 11
Gass’s reader resembles Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, hopscotching through a volume of poems while wondering about the personal lives of everybody on holiday with the Ramsay family. An audience member in a lecture hall may be similar: shuffling papers, scratching their knee, tapping distractedly at their smartphone, shooing a fly off the plastic lid of their coffee.
Still, for art objects like texts, it is this self-organization that frees the artist-critic’s public from remaining sequestered in its own historic or temporal moment. When Forster’s Aspects pans Sir Walter Scott’s novels as a detailed register of events unmoved by affect or plot, or when he praises the atmospheric emotions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the lectures and book alike align themselves with the publics of Scott’s and Brontë’s readers.12 This also means that Forster’s listeners and readers, too, gain access to those spaces.
Whether they will take Forster at his word on Scott or Brontë or form their own opinions is another matter. The moment Forster spoke, the lecture was out of his mouth and into the minds of the many publics that Aspects would influence.
There’s a situational irony here. Texts and the community of readers share a public (but abstract) relationship. Yet, we all write alone, hoping that the pen or the keyboard transmits our ideas to whatever medium we prefer—the legal pad, the collage of post-its on a computer monitor, the bleach-sterility of the blank Word document. In 1929, shortly after an unpleasant stint in Berlin, Virginia Woolf would return to her diary and apologize to it for the “disgrace” of leaving it unattended for too long. “I am going to enter a nunnery these next months;” Woolf confides to her diary, “and let myself down into my mind […]. It is going to be a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful I think.”13 Writing to C.P. Curran in 1937, James Joyce laments the arduous task of working through the proofs of Finnegans Wake and likens the red “gore” of his pens and colored pencils to wine stains: “In fact I am treading this winepress all alone.”14
Unlike the storyteller, the writer has no rapt listeners, as Margaret Atwood points out: “alone while composing,” she argues, a “writer […] can scratch his way through draft after draft, laboring […] over the shapes of sentences.”15
Stephen King puts it more bluntly: “Writing is a lonely job.”16
Forster delivered his lectures nearly a century ago. Yet they persist, and the public of creative writers keeps circulating them. I’m citing a copy of Aspects that I purchased in 2007 and heavily annotated, while still an undergrad. In A Short Story Writer’s Companion (2001), Tom Bailey invokes Aspects and its celebrated distinction between a “story” (a sequence of events) and a “plot” (a novel’s system of cause and effect) to urge young writers to imbue their stories with complexity.17 Christopher Castellani, in The Art of Perspective (2016), cites the same distinction, before elaborating that a novel’s plot also depends upon the broader narrative strategy.18 Forster’s insistence that stories are “patterns of change” surfaces in multiple editions of Janet Burroway’s handbook Writing Fiction.19 Though Jane Alison doesn’t cite Forster, her 2019 book Meander Spiral Explode draws on that very premise: “fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes.”20
Or, as Forster put it in Aspects, each narrative possesses its own pattern: “hour-glass or grand chain or converging lines of the cathedral or diverging lines of the Catherine wheel […]—whatever image you like as long as it implies unity.”21
The book publication of Forster’s lectures, as I said before, is a replica of an irretrievable moment. We cannot taste the air in that hall, or inhale the smells of tobacco or coffee emanating from blazers, or note the odd bubble or crack in the upholstery of the chairs on either side of us. Nor can we sense Forster’s weariness with the art of fiction from his countenance, gestures, or intonation.
It also anticipates one of the most pivotal exchanges in contemporary criticism: the circulation of lecture, into book, into multiple public permutations. Virginia Woolf’s frenzy of writing in January 1929 expanded her lecture “Women and Fiction” into a component of A Room of One’s Own. T.S. Eliot reproduced his 1932 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. And it extends onward. Robert Penn Warren’s Democracy and Poetry began as the 1974 Jefferson Lectures for the National Endowment of the Humanities. Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” began as a speech at London’s Festival of India in 1982. Much of Margaret Atwood’s critical work—her study of the wilderness in Canadian fiction Strange Thing (1995) and her craft book Negotiating with the Dead (2002)—began as lectures. Toni Morrison’s influential Playing in the Dark (1992) built on, as she notes, “questions raised in three William E. Massey Sr. Lectures given at Harvard University.”22
It might be said that the lecture is the definitive way to compel creative writers to produce criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Still, Aspects of the Novel and these other books remain available to us on different platforms, in different media, in different spaces and times. This anticipates other replicas, other ghosts. Some of these may still be recovered, unexpectedly, like the fragment of a BBC recording, with the raspy and spectral voice of Virginia Woolf delivering eight minutes of a talk called “Craftsmanship.”23 Others are being actively preserved. Entire print runs of defunct little magazines continue to survive and shape their own publics through afterlives in online databases like the Modernist Journals Project. Decades of otherwise irretrievable discourse, preserved.
Reprinted or digitized or transplanted to a different medium, the work of artist-critics remains accessible to multiple, ever-changing publics. And with that, their capacity to generate further discussion, further discourse, remains.
“Ultimately you write alone,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes of the drafting process, adding, “ultimately you and you alone can judge your work.”24 Yet, few people write to be alone, to subject themselves to the monastic aesthetic practice of Philip Roth’s Eli Lonoff, the Bernard Malamud stand-in who enthralls Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer (1979). Lonoff tells Zuckerman, “I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again.”25
Save an archivist or a biographer, nobody will ever read the flipped and inverted sentences in the drafts of a writer with Lonoff’s plodding process. Ian McEwan says there’s a certain liberation in this knowledge for the writer, that his similarly incremental practice of writing longhand “allows […] a way of unearthing things slightly below the surface of conscious thought.”26
But for whom does a writer conduct this patient excavation of ideas and affects with the inefficient chisels of language? Atwood would say it’s for the “dear reader” who picks up a book—whoever that person might be.27 Frank O’Connor claims that “there is in the short story […] an intense awareness of human loneliness,” a sensitivity that draws in other loners—“tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled priests.”28 The short story writer is a lonely voice speaking to other lonely voices, an invitation from one nobody to another (to loot the lines of Emily Dickinson).
But it’s not only true of short stories. King, again, attributes the potency of writing to its unique power to annihilate the rules of space and time: “We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room … except we are together. We’re close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.”29 Oscar Wilde says the same for critics: the critic is always “reminding us that great works of art are living things—are, in fact, the only things that live.”30
Even though we write in solitude, we write for somebody—a public, a community, however small, generated in their moment of contact with the living work of art.
In their many iterations and re-iterations, the publics of Forster’s Aspects adapt and alter, transcending—much like he himself set out to do—the restrictions of chronology and the walls of the lecture hall. This future is endowed to many other artist-critics, making the past present and persistent—and political. In epistolary essays in The Fire Next Time (1963), James Baldwin indicts the patterns of ideology and rhetoric for imperiling Black lives and the nature of beauty:
And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable […]. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, […] to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.31
Baldwin conceptualizes a similar collapse of time and history to Forster’s. “Baldwin’s work constantly folds back on itself,” as Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes.32 But such folding and cycling back is necessary for Baldwin. Baldwin suggests that those attuned to the trials of the present—systemic racism, ignorance, the brutality of the state, the disavowal of nuance and human connection—have the capacity to facilitate change. It will be an arduous task. History is engineered against it—and Baldwin is candid about this.
Glaude reads Baldwin in the United States of the 2010s, an America in which police brutality regularly led to the killing of unarmed Black Americans, an America which elected Donald Trump as president in 2016 and doubled-down on the physical and rhetorical violence of racism. Glaude writes that Baldwin’s call remains urgent: “We have to create spaces to accomplish this work without succumbing to the depression and exhaustion produced by the onslaught of the reassertion of the lie in Trump’s America”33—something that, Glaude notes, happened in the responses to the August 2014 murder of the unarmed, Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, Missouri.34
Baldwin’s arguments and vision returned, reiterated and nuanced and re-calibrated across multiple platforms. Toni Morrison took to Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report on 19 November 2014 to discuss the social construction and perpetuation of racism with Stephen Colbert’s studio and home audiences.35 Ta-Nehisi Coates borrowed the epistolary form of The Fire Next Time in Between the World and Me (2015), an evocative public letter that brims with compassion and concern for the lives of young Black Americans. Jesmyn Ward recognized a similar need, editing a volume of essays that nods to Baldwin in its title, The Fire This Time (2017), with contributions by Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Tretheway, and Ward herself, to name but a few.
Ward shares in Baldwin’s maybe, in Baldwin’s hope: “I hope this book makes each of you, dear readers, feel as if we are sitting together, you and me and Baldwin and […] all the serious, clear-sighted writers here—and that we are composing our story together.”36
As if we are sitting together, Ward writes. As if we are seated next to each other on the same bench, whether in a reading room or a restaurant or the concourse of a train station. Ward’s “as if” derives from the same impulse as Forster’s effort to collapse time, “to visualize the English novelists […] as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room—all writing their novels simultaneously.”37
This is the hope that impels the artist-critic to write, despite the solitude and loneliness of committing words to the page or uttering them as sound waves that, moments later, fade. It is the hope that the writer might serve someone other than themselves, that the twin rhetorics of creative and critical writing (as Forster says) “might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity.”38 This is the work of the artist-critic—the work of the living—and it remains work worth doing for our publics and those that are yet to form around and through discourse.
- Nicola Beauman, E.M. Forster: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 334. ↩︎
- H.G. Wells, introduction, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, ed. Patrick Parinder (New York: Penguin, 2007), 398. ↩︎
- T.S. Eliot, “Introduction to The Sacred Wood,” in The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: Volume 2, The Perfect Critic, 1919–26, eds. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 296. ↩︎
- E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 23. First published in 1927. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 24. ↩︎
- Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 67. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, unpaginated “Note.” ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, unpaginated “Note.” ↩︎
- Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 88. ↩︎
- Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 65. ↩︎
- William H. Gass. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction,” interview by Thomas LeClair, in Conversations with John Gardner, ed. Allan Chavkin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 176. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 30–7, 144–7. ↩︎
- Virginia Woolf, diary entry for 28 March 1929, in A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 257. ↩︎
- James Joyce, Letter to C.P. Curran (14 July 1937), in The Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 385. ↩︎
- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (New York: Anchor, 2002), 47, 48. ↩︎
- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Simon & Schuster–Pocket Books, 2002), 65. First published by Scribner in 2000. ↩︎
- Tom Bailey, A Short Story Writer’s Companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 65–71. ↩︎
- Christopher Castellani, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story? (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2016), 5–6. ↩︎
- Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, tenth edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 69. ↩︎
- Jane Alison, Meander Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (New York: Catapult, 2019), 24. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 163. ↩︎
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993), n. pag. ↩︎
- BBC.com. “Rare Recording of Virginia Woolf,” 9 July 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-28231055. ↩︎
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (New York: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), xii. First published in 1998. ↩︎
- Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 17–8. ↩︎
- Ian McEwan, “The Writers Digest Interview: Ian McEwan,” interview by Amy Jones, Writers Digest, 30 December 2022. https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/writers-digest-interview-ian-mcewan. ↩︎
- Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead, 151. ↩︎
- Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, intro. by Russell Banks (New York: Harper Colophon, 1985), 19, 20–1. First published in 1963 by the World Publishing Company. ↩︎
- King, On Writing, 98. ↩︎
- Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist—Part II,” in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (New York: Penguin, 2001), 246. ↩︎
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993), 105. First published by the Dial Press in 1963. ↩︎
- Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown Books, 2020), xxvii. ↩︎
- Glaude, Begin Again, 140. ↩︎
- Glaude, Begin Again, 141. ↩︎
- Toni Morrison, interview by Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, 19 Nov. 2014. ↩︎
- Jesmyn Ward, introduction, in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (New York: Scribner, 2017), 11. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 9. ↩︎
- Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 174. ↩︎
