The Story – Class 11 English Chapter 26 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) was a noted English author and critic who wrote short stories, novels and essays. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905, followed by Howards End, A Passage to India and others; The Hill of Devi (1953) is a portrait of India. This essay is an excerpt from *chapter two of Aspects of the Novel*, based on the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in spring 1927**.

Summary

1. Three voices answer "What does a novel do?"

Forster agrees the fundamental aspect of the novel is story-telling, but the tone in which we agree matters. He imagines three men:

2. The story — ancient, primitive, a 'tape-worm'

The story "runs like a backbone—or may I say a tape-worm—for its beginning and end are arbitrary." It goes back to Neolithic or even Palaeolithic times. The primitive audience was "an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense." If they guessed what happened next, "they either fell asleep or killed him."

3. Scheherazade

Scheherazade, heroine of The Thousand and One Nights, was a great novelist — "exquisite in her descriptions, tolerant in her judgements, ingenious in her incidents…" — yet she survived only because she "knew how to wield the weapon of suspense—the only literary tool that has any effect on tyrants and savages." Each dawn she stopped mid-sentence and left the king "gaping". "At this moment Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, discreet, was silent" — this phrase is the backbone of the collection. (The chapter's note explains: the king beheaded his wife after each wedding night; Scheherazade kept him wanting the end of each story until he accepted her as queen and stopped the practice.)

"We are like Scheherazade's husband in that we want to know what happens next."

4. Definition of a story

"It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence—dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday coming after Monday, decay after death, and so on."

Qua story (as a story), it has only one merit — making the audience want to know what happens next — and one fault — making them not want to know. It is "the lowest and simplest of literary organisms", yet "the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels". Isolated, it is "the naked worm of time"—"unlovely and dull".

5. Life in time and life by values

Daily life also has the time sense, but there is "something else in life besides time… 'value'", measured "not by minutes or hours, but by intensity". Our past "piles up into a few pinnacles"; the future seems "a wall… a cloud… a sun, but never a chronological chart". Dreamers, artists and lovers are partly freed from Father Time's tyranny.

So daily life is two lives — the life in time and the life by values — and our conduct shows "a double allegiance": "I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it." The story narrates the life in time; the whole novel, if good, includes the life by values too.

6. The novelist cannot deny time

In daily life one might deny time (and be sent "to what they choose to call a lunatic asylum"), but a novelist "must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story" or become unintelligible. "In a novel, there is always a clock." Authors may dislike it: Emily Brontë tried to hide hers in Wuthering Heights; Sterne turned it upside down in Tristram Shandy; Proust kept altering the hands. None contradicts the thesis: "the basis of a novel is a story and a story is a narrative of events in time sequence."

Note on Aspects of the Novel

The lectures were "informal, indeed talkative"; Forster kept words like 'I', 'you', 'curiously enough', 'so to speak', 'of course' in print, because the novel itself is often colloquial and may reveal its secrets to "backwaters and shallows" rather than "graver and grander streams of criticism".

Themes

Literary Devices & Style

Word Power

Exam Focus

Q. What do the three voices reveal about attitudes to the novel?

Outline: first vague and humble (respected); second aggressive, anti-art, wants only story (feared); third — Forster's regretful admission that story is basic but low; the tone of agreement shapes later conclusions.

Q. How does Forster use Scheherazade to establish his point?

Outline: despite all her gifts she survived only through suspense; shows the story's one merit — making the listener want to know what happens next.

Q. Discuss the importance of time in a story.

Outline: story = events in time sequence; novelist cannot deny time — "always a clock"; Brontë, Sterne, Proust play with the clock but do not abolish it; good novels add the life by values.

Common Mistakes