Prudence and the Providence of Plot
Bruno M. Shah, OP
A single novel is proposed to the Christian--his own; a single debate taking place between him and his Creator.
--François Mauriac
For the twentieth-century novelist and critic, E. M. Forster, the novel’s element of “story” is as necessary as it is, in itself, “base and inferior.” (1) Even a “novel” that would postmodernly play with narratival disjunction and cosmic fragmentation bears characters and events according to a certain temporal order; at the very least, a dramatic clock is ticking away in the reader’s mind and heart. Thus, as the time-bound ordering of particular persons and contingent events, “story” answers the most basic of questions, “And now what happens?” But that is all it does.
Nevertheless, in his Aspects of the Novel, Forster concedes that, without this mere “life of time,” the “life of values” could not emerge. Only through particular, temporal actions can necessary goods be intended and instantiated. A novelist’s “values,” then, are necessarily communicated through his “actors”; and the actions of these actors reveal deeper, more significant “secret lives.” Forster would thus reverse Aristotle’s claim that “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality.” (2) Forster judged that Aristotle was in want of an absolutely transcendent vision, wherein “action” could bear more than a story’s categorical occasions. Consequently the modern novelist judges “that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence” (113).
One might well wish that Forster had known the Church’s doctrine of supernatural quality, of infused grace, especially as so clearly articulated by the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. For it is by grace that categorical actions are empowered to bear transcendental values and intend divine realities. Unfortunately, lacking the manifest grace of Christian insight, Forster tends toward a nebulous gnosticism. Regardless, even for Forster, neither real nor fictional persons are mere aggregates of their attributes, external or internal. An author’s insight into human nature cannot be exhausted by his characterizations. Somehow, homo fictus possesses a transcendent meaning that is capable of “opening out” beyond the novel’s horizon of mundane action. But what is this trans-narratival dynamism about, and what does it have to do with our own, concrete lives?
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Bruno M. Shah, OP, is studying at the Dominican House of Studies, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, in Washington, D.C.
(1) E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1927), 60. All citations are parenthetically noted in the text.
(2) The Poetics, 1450a.
