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 Good morning!

What I have posted today is a paper my daughter, Rebecca Schwarz, wrote for her 20th Century Literature Class.  Their assignment really made me think.  I hope you will enjoy it!  (Isn't Barnard College lucky to be getting her?)

Yes E. M., A Novel Needs a Story

When questioning the fundamental aspects of his art in his book Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster unwillingly concluded that

"Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different—melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form" (26).

Yet, however disappointing the baseline of the story is to Forster, it is the frame on which every novel is built. To play with characters, symbols and points of view, there must first be a sequence of related events for them to stand on. To create purpose, there must be a structure to hold it up. But early in the twentieth century, writers began to see the traditional components of the novel as cages for their creativity, walls blocking the progress of their art. In addition, they felt that within these established limits, they could not mimic the total upheaval of the world around them. Yet, despite this strong opposition, the story prevailed. It was reshaped, transfigured, redefined and fragmented, but stayed the foundation of all novels. Even in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To the Lighthouse where James Joyce and Virginia Woolf each confront the confines of the past with the experimental narrative technique of stream of consciousness, profluent events remain the underlying form.

In the case of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce uses stream of consciousness to convey the emotional reality of the development of the artist. However, since a novel cannot be absorbed in an instant like a photograph, painting or any other type of graphic portrait, Joyce could not just piece together select fragments of his character’s thoughts. Instead, to make his work coherent, he had to have some common thread that linked them together: a story. And even though a plot seems minor in this type of novel, it plays a crucial role and even enables Joyce’s protagonist to become convinced of his calling to art. At the end of part IV, when Stephen Dedalus sees a bird-girl wading in the ocean, he is inspired by her beauty which assures him of his epiphany.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! (186)

Although the story line in this section is not the aspect that commands the reader’s attention, it is the part which makes Dedalus’s feelings accessible to the reader. By having specific events taking place, Joyce is able to display the forces of emotions that drive his character’s actions while making the reader more invested in what happens next. Moreover, the sequence of the story creates a form on which Joyce’s intended purpose can be logically presented.

Virginia Woolf organizes her novel To the Lighthouse in a similar manner. However instead of using stream