We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
INTERLUDE: FILM AND NOVEL 233
not permit the story construction to overwhelm open-ended reality and replace it by a closed universe. Instead of investing too heavily in the texture of story developments (which he must not neglect either, of course), he will therefore profit by "ragged ends/'4 say "things that have no bearing on the development/'5 and feature "round"6 characters apt to surprise the reader. Only in subduing the exacting story patterns will he be able to suggest the "incalculably of life."7 It is logical that Forster should blame Thomas Hardy for reflecting Fate through a plot so tight that it encroaches on the characters of his novels; "their vitality has been impoverished, they have gone dry and thin."8
Like film, the novel aspires to endlessness
The novel's tendency toward endlessness is of a piece with its inherent nostalgia for the vast spaces of life. George Lukacs in his Die Theorie des Romans, written before his conversion to Communism, says this is so because of the place the novel occupies in the historical process, as he conceives of it. His theological outlook on history leads him to assign the novel to a different era from that of the epic. The latter era he identifies as an age filled with significance— an age in which the notion of chronological time is still powerless because all humans and objects are oriented toward eternity and virtually partake of it. The novel on its part is the form of expression of a later age which no longer knows of ultimate meanings, so that the life it contains— the very life rendered by the novel— does not manifest itself in a rounded-out cycle of eternal presences but evolves in chronological time without beginning and end.9
This concern for endlessness has repercussions affecting the course of the story. The novelist naturally wants to bring his story to a conclusion which will put the seal on its wholeness. But in genuine novels it is precisely this conclusion that makes the reader feel uneasy; it strikes him as an arbitrary intervention, cutting short developments that might, or indeed should, be carried on and on. It is as if the story of the novel were meant to destroy the integrity it is about to achieve. "Why has a novel to be planned?" asks Forster. "Cannot it grow? Why need it close, as a play closes?"10 And referring to that central passage of Gide's The Counterfeiters where Edouard expresses his desire to plunge into the (endless) stream of life rather than comply with the demands of the story, he exclaims, entirely in keeping with Edouard-Gide: "As for a plot— to pot with the plot. ... All that is prearranged is false."11
If these resemblances between the two media were alone decisive, the novel would indeed be a cinematic story form. Yet novel and film also