Author: Jamie Gaston
Contents
Flat / Round
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “the hidden life” as those components of character that the reader cannot know from “external signs or history.”[1] Information concerning another person’s innermost thoughts and feelings, which would remain inaccessible to us in the course of standard social interaction will be disclosed to the readers of a (modern) novel.
On this basis, Forster divides fictional characters into two kinds, Flat and Round, one without and the other with a hidden life. The former is quite simple, indeed, we might say, already interpreted, in that it displays “no more than one factor, the features of a recognizable type.[2] The round character, by contrast, is multifaceted and complex, precisely because it has a hidden life that the superficial features of type or position conceal. It used to be the novel’s purpose to round out such a character by showing us how the personal life hidden within interacts with and changes the way we read what other characters see on the surface, enabling a character to become in new and often surprising ways. The round character, says Forster, “has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.”[3]
The fact that “the hidden life” of a character contains the potential for that character to become any number of “people,” who might occupy quite different positions in relation to others, is what makes it possible for us, readers, vicariously to share that personal experience. The role of the classic novel is indeed to give readers a window into the hidden life of its characters through which we can fathom the innerworkings of subjectivity.
The postmodern novel, on the other hand, plays with the hidden life in ways that make such access on the part of readers difficult, if not impossible. Characters in those later novels are often left to question their own hidden life as they discover more potential characters in themselves and others, possibilities that the novel discloses but never validates. Alternatively, the postmodern novel offers so many dispersed depictions of the characters’ flatness that there appears to be either no hidden life at all or a bundle of hidden lives interwoven in a network of subjectivity.
By displacing and disseminating the hidden life, the postmodern novel completely disrupts Forster’s conception of flat and round characters. Any one flat character has the potential to become so many other flat characters, who reveal themselves when one least expects it, that the reader is forced to abandon his/her reliance on disclosures of the inner life as a proper measure of the novel’s achievement. Because the hidden life is displaced, so is the presumption of each character’s individual subjectivity, as found in the classic novel.
This essay will take a closer look at Forster’s analysis of the role of characters’ hidden life in the traditional novel. I then propose to show how Italo Calvino, G. K Chesterton, and Thomas Pynchon simultaneously deconstruct and then reorder these categories by presenting the novel as its own hidden life in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Crying of Lot 49.
Dispersion
Forster argues that in the classic novel, the plot and the characters are always at war with one another. “The plot requires to be wound up…” and the characters are always “getting out of hand.”[4] In other words, the novel needs to finish the story, while the characters tend to motivate their own plotlines, driving the novel to proceed in an often fragmented and inharmonious fashion. The struggle is most evident in round characters, who want to linger or make connections in ways that threaten to derail the plot. Every novelist is faced with this dilemma: She or he must give the protagonist wayward desires and more plots than any individual can pursue, but then must contain most of those desires and potential plot within the character where they can be exposed in a timely fashion and without preventing the narrative from unwinding.
The postmodern novel, however, does not align with either side of this traditional duality between plot and characters. The characters become dispersed throughout the novel in such a way that the binary between externality and interiority can no longer be unbundled or articulated. This postmodern displacement of the hidden life promised by fictional characters altogether forces a new paradigm for novel theory. Forster gives one example of this in Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters. Gide serves there as a precursor to postmodernism with his use of mise en abyme, placing a novel within another novel. While Gide does not commit to the complete displacement of the hidden life as the postmoderns will do, he does foreshadow this drive or drift. One of Gide’s character’s, Edouard, is a novelist within the novel, who writes down his thoughts in a journal, which another character reads. We, the readers, do not know whether this journal is meant to be disclosed to the other characters within the novel, or whether it was supposed to serve as an account of his own hidden life. When another character, Sophroniska, asks Edouard what the subject of his novel will be, he responds,
“There is none. My novel has no subject. No doubt that sounds foolish. Let us say, if you prefer, that it will not have ‘a’ subject… ‘A slice of life,’ the naturalistic school used to say. The mistake that school made was always to cut its slice in the same direction, always lengthwise, in the direction of time. Why not cut it up and down? Or across? As for me, I don’t want to cut it at all. You see what I mean. I want to put everything into my novel and not snip off my material either here or there. I have been working for a year, and there is nothing I haven’t put in: all I see, all I know, all I can learn from other people’s lives and my own.”[5]
Edouard’s response shows Gide’s contention with Forster’s categories of the hidden and external life, as well as of plot versus characters. Through Edouard, Gide attempts to write a novel that includes both the reality of life in the novel and the reality of actual life. This inclusion of the subject-less novel, containing the external and hidden life, opens the door for postmodernism to unbundle the hidden life altogether. Gide’s account offers a window through which the later postmodern novel will reorient and multiply the lines that Forster has defended: The lines between the hidden and the external life. This creates a phenomenon in which there is no longer a sharp dichotomy between what is hidden and what is revealed about the character. The characters in the novel appear to have agency; however, their hidden lives are spread throughout the novel, thus stripping them of the classic novel’s preconceived reality of subjectivity. This begs the question: If the characters are no longer autonomously working for or against the plot, then what is? The postmodern novel suggests that the novel itself is accomplishing this by diffracting the hidden life throughout the entire work.
This phenomenon is evident in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler as the protagonist consistently falls behind his own hidden life in the narrative. When he first discovers that the original text is incomplete, he and Ludmilla, the other reader, begin a wild goose chase searching for the remainder of the novel. The irony of course here is that rather than these two readers reading the novel, the novel is actually reading them and dictating their every action. Thus, every endeavor by the readers to find the next piece to this ongoing story is guided by the novel’s refusal to reveal itself. If the novel were to do this, then both readers could go on with their lives and become subjects once again. However, this novel’s approach is to pull the outside reader (you and I) into the character’s (the reader) dispersed hidden life, all the while prohibiting the outside reader (us) from accessing it. Thus, producing an end to the hidden life in the character altogether. This is what the postmodern subject-less novel produces: A curiosity of, yet an inaccessibility to the character’s hidden life. The first reader considers, “The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.”[6] The novel’s unbundling of a hidden life in its characters, rather than influencing the characters within the text, directly imposes itself on the outside reader of the text. This disorients the outside reader as he or she is no longer given the false allusion of control found in traditional novels. She or he cannot read the novel in a Forsterian way, as a perpetual disclosure of the hidden life of its characters. By contrast, the novel conceals itself from the characters and the reader, giving the novel an autonomy, and perhaps hidden life of its own.
The Self-Concealed Subject
Another way in which the postmodern novel disperses the character’s hidden life is by hiding the character from herself. Forster establishes that the novelist has a unique power over her or his characters. He writes, “The novelist is allowed to remember and understand everything, if it suits him. He knows all the hidden life.”[7] Thus, Forster anticipates the power of the postmodern novel to disclose and conceal as much of the hidden life as the author pleases. However, Forster could not have predicted the postmodern novel’s capacity to conceal characters from themselves. He argues that in reality “we cannot reveal ourselves” because perfect knowledge is an illusion, yet “in the novel we can know people perfectly.”[8] He still operates understand the assumption that there is a sharp dichotomy between the hidden and the exterior life, and the novel’s unique position is that it grants access to the secret life. Forster’s mistake is thinking that ideality lies within the novel, and that the hidden life is the gateway to that lucid understanding of reality. The postmodern novel reverses his categories by concealing characters from themselves, and in turn, leaving them helpless before the novel’s own volition.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger makes a similar observation as Forster about disclosure in his work The Origin of the Work of Art. He writes, “Art is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is a becoming and happening of truth.”[9] The traditional novel, a work of art, functions in the same capacity. It discloses what is otherwise hidden from the reader. However, the postmodern novel reverses these categories. In the process of concealment, most notably the concealment of characters from themselves, the characters actually know more than when their true identity is revealed. Thus, concealment, rather than disclosure is the primary method of revealing truth. The postmodern novel dispels the disclosure of the hidden life by keeping it secret from the subjects themselves.
Chesterton expresses this pattern of self-concealment in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday. Like Gide, Chesterton serves as a precursor to postmodernism. Although the hidden life is not completely absent, the flat nature of each of his characters, paves the way for postmodernism’s concealment of the hidden life. In the novel, the protagonist, Syme, attempts to infiltrate a secret society of anarchists by disguising himself as one of them. However, throughout the novel the reader learns that one by one, every single member of the society reveals themselves to be spies just like Syme. Each character felt that they had a heightened sense of the hidden life as they concealed their identity from one another; however, the more that is revealed, the greater is the secret behind this society they all joined. The characters are left questioning their own identity, and the reality of their own autonomy in the novel. When all six of the members have revealed themselves, making their way towards the President of the organization, Syme observes, “[We] are six men going to ask one man what [we] mean.”[10] Thus, the characters are so disoriented by the novel’s dismantling of their hidden lives that they must turn elsewhere to simply know themselves. The irony of course, is that Syme, as well as the other spies, seemed to know more about reality when they were concealed rather than disclosed. The narrator observes, “These disguises did not disguise, but reveal.”[11] It is only when the masks come off that the characters learn their true identities have been concealed from them by the novel all along. Thus, a complete revision of Forster’s notion of the hidden life takes form.
In Syme, Chesterton masterfully articulates, “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal… Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—.”[12] The problem that the postmodern novel presents and that Chesterton anticipates is not just that the hidden life is concealed, but that the subject lacks the capacity to disclose it on its own. Thus, the postmodern novel offers what the classical novel could not imagine: A diffraction of the hidden life through the concealment of the self. This notion overturns both Forster and Heidegger. The new novel demonstrates how the power of disclosure and concealment belong to the novel alone. This, in turn, reverses Forster’s categories between the novel and real life in that the novel is closer to reality than reality itself because the novel is just as hidden, just as disorienting, and just as elusive as reality. In this light, Chesterton serves as Calvino’s forbearer: The reader is no longer reading the text seeking revelation; in actuality, the novel is reading the reader through the art of concealment. This reality creates an existential sense of anxiety in both the characters and the reader. While the novel, a classic work of art, revealed truth through “the clearing and concealing of beings,”[13] the postmodern novel offers no such clarity. It conceals rather than discloses by dispersing rather than revealing the hidden life, in so doing, giving the character and reader a far from ideal understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Concealment as Paranoia
The postmodern novel correctly identifies the next logical step following self-concealment as paranoia, particularly in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Just as in real life, when a character loses complete control of their own autonomy and is concealed from themselves, they naturally believe that the world is conspiring against them. Pynchon dissects this habit through his primary character Oedipa, who spends the greater part of the novel seeking to investigate and expose a grand conspiracy within the postal service by a group called Trystero. Unlike Chesterton, who makes his characters so flat that they lack a hidden life, Pynchon disperses Oedipa’s hidden life throughout other aspects of the novel, producing a paranoid character in her and a paranoid reader in you and me. Pynchon offers this vividly to the reader by giving us access to Oedipa’s paranoid conscience:
“Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and/or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon’s vanity mirror. Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you… Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.”[14]
In this example, there is nothing Forsterian to be disclosed about Oedipa. In fact, her secret life is predicated on the existence of a conspiracy. She would not have one otherwise; she would be flat. While the traditional novel affirms the character’s ability to understand information as it is disclosed, the postmodern work challenges these assumptions. The postmodern novel asks the question: What if everything experienced externally in life is all that there really is, and every attempt to make sense of externality within the hidden life is just paranoia? Oedipa asks her therapist Dr. Hilarious a similar question. His response is quite intriguing:
“I Came, “[Oedipa] said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”[15]
This is a critical dispensation of postmodernism’s reversal of Forsterian’s categories. Oedipa comes to Hilarius seeking answers, desiring for the secret of Trystero to finally be concealed, and hoping that her paranoia can finally be dispelled. However, Pynchon through the madness of Hilarius grants her no such solace. The hidden life has become nothing more than fantasy that Hilarious insists is essential to one’s ontology.
Forster argues in the traditional novel that fantasy is a “bar of light” that “cuts across [all other aspects of the novel.”[16] It is not external or internal, but it stands adjacent and perpendicular to the characters, incidentally illuminating what is otherwise hidden and unclear. Through fantasy, the novelist says, “Here’s something that could not occur,”[17] but he or she asks the reader to accept anyway. In the traditional novel, fantasy helps shape and develop the hidden life because they are not mutually exclusive. In the postmodern novel, on the other hand, the character’s hidden life is so fragmented that any notion of a hidden life becomes mere fantasy. This is clear in Oedipa as her whole life is called into question by these external factors that she can only reconcile through the role of fantasy. However, this is not fantasy’s role. It does not exist to contradict reality but to compliment it whimsically. This is just what the postmodern novel produces: A world full of fragmentary experiences that cannot be justified except through the fantastic. The lines between what is secret and revealed have now become blurred in such a way that the hidden life, at least in Forster’s sense, is obsolete. In contrast, what postmodernism offers is a diasporic journey of the hidden life away from the individual and into various elements of the external world.
The Novel’s Hidden Life
While this fragmentary reality of the postmodern novel is rather disillusioning, as we see in Pynchon, we shall return to Calvino, who offers a solution to this disfiguration that brings the reversal of Forster’s categories between the hidden and external life full circle. Calvino’s position is rather than viewing the postmodern novel as a conclusion of Forster’s hidden life, we ought to consider the reality of the novel containing its own hidden life. It conceals and discloses to the characters and readers aspects of itself as it so chooses. Ludmilla puts it well:
“The novel I would most like to read at this moment should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves…”[18]
Thus, in approaching the novel in such a way as to assume its own ontology, its own hidden life, the reader is comforted knowing that the text is neither meant to confine him or her nor meant to be an instrument of the reader’s own confinement. Rather, the postmodern novel is to be received in its own givenness, phenomenologically. The novel is not merely a pawn in the game of disclosure and concealment; instead, “it is the book in itself that arouses your curiosity.”[19]
In Calvino’s work, the plot and the characters are not at odds because the displacement of the hidden life disrupts these categories. The characters’ secret life is inaccessible to them, and the plot cannot progress because there is nothing in them to further disclose. While the reader of classic works might be expecting Forster’s pendulum to swing towards the character or towards the plot, the postmodern novel reverts the pendulum back into the reader herself. Returning to Gide, In the words of Edouard, “I am waiting for reality to dictate to me.”[20] This is the experience of both readers in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. They want more than anything to read the end of the novel, yet they cannot do so until the novel works its way back to them. In fact, it is not until the protagonist and Ludmilla are laying in bed reading together, that they are permitted to finish the book. Furthermore, the text does not conclude in traditional fashion. It reads, “I’ve almost finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino,”[21] which suggests that even at the book’s closing, it still is not fully revealed, and thus, still has a strong grip on the future life of the reader. The rest of the novel is unwritten, and the remainder of the readers’ lives are concealed; leaving us, the actual readers, bewildered by the novel’s confounding sense of inaccessibility.
While postmodernism appears to disrupt the subjectivity of self in Gide, the secret life of Chesterton’s spies, and the internality of the paranoid conscience in Pynchon; Calvino offers a pleasant alternative to the postmodern novel’s reversal of the hidden life. The novel does not exist purely to deceive or create anxiety in its readers, but to reveal to them that it has a hidden life of its own that is not bound by Forster or anyone else’s constraints. To the postmodern novel, concealment and disclosure are two sides of the same coin that it offers to its readers; not out of malevolence, but out of the sheer nature of being a novel. Returning to Heidegger, he explains that the process of disclosure occurs through the logos, which in Greek means not only reason or word, but also represents the foundation of epistemology itself. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar offers a helpful corrective. He argues that in disclosure, “the logos of being becomes dialogos… a communication that can never be closed again.”[22] The same can be said of Calvino regarding the disclosure of the novel’s hidden life. The novel, a piece of art revealed dialogos— “through language” offers an ongoing disclosure of its own secret life irreducible to the wishes of its readership. In this light, the novel truly exists as its own best theory. Like a traditionally round character, it “has the incalculability of life about it.”[23] It conspires against the novelist’s wish to confer on it a particular plot. With these characteristics, the postmodern novel proves to the reader that it is just as real as reality itself, thus reverting Forster’s categories back into themselves and giving the novel an ontology never before conceived of in classic literature. While the characters’ hidden lives may disappear, the novel’s survives, and to this end, the novel not only withstands postmodernism’s dispersion of the hidden life, it codifies it.
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Works Cited
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “The Truth of the World.” In Theo-Logic vol. 1. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985.
Benveniste, Emily. “Subjectivity in Language.” In Critical Theory Since 1965. Edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searie. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1986.
Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
Chesterton, G. K. The Man Who Was Thursday. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: RosettaBooks, 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. London: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008.
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Notes
[1] E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), 34.
[2] Ibid., 48.
[3] Ibid., 55.
[4] E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 67.
[5] Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (New York: Vintage, 1973, 187) quoted in E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 69.
[6] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 172.
[7] E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 36.
[8] Ibid., 46.
[9] Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (London: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 196.
[10] G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 223.
[11] Ibid., 253.
[12] G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 247.
[13] Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 197.
[14] Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) 170-171.
[15] Ibid., 138.
[16] E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 74.
[17] Ibid., 75.
[18] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 92.
[19] Ibid., 8.
[20] Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (New York: Vintage, 1973, 188) quoted in E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 69.
[21] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 260.
[22] Han Urs von Balthasar, “The Truth of the World,” In Theo-Logic vol. 1, trans. Adrian J. Walker, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 18.
[23] E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 55.
