From: Jerdevinjohnson-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 03:13:32 EDT
Subject: a problem with E.M. Forster



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 E. M. Forster, in his book, "Aspects of the Novel" says of G. Stein, "Well, 
there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her failure is 
instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily Bronte, Sterne or 
Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized her clock and scattered 
its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this 
not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate 
fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values 
only. She fails, because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time 
it cannot express anything at all, and in her later writing we can see the 
slope down which she is slipping. ... There is nothing to ridicule in such an 
experiment as hers. It is much more important to play about like this than to 
rewrite the Waverley Novels. Yet the experiment is doomed to failure. " His 
point is there is a way to tell a story that is set. Yet cyberpunk and beats 
and Woolfians defied this ethos of "the novel tells a story" merely through 
use of Time. That is what moderns were about: BUSTING UP TIME. Making new 
time. Ezra Pound does this, too, with The Cantos. Marvelously! So is Forster 
to be considered old guard Modernist, Edwardian, neo-Victorian, or just out 
of step with the most radical folks in Early Modernism? Or just merely trying 
to play the learned sage and promote his name? 

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