How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

In this chapter, Foster explores why novels tend to have chapters and how chapters shape readers’ interaction with a book. Chapters—an organizing principle of Victorian novels—fell out of favor with Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; the new authors rebelled against the constraints of the Victorian model. However, the chapter was not just an old-fashioned style but an economic and narrative necessity for Victorian novels, which were initially published in serial installments. Chapters provided natural breaks for the serial format, allowing devices like cliffhangers at their end to sustain readers’ interest. Additionally, Victorian novelists such as Dickens preferred to title their chapters, as does Foster himself: “[T]itles give you something to work with from the start” (101). The first chapter of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852) is called “In Chancery” and introduces the setting of a court (the chancery); the first lines depict the Lord Chancellor sitting in London’s Lincoln Inn Hall, while the following paragraphs evoke the confusion that accompanies a bureaucratic office, the atmosphere that the book’s larger themes address.

The Dickens example shows how chapters create small structures to support a book’s larger structures. Foster next examines the form of the chapter. Like a microcosm of the larger story, each chapter has a beginning, middle, and end. The finish is momentous or emphatic, compelling readers to turn the page. However, in some experimental works, chapters may not correspond to this definition. Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel To the Lighthouse (1927) has chapters, but they contain little plot development. Traditionalists may consider these sections more arbitrary than chapters, but Foster argues that fit the definition of chapters, noting that they are smaller parts that reflect the tone of the larger story, and are the right choice for her narrative. Most importantly, he considers them chapters because they benefit readers, making the text more manageable to peruse. Paying attention to the flow and structure of information in chapters tells readers how to read the novel, “and we’ll take all the help we can get” (108).

Settings are key elements in a novel because the emphasis on particular time, geography, and culture paradoxically creates something universal and timeless. A novel can be about everywhere when it is most about a single place. Trying to write a universal novel by focusing on generalities hardly ever works: In Foster’s opinion, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, is the only generalist novel that remains relevant. The universal allegory that uses stock characters and places, as in medieval morality plays, has not endured as a genre because of the form’s two-dimensionality.

Great writers understand the value of specific settings, so they approach even the most momentous historical event from the perspective of a single life. For instance, in Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman Rushdie explores an enormous theme—the development of post-partition India—by focusing on the life of one person: his narrator, Salim Sinai, who was born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence from colonial rule. Similarly, Faulkner tells the story of the American South by focusing on a single county, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, the location of most of his novels and stories.

However, this does not mean that all novels aspire to universal themes or that one novel can speak for the experience of postcolonial India or the American South. Universality does not lie in the text but in the reading. Readers are the ones who create universality, because they infer something from the novel that resonates with them. The tendency to infer is natural, since humans are an inference-driven species. Facing something specific, humans always move toward the general.

In this chapter, Foster explores what he terms “character-emblems” (117): the names, objects, goals, quirks, or even turns of speech that make a character distinct. Character emblems were highly significant in serialized Victorian novels because they served as mnemonics, or ways to remember the characters. Dickensian names like Uriah Heep, Skimpole, and Scrooge are themselves mnemonics; Dickens also gave his characters trademark gestures and dialogues that made them memorable, such as Mr. Micawber (in the 1850 novel David Copperfield), who constantly repeats his catchphrase, “something will turn up” (120).

Although the serialized format became a thing of the past, novelists continued to use emblems to express something about their characters. For Clarissa Dalloway, the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that expressive emblem is flowers. As the novel opens, Clarissa plans to buy flowers for the evening’s party; throughout the novel, the presence of flowers often leads to past reminisces and the sadness of lost time. The preponderance of flowers in the narrative lead readers to infer that among other things, flowers represent the transience of life, distant youth and sexuality, and hope, all the elements that build Clarissa’s characterization. Thus, the emblem of the flowers enriches the experience of reading the novel, opening fresh avenues of enquiry.

Emblems reveal not just hidden bits about a character but also a novel’s ideas, motifs, symbols, and themes. They act as what Modernist poet and literary theorist T. S. Eliot called “object correlative,” or external circumstances that reflect inner conflict or emotion. Although Eliot clarifies that an object correlative can have only one meaning, the ambiguity around the meaning of an object is what makes reading thrilling. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), protagonist Stephen Dedalus carries a stick made of ash. The stick plays a role in the plot, leading readers to wonder about its symbolism. The stick could be a phallic symbol or a device meant to keep the world at a distance from Stephen. Most importantly, the stick gives readers creative license to decide what they want it to represent.

The chapter title, “Met-him-pike-hoses” (131) refers to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the female lead, Molly Bloom, uses this term in lieu of “metempsychosis,” the concept of the transmigration of souls. Molly’s pronunciation of the word reveals the dynamic of her marriage to the intellectual and bookish Stephen in that she simultaneously struggles with the word and scoffs at Stephen’s pompousness. Foster uses the example of “met-him-pike hoses”/metempsychosis to show how a novel’s use of vocabulary creates a chain of meaning. Each word in a novel is important, which is why Foster urges readers to pay attention to every word. The choice and position of words and phrases can create many effects, including puns, double-meanings, subtext, and literary devices. For instance, in Grendel (1971), John Gardner inserts phrases like “Cut-A” and “Time-Space Cross-section” anachronistically, to jolt readers out of the story’s medieval context. (Grendel is based on the monster from early English epic Beowulf.) The effect is that Grendel becomes a timeless figure, beyond the realm of historicity.

Although some writers use a radically different style in each work, the way most writers use words becomes their hallmark. Writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Nabokov, for example, are immediately identifiable from a few sentences of their writing. One of Faulkner’s tricks is that he uses “noble-sounding words in odd combinations” (134), while Hemingway’s uniqueness is the unsaid things behind his brevity. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s narrator describes a church as a “nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches” (137), the juxtaposition of short words like “nice” and “dim” revealing a depth of unspoken disinterest. Some authors, like Shakespeare, are adept at creating new words altogether, while others, like Dickens, use wordplay through memorable names like “Pumblechook and Lady Dedlock” (141). As these examples show, every writer creates their own, distinctive language or narrative diction through the placement and choice or words, phrases, and sentences.

Whether through a minimalist writing style like Hemingway’s or an extravagant style like Faulkner’s, novelists love to construct “ambitious […] magnificent, impossibly coherent sentences” (145); therefore, it makes sense to pay close attention to this unit of writing. Like choice of words, a particular writer’s framing of sentences is distinctive. Readers can typically identify a writer they know from their sentences alone. Because some writers, like Hemingway, have a deceptively simple writing style, marked by short declarative sentences, one might assume that Hemingway’s style is easy to copy. However, according to Foster, though many try, no one else can write like Hemingway because his philosophy of leaving things unspoken, or revealing only the tip of the iceberg, informs his short sentences. A narrative and aesthetic basis that defies reproduction underlies his sentence choices.

The Hemingway example shows that sentences work best when the demands of the plot and narrative dictate them. Readers like sentence choices when they can trace the “connections between style and story” (152). If that connection is absent, sentences, whether extravagant or innovative or simple, can become repetitive and grating. Foster next poses the question of whether distinctive stylings and experiments with language are necessary for a good novel. Many novels use straightforward sentences, like the works of Arnold Bennett, a contemporary of innovator Henry James. Though Bennett’s work was popular, his Modernist contemporaries like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf scorned him for not being artistic enough. Although Foster himself agreed with Pound and Woolf, he noted that some readers prefer straightforward writing, which doesn’t intrude on the story by drawing attention to itself.

As a teacher of reading and writing, Foster realizes that both kinds of sentences are enjoyable: those that are beautiful in themselves and those that move in service of the narrative. While Foster, as a creative writing instructor, prefers stylistic innovators like Woolf, James, Nabokov, and Faulkner, he acknowledges that the fact that his students sometimes differ from him shows that a sentence is also about readers.