A World Gone Flat

In Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Forster defined a ‘flat character’ as one who boasts no mental or emotional development—someone whose defining characteristics, speech habits, and normal ways of thinking lock him into predictable (and often dull) actions and behaviours. A ‘round character’ by contrast is complex and increases in complexity throughout the story, capable of contradiction and emotional and psychological development. Our politics is now filled with a flatness rivaled only by the flatness that religion requires of its devotees and consumerism imposes on all parts of our daily lives, from eating to having sex. The whole world has gone from round back to flat.