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Abstract
Among the qualities that distinguish E. M. Forster’s literary legacy is his dexterous use of irony to critique norms and ideologies that call for conformism at the expense of an authentic experience of life. When approached as a tool of social critique, Forster’s irony might be said to possess a high degree of critical intelligence. However, as demonstrated by Alan Wilde, the purposiveness in Forster’s irony becomes more uncertain as he progresses in his literary career, reflecting a growing modernist doubt in the ability of life, relationships, and language to contain and sustain universally valid expressions of meaning and value. In this paper, I will compare the novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Passage to India (1924) to argue that anxious experiences of racial-cultural difference, in transnational and colonial contexts, are significantly responsible for the disorientation of purpose in Forster’s modernist irony. Through this argument, I demonstrate that a fuller understanding of modernist irony, particularly as a mode of alienated consciousness, requires investigating its relationship with historically contingent and geopolitically significant constructions and representations of racial-cultural difference.
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Notes
1 Seshagiri, Race, 6-9. Seshagiri adopts the binary model of filiation and affiliation from Edward Said, who defined literary modernism as “an aesthetic and ideological phenomenon that was a response to the crisis of what could be called filiation—linear, biologically grounded process, that which ties children to their parents—which produced the counter-crisis within modernism of affiliation, that is, those creeds, philosophies, and visions re-assembling the world in new non-familial ways.” Seshagiri, 8.
2 Although Seshagiri doesn’t focus on Forster in her study, she does suggest connections between his modernist expressions of dissonance and fragmentation and the racialized fracturing of British imperial identity. Seshagiri, 12, 48, 58.
3 Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 1-2.
4 Medalie’s representation of Forster’s qualified liberalism is anticipated by Lionel Trilling in E. M. Forster, one of the earliest book-length studies on the author. There, Trilling argues that Forster writes in a “comic manner” that rejects contemporary liberalism’s predilection for moral absolutes. For Trilling, one explanation for Forster’s attachment to this comic or ironic style is that he “fears power and suspects formality as the sign of power.” Trilling, “Introduction,” 4, 7. Medalie, in contrast, demonstrates that liberalism in general, including Forster’s qualified version of it, was fundamentally implicated in the power dynamics of imperialism.
5 Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 40.
6 Forster, Howards Ends, 134. “Only connect” became a catchphrase for this vision.
7 Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 4.
8 Wilde, Horizons of Assent, 53.
9 Wilde, 9-10.
10 Wilde’s analyses concerning how the mediate and disjunctive modes of irony manifest in the two novels, as well as his understanding of how the novels handle the negational force of their ironies, differ significantly from my own, sometimes to the point of contradiction. I rely on his theoretical model less for its concrete particulars and more for its general structure.
11 The distinction between the terms “imperial/ism” and “colonial/ism” as used in this paper is largely based on the one defined by Edward Said: “‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.” Said, Culture and Imperialism, 9. That said, I also use “imperial/ism” to designate cultural expressions of British power that affected metropolitan perceptions of territories and populations not ruled by Britain, including Italy and Italians. For an explanation of my rationale, see footnote 40.
12 While I draw on Wilde’s categories of mediate, disjunctive, and absolute irony in my discussion of Forster’s first and last novel, I do not approach the post-modernist area of suspensive irony as it lies outside the scope of these novels’ ironic representations. Wilde argues, however, that suspensive irony is the dominant mode of irony in Forster’s posthumously published short-story anthology The Life to Come. Wilde, Horizons of Assent, 67.
13 I use the hybrid term “racial-cultural” to account for the fact that the two domains of difference are organically intertwined and often understood as mutually referential. However, within the terms of my discussion of irony, I approach the cultural domain of difference as derivative of the racial domain.
14 Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 36. Sawston appears as the embodiment of suburban English parochialism in The Longest Journey (1907) as well as Where Angels Fear to Tread.
15 Roszak, “Social Non-Conformists,” 169-70.
16 Pierini, “Multitudes of Otherness,” 88. Pierini consciously uses the terms “colonial” and “orientalist” to describe Forster’s approach to European Italy, and provides a theoretical-practical justification for doing so in her article.
17 Forster, Angels, chap. 1, chap. 2.
18 Forster, Angels, chap. 1.
19 Forster, Angels, chap. 1.
20 Corby, “E. M. Forster,” 174.
21 What’s most interesting about Corby’s article is its revelation that a similar ambivalence defined Forster’s relationship with Italy, notwithstanding his mockery of the Baedeker culture and its fastidious attempts to preempt the cultural anxiety of the English tourist. In Corby’s biographically informed reading, Forster’s repressed English upbringing conditioned him to experience Italy through a “muddle” of conflicting impressions and feelings. With time, however, Forster managed to clear away the muddle enough for him to find and appreciate the “view”—or life-embracing and life-giving perspective—offered by Italy. Corby, 173-91.
22 Forster, Angels, chap. 4.
23 Forster, Angels, chap. 1.
24 Forster, Angels, chap. 3.
25 For a historical background to the parallels between imperial British perceptions of Italians and of the peoples of the Orient, see footnotes 16 and 40.
26 Forster, Angels, chap. 6. The Italian distich expresses Monteriano’s popular animosity towards Poggibonsi. It is drawn from a mock Baedeker entry on Monteriano introduced by Forster earlier in Chapter 1. The entry “explains” that (fictional) Monteriano was unwillingly part of (real) Poggibonsi until the former gained its independence from the latter in 1261 CE.
27 Forster, Angels, chap. 1. Suzanne Roszak explicitly identifies this dichotomous approach in Forster. In her analysis, Forster deliberately emphasizes “the primitive earthiness that he sees in Italy” to counter Edwardian touristic culture’s tendency to romanticize Italy’s classical past at the expense of its modern present. However, she points out that “the secondary effect of this [choice of emphasis] is to widen the perceived gap between English and Italian society by advancing a one-dimensional portrait of the latter, deemphasizing elements of its culture that would be understood as ‘civilized’ from the reader’s perspective.” Roszak, “Social Non- Conformists,” 186-87.
28 Forster, Angels, chap. 5.
29 Forster, Angels, chap. 5.
30 Wilde, Horizons of Assent, 58.
31 Forster, Angels, chap. 2.
32 Forster, Angels, chap. 5.
33 Forster, Angels, chap. 2.
34 Forster, Angels, chap. 4.
35 Forster, Angels, chap. 2.
36 Forster, Angels, chap. 2.
37 I must clarify here that “aesthetic” in the context of the “personal aesthetic imagination” of Philip is different from “aesthetic” in the context of the “aesthetic closure” that Wilde links to absolute irony. The first instance of the word refers to what pertains to beauty and to its appreciation; the second refers to literary form. Thus, the counter-ironic function of the “aesthetic imagination” and “aestheticism” in Where Angels Fear to Tread shouldn’t be identified with Wilde’s aesthetic closure, which pertains rather to the modernist irony of A Passage to India.
38 Forster, Angels, chap. 5.
39 Forster, Angels, chap. 9.
40 Suzanne Roszak makes a compelling observation that at the turn of the twentieth century, a racialized binary opposition between the European North and the European South overlapped in part with the racialized binary opposition between the colonizing West and the colonized East. As a result, “we see that Forster’s subtle racism and chauvinism do not appear solely in his complex treatment of colonial India. On the contrary, we can also find them in his depictions of a European nation that we may not conventionally consider when we examine the character and the stakes of Forster’s attitude toward ethnicity—a nation whose Europeanness, all the same, does not save it from being subordinated by Forster in a similarly racialized manner.” Roszak, “Social Non-Conformists,” 182-83. I concur with Roszak’s observation and suggest that although racial-cultural difference gets complicated and magnified by the colonial setting in A Passage to India, it exists on the same continuum of discriminatory distinctions that spans the racial-cultural difference represented in the Italian novels—this continuum being projected and translated by a broadly imperial English imagination.
41 Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 25.
42 Medalie, 26.
43 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 200.
44 Said, 203-4.
45 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 257.
46 Friedman, “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality,” 247-48.
47 Forster, A Passage to India, 165.
48 Forster, A Passage to India, 3-4.
49 Forster, A Passage to India, 33.
50 Forster, A Passage to India, 27.
51 Forster, A Passage to India, 8, 12, 13-14, 17, 21, 59, 66, 68-69, 72, 74-76, 80, 99-100, 107-8, 113-15, 122, 126, 132, 140-41, 143, 145, 157, 168, 195, 252, 272, 336, 341.
52 Forster, A Passage to India, 287.
53 Forster, A Passage to India, 93, 102.
54 Friedman, “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality,” 248.
55 Forster, A Passage to India, 135-36.
56 Forster, A Passage to India, 140.
57 Forster, A Passage to India, 165.
58 Forster, A Passage to India, 146.
59 Benita Parry, while conceding that the novel’s critique of British colonialism is “manifestly inadequate,” argues that “The novel’s dissident place within British writing about India does not reside in its meager critique of a colonial situation…but in configuring India’s natural terrain and cognitive traditions as inimical to the British presence.” Parry (Citation1998), “Materiality and Mystification,” 180. In my reading, the hostile opacity of “India’s natural terrain and cognitive traditions” reflects, and ultimately reinforces, the British colonial perspective’s self-assured racism.
60 Forster, A Passage to India, 162-65.
61 Forster, A Passage to India, 168-69, 266-67.
62 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 223.
63 Friedman, “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality,” 249.
64 Forster, A Passage to India, 358.
65 Forster, A Passage to India, 314.
66 Medalie draws an analogy between the novel’s tripartite structure and the tripartite structure of the sonata, based on the premise (adopted from Alex Aronson) that “The sonata form is particularly well suited to the modernist crisis.” Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 140-44.
67 Forster, A Passage to India, 340, 353.
68 Forster, A Passage to India, 323.
69 Forster, A Passage to India, 362.
70 Forster, “Tolerance,” 319.
71 Nicholls, Modernisms, 3.
72 Seshagiri, Race, 6.
73 Wilde, Horizons of Assent, 20.
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Khalid Hadeed
Khalid Hadeed is an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University. His research interests include modern and contemporary English and Arabic literatures, world literature, post-colonial studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and literary theory and criticism. He also has extensive experience in translating between English and Arabic.