Modernist irony and racial-cultural difference: the case of E. M. Forster

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.

Keywords:

• E. M. Forster
• English literature
• modernism
• twentieth century literature
• irony
• race
• colonialism
• imperialism
• postcolonial studies
• cultural studies

Reviewing Editor:

• Oliver Nyambi, English, University of the Free State, South Africa

Subjects:

• British Studies; Colonialism; Imperial & Colonial History; Cultural Studies; English; Literature; 20th Century Literature; Post-Colonial Studies; Literature & Race

Introduction

In Race and the Modernist Imagination (2010), Urmila Seshagiri argues that modernity and race, as modalities of consciousness, both developed through a dialectical relationship between “the surprisingly simple concepts of continuity and discontinuity.” As modern identity sought to (re)define itself by purging the past out of the present while also approaching the present as the soon-to-be past, racial identity sought to (re)define itself through recursive movements between stabilized filiations involving inherited aspects of race (“biological, national, religious, linguistic”) and disruptive affiliations involving aspects of race consciously adopted from foreign racial backgrounds—with the potential for affiliations expanded through increasing transnational and transcultural travel and traffic. Given this dialectical relationship common to both modernity and race, “modernism’s revolutionary momentum derived from a poetics of racial difference. Modern works that self-consciously abandoned 19th-century realism … achieved their literary radicalism with aestheticized forms of race.” In contrast to the Victorians, who imagined race in concrete terms that helped them to solidify their sense of belonging to a uniquely elevated collectivity, “The moderns … transformed the outward signs of race into artistic content notable for its unreliability. If modernism’s creative energies arose out of profound cultural and historical estrangement, what richer aesthetic resource than the alienation inherent in racial difference?”¹ Seshagiri’s argument provides a rich historical context for understanding the role played by racial difference in the works of many modernists, including E. M. Forster, whose fiction articulates the modernist experiences of skepticism, rootlessness, and social fragmentation in racialized plots, settings, characters, and language.²

In accounts of literary modernism that emphasize formal experimentation, Forster is not usually identified as a prominent participant. However, as both David Medalie and Alan Wilde demonstrate, no account of modernism can be balanced if it doesn’t chart Forster’s major contributions to recognizably modernist critiques and sensibilities, such as the skepticism about the cohesion of social relations and values, doubt in the ontological coherence of reality, and the treatment of language as an unreliable or dubiously effective medium of representation. In E. M. Forster’s Modernism (2002), Medalie explains that the tendency to overlook Forster’s modernism grows out of a reductive perception of the writer as a staunch liberal-humanist who held on to values and outlooks that had been decisively negated by the violent shocks of modernity:

It is not a coincidence that Forster, who has been held up for decades as a quintessential liberalist and humanist…has been seen as an awkward straddler of traditions rather than as a modernist, or that it has taken so long for him to be acknowledged as the writer of one work of nascent modernism, namely Howards End, and of one fully fledged and seminal modernist work: A Passage to India. It is precisely because he has been seen as a figure of resiliently gentle liberal-humanism, one who consoled more and more as the century seemed to become less gentle and less kind to liberalism and humanism, that his status as a modernist has been undervalued.³

While Medalie acknowledges that Forster’s fiction provides ample space for liberal-humanist ideals and principles—such as the primacy of individuality and personal freedom, universal kinship based on shared human rights and affinities, and progress through reason and culture—he also demonstrates that these ideals and principles appear in varyingly qualified and ambivalent forms, becoming more suspect and less viable as Forster’s career progresses.⁴

Specifically, Medalie argues that Forster’s fiction shifts its focus progressively from an Edwardian romantic realism inspired by a liberal-humanist marriage between “love” and “truth,” to a modernism marked by anomie, cynicism, agnosticism, and moral relativism. Whereas “love” and “truth,” in earlier texts such as A Room with a View (1908; begun in 1902) and Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), survive as ideals that can confer value and meaning on human life—thus helping to maintain its status as intelligible and purposive in keeping with the realist tradition—this capacity gets compromised in later texts such as Howards End (1910) and, more so, in A Passage to India (1924):

The pursuit of Love and Truth per se is not necessarily admirable: what is more, if it is inattentive to the contexts in which it operates and neglects to consider the consequences of its actions, it is dangerous. The pursuit of moral absolutes and universal truth in a relativistic world of contingent (often incompatible) truths becomes the great drama of Forster’s later fiction, as it is in the work of so many of the modernists.⁵

In Howards End, the barriers imposed by the hierarchies of class and lineage deny the freedom of opportunity in love, thus highlighting the gap between reality and the liberal-humanist ethos that preaches equality and connection across boundaries of class, creed, nation, and race. However, this ethos is upheld as viable in theory even as it is undermined in practice. Via Margaret Schlegel, who believes in the possibility of reconciling the conflicting demands of romantic desire and social pragmatism, the narrator proclaims Forster’s liberal-humanist vision of the potential of interpersonal relationships: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”⁶ Such an optimistic faith in the attainability and sustainability of “human love” is nowhere to be seen in Forster’s final novel, whose modernist skepticism unfolds in a colonial setting pervaded by racial divisions and tensions: “In A Passage to India, despite Forster’s reputation as the liberal-humanist who spoke for all the century, the implication, albeit couched in wistfulness, is unflinchingly clear: liberal-humanism is no longer tenable; there are no longer viable contexts for its articulation.”⁷ With A Passage to India, Forster’s ideological and aesthetic affiliations appear to drift farther away from the sphere of humanistic realism and closer to the sphere of anti-humanistic modernism. In Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (1981), Alan Wilde traces the development of Forster’s modernism in terms of his evolving deployment of irony, the latter understood as a mode of consciousness that reflects and enacts the epistemology and ontology of its historical milieus. For Wilde, Forster is unique among the modernists in that his “career portrays the progression and interrelations of the century’s different ironic modes, as mediate gives way to disjunctive and disjunctive to suspensive irony.”⁸ Wilde defines the increasingly complex modes of irony as follows, identifying disjunctive irony as “the characteristic form of modernism”:

One: mediate irony…(irony at this stage serves to mediate a fundamentally satiric vision), imagines a world lapsed from a recoverable…norm. […] The ideal, in other words, is one of recovery, an ideal of harmony, integration, and coherence…the possibility of recuperation, of mending the fracture, persists, and with it, the dream—moral, psychological, or interpersonal—of wholeness. Two: by contrast, disjunctive irony (the characteristic form of modernism) strives, however reluctantly, toward a condition of paradox. The ironist, far more basically adrift, confronts a world that appears inherently disconnected and fragmented. At its extreme or “absolute” point…disjunctive irony both recognizes the disconnections and seeks to control them…and so the confusions of the world are shaped into an equal poise of opposites: the form of an unresolvable paradox… Inevitably, works of disjunctive and more particularly absolute irony achieve not resolution but closure—an aesthetic closure that substitutes for the notion of a paradise regained an image…of a paradise fashioned by man himself. Three: finally, suspensive irony (which I connect with postmodernism), with its yet more radical vision of multiplicity, randomness, contingency, and even absurdity, abandons the quest for paradise altogether—the world in all its disorder is simply (or not so simply) accepted.⁹

While the different modes of irony don’t exclude each other or succeed each other in a clear, forward trajectory of development, Wilde maintains that each mode can be considered a distinct category to the extent that it expresses a distinct type of consciousness. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, irony comprehends the dissonances and disappointments attached to the conventional characters’ relational failures, and to the tension between their repressed lives and their romantic expectations. When it seems to threaten the possibility of meaningful relationships in general, this irony seems to operate within the disjunctive/modernist domain. However, because an “ideal of [social] harmony, integration, and coherence” survives ironic scrutiny, the predominant orientation of the novel’s irony may be viewed as mediate or satiric. In A Passage to India, on the other hand, ironic dissonance and negation undermine meaning and value to such an extent that the integrative ideal fails to restore them; to “deal” with the nihilistic vision of chaos that emerges, the ironic imagination attempts to substitute a formally harmonious aesthetic “closure” for a substantive ideological “resolution,” and irony thus becomes “absolute.”

Wilde compares Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India to argue that a general movement can be observed in Forster’s fiction from satirical irony to modernist irony, which becomes “absolute” in the latter novel. Although the racial and cultural gaps and clashes between Englishness and foreignness exert a formative influence on the shape and function of irony in both of these novels, Wilde doesn’t address racial-cultural difference in his theoretical model, and this omission determines the shape his model assumes as well as the ways in which he applies it to the fiction of Forster.¹⁰ In this paper, I argue, interweaving the contributions of Seshagiri and Wilde, that the shift from satirical to modernist irony in Forster’s work develops in concert with an imperial-colonial English anxiety over contact with racial-cultural difference;¹¹ as the face of this difference changes from the uncivilized Italian neighbor in Where Angels Fear to Tread to the radically alien Indian indigene in A Passage to India, irony becomes “absolute,” expressing an existential crisis while attempting to manage it through aesthetic closure.¹² My comparison of the racial-cultural politics of irony in the two novels suggests that modernist irony—and perhaps more importantly, the spirit of alienation at its heart—should not be approached as politically neutral and universal responses to a global and uniform experience of modernity; rather, they should be investigated in connection with historically contingent and geopolitically significant constructions and representations of racial-cultural difference.¹³

Where Forster fears to tread

Set in Italy, Where Angels Fear to Tread reveals an interest in the country and its Mediterranean character that Forster pursues frequently in his fiction, most notably in A Room with a View, “The Story of a Panic” (1904), and “The Eternal Moment” (1905). As Medalie explains, “Much of [Forster’s] early work is about the oppressiveness of conventions that cramp, confine and stifle, be they archaic moral and sexual codes or the stultifying suburbia represented by Sawston. In Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View, the contrasting expansiveness and liberation are offered by Italy.”¹⁴ While Forster’s “Italian” novels, as they’ve come to be called, locate in Italy the power to unsettle English prejudices and conventions and expand the horizons of English identity, they also represent Italy in othering ways, associating the land and its people with primitive and uncivilized qualities, and developing the inner transformations of the English characters at the expense of the Italian characters. Suzanne Roszak (2014) identifies this bifurcated approach to Italy in Forster’s work and dissects its ambivalent cultural-political psychology:

Forster’s narratives exert a corrective impulse on his characters by problematizing this [conventional English] view of Italy and underlining [Italy’s] call to non-conformity, which generates new modes of viewing nationality and ethnicity, class, and gender, not only for women like his main characters Lilia and Lucy but also for the other English characters who surround them. […]

Still, in thus imagining Italy, Forster’s novels also insistently over-emphasize the purported ‘difference’ of both rural and urban Italian spaces and their inhabitants—their charming timelessness or anti-modernity; their dangerous natural beauty; their primal, animalistic violence; and their unabashed coarseness—thus fetishizing and often patronizing the ‘primitive’ Italian nature that inspires social experiment. The Italian novels also assert an implicit value judgment in the way in which the English characters transcend their less enlightened selves at the expense of the novel’s Italians, whose lives are subordinated to the inner development of the tourist, generating a problematic hierarchy of which the narratives communicate limited awareness.¹⁵

Roszak’s incisive analysis, borne out by my own reading of Where Angels Fear to Tread, demonstrates the need for a polyvalent approach to the encounter between the English Self and the Italian Other in Forster’s work. Commenting on the primitivist frameworks that Forster frequently adopts when representing Italy and Italians in his fiction, Francesca Pierini (2019) complements Roszak’s argument through this qualified note of caution concerning Forster’s treatment of Italian otherness:

Although we should be wary of a reductionist view of Forster’s work that reads it as ‘ultimately colonial’—Forster’s vision is indeed more complex and, as such, undeserving of this crass judgment—we should see as problematic the epistemic gesture of accommodating the other along a linear historical development that one (in this case the British subject) can contemplate from the vantage point of ‘the end of history.’¹⁶

The “vantage point of ‘the end of history’” is indeed the one from which the English characters perceive and experience Italy: qualities such as spontaneity, emotional and sexual passion, simplicity of character and coarseness of manners, laziness, and simple-mindedness all combine to produce the impression of an Italy that charms and repels through its uncivilized primitivism, which stands in stark contrast to the modern imperial civilization of Britain. As I will show, the confused critical function of irony in Where Angels Fear to Tread grows naturally out of the confused and fraught relationship the novel stages between a civilized imperial Englishness and an uncivilized primitive Italianness.

Centering on an intra-familial conflict that expands into a wider cultural antagonism between the English and Italian characters, the novel’s main plot line pits the widowed protagonist Lilia Theobald against her in-laws the Herritons, whose bourgeois snobbery and conventionality she is forced to endure when, bowing to the domineering Mrs. Herriton, she settles for being their neighbor in the town of Sawston upon her husband’s death. Desiring to take a break from the Herritons’ relentless and stifling supervision, Lilia decides to go on a yearlong journey to Italy with their neighbor Caroline Abbott, a younger but more cautious woman whose rigid conventionality appeals to the Herritons as an ideal check against Lilia’s dangerous spontaneity. In the fictional Tuscan hill town of Monteriano, Lilia falls in love with a handsome working class Italian man named Gino, gets engaged to him, and marries him as soon as she learns that Mrs. Herriton has sent her son Philip to terminate their engagement. Subsequently, the Herritons ostracize Lilia and forbid her direct contact with her daughter Irma, and Lilia is forced to make things work with Gino on her own.

While the first half of the novel deals with the cultural, class, and gender divisions that ultimately lead Lilia and Gino’s relationship to failure, the next half deals primarily with the Herritons’ and Caroline Abbott’s efforts to rescue the baby boy Lilia has had with Gino from the corrupting influence of Italy after his mother’s premature death. Dominated by the English characters’ internal struggles between the mysteriously alluring and judgment-distorting magic of Italy, on the one hand, and the self-preserving weight of their suburban conventions, on the other, this narrative arc also ends in failure. Both Philip and Caroline succumb in their turn to the Italian influence that captivated Lilia, yielding to the personal and fatherly charms of Gino and giving up on their mission. Although Harriet, Philip’s comically righteous sister, succeeds in kidnapping the baby, he dies in a carriage accident during the Herritons’ and Ms. Abbott’s departure from Monteriano, a tragedy that highlights the destructive nature of the middle-class English characters’ rigid conventional codes.

Throughout the novel, the Sawstonites are subjected to the ironic scrutiny of the narrator, who exposes the comic, hypocritical, and self-serving nature of their conventional propriety. Mrs. Herriton, always careful to appear the paragon of matronly and domestic virtue, is shown to be calculating and insincere in her efforts to recover Lilia’s baby from Italy; Harriet, “Though pious and patriotic, and a great moral asset for the house…lacked that pliancy and tact which her mother so much valued,” and “As Philip once said, she had ‘bolted all the cardinal virtues and couldn’t digest them’”; Ms. Abbott “was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three: there was nothing in her appearance or manner to suggest the fire of youth”; and “even Philip, who in theory loved outraging English conventions, rose to the occasion, and gave [Lilia] a talking which she remembered to her dying day” after she ventures to ride a bicycle down Sawston’s High Street and falls off of it in full view of the town’s respectable denizens.¹⁷ Moreover, by highlighting the limitations in their perceptions of Italy and its people, as well as the gaps between what they expect to find and what they do find there, the narrator’s irony implicates the English characters’ conventionality in their failure to connect with Italy and Italians.

Overdetermined in its nature from the beginning, the allure that Italy signifies for the Sawstonites—or the repulsion, in the case of Mrs. Herriton and her daughter Harriet—has its basis in the sexually reserved, emotionally inhibited, culturally parochial, and aesthetically barren pattern of life in Sawston. For Lilia, Italy represents an escape from the overbearing tutelage and surveillance of the Herritons, who do their best to inhibit the spontaneous streak in her personality and make her seem more like the dignified lady, responsible mother, and mourning widow she should be in their view. For the meticulously proper Caroline, who acknowledges herself as “John Bull to the backbone,”’ the trip to Italy is a “fling” that will “give [her] things to think about and talk about for the rest of [her] life.”¹⁸ As for Harriet, who is too immersed in being a dutiful daughter and attending Sunday services to imagine other ways of occupying her time, the narrator observes that “She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited,” suggesting that a repressed desire may inform her resolute antipathy to the country.¹⁹ Overburdened by the demands of English conventions, the English visitors to Italy—Lilia, Caroline, and Philip all included—bring with them romantic expectations inflated beyond the scope of Italy’s reality, which opens the door for the novel’s ironic discrepancies and disappointments. Informed as they are by the middle-class touristic culture of Edwardian England and the Baedeker travel guides it thrives on, these expectations betray a tendency to stereotype and exoticize from the English tourist’s position of privileged spectatorship. As James Corby (2015) demonstrates, the touristic approach scripted in the Baedeker guides actively sought the excitement of Italy’s exotic wonders while also striving zealously to control and regulate the experience and expression of this excitement, lest living in the Italian moment undermine the self-possession of the properly English character:

At that time, the Baedeker guide books, along with the Murray guidebooks and one or two others, led the way for countless British tourists travelling on the continent. In A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread, Forster is gently mocking of the Baedeker approach and of the type of tourism that such books represent—the way they attempt to catalogue the many splendors of Italy, translating them in the brisk, unfeeling language of respectable late-Victorian, early-Edwardian paternalism.²⁰

Besides shedding light on Forster’s (conscious) rejection of touristic paternalism and its conformist pressures, this historical context captures the collective scale and weight of the ambivalence characterizing contemporary middle-class English attitudes toward the foreign and the exotic.²¹

Indeed, an irony-rich oscillation between attraction and repulsion characterizes most of the Sawston group’s relationships to Italy, and most significant in this regard is Lilia’s relationship with Gino. Although Lilia is initially so agitated by her love for the exotically handsome and sensual Gino that she’s determined to defy the Herritons for it, the narrator shares with us the ironic revelation that “She did not hate him, even as she had never loved him; with her it was only when she was excited that the semblance of either passion arose.”²² Here, the shallowness and ephemerality of Lilia’s passions appear to accord with a bourgeois English touristic sensibility, one for which the foreign figures as a passing pleasure with no profound or enduring influence on the inner life: in Caroline Abbott’s words, a “fling.” Indeed, it is difficult to separate the exotic and swiftly consumable impressions that Italy leaves on Lilia from her experience of Gino as a spouse. When Lilia writes to the Herritons from Monteriano, telling them “It is not only so quaint, but one sees the Italians unspoiled in all their simplicity and charm here,” these generalizing, primitivizing impressions anticipate the generic dimensions of her feelings for Gino.²³ As the narrator demonstrates, Gino is attractive to Lilia less as a three-dimensional person and more as an easily legible type, one that combines the attractive and unattractive qualities of primitive Italianness. In addition, her diminishing and condescending approach to him is enabled by the class and racial power differentials that exist between them:

She always treated him as a boy, which he was, and as a fool, which he was not, thinking herself so immeasurably superior to him that she neglected opportunity after opportunity of establishing her rule. He was good-looking and indolent; therefore he must be stupid. He was poor; therefore he would never dare to criticize his benefactress. He was passionately in love with her; therefore he could do exactly as she liked.²⁴

Lilia’s stereotyping perceptions of Gino, which seem to match the illogical projections of orientialism, yoke youthful spontaneity and exotic good looks to foolishness, stupidity, and a pre-capitalist laziness.²⁵ Moreover, the economic advantage she has over Gino is an integral part of the “immeasurably superior” (i.e. imperial) attitude she assumes toward him. As the eventual highhandedness and calculated control exercised by Gino prove, Lilia’s imperialistic misreading of his character and capacities is fatally ironic: her indulgence of him shifts the power dynamics of their relationship in his favor, and his willful neglect of her develops into adultery, while the combined disappointments of her life with him lead her to a physically detrimental depression ending with her death upon the birth of their son.

Another example of the ambivalence Italy elicits from the imperialistically romantic English imagination is presented by Caroline. Gone on a mission to rescue Lilia’s baby from the unsalutary influence of Italy—and thus atone for the part she played in abetting Lilia’s romance with Gino—Caroline finds herself again overwhelmed by the mysterious gravity of Italy that led her to fail as Lilia’s chaperone:

She gave a sudden cry of shame. “This time—the same place—the same thing,” and she began to beat down her happiness, knowing it to be sinful. She was here to fight against this place, to rescue a little soul who was innocent as yet. She was here to champion morality and purity, and the holy life of an English home. In the spring she had sinned through ignorance; she was not ignorant now. “Help me!” she cried, and shut the window as if there was magic in the encircling air. But the tunes would not go out of her head, and all night long she was troubled by torrents of music, and by applause and laughter, and angry young men who shouted the distich out of Baedeker: “Poggibonizzi, fatti in là, Che Monteriano si fa città!”

Poggibonsi was revealed to her as they sang—a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew it had been Sawston.²⁶

Caroline’s comically inflated perception of herself as engaged in a righteous struggle against Italian debauchery, and the acute anxiety she experiences as her resolve begins to waver, suggest that the main aspects of Italy’s dangerousness lie in the primitively natural romantic magnetism of its people, a magnetism for which the projections of English fantasy account in good measure. The projective and repressed nature of English desire reveals itself through the fantastic and discomfiting impressions left by Italy on Ms. Abbott: “there was magic in the encircling air,” and the “torrents of music…applause and laughter” keep her from sleep with their provocative suggestions. Moreover, she imagines herself as a native of Monteriano, and the locally detested Poggibonsi as Sawston, “a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended.”

Not all of the Sawstonites view Italy with the ironically projective eye of the typical imperial tourist: Philip, for example, has an interest in Italy that is less commercial and more the product of a personal investment in aestheticism. Yet it is not, for that, any less ironic: in its self-conscious ambivalence—joining desire to repulsion and idealism to disillusionment—Philip’s ironic attitude toward Italy comes closest to the overarching ironic attitude of the authorial narrator. Philip holds himself aloof from Sawston society on the grounds of an intellectual and cultural superiority and an ostensible aversion to conventionality. Among the prominent signs of his unconventionality is his great attraction to the history of continental Europe. For Philip, who “believe[s] that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her,”

Italy is a precious remnant of Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance civilization, a treasure-trove of architecture, art, culture, and history; the fact that this long history of civilization doesn’t extend to modern Italy and its people in his mind reflects imperial England’s dichotomous perception of Italy, which consigns its civilization to its past and construes its modern present as primitive.²⁷ Italy is also a romantic aesthetic prospect to which Philip brings an intensely personal and suggestively obscure affective investment. As the narrator’s brief and allusive biographical account of Philip’s childhood suggests, the young Philip develops two particular orientations toward life that come to define his character: “a sense of beauty and a sense of humour”—in other words, aestheticism and irony.²⁸ Aestheticism and irony become for Philip the main compensations for his deep loneliness and his sense of powerlessness in the face of social conventions. Furthermore, the narrator associates both these aspects of his character with a lack in masculine resolve stamped on his body and destined to define the trajectory of his life. Through delicately allusive language, Forster’s narrator implies that in Philip, irony and aestheticism are organically intertwined with a closeted, socially isolating homosexuality.

While Philip invests “All the energies and enthusiasms of a rather friendless life…into the championship of beauty,” irony becomes his answer to the paralyzing power of the conventions: “If he could not reform the world, he could at all events laugh at it, thus attaining at least an intellectual superiority.”²⁹ Considering the biographical resonances between Philip and Forster in terms of gender/sexuality, irony, and aestheticism, it is perhaps not surprising that the stance of the amused spectator that Philip assumes toward the people and events surrounding him most closely mirrors the authorial narrator’s own stance toward the narrative. Falling down forcefully on both the class snobbery and hypocritical morality of the Sawstonites, and the vulgar disappointments of Monteriano and its people, Forster’s narrator—like Philip—wields irony from a privileged distance that allows him to satirize the characters around him without partaking in the psychological intensity of their lived realities: the narrator’s “distance from the [emotional] events (like that from the characters) makes for an understated power in the novel, but it also confirms, through its tonal and stylistic checks, Forster’s resemblance to Philip.”³⁰ When their tragedies threaten the levity of his irony, he, like Philip, attempts to appreciate these tragedies through an aesthetic framework that enables him to maintain the distance of a spectator. However, while all of Forster’s characters are cut short in one way or another by his narrator’s liberal use of irony, it is Italy and Italians who come out the worst, and secure, by contrast, the privileged status of the English characters.

The ironic significance of Italy for the narrator echoes its ironic significance for Philip, who, in his combination of an English conventionality repelled by the foreign and an imperial romantic aestheticism drawn to it, shares the double vision underlying the narrator’s irony. Due to the proximity of their ironic perspectives, it is often difficult to determine through the narrator’s mediation whether Philip’s disillusionment with Italy is a function of his privileged and self-referential aestheticism, or of Italy’s actual shabbiness. Upon learning from Caroline that Lilia’s fiancé is not, as previously advertised, a member of the Italian nobility, but rather the son of a dentist, Philip reacts in a way that betrays the imperialistic ambivalence of his attitude toward Italy:

Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan league, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better. It was going from Philip now, and therefore he gave the cry of pain.³¹

On the one hand, the narrator exposes the imperial naivety of Philip’s aesthetic perception of Italy: Philip’s ideal Italy is so much an ahistorical “fairyland” that he can’t bear associating it with a profession as necessary in the modern world as dentistry. After the reader moves through the hyperbolic exclamation marks and gets to the paragraph’s final sentence, s/he feels fairly certain that Philip is less interested in Italy as it is than in Italy as his imperial imagination would have it be. Given that it cannot withstand the intrusions of “the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque”—i.e. the intrusions of modern reality—Philip’s attachment to Italy must involve “a spurious sentiment” that encourages projection from a position of safely distant spectatorship. On the other hand, the narrator’s indefinite “a” doesn’t restrict the “spurious element” of romanticism to Philip, while his definite “the” imparts a sense of objectivity to Philip’s experience of “the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque” aspects of Italy. As a result, the reader is at pains to decide whether the issue lies in Philip’s failure to adjust to the realities that don’t match his self-indulgent image of Italy, or in these realities themselves. In addition, as can be seen from the narrator’s stereotyping representations of Italians—particularly Gino—his unstable ironic orientation doesn’t merely reflect, but also constitutes, the objective discrepancies between Philip’s Italy and the Italy that is.

In terms of the racial-cultural logic of his irony, it is significant that Forster’s narrator makes Gino accord in several respects with the vulgar “cad” that Philip envisions him to be.³² Gino considers accepting Philip’s bribe in exchange for Lilia, as Philip expects him to. Moreover, he is adulterous and generally inconsiderate to his wife, almost resorts to violence when she tries to shift the power dynamics of their relationship in her favor, and has no compunctions about his mistreatment of her. The narrator suggests that Gino is possessed of “the brutality so common in Italians,” and that his indolence and vulgarity are broadly Italian characteristics.³³ Explaining the double standard according to which Gino curtails Lilia’s social freedoms while placing no limits on his own, the narrator asserts that “His morality was that of the average Latin.”³⁴ When the narrator registers through Philip’s eyes Gino’s reaction to Philip’s bribe, the caricaturistic qualities observed, as well as the objectifying distance from which they’re observed, carries over from Philip’s perspective to the narrator’s own: “Philip watched his face—a face without refinement, perhaps, but not without expression—watched it quiver and re-form and dissolve from emotion into emotion. There was avarice at one moment, and insolence, and politeness, and stupidity, and cunning—and let us hope that sometimes there was love.”³⁵ All the character traits that Philip observes—including “politeness,” which appears contrived in context—speak of the vulgar “cad” and “village yokel” weighing his options before the English gentleman who has come to put an end to his unconscionable exploitation of an English lady.³⁶ While the narrator’s “There was” renders Philip’s perspective with a simple immediacy that could be given an ironic twist, Philip’s perspective is instead confirmed when the narrator invites the readers to “hope,” with them both, “that sometimes there was love.” Here the narrator aligns his perspective with Philip’s and effectively encourages the reader to do the same. Having assumed a position of critical distance from Gino, the reader is also invited to attribute to Gino the brunt of the responsibility for the ironic discrepancies between who he is and who Philip/the narrator would have him be; the projections of imperial English fantasy are thus occluded from view by the disappointments of Italian vulgarity.

While they are negatively stereotyped, Gino and Italy are not demonized; both are credited with abundant charm, sincerity, and moments of civility as well. Gino even appears capable of a precious fatherly love and devotion in the eyes of Caroline, a capacity that endears him to her very much. However, neither Gino nor any other Italian characters—and besides him, few are involved throughout the narrative scene—are well-rounded; the narrator consistently presents them as types, or reinforces the English characters’ stereotypical perceptions of them. The reader is given no access to their thoughts except through the narrator’s brief and generalizing commentary. While the narrator doesn’t exempt from ironic scrutiny the prejudices or romantic investments brought to Italy by the English characters, his ironic negation of their perspectives is countered by moments of reinforcement. Both the narrative circumstances and narratorial representations pertaining to the Italian characters accommodate them to the contours of the English characters’ pre-conceived notions. Thus, the novel’s representational gestalt presents a rather dim view of the possibilities of interpersonal relations between Italy and England, clinching them between the alternatives of conventional condescension and far-fetched romanticism. Put differently, Forster’s irony in the novel witnesses the liberal-humanist desire to “only connect” get thwarted by the racial-cultural gaps between imperial England and its relatively primitive neighbor Italy.

In their undermining of the prospects for deep and durable interpersonal relationships, these racial-cultural gaps seem to take the novel’s irony in a disjunctive/modernist direction, where incompatibility, alienation, and incommunicability are default conditions that characters must contend with in their search for connection. On the other hand, the novel’s cynicism vis-à-vis transnational relationships qualifies its cynicism vis-à-vis intra-national relationships. In rendering English-Italian relationships unviable, Forster renders relations within English boundaries more viable by comparison. In the first place, the way he distributes responsibility for relational disconnect among his English and Italian characters reinforces the former group’s cultural sensibilities at the expense of the latter’s: while the English are comically snobbish and hypocritically righteous, they are partly justified in being so by the Italians’ primitiveness, vulgarity, and underhandedness. In the second place, narrative subjectivity and rounded characterization are reserved for the English characters, so that even when they fail, their failures are complex and fully human, while those of the Italians are more or less cartoonish. Finally, the trajectory of the plot sees the triumph of Sawston’s conventions against the romantic allure of Italy. The failure of Lilia’s relationship with Gino constitutes one aspect of this triumph; other aspects include the non-realization of Caroline’s love for Gino; the symbolically significant death of Lilia and Gino’s bi-racial child; and the English characters’ subsequent retreat to Sawston. However, the most potent manifestation of English conventionality’s triumph is the survival of Philip’s interest in Italy in the form of a self-centered, spectatorial aestheticism.

By the end of the novel, the release from conventional constraints through the freedom of the personal aesthetic imagination—Philip’s childhood coping strategy, which he announces as a sort of manifesto to the skeptical Caroline—absorbs the cynical momentum of the novel’s irony:³⁷

“…Society is invincible—to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity—nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty—into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life—the real you.” “I have never had that experience yet. Surely I and my life must be where I live.” Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy.³⁸

While Philip’s sexist, summary dismissal of Caroline’s realistic rejoinder renders his self-assured conviction somewhat ironic, his philosophized aesthetic perspective ultimately prevails to counterbalance, and contain, the negational force of the novel’s irony.

In the novel’s final section, the narrator duplicates Philip’s aesthetic coping strategy, countering the narrative’s demoralizing trajectory by conjuring, through an aestheticized language, a vision of a heroic English joie de vivre:

Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. And Philip knew that he was still voyaging on the same magnificent, perilous sea, with the sun or the clouds above him, and the tides below.³⁹

The emergence of “pride and pity and love” in the form of a mechanistic “vast apparatus” gives the feelings a forced, artificial air. As for “The passion [the dead] have aroused,” it is likewise abstract; the reader is hard pressed to imagine Philip developing a sudden passion for Lilia’s child out of his earlier cold indifference to him, while Caroline and Harriet’s feelings for the child are, from the beginning, inextricable from their conventional understandings of duty. The voyage “on the same magnificent, perilous sea” places Philip at the center of a suddenly poeticized narrative, one in which he has hitherto played the role of an alternately amused and repelled, but most often an ironic spectator. In obscuring the self-referential nature of the characters’ investments in Italy—as well as their direct and indirect responsibility for the death of Gino’s child—this contrived aesthetic gesture attempts to transform the characters’ relational failures in Italy to an aesthetic success. Complementing the general shape of the narrative and the biased distribution of narrative space, character complexity, and moral responsibility for relational failure between the English and Italian characters, the aesthetic inflection to the narrative does the most to recuperate Sawston and its conventional Englishness from the withering force of the narrator’s irony. Ultimately, the seriousness of the English characters’ flaws and failures gets alleviated through an Anglicized aestheticism, and the irony that seemed to negate their ability to have meaningful relationships, thus evoking the radical separations of disjunctive/modernist irony, assumes the milder form of mediate irony or satire.

In Where Angels Fear to Tread, the “Love” and “Truth” of Forster’s liberal humanism survive ironic scrutiny by finding refuge in the abstract space-time of the personal aesthetic imagination. In terms of racial-cultural politics, this act of recuperation suggests that Englishness can metabolize Italianness, no matter how jarring the latter’s inferiorities might be. In A Passage to India, the colonial context of racial-cultural difference strains the novel’s liberal-humanist ideology to a far greater extent; ironic scrutiny reaches absolute dimensions, and Forster’s “only connect” must surrender its prized vision of an all-meaningful human relationality and content itself with a formally significant and ideologically vacant “aesthetic closure.” The implication is that Englishness cannot cope with Indianness; the latter, perceived and defined through a colonial lens, threatens to take the former beyond the boundaries of the human.⁴⁰

A passage to England

As part of his meticulous mapping of the connections between Forster’s political sensibilities and his fictional creations, Medalie quotes the opinion of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century liberal political theorist Leonard Hobhouse concerning the collusion of British liberalism with British imperialism:

The true political nature of Imperialism is best seen by confronting it with the watchwords of progress accepted in the middle of the nineteenth century by moderate men of both great parties in the State … – peace, economy, reform and popular self-government … a large section of professed Liberals believe or assert that Imperialism is consistent with the maintenance of all these virtues. This contention, however, is belied by facts.⁴¹

This ironic embrace by contemporary liberals of an oppressive system, imperialism, that contradicts the foundations of the peace-loving philosophy they profess, transmitted itself to the liberal humanism that Forster relied on as his moral compass. As Medalie suggests, the doublethink and hypocrisy in contemporary liberalism’s embrace of imperialism are inherited by Forster and expressed in A Passage to India: “The fact that, for much of the novel, Forster condemns the practice of British imperialism in India rather than the idea of it…is directly attributable to the implication of liberal precepts in the idea of a conscionable British rule in India.”⁴² If Forster’s critique of the Raj ironically elevates Englishness above Indianness, the apparent contradiction has an explanation in the historical irony outlined above. Where India is concerned, Forster’s racial-cultural attitudes and political convictions are partly the products of an independent critical mind and partly the products of liberal imperialistic groupthink.

In Culture and Imperialism (1994), Edward W. Said notes the politicized connection between India and unrepresentability in Forster’s last novel: “I have always felt that the most interesting thing about A Passage to India is Forster using India to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot in fact be represented—vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions, histories, and social forms.”⁴³ In Said’s post-colonial reading of the novel, India’s resistance to representation is a function of Forster’s blindness to the colonial attitude framing his own perception of India. While he credits the novel’s irony with a searing critical intelligence, Said also observes that the novel doesn’t acknowledge colonialism as a systematic injustice or accept the legitimacy of anti-colonial nationalism:

The novel’s helplessness neither goes all the way and condemns (or defends) British colonialism, nor condemns or defends Indian nationalism. True, Forster’s ironies undercut everyone from the blimpish [Anglo-Indian] Turtons and Burtons to the posturing, comic Indians, but one cannot help feeling that in view of the political realities of the 1910s and 1920s even such a remarkable novel as A Passage to India nevertheless founders on the undodgeable facts of Indian nationalism. Forster identifies the course of the narrative with a Britisher, Fielding, who can understand only that India is too vast and baffling, and that a Muslim like Aziz can be befriended only up to a point, since his antagonism to colonialism is so unacceptably silly.⁴⁴

Said’s astute analysis of the novel’s blind spots reveals the mutual implication between the racial politics of colonialism and the politics of representation, that latter being inclusive of the politics of irony. A connecting thread thus appears between Fielding’s failure to comprehend Indian nationalism, India’s resistance to representation and intelligibility, and the state of cognitive paradox inherent in absolute irony, the novel’s dominant ironic mode.

In terms of the constitutive role played by colonial racism in the development of the novel’s modernist form, A Passage to India might be compared to Joseph Conrad’s earlier novella Heart of Darkness (1899). As Patrick Brantlinger argues in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988), the racist and anti-racist strands of Conrad’s novel are difficult to disentangle from each other, as both are subsumed into a modernist style of impressionism that avoids a clear indictment of imperialism, lingering instead on abstract Manichean contrasts—e.g. light/dark, white/black, good/bad, civilized/savage—and vaguely disturbing atmospheres unmoored from specific colonial geographies and histories. In spite of its gestures toward abstract universality, this impressionism evokes and reifies the same racist colonial imaginary it purports to transcend:

Heart of Darkness offers a powerful critique of at least some manifestations of imperialism and racism as it simultaneously presents that critique in ways that can be characterized only as imperialist and racist. Impressionism is the fragile skein of discourse which expresses—or disguises—this schizophrenic contradiction as an apparently harmonious whole.⁴⁵

In Brantlinger’s account, the “schizophrenic contradiction” between the racialized ideologies vying for control in the novel is too intense for the author to process through the realistic register of discourse; therefore, he resorts to a modernist style—impressionism—that is too “fragile” to contribute anything besides the appearance of a “harmonious” resolution. While it doesn’t focus on irony, Brantlinger’s analysis of Heart Darkness resonates with my analysis of A Passage to India: in both of these texts, the intense ambivalence in the way colonial relations are racialized undermines the modern metropolitan authors’ ability to develop a clear perception and ethical judgment of colonialism, prompting them to represent and “resolve” the colonial crisis through rarefied modernist aesthetics.

In her post-colonial analysis of A Passage to India, Susan Friedman also posits a connection between the ambivalence of colonial racial psychology and the modernist formal ambiguity in the novel: “One of the marks of the novel’s modernist indeterminacy is its simultaneous critique of and participation in a colonial standpoint.” After observing that “the novel uses a form of irony familiar to the English novel of manners epitomized by Jane Austen to satirize a spectrum of British racist attitudes,” Friedman goes on to state that the complexity of the colonial encounter is expressed by the text’s movement beyond satirical realism toward an indeterminacy characteristic of modernism:

For all its ties to the realist tradition in the English novel of manners…A Passage to India goes well beyond satire in its depiction of colonial racism. The novel’s fusion of realism with symbolist, religious, and mystical dimensions creates a hybrid text that, while not ‘high modernist’ in formal terms, nonetheless departs significantly from the conventions of realism and introduces an unsettlingly indeterminate dimension to the story of many passages to and within India.⁴⁶

The correspondence that Friedman posits here between the novel’s modernist indeterminacy and the complex dynamics of colonial racism speaks to my argument. Because the challenge posed by India’s colonial otherness to (Forster’s experience of) English identity is so intense, the satirical approach he relied on to manage the Mediterranean otherness of Italy won’t do: instead, a radically abstract solution must be sought in the form of absolute irony.

The plot trajectory of Where Angels Fear to Tread carries the English protagonists through Mediterranean (mis)adventures that enable them to suspend the conventional constraints that dominate their lives in England, but their evasion of these constraints is temporary and punctuated by tragedy. The upper middle-class conventions of England’s suburbia, and especially the belief in the sanctity of interpersonal relationships, retain their importance and their capacity to confer meaning and structure on the protagonists’ lives, particularly as the personal aesthetic imagination works to compensate for the dullness of conventionality. In A Passage to India, on the other hand, the ability of the conventions to confer meaning and structure on the protagonists’ lives is called into question, along with the significance of human existence. The initiative to discover the “real” India, undertaken by Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore, leads to an experience of pure nihilism in the Marabar Caves, and India in its entirety becomes a metaphor for this experience. The nihilism attached to India gets expressed as a distinctly modernist conviction that “everything exists, nothing has value,” and that interpersonal relationships, and the conventions that regulate them, merely obscure the radical loneliness and meaninglessness of existence.⁴⁷

Set in the fictional Ganges city of Chandrapore during an unspecified period of the British Raj, the novel positions Forster’s narrator over encounters fraught with the divisions and frictions of colonial rule and ideology. While some of the main characters are more advanced than others in their political awareness and cultural intelligence, the power disparities and ideological distortions built into the colonial setting compel all of them to participate in various scenarios of miscommunication, misperception, misunderstanding, mis-representation, mistreatment, suspicion, and/or disconnect. Miss Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore arrive from England in the hope of discovering an India that exists outside the limiting frames of imported colonial discourses. Both Adela and Mrs. Moore also hope to see the former engaged to Ronny Heaslop, Chandrapore’s Magistrate and Mrs. Moore’s son from her first husband. In their desire to develop an independent experience of India, Adela and Mrs. Moore are dialectically engaged with Ronny, whose gradual and ambivalent internalization of his peers’ prejudices dramatizes the vulnerability of the individual mind to the pressures of the colonial herd mentality. This mentality is represented principally by the Collector Mr. Turton, his wife Mrs. Turton, and the Civil Surgeon Major Callendar, all of whom speak and act in support of the hierarchical divisions in place between the English and the Indians at Chandrapore. Cyril Fielding, principal of Chandrapore’s Government College, represents the model of colonial Englishness most closely aligned with Forster’s liberal humanism; his investment in English-Indian friendship across colonial lines, although compromised by his participation in the colonial machine, remains (however naively) sincere. Through Fielding, Adela and Mrs. Moore get acquainted with two of the novel’s main Indian characters: Dr. Aziz, a Muslim doctor who reports to Major Callendar, gets frustrated by the superior attitudes expressed by the Anglo-Indians, and grows in nationalist resentment as the plot progresses; and Professor Godbole, a Hindu teacher who works at the College run by Fielding, and expresses a mystic, unperturbed, all-accepting relational philosophy strikingly out of synch with the charged divisions and antagonisms of the colonial scene.

After the acquaintance opens the door for friendship, the group arranges a trip to the Marabar Caves, a mysterious and ancient site near Chandrapore that registers, metonymically, the alienating incomprehensibility of India. In one of the caves, Mrs. Moore feels herself drowning in an all-negating metaphysical darkness; in another, Adela hallucinates getting sexually assaulted by Dr. Aziz. Upon Adela’s return to Chandrapore, Aziz is put on trial and Indian-English tensions reach a feverish pitch, reinforcing Indian anti-colonial sentiments and English prejudice toward the Indians. Although Adela retracts her accusation and Aziz gets exonerated, his resulting bitterness alienates him from English people, including Fielding, who, in spite of taking Aziz’s side against the Anglo-Indians during the trial, resumes his friendship with Adela in the trial’s aftermath. Mrs. Moore makes her way back to England and dies during the journey, without having recovered from her encounter with the Marabar void. Adela returns to England with no plans to revisit India, and Aziz relocates to the Princely State of Mau, hoping to put his humiliation at Chandrapore behind him. When Fielding visits Mau in an official educational inspection tour, he runs into Aziz, who, believing him to have married Adela, can’t bring himself to be friendly. Although the misunderstanding is cleared, the novel concludes with a scene that suggests that India’s essential alterity, apart from its oppressed status under the Raj, might never permit friendship between the two, or between the races to which they “belong.”

From the very first pages of the novel, it is clear that the racial, cultural, and class boundaries that set the terms of the English protagonists’ encounters of India are much more pronounced than those that frame their encounters of Italy. Policed and reinforced by the colonial administration of the Raj, these boundaries are strong enough to inflect the authorial narrator’s tone from the novel’s opening paragraph:

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. […] The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.⁴⁸

The descriptions with which the narrator introduces Chandrapore intimate their roots in colonial racism. Chandrapore appears “scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely,” not merely because of its poverty and urban disarray, but also because its inhabitants’ skin-color appears scarcely distinguishable from the mud around them. “So abased, so monotonous” are their shabby appearances and poor surroundings, that one could hardly be expected to react when “Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting”; in any case, “the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.” In comparison with the earlier novel’s narrator, whose deprecations of foreigners are more subtle and subdued, the narrator of A Passage to India is more deeply constrained by the same racial prejudices he takes it upon himself to ironize.

While much of the narrator’s irony moves in the direction of reinforcing the conventions, much of it also moves toward undermining them; the fluctuation between these two goals constitutes his irony’s instability. The narrator frequently manipulates irony to expose the self-serving and hypocritical nature of Anglo-Indian superiority, demystifying the workings of colonial ideology in the process. In the following exchange between Ronny Heaslop and Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Moore expresses her disapproval of her son’s prejudices toward Indians. Forster’s narrator highlights the ironic clash between the loud conviction with which Ronny justifies his prejudices, and the derivative nature of these prejudices:

“You never used to judge people like this at home.” “India isn’t home,” he retorted, rather rudely, but in order to silence her he had been using phrases and arguments that he had picked up from older officials, and he did not feel quite sure of himself. When he said “of course there are exceptions” he was quoting Mr. Turton, while “increasing the izzat” was Major Callendar’s own. The phrases worked and were in current use at the club, but she was rather clever at detecting the first from the second hand, and might press him for definite examples.⁴⁹

Ronny’s unthinking reenactment of the prejudicial postures of Mr. Turton and Major Callendar, both his superiors in the colonial hierarchy, betrays the herd mentality in Anglo-Indian racism and the coercive power it exercises on both sides of the colonial divide. As the following quote indicates, the racial, class, and cultural divisions enshrined in this ideology serve not only to enable Chandrapore’s Anglo-Indians to exploit its natives, but also to gain the Anglo-Indians a powerful social status they would not have in England: “A community that bows the knee to a Viceroy and believes that the divinity that hedges a king can be transplanted, must feel some reverence for any viceregal substitute. At Chandrapore the Turtons were little gods.”⁵⁰ The ladder of colonial authority and prestige extends all the way down from king to viceroy to viceregal substitute (the Turtons), with more psychological reinforcement required the lower one descends on the ladder. For the colonial administration at Chandrapore, this reinforcement is gained through repeated postures of racial superiority.

Although Forster’s ironic treatment of his English characters calls attention to their implication in colonial ideology, his ironic treatment of Chandrapore’s Indian population endorses, in effect, the racism of this ideology. Forster’s narrator frequently delivers ironic commentary on the Indian characters’ variously disappointing traits, and he does so in ways that conform to Orientalist and colonialist stereotypes and satisfy colonialism’s desire for mastery and its need for self-justification. Moreover, the Indian characters reinforce the truth status of the narrator’s representations by claiming them as their own reality. Through the combined output of the narrator, the Anglo-Indians, and the Indians themselves, Indians collectively appear to be indolent, unreliable, unpunctual, disorderly, irresponsible, frustratingly opaque, evasive, vulgar, deceitful, exaggeration-prone, cowardly, ugly, monkeyish, servile and flattering, superstitious, excessively emotional, volatile, petulant, petty, desperate for English attention and approval, doomed to despise each other in their deeply entrenched sectarian divisions, and unlikely to manage ruling their country without the more rational, cool-headed, and objective Britons.⁵¹ In light of this bewildering array of negative representations, it shouldn’t be difficult to appreciate the position of the Lieutenant- Governor Sir Gilbert, who, “Exempted by a long career in the Secretariate from personal contact with the peoples of India…was able to speak of them urbanely, and to deplore racial prejudice.”⁵² The ironic insincerity of Sir Gilbert’s demonstration of racial tolerance gets overshadowed by the ironic certainty that such tolerance is bound to fail when put to the test. By the same token, it is understandable that Adela’s “desire to see India had suddenly decreased” after she rejects Ronny as a suitor, and that Mrs. Moore loses interest in India as soon as she learns of Ronny and Adela’s eventual engagement. Adela’s interest in India had “a factitious element in it,” while Mrs. Moore’s is lukewarm and tentative from the beginning.⁵³

The failure of the passage to India, dictated by the ideological ambivalence in Anglo-Indian relationships, manifests most starkly in the two Englishwomen’s experiences at the Marabar Caves, experiences rich in disjunctive irony. For Friedman, the Caves as experienced by Adela condense racialized colonial traumas, desires, and transgressions that go at least as far back as the Mutiny of 1857; in this capacity, the Caves also serve as a point of transition from a realist commitment to mimetic representation to a modernist rejection of the same:

As a particular marker of the novel’s modernist dimension, a space of absence governs the narrative. What happened [to Adela] in the Marabar cave is unnarrated and unnarratable… This gap operates as the narrative’s pivotal point—everything before leads up to it; everything that happens afterwards results from it. It is the narrative’s “black hole,” a source of enormous power into which traumas, forbidden desires, and crimes have been drawn and disappeared from view.⁵⁴

Envisioned by the narrator as remnants of the “primal” India along with the other “high places of Dravidia,” the Caves represent an ancient, earthly wildness that, in its radical disconnect from human affairs, evokes philosophical associations with existentialism, as well as mystical associations with Jainism.⁵⁵ While the forbiddingly abstract aura of the caves takes on a life of its own during the narrator’s vivid description, its originating context lies in a tangible difference made compelling by imperial ideology: the racial-cultural difference between Indians and Britons that the Anglo-Indian community develops into a creed. As we have already seen, the narrator inscribes radical racial alterity into the Indian landscape from his opening description of Chandrapore. When commenting on the numerous bureaucratic and cultural obstacles that Aziz encounters while arranging the Caves expedition, he faults the naturally divisive spirit of India: “Trouble after trouble encountered [Aziz], because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments.”⁵⁶ The narrator’s projection of cross-racial relationship failure onto the Indian landscape anticipates the significance later assumed by the caves, where all relationships are hollowed out in the spirit of disjunctive irony. It is primarily through their function as colonial symbols of racial-cultural difference that the caves occasion their English visitors’ experience of traumatic negativity.

On the one hand, the Englishwomen’s unsettling experience of the caves is described in language that evokes a radical metaphysical alienation, thus inviting the reader to understand the caves as an independent sort of void. Relaying Mrs. Moore’s post-traumatic recollection of her encounter with one of the caves, the narrator suggests that the dark emptiness of the caves closes all spiritual horizons, whether divine or demonic, and cuts off the imagination from the potential inspirations of spirituality: “Devils are of the North, and poems can be written about them, but no one could romanticize the Marabar because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind.”⁵⁷ Here the power of the caves negates all spiritual cosmologies and their promises, suggesting that a divine dimension to human life is implausible. On a closer reading, however, it can be seen that the metaphysical negativity of the caves extends to existential proportions mundane feelings of apathy, emptiness, and loneliness that have dogged the characters since their arrival in incongruous India. These feelings are first brought into relief after the Englishwomen attend the performance of a disappointingly formless Hindu chant offered them upon request by the Brahmin Professor Godbole: “It so happened that Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested had felt nothing acutely for a fortnight. Ever since Professor Godbole had sung his queer little song, they had lived more or less inside cocoons, and the difference between them was that the elder lady accepted her own apathy, while the younger lady resented hers.”⁵⁸As a representative of the Hindu spirituality that becomes emblematic of India in the novel, it is significant that Professor Godbole’s disappointing religious song initiates the Englishwomen’s awareness of an existential void. The failure of the Professor to fill this void with inspiration parallels Shri Krishna’s failure to respond to the milk-maiden’s call as narrated in the song, and both failures evoke the failure of all of India to inspire. Thus the stage is set for the encounter with the Marabar Caves, where India’s many disappointments become an alienating metaphysical negativity rooted in its geography; rather than decenter the British colonial perspective—the argument made by Benita Parry—the inscription of negative alterity into the Indian landscape actually reinforces this perspective.⁵⁹

As the following passage suggests, the horror of the caves is closely linked to the Englishwomen’s proximity to Indian bodies:

A Marabar cave had been horrid as far as Mrs. Moore was concerned, for she had nearly fainted in it, and had some difficulty in preventing herself from saying so as soon as she got into the air again. It was natural enough; she had always suffered from faintness, and the cave had become too full, because all their retinue followed them. Crammed with villagers and servants, the circular chamber began to smell. She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her, couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad. She tried to regain the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back. She hit her head. For an instant she went mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic. For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there was also a terrifying echo.

[…]

The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”

Mrs. Moore’s experience of the “echo” that begins “in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life” is attended by her experience of the Indian bodies and smells surrounding her. While the darkness of the caves is in itself threatening to Mrs. Moore, it is especially threatening because it makes it impossible for her to “know who touched her”—a knowledge particularly important given bourgeois English reservations around bodily proximity. More importantly, Mrs. Moore’s perception of the invisible “naked thing” that strikes her face as “vile”—she discovers upon exiting the cave that “the naked pad was a poor little baby, astride its mother’s hip”—indicates a powerful anxiety over cross-racial physical contact, one that develops into a defensive hostility when the established barriers against such contact are breached. ⁶⁰

A similar anxiety determines Adela’s subsequent experience of the caves, where she gets subjected to a cross-racial rape attempt of dubious facticity; several clues suggest that the incident is a hallucination at least partly grown out of her repressed desire for Aziz, whom she accuses of the crime on no solid basis, and eventually acquits of the charge.⁶¹ Brantlinger situates the incident in the historical context of the racialized sexual paranoia that erupted among Anglo-Indian communities upon the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, an episode that generated many unfounded, but politically expedient, reports of Englishwomen being raped by Indian men.⁶² In Friedman’s reading of the novel, both Mrs. Moore’s experience and Adela’s experience are linked through a colonial heritage of English racial paranoia:

Mrs. Moore’s hysterical symptom foreshadows Adela’s pathological response. Of the many ways in which the cave episode can be read, the experience of the two “liberal” Englishwomen signifies their confrontation with the primitive and primeval Other, for which an ancient formation in the Indian landscape serves as a convenient symbol. Racialized in the utter blackness inside the caves, “India” surrealistically externalizes and projects a darkness within English identity that the concept of Englishness suppresses.⁶³

The “darkness within English identity that the concept of Englishness suppresses” is suggested by Mrs. Moore’s frantic aversion to the smelly brown bodies that smother her in one of the caves, and by Adela’s hallucination of a sexual assault by a brown man in another. Both of these experiences racialize the darkness of the caves and the metaphysical negativity attached to it, tracing their fundamental “meaning”—i.e. their radical negation of meaning—to a racist colonial imagination.

Whereas the dangerous negativity of the Marabar Caves seems to challenge imperial Englishness as represented by Adela and Mrs. Moore, the essentialized association of this negativity with India enables its consignment to India; the emerging impression of India as negativity itself invites, by way of compensation, an attempt to cling to England and Englishness as sites of meaningful belonging. All of the English characters who try to invest in friendships with Indians eventually abandon their attempts for the more reassuring familiarity of English society. Adela picks up her reins again and returns to her life in suburban England, where she appears to find her niche, while Mrs. Moore—in an irony that clinches the gratuitous hostility expressed by India toward foreigners—gets killed by a natural symbol of this hostility, the tropical sun, on her way back to her familiar life with her children in England. As for Fielding, in many ways a fictional counterpart to Forster, his interest in Indians falls victim to his assimilation by colonial ideology. He returns to India to resume the duties of his colonial office, but without the compunctions (however mild) he formerly had about his complicity in colonial oppression; this time, he is accompanied by Stella Moore (Mrs. Moore’s daughter), to whom he had recently gotten married, thus reinforcing his absorption into imperial racial and sexual normativity: “He had thrown in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a countrywoman, and he was acquiring some of its limitations, and already felt surprise at his own past heroism. Would he to-day defy all his own people for the sake of a stray Indian?”⁶⁴

In comparison with the ironic stance he develops toward the English encounter with Italy in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Forster’s ironic approach to the English encounter with India undermines with heavier force the prospects of cross-racial relationships—even as his ironic observations of his English characters cast doubt on their capacity for social cohesion within their own ranks. Although Forster positions Italy beyond the pale of English normality in his first novel, the encounter with India in his last novel expands, through the sheer power of its alienating effect, the boundaries of English normality to the point that it can encompass the difference represented by Italy. Through a remarkable twist of perspective, Italy and its Mediterranean civilization turn into the standard for defining what is normal on a generally human level. Expanding on Fielding’s romantic speculations about the advantages of the Italian over the Indian landscape, the narrator opines that “The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all.” If the assertion the narrator makes about the Mediterranean seems exaggerated, the exaggeration highlights the lack of form and symmetry that renders India’s abundance of sensory stimuli overwhelming in comparison with Italy; by contrast, the latter represents “the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting.”⁶⁵

As he does in his first novel, Forster attempts to address the political impasse resulting from his irony’s double bind through an aesthetic strategy. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, the strategy is Philip Herriton’s withdrawal into the aesthetic freedom of his personal imagination. In A Passage to India, the strategy manifests on a structural level as a thematic trajectory comprised of the book’s three subdivisions: “Mosque,” “Caves,” and “Temple.”

“Mosque” introduces, through the character of Aziz, a nostalgia for Mughal India as the carefree, romantic, spiritually rich, and socially equitable India lost to the hostile, divisive, exploitative, and spiritually impoverished institution of the British Raj. This section also sees Aziz on one side and Mrs. Moore, Adela, and Fielding, on the other, trying earnestly to build a solid friendship across the dividing lines of colonial racism entrenched in Chandrapore. “Caves” presents the intensification of India’s alienating otherness, which, after arousing in the two Englishwomen a nagging skepticism regarding interpersonal relationships, hits them with the force of existential horror at the Marabar Caves. This racialized trauma is followed by Adela’s rape accusation against Aziz, the racial polarization and legal confrontation between the Anglo-Indian establishment and the natives of Chandrapore, and the failure of Aziz’s friendship with the “liberal” English trio, followed by the latter’s departure for England. “Temple” centers on an aesthetic narrative subtext that sees the English protagonists’ troubled passage to India reflected in a more hopeful, mystical light through an inclusive and colorful Hindu ceremony that celebrates the anticipated birth of the god Krishna. However, both the ceremony and the manner of its narration suggest that its reconciliatory promise is equivocal, more suited to the register of aesthetic symbolism than reality. Moreover, the final scene involves a bitter confrontation between Fielding and Aziz that, instead of bridging the colonial gap between them, defers the challenge to an abstract future envisioned in imperial terms. Read in terms of the dialectical series of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the novel’s counter-ironic structural strategy might be described as follows: the British Raj is a serious problem (Mosque); India is a more fundamental problem (Caves); the problem of British India is best solved by being deferred (Temple). The paradoxical formula of a colonial problem that can only be solved through deferral concludes and encapsulates the novel’s paradoxically racialized irony, which renders India’s naturally inhospitable alterity the other face of its natural colonizability.⁶⁶

While the confrontation between Aziz and Fielding suggests the end of the British Raj as a condition for the survival of their friendship, Aziz’s anti-colonial stance is represented as contradictory, comic, and ineffectual by the narrator’s ironizing discourse; on the other hand, the same discourse leaves Fielding’s colonial arrogance largely intact. It is not by validating Aziz’s anti-colonialism, but by presenting an aesthetic spectacle of harmony in the form of a Hindu ceremony at the Princely State of Mau, that Forster attempts to mitigate the damage his irony deals to the prospects for English-Indian friendship. The ceremony, which embodies Professor Godbole’s Hindu’s spirituality in its all-embracing love and future-oriented mysticism, combines solemnity and vulgarity, comedy and tragedy, beauty and ugliness, and involves people of all genders, ages, and castes in a symbolic reconciliation of differences. After the magical midnight birth of the silver idol representing Krishna is celebrated, the celebration continues in the form of a procession where the idol, the altar on which he stands, and a clay model of the village of Gokul believed to be his original birthplace are all carried on a palanquin from the state palace to the tank. Between the birth and procession, the status of the god’s birth appears uncertain, temporally suspended between an already witnessed present and a yet-to-be witnessed future: “The revelation [of Krishna’s birth] was over, but its effect lasted, and its effect was to make men feel that the revelation had not yet come… Although the God had been born, His procession—loosely supposed by many to be the birth—had not taken place” (my emphasis). At the tank, the clay model, treated as a symbolic substitute for the idol, gets thrown into the water in an acknowledgement and a reinitiation of the divine cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Here, also, the anticipated (re)birth is remarkable for the uncertainty surrounding it: “Thus was He thrown year after year…a passage not easy, not now, not here, not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable: the God to be thrown was an emblem of that.”⁶⁷

Although Krishna’s periodical birth in the human realm seems to promise universal reconciliation and peace by virtue of his divine role as “the universal lover,” the indefinite status of this birth qualifies its promise and gives it the form of a metaphysical paradox inversely mirroring the paradoxical negativity of the caves.⁶⁸ While the caves collapse eternity into a soulless void, homogenizing time and emptying it of divine intentionality, the ceremony stretches the time of divine intervention to the point of eternal indeterminacy and practical irrelevance: in both cases, the all too human messes of the colonial situation are left to sort themselves out. Considering the symbolic nature of the ceremony’s inclusiveness, and the paradoxical, imagination-dependent status of the universal redeemer’s incarnation—“not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable”—the ceremony at most enacts a tenuous aesthetic opposition to the divisive constructions of racial-cultural difference supporting the British Raj.

The formal parallelism between the passage of a savior god to an uncertain birth, and the passage of an Englishness to an India that preempts its arrival, accords with both the imperial logic and absolute irony of the narrative: the only space that Forster’s irony leaves for viable English-Indian relationships is a phantasmic, indefinite, imperial elsewhere freed from the contradictory demands of the historical now. This point is demonstrated clearly in the novel’s concluding scene, where, after Fielding mocks Aziz’s vision of an independent and unified India, the narrator involves the Indian earth and sky in a joint rejection of the two men’s friendship:

But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”⁶⁹

The novel’s final passage, which seems to draw the reader away from India, adopts the same hollow voice of aesthetic closure that describes the Hindu ceremony: the “not now, not here” of Krishna’s symbolically redemptive birth is echoed by the “not yet” and “not there” of Aziz and Fielding’s friendship. While “not yet” suggests a future when a durable English-Indian friendship may be realized, “not there” excludes from this future the geographical reality of India and all the “hundred voices” that define it, the irreconcilable and unmanageable cultural differences and sectarian hostilities, the unappealing, formless mess of mud and people and refuse, the awkwardly sprawling vegetation, unidentifiable animals, and hostile sun. Through this double movement of anticipating and preempting the possibility of English-Indian relationships, the future site of possibility for these relationships emerges as a utopian space in an imperial imaginary, wherein Aziz’s colonized subjectivity will somehow be reconciled with the notion that India can only have a coherent existence under the British Raj. The contribution of the earth, temples, tank, jail, palace, birds, carrion, Guest House, and sky to the double movement of anticipation and preemption serves not only to secure the colonial divide between Aziz and Fielding, but also to render it normal and inevitable. The novel thus concludes within the terms of an absolute irony configured to the racial power dynamics of colonialism.

Conclusion

The ultimate ineffectuality of Forster’s ironic critique of imperial English racism reflects a fundamental ambivalence in his brand of liberal-humanism: one that is haunted by the very differences it strives to embrace, because it perceives these differences as burdens to be tolerated. In his essay “Tolerance,” Forster reveals that his attitude toward racial-cultural difference is biased toward the imperial center, even as it gestures toward tolerating the difference at the periphery. After opining that only tolerance, and not love, can enable people of different national and cultural backgrounds to coexist peacefully and productively, he explains,

The world is very full of people—appallingly full; it has never been so full before, and they are all tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn’t know and some of them one doesn’t like; doesn’t like the colour of their skins, say, or the shapes of their noses, or the way they blow them or don’t blow them, or the way they talk, or their smell, or their clothes, or their fondness for jazz or their dislike of jazz, and so on. Well, what is one to do? There are two solutions. One of them is the Nazi solution. If you don’t like people, kill them, banish them, segregate them, and then strut up and down proclaiming that you are the salt of the earth. The other way is much less thrilling, but it is on the whole the way of the democracies, and I prefer it. If you don’t like people, put up with them as well as you can. Don’t try to love them: you can’t, you’ll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate them. On the basis of that tolerance a civilised future may be built. Certainly I can see no other foundation for the post-war world.⁷⁰ (my emphasis)

That the world is “appallingly full” for Forster suggests that his impersonal third-person “one” masks a more personal relationship with the masses, “tumbling over each other” in an unseemly mess, like the brown bodies that tumble over Mrs. Moore in one of the Marabar caves. One should do one’s best to tolerate these masses, and do no more; after all, “you’ll only strain yourself”—as Philip Herriton, Lilia Theobald, Caroline Abbott, Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested, and Cyril Fielding do—if you “try to love them.”

Although he wields irony to critique imperial English conventions and ideologies—in a transnational setting in Where Angels Fear to Tread, and a colonial setting in A Passage to India—Forster’s ironic scrutiny falls more heavily on the foreigners in his cross-racial encounters. While he displays varying degrees of skepticism about interpersonal relationships throughout his oeuvre, the foreign relationships that are the focus of his first and last novels stand out as especially fraught, doomed to failure before they’re given a chance to develop; however, through the logic of contrast, these failed relationships highlight the more viable—or, as dictated by disjunctive irony, the more tolerable—status of interpersonal relationships within English boundaries. In both of these novels, as in other fictional writings of his, the encounter with the foreign serves more to recuperate than to disrupt the conventional molds out of which his bourgeois English protagonists manage—partially and temporarily—to slip. Accordingly, Forster’s irony, even in its more modernist form, ultimately works in favor of the imperial Englishness it might be expected to unsettle.

Speaking broadly, the common association of modernist form with the disruption of established ideologies, identities, and norms needs to be qualified, as Peter Nicholls so effectively demonstrates in Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995). Nicholls argues there that the spirit of modernist literature could be condensed in the concept of a certain ironic attitude, one rooted in a power differential between the observing/representing artist and the observed/represented subject-object. For Nicholls, the archetypal template for this power differential is gender. Engaging with a disorientingly alien world as his subject material, the modernist author anxiously assumes the privileges of masculinist subjectivity to recover his equilibrium. Observing the external world from the safely distant vantage point of the refined, “objectively” disengaged aesthete, the author turns this world into a muted object defined through his projections, just as “woman”—interchangeable with the external world—gets defined through the projections of the masculinist mind. The result is an ironic repudiation of the same reality that the modernist author strives to bring to life. Nicholls illustrates this paradoxical dynamic through his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “To a Red-haired Beggar Girl” (1845/6):

Baudelaire’s way of making a representation of the feminine the means by which to construct an ironically anti-social position for the writer contains in germ many of the problems of the later modernisms. It is as if the poem’s success must be measured by the degree to which the beggar-girl is finally objectified, for it is this which ensures the poet’s separateness from the social world of which he writes. ⁷¹

By superimposing race and culture onto the template of gender, we can see how Forster’s irony shares the impetus that defines much modernist authorship according to Nicholls. Unsettled by the ambivalent allure of Italian otherness, and threatened by the dangerously misleading allure of Indian otherness, Forster—or his implied presence in his authorial narrators and some of his characters—“manages” the anxiety triggered by the racial-cultural Other by objectifying this Other through ironic distance. Irony thus allows Forster to separate himself from the same Other who seduces him toward the narrative act.

Although I’ve focused on power disparities in my analysis of the racial-cultural politics of Forster’s modernist irony, I believe that it’s important to heed Seshagiri’s contention that a well-rounded understanding of modernism’s relationship to race must not equate its attitude toward race with the hierarchical attitude of imperialism: “I challenge the assumption that artistic treatments of race in early twentieth-century England were predominantly or univocally imperialist, demonstrating instead that modernism conceived of race as shifting rather than set, disordered rather than hierarchical.”⁷² While I have argued that the racial-cultural orientation of Forster’s modernist irony is predominantly imperialist, I have also shown that it is not univocally so. In the first place, rather than be swayed by the “common sense” of imperial culture, Forster finds many intelligent and humorous ways to problematize this common sense and expose its self-interest, hypocrisy, oppressiveness, and imaginational poverty. In the second place, in spite of benefiting from its qualified identification with some dimensions of imperialism, Forster’s approach to racial-cultural identity is too flexible to be easily serviceable for hegemonic imperialism. After the passage to India leads Forster back to England, England expands enough to accommodate and normalize an Italy that was previously beyond the pale. On the one hand, the fact that Forster’s racial comfort zone seems to stretch only as far south as the Mediterranean might warrant emphasizing the sway that imperial racism had over his racial imagination. On the other hand, the fact that this imagination could expand and contract in response to differently racialized circumstances indicates that it was elastic and adaptive in ways the racial imagination of orthodox imperialism wasn’t. Seen in this light, Forster’s racialized irony appears to qualify itself: as it strives for a controlling knowledge of racial-cultural difference, it also dramatizes the vanity and expediency of the attempt.

Taking Forster’s career as a model for modernism’s journey, Wilde suggests that “Forster’s ‘only connect’ expresses desire, not achievement; and it is in the space between the two that modernism…reveals the dynamics of its often desperate undertaking.”⁷³ Relating Wilde’s reading to the dialectic proposed by Seshagiri enables us to see how the modernist “desire” to reconcile a fragmented and forbidding reality with an integrative aesthetic spirit—a desire that, in Wilde’s terms, reflects an “often desperate undertaking”—could have been racialized through various forms of filiation and affiliation. Forster’s qualified attachment to Englishness and his ambivalent attraction to foreignness both reflect his experience of the shifting racial identity-scapes of modernity, a modernity on its way to a permanent separation from classical forms of imperialism. The fact that his irony founders on the fault-lines of racial-cultural difference—and most acutely in colonial settings—reflects his lack of confidence in his ability to identify with, and navigate, a modern reality for which the waning British Empire can no longer serve as a reliable frame of reference. Thus, beyond a personal biographical context, a historical geo-political context frames the chronicle of Forster’s irony. In its scrutinization of English conventions, prejudices, and abuses of power, this irony articulates Forster’s awareness and rejection of the conformist pressures and jingoistic extremes of metropolitan imperial culture; in its racial stereotyping of imperialism’s others, it reflects his unconscious internalization of imperial racism; and in its existentially menaced, formally paradoxical apprehensions of the others’ radical difference, it signals his insufficient recognition of the fact that racial-cultural difference is constructed, subjectively experienced, gradated, and mediated, rather than essential, objectively given, polarized, and original—as imperial ideology would have it be. Ultimately, the case of E. M. Forster demonstrates that whereas modernist irony might suppress the racialized conditions of its emergence, these conditions resurface to re-articulate the orientation and import of its alienated and alienating consciousness.

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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.

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 (1998), “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.