With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial...

I'd really like to find and read "Notes on the English Character" because I think it would shed a lot of light on A Passage to India at least in terms of ethos. I think this essay's included in the collection Abinger Harvest but I can't even find snippets of it online, alas.

So uh, I actually had a chunk to post before I realized, thanks to your posts, that I'd read Fanon's "The Negro and Language" as opposed to "On Violence". Brilliant. Anyway. Violence is specular rather than diffuse. This polemical tract wasn't enlightening as much as it was refreshing; I think it reaffirmed what we already knew/studied/suspected, without mincing words. The act of consuming (or consummation, even) is central: the colonists want to possess and perpetrate while the colonized masses want to eradicate and replace. Nietzsche, Wagner and Hitler all had something in common: they looked upon leadership as sexual mastery of the "feminine" masses. This rape, I think, underpins the reading. Colonization or decolonization: it is merely a power struggle. Reading A Passage to India throws up various parallels: 'You're superior to them, anyway. Don't forget that. You're superior to everyone in India except one or two of the ranis, and they're on an equality.' You can't deny the racism inherent in colonialiam by corollary, the violence inherent in colonialism. In Zadie Smith's article, Furbank calls Forster the "great simplifier". Both the text and the reading assigned this week ARE simplified; let's recall Fanon's easy dismissal of the colonial world as a "compartmentalized" world. He proceeds to divide that world into two to (I really think) better facilitate his theory that the colonial world is "a Manichean world" in which, of course, violence reigns. There is a certain implicit violence in smashing the colonized to smithereens, by laying their moral code flat on a rock and taking a hammer to it. That is what Fanon means by absolute evil, that values are, in fact, "irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized." We see this stain rearing its ugly head in A Passage to India. Best example for me? "Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession." Seriously, this made me sad guys.

I think it was Fielding who persisted in wanting to see Adela, citing the reason that 'on the off-chance of her recanting before you send in that report and he's committed for trial, and the whole thing goes to blazes' to the Police Superintendent. Fielding wanted to ask her himself, because he believes in Aziz, because she is "among people who disbelieve in Indians." Just a few lines before, the Police Sup had paternalistically said "when an Indian goes bad, he goes not only very bad, but very queer" and proceeded to remind Fielding that the "psychology here is different." Ergo, Fanon's binary system is at play in Forster's novel too, in addition to the babel that association with the Other invariably produces.

I think it was Nadia who posted on the aesthetics of violence. It is both ironic and intriguing to me that we're essentially debating how the relation of masters and slaves should be consciously aestheticized this week. Forster wrote, using a character as a mouthpiece that there is no such person in existence as a general Indian. I really liked that line, and though I find him no Naipaul, I think A Passage to India really reaffirmed the sentiment that all representations of India are ultimately autobiographical. There wasn't anything particularly Indian in the text (colonial and racist, yeah), even the nationalist struggles were shunted in the back, but a lot of Forster shone through. In conclusion, violence induces ruptures, entices with the promise of transgression of boundaries, and when inflicted, paves the way for modernist aesthetics, because modernism was a response to the chaos of our world, our answer after having been exposed to reinterpretation and acceleration and existential, dare I say it, angst to alienation, loss, absurdity and meaninglessness. Individual subjectivity tends to glomp to solidarity and the intimacy of violence is a primal bond. This revolutionary consciousness is present in both Fanon's reading and Forster's (albeit muted/incarnated in another form as evinced by the ending) novel.