Finessing Intent

This is a cursory response to Peter Burra’s claim in his introduction to A Passage to India of the Everyman Edition (1957), that “the propagandist element in the book is undeniable, but one can hardly conclude that it was written with that for its final purpose.” What Burra formulates as justification for his claim – and he locates his evidence in the episode of Dr Fielding and Aziz’s last ride together, in which “the rocks that rise between them” that causes their horses to swerve apart seem to symbolize “Indian differences [insofar as they are] differences that are not more great, only more particular, than the differences that exist between any two men.” – is that Forster’s interest lies more emphatically in the clash of human beings, as opposed to personifications of race or class, and in “the struggle which any one individual must endure if he is to achieve intimacy with any one another.”

I do not quite understand the basis for which Burra claims to apprehend the propagandist element in Forster’s novel. This is surely a problem of reading, for in my reading the novel appears to me a text polysemous in its structure that to ascribe the label of propaganda, or even that which hints at a propagandist intent, would be, perhaps, to indulge in willful misreading of the notion of polysemy – whose nature is, to reference Deleuze and Guattari, of the topological rather than of the monolithic. Unless what Burra means by his claim is that Forster’s technique of novelistic orchestration incorporates narratological moments in which an event, on first reading, sets up an emotional response in the reader, that is compelled to be pulled along one particular sentient plane, urging the reader to feel in a particular and reactionary way, only to encounter opposition in the form of doubt – the reader asks “What basis do I have for feeling the way I do?” – in very same instant of that response.

To elaborate the technique which I find evident in Forster’s text, I would have to refer to Auerbach’s question of “who speaks?” that is contextualized by his reading of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse: a way of understanding a tenet of modernist literary sensibility is encapsulated by Auerbach’s analysis of the sentence “Never did anybody look so sad”, in which he says that such a technique “verges [the writing] upon a realm beyond reality”, that “in the ensuing passage the speakers no longer seem to be human beings at all but spirits between heaven and earth, nameless spirits capable of penetrating the depths of the human soul, capable too of knowing something about it, but not of attaining clarity as to what is in process there, with the result that what they report has a doubtful ring.” (532) What is useful for an understanding of the “doubtful ring” of Forster’s text lies not so much in the diminishment of “clarity” insofar as the text presents its exteriority quite emphatically as that which is crucial in the understanding of the actual politics in a particular history of India that is the basis of the human conflicts inscribed within the text – we know that the story takes place in pre-War India; we know that the story is grounded in actual sociopolitical conditions – but rather, insofar as the text seems to be narrated by a voice that vacillates between a third person, omniscient register and a first person register – as in, “There they were! Politics again.” (124); or “As long as someone abused the English, all went well…” (119) – such commentaries being indeterminate in relation to their source: the thoughts of the characters or of Forster’s, or that of his slyly ventriloquising through his creations. This polyphonic structure of Forster’s text is precisely that which grants its polysemous texture insofar as, knowing this, where and how does one begin to unravel an ethical response to the fiction Forster may or may not be presenting to us?

I will, perhaps, elaborate more in class, should there be a need to.