Modernists and Milkmaidens

In my reading of A Passage to India, the Milkmaiden’s song (end of chapter seven) seems like an allegory for the desire to know and/or represent Reality completely. Novelists strive to call Reality into presence through language; similarly the Milkmaiden pleads for Krishna’s presence: although he is in her heart and on her mind, so to speak, but is nonetheless physically absent

Adittionally, this allegory possibly illustrates the shift in mimetic techniques from the Victorian to the Modernist as described by Auerbach. The novelist “in earlier times” who employs language with “objective assurance” conceptualises a “unipersonal subjectivism”: he admits a single objective version of reality, one Krishna, so to speak.

The modernist, on the other hand, senses the inability to know/represent Reality in this way, and works with a random portion of the whole experience of reality: the Milkmaiden does not care which of the hundred manifestations she wants, each of the part will reflect the whole. Here I think of what Auerbach describes as a “transfer of confidence”: “that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed. (547)” Through the selection of small, intimate, “random” moments, deemed as “common” to all men (552), the modernists strive to present reality within their works, just as the milkmaid makes her humbler appeal for Krishna’s presence.

Despite her new appeal, Krishna still doesn’t come. This points to where Auerbach and Forster seem to diverge, in my reading.

While Forster’s narrative technique differs from the modernists, he nonetheless seems concerned with the impossibility of grasping reality—here, India—in totality, and presents to us a myriad of perspectives from parties and persons seeking the “real India”. Random seeming events—for example, the bribing away of Antony, the servant from Goa—return from a different perspective: instead of demonstrating Aziz’s attempt at hospitality, it is perceived as proof of malicious intent. Yet through all these, the ‘real India’ is explicity described as eluding everybody, from the satirised Anglo-Indians, to the sympathetic Mrs Moore, and even to Aziz when he, as a Nationalist, seeks a definition of India to forge a new nation-state.

The end of Auerbach’s essay appears optimistic: with a world that is “inextricably mingled”, difference decreases (there are no longer any “exotic peoples”). By assuming a commonality in human consciousness, the random occurrences common to every man then should illustrate at least a human version of “reality”. But within Forster’s novel, the differing perspectives seem to create more fragmentation than synthesis: it is as if the very consciousness of each party was not merely different, but tending in different directions. It is as if the ninety-nine names of God were contradictory, yet all name God; or that the hundred manifestations of Krishna were so radically different, that the milkmaiden would find some irreconcilable with her desire.