Violence against an absolute

For me, as i continued to finish off Forster's novel, the thing that struck me the most was the breaking down of the absolute- an absolute colonizer, an absolute colonized subject, and thus an inability to clearly substantiate or define anything. Largely differing from Fanon, who seems to present us with binaries, and manichean aesthetics which "compartmentalise" the whole colonial context very neatly, Forster continues to wage war against such a representation. When the narrator so knowingly admits in the novel, " and the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by the gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars", to me this is symbolic of the breaking down of the whole notion of a whole or absolute; that any sense of englishness or indianness will always never be constant or definable simple because it is constanly being translated and mediated through various different tongues and representations.

Hence, to fanon, this binary is very clear, and he presents a very homogenised colonial and colonized community, where the colonized are always "reduced to the state of an animal" by the colonizer, and the colonizer is always feared or looked up to with envy by the colonized. Yet, Forster challenges this with his characters like Fielding and Aziz, who do not readily fit into Fanon's theories and conventions. So perhaps violence in modernism is really a violence against simple generalisations, and an attempt to represent communities, but which are made up of very distinct individuals who who do not necessarily conform to what is expected of their community. However then the problem arises when we also realise that any act of violence projected onto a community only strengthens it, like Fanon suggests. Similarly, any attempt of Forster's to break down definitions seems to. on the contrary define and attribute very specific qualities to the very things he claims transcend definition.