"mankind and flowers": a passage to violence

(this is a fairly ambitious post, please bear with me)

Aziz's interest in religious poetry appears to be a throwaway characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual. Yet this emphasis on aesthetic experience is one of the central intertwined strands of the novel, along with friendship, religion and nationalism. There is a moment early on in the novel where Aziz while ill, with Haq, Hamidullah and Syed Mohammed gathered around bed, recites lines from Urdu poet Ghalib. The narrator notes the effect, that "[l]ess explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (IX). Note the shift in the use of pronouns: it appears Forster identifies with and also wishes his readers to simultaneously grasp with him how Urdu poetry, in the scope of its aesthetic effects, is appreciable by all humans who should have universally felt that existential loneliness, that dismal solipsism that besets each human being. And furthermore, how does Muslim poetry stand as a call to a rival Hindu deity?

I think, unlike Fanon who felt African colonial subjects could be united on "the grounds of nation and sometimes race" (10), Forster might be suggesting art as a means for resisting heterogeneity; aesthetic experience as coterminous with religious experience, a transcendental means of galvanizing mankind towards something greater than ourselves. But art and its effects are never as straightforward as we might like it to be, else all of India, nay, all of the world, would have been united by poetry recitals. Later on in the same passage in IX, Aziz notes that sometimes poetry "only increased his local desires" for women. At the heart of this aesthetic experience is the desire to fully know, and to be fully known by, another person. Yet Forster, throughout his novel, seems to be underscoring the difficultly of this, with the cryptic echo, the ninety-nine names of God, the breakdown of Adele's and Ronny's romance, and the failure of Aziz's and Fielding's friendship. Poetry, given its elliptical nature, expresses itself in terms of an omission, a kind of meaningful void that at first appears meaningless (like the Marabar Caves). Wallace Stevens said that "the nobility of poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without", and I think Forster, in leveraging upon Urdu religious poetry to expose the longings and desires of the soul, consciously resists that violent call to arms that is central to Fanon's essay, and batters the inner self in search of redressal from all the schisms and divisions that keep man and man apart.

Forstering Modernism

The question of how Forster is a modernist is not easily answered, not in the least within the confines of this blog post. But my sense is that while Forster is not a modernist in style and technique, in his thematic concerns and outlook he might be considered one. Allow me to explain.

Largely speaking, there is not a great deal of formal divergence of the kind we previously saw in Woolf with her use of free indirect discourse. Forster does not fracture time in the representation of the inner psychologies of his characters; there are flashbacks and excursions and echoes(!) of the past, but there is always a singular authorial voice that coheres the individual experiences of each of his characters. However, given the symbolic import of the Caves, of the echoes that resonate within the minds of Adele, Aziz, Fielding and Moore and of the religious imagery throughout the book one could make a argument aiming to strengthen Forster's relationship to modernism, for symbolism as a literary stylistic allows for the creation and expansion of an externalized objective significance within an interiorized subjective conciousness, which is what Woolf achieves in her fragmentary stream-of-conciousness.

Back from the verbosity of it all - I would think that one would find a greater justification for Forster as modernist and A Passage To India as a modernist text if we examine its thematic concerns. I put it to you that Forster depicts in this novel various individuals grappling with their own individuality and autonomy over and against the prevailing socio-cultural onslaught of a modernity shaped by the imperial enterprise. We see Adela struggling with the expectations of becoming a betrothed wife to an Anglo-Indian, Fielding dealing with a mid-life crisis of sorts as well as his own ambivalent relation to the Empire and India, and Aziz having to bear the weight of expectation of the British and Indians in addition to his incarceration, and so on in other characters as well. It is this emphasis of the individuals at odds with a received socio-cultural heritage which perhaps marks Forster and this novel as modernist. At the end of Chapter XXVI, Fielding considers that "we exist not in ourselves, but in terms of each other's minds" (234), evincing a kind of reverse solipsism, where the individual can never fully reckon himself or herself. This dismal internal void, which the Caves are metonymic for, underscores perhaps Forster's engagement with "modernist mode", and also points to modernism's relation with the Empire and the Orient, how this literary movement looked upon the colonized Other and reflected on the horror, the horror of its inner void.

Yet I would call Forster, at best, a marginal modernist, for while the emotional, spiritual and epistemological crisis that beseiges the characters in A Passage To India is what typifies much of modernist literature, much of the novel unfolds conventionally, in accordance with the norms of earlier nineteenth-century literature, where authorial authority and social critique are hallmarks of such texts. One should also bear in mind the connotations borne by "modernism" as a taxonomic classifier. Must any great work of the twentieth century necessarily be called modernist? Is the term, as a generic marker, normative and does it bestow some inherent prestige among its canonical works, that we may lay open such assumptions to contestation?

(I would have like to have touched on Aziz's concern with poetry and the emphasis on aesthetic experience, and the connections with the mythic, but I've run out of space. In class, perhaps?)