The Twilight of The Double Vision:
Forster's Pastoral Burlesque in Passage To India
1.
Reductive Criticism
Literature is vitiated by critical writing; yet it exceeds our boundaries. The attempt to locate an ideology that binds a work of art, unifies it from within, or decenters it in a context beyond its covers has become a divertissement, its objectives as devoutly to be wished as the quarry in Pascal's fox hunt, insignificant compared with the sweat the activity generates. Finally, any analysis is no more or less than a response, valid to the extent that it reflects the view-point and appreciation of the reader. To transpose Althusser's analysis from another context, the modern critic's effort to reduce a writer's work to a single internal principle, Hegel's gift to us all, is a dialectic that builds more complex versions of the original essence, that contains its own negation, and spins toward a simple formula that resonates with the thesis. This is a typical critical approach, akin to Mr. Ramsay's method in To the Lighthouse of reducing ontology to a kitchen table.
The Hegelian method is, however, as inadequate to explain a fiction as it is the world on which the fiction is based; it elucidates the critic's themes more than the work he analyzes.
As Roland Barthes suggested in Critique et Vérité, analyzing literature can be one of two activities, which he calls "the science of literature" and "criticism." The former, to paraphrase Jonathan Culler, is the study of works as specimens of a literary system whose objective is to show how the conventions of that system operate, while the latter aims to elucidate individual works. An off-shoot of this enterprise, Marxist-Structuralism, postulates that all works bear relation to their time, while only certain works reflect the structural problems thereof. The Althusserian notion of "overdetermination in a structure of dominance" will be especially useful to us, not merely to demonstrate how a work like A Passage to India reflects the incipient rupture of the imperialism it describes, nor to show the attitudes and historical situations that lead to it (the utterances of Major Callendar and Mrs. Turton are every bit as racist and virulent as any made by Dalhousie or James Mill à propos of Indians in the 19th century) but rather to show how this overdetermination-- an overloading of historical features (events, personalities, ideologies, super-structures and structures) and political factors within the unity in contradiction (capital\labor)-- is present within the work in question and leads to the rupture that constitutes the plot of the novel, its ark of change.
Which approach we take, Hegelian or structural, literary-scientific or practical-critical, is of particular importance in dealing with E.M. Forster's A Passage To India,which incorporates, or slides between, two competing view-points-- the political and the aesthetic.
2.
A Critical Muddle
Forster's Passage to India is, by most accounts, a consummate fictional rumination of several themes--historical, geographical and sociological-- yet, judging from the diversity and fragmentariness of critical positions it has prompted, it is a literary muddle rising to the situation it narrates. The novel has been praised as a masterpiece in which structure, plot, tone, mood and symbolism reflect the author's conscientious liberalism, complexity, and understanding of India. Yet, unanimously impressed by its whole, critics seem confused by its parts, and unwilling to analyze it as a unified work. They are content to analyze the novel piecemeal, to explicate the parts that interest them, rather than find a formal principle. This practice has lead to discursive and inconsistent readings. One critic admits that A Passage To India is Forster's most comfortable and conventional book, then claims not to understand the final part.
While Forster's philosophy and the manner in which it is revealed in specific scenes are analyzed serially and consistently, no coherent attempt is made to resolve A Passage to India's paradoxes, doubtless because, as I will show, the paradoxes rive right down to the tectonic plates of its creation, in the grundelag of its structure and ideology. Because they do not drill this deeply, critics of A Passage To India offer interesting readings but no embracing insights.
3.
Two Thematic Readings
When reading critics of A Passage To India one is often reminded of the scene in Heart of Darkness in which a French ship shoots cannon into the bush. One suspects some shots hit the mark, yet the character of the place is neither changed, explained or affected.
Wilfred Stone gives a prime example of this "shot in the dark" method, which is also incidentally a spin-off of the Hegelian method of criticism mentioned above:
Circles, containers, hollows and swelling are with Forster basic symbol. His fiction is thick with dells, grottoes, hollow trees, rings, pools, rooms, houses, and in this last and greatest novel, with caves..."
It is one thing to note the frequency of these motifs in Forster's oeuvre, but Stone over-reaches, connecting the prevalence of the circle in this work to the circle as an ancient-symbolic lineage:
"A Passage to India is an attempt to put together the pieces of that broken circle...The book's fundamental sructure consists of circle after circle echoing out from the caves at the center to the outermost fringes of the cosmos...
This perhaps not coincidentally is how Althusser describes the Hegelian dialectic:
"A circle of circles, consciousness has only one centre..."
To spin A Passage To India, an eclectic work if ever there was one, around a cosmic hub of circles seems specious, outside the central concerns of the novel, not incorrect so much as irrelevent, like describing a room by its wainscotting. A Passage to India will not yield to a discussion of circle-imagery, it seems inadequate, as if the critic shied away from dealing with the heart of the novel and so contented himself with the toe-nails.
Yet, another critic, though helter-skelter in her approach, takes enough pot-shots that one feels she is on to something.
"This freedom from commitment may often seem a virtue (in Forster) but it has its limitations, too. For one thing, it is not an end in itself, but an interim state-- freedom from something for something else...to perserve his freedom, he may preserve his freedom, he may preserve himself only in inactivity..."
Moody's version of Forster's "freedom"-- which sounds like the open box of Post-structuralism-- is not primarily a virtue but an equivocation-- broad profundity lacking deep conviction. Perhaps due to this view, Moody's treatment of Forster's eclecticism and "freedom" lacks a clear attack, and indeed, her critique oscillates between idolatrous enthusiasm and frustration, and is therefore sometimes quilty of outright self-contradiction. After admonishing "pseudo-scholars" that "the life of the novel is of more interest than the material on which it draws", Moody proceeds to give the reader a crash-course in Islam, Hinduism, Pre-historic India, etc. Her critique is a mirror of Forster's own fictional method, as she treats the novel in its constituent parts-- Moslems, Hindus, English, its first, second and third parts, witholding her all-embracing statement on Forster till the essay's envoi, a paragraph in whiche she puts Forster between "Lawrencian enthusiam" and the "negativity of certain realists."
However, despite Moody's lack of a comprehensive analysis, the notion of freedom she adduces takes us closer to an instrumental analysis of A Passage To India. But to arrive at that view, we need go elsewhere than Forster's critics.
4.
Some Reasons Critics Fail to Grasp the Whole
If critics shy from analyzing A Passage To India it is because Foster infused it with deconstructive antibodies that simply ward off a comprehensive explanation. The book, itself, defies deconstruction because Forster did such a good job of it, himself.
On one side, he put politics, the public world of India, with its rancors and resentments, where the structure-in-dominance, the master slave relationship, was about to rupture under the weight of its contradictions, at the weakest link-- the liberal western woman, strong-willed and weak-bodied.
But as the novel tilts toward politics, it flips back into a rhapsodic picture of mountains and plains, rivers and submerging oceans, well-wrought comic scenes of manners in which minds are playfully entered and explored.
Forster decenters the novel by posing the political weight of the bridge scene, tea party, and climactic court debacle against his literary conservatism-- a commitment to fairness, to suggest without advising, show instead of tell.
However, when we think of A Passage to India as a pastoral tribute to the power of love, with Fielding and Aziz as its chief exponents, and Professor Godbole and Mrs. Moore as its patron sprites, the political nature of Anglo-India, of imperialism, and racism re-assert themselves and refuse to disappear, even during the rapprochement of Fielding and Aziz on horse-back in the final scene that concludes in the latter's final denunciation.
These are the two contradictions in force in A Passage to India, that seem to hold the novel together in a unity, then destabilize like a confederation and threaten to pull it apart. The political and the aesthetic do not easily coexist. The former view-point, like Chandrapore society, requires side-taking, which results in the kind of caricature that Aziz indulges in privately about his English superiors. The aesthetic view meanwhile works for unity, tries to smooth over differences and, perhaps much despite the best intentions of the writer, is an ideology of its own.
A Passage to India moves on this friction between the two views-- political and aesthetic (which is an ideology malgré lui)-- and is simultaneously worn away by them, its plot reduced to static celebration by the concluding "Temple" section, two-thirds of the way through. If this alternation/altercation between politics and aesthetics, Forster's freedom, is symptomatic of a flaw, the flaw is not as Moody claims, in feeling so much as in his failure to create the unity he has tried so scrupulously to achieve by eliding ideology. The novel's resolution, which bothered Trilling, seems to be Forster's attempt to escape the walls of politics and aesthetics closing in. But the effort is in vain, for the open-ness he aims to achieve in A Passage to India constitutes the very closure he has tried so assiduously to avoid.
Ideology is ineluctible, however unintentional. Without it we have an art which resembles Fielding's appraisal of an India in which "everything was placed wrong." It is embedded in the text and regardless how deeply, it must ultimately surface-- in as Lenin put it, the weakest link of a writer's defense of craft and distance. Why must this be so? Because fictions, like musical compositions, operate within a scale and have their tonic key within it. To put it less metaphorically, ideology is the matrix of values and assumptions without which no book can be written or understood. As signs give utterance to myths, so myths explain languages that speak them. These myths may be thematic ("goodness is rewarded", "love conquers all") or conventional ("characters change", a plot concludes in a marriage, a birth, or a death). The ideology determines which character is "likeable", and who in the plot lives, dies, wins and loses
5.
The Pastoral
I have observed that Forster was a political liberal but a literary conservative (an opinion substatiated by his Aspects of the Novel). Perhaps, a better word than "conservative" would be "conventional."
"...nature, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man The earth offers its gifts voluntarily, and the svage beasts of mountain andesert approach in peace...Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which neither necessity or despitism has erected between men are shattered. Now the gospel of universal harmony is sounded...there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness."
"Infinite Love took upon itself the form of Shri Krishna and saved the world. All sorrow was annhilated, not only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways and the stars; all became joy, all laughter; there had never been disease nor doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty, fear...The
corridors, the courtyard, were filled with benign confusion...There was no quarreling, owing to the nature of the gift, for blessed is the man who confers it on another, he imitates God...a pious revolution had been born..."
The Hindu celebration of the Birth of "Shri Krishna" is as close a fictional analogue to Nietzsche's Dionysian apocalypse as has one will find in English . During "The God of Infinite Love's" birthday, worshippers from all castes raze the walls between as well as within themselves, barriers separating people from each other and adults from their earlier phases of development.
Nietszche's description of the Dionysiac rite may have given Lionel Trilling the key to the final "Temple" segment of A Passage To India. Whether the Shri Krisha nativity-scene is an accurate portrayal of Hindu rite is irrelevent just as the claim that Forster intended Hinduism as a resolution of the cultural and political dislocations of the novel is absurd. Forster wrote of India wrote faithfully as he could of India and portrayed characters of diverse cultures and faiths but his language and myth were English and his vision, European: explicable not in Indian paradigms but western ones.
Hinduism could no more be a solution for the author than for Aziz, the Moslem protagonist. He chose to solve or close the problems raised in his novel, not religiously, but conventionally. Though A Passage to India is a collage of conventions, "the
detective genre" prominent among them, the dominant one in which the theme of social dislocation in a pluralistic society is filtered is not Hindu rite but the pastoral tradition it resembles.
"The wish to find in country life a relief from the problems of a sophisticated society formed itself, in the renaissance times, into a set of poetic conventions."
Into the pastoral convention A Passage To India snugly fits. The situation is pastoral. A woman comes to an exotic place to be married. In a few party scenes the various worlds collide, the plot complicates. After some misgiving, and a near parting, she and her lover decide to marry under a starry sky. Then comes the middle section of complications-- more doubts, misunderstandings, a test of nature, represented by the Marabar fiasco and a trial, a wallpurgisnacht in which human values will be tested, identities lose their integrity, membranes of social decorum and justice rupture (the platform in the trial, Aziz denied bail), public order will be transgressed (the Mohorrum), even sexual specificity will be lost, (McBryde is called a woman twice, Mrs. Turton complains that the men are weak before she faints). The witches' sabbath results in justice, order is restored, identities return to their proper quarters, foregiveness is achieved and a kind of reconciliation of adversaries.
Pastoral ElementsA Passage to India
language"pan", "punka", "burra", "chukker", "shikar", "Purdah"
(the veil of exotic words)
exotic localeIndia, Chandrapore; Marabar
imagery moon imagery; twilight settings; "encircling night"; nature descriptions; Aziz's visions of Babur; Godbole's singing; Fielding's room
"unity of man" Fielding/Aziz; chukker between
(social connectedness)Aziz and British sergeant; Mrs. Moore-Aziz; penultimate scene in pond.
"noble savage" Untouchable in the court
"publicity" Ronnie's and Adela's engagement
couplingAziz-Mrs. Moore; Aziz-Fielding; Aziz- Adela; Adela-Heaslop; Mrs. Moore-Godbole
a journeyAdela, Mrs.Moore come to India; The Marabar expedition; Adela, Fielding leave India, have epiphanies, respectively in Egypt and Venice; Ralph Moore and Aziz on the lake.
bridging differences
through language"Esmiss Esmoor"
Every convention expresses a myth. Which came first I do not seek to determine here. Doubtless, they are composed of the same linguistic elements and are molded to serve different functions in the same sentence. Pastoral images, characters, and plot devices serve myths which reduce to the well-loved cliche-slogans of which they are made: "Love conquers all", "Natural man is good, social man is evil", "Nature is the antidote of civilization", "Under the armor of petty differences bred of socially learned habits like competition and selfishness, all humans are brothers and sisters in a Unity of Man" are expressions of the pastoral idea.
As I've shown in the partial diagram above, A Passage To India works as pastoral, on the ideational level, as well. It could have been written by the author of As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was probably a consummation devoutly to be wished by Forster. A Passage To India, like the Shakespeare comedies, moves from society to wilderness, from dislocation to integration; from dog-eat-dog and brother against brother it aims at "savage beasts of mountain and desert approach in peace..." and "animals speak...and man feels himself godlike...no longer the artist, he has himself become the work of art..."
But pastoral is constantly subverted, too. The couplings are always wrong, romantic potentials, lampooned, dissipated or suppressed. They come to resemble the cross-over of chromosomes in gamete-making. Aziz falls in love with Mrs. Moore but admits she is "excessively aged"; rejects Adela as "an old hag" after he has verbally seduced her during the tea scene; Heaslop expresses his love for Adela, accepts her rejection with barely a word, suffers over her breakdown, then drops her when she is at her weakest. Adela flees to the protection of Fielding, who considers her a prig, and gains a reputation as his concubine, before leaving India for a doubtful future of probable spinsterhood.
The theme of universal love is also detonated by the very Mrs. Moore who is beatified as its goddess
"Her Christian tenderness had gone, or had developed into a hardness, a just irritation against the human race...
`...My body, my miserable body...Why isn't it strong? ...Why all this marriage, marriage?...And all this rubbish about love, love in a church, love in a cave...as if there is the least difference'..." (Ch.22)
Within this sequence we see the pastoral mixed in with its negation. Mrs. Moore turns on the whole mythology with a vengeance but concludes by celebrating the universality of love wherever it is practiced. Similarly, Godbole, a Pan figure, sings to dispel tensions in the tea scene, but withdraws during the trip to Marabar, disappears during the trial and only resurfaces in the novel years after the action.
This "double-vision" of the pastoral in A Passage to India makes us question the appropriateness of the designation. However, the convention was always characterized by a certain "baseness" and "lightness" with learned shepherds discoursing on philosophy and the times. Traditionally pastoral debunks the myths it celebrates, a tendency traced back to Daphnis and Chloe. The form is often classified as "satire" and its contradictions are overdetermined to the point of rupture from which pours the burlesque side of its comedy. Jaques sees through Arden by noting that the usurped Duke usurps the deer, and Rosalinde deconstructs shepherds' virtue by spurning the conceited Phoebe, while Touchstone lampoons the whole enterprise in his efforts to educate Audrey. So does Forster satirize the pastoral of A Passage To India with cross-overs in coupling and by alternating a nature as simple and beautiful as "moon, caught in the shawl of night with all the other stars..." with one that is barren and nondescript: "A horrid, stuffy place, really," as Mrs Moore says of the Marabar. But in Shakespeare, even in A Room With a View, the ends are joined, the conclusion is happy and fair. Pastoral triumphs over satire. Not so, in A Passage To India. The final words of the book mark the fault between the pastoral ideal and Forster's vision and it leads us to the vision's fissure:
"But the horses didn't want it-- they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks... the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion...they didn't want it , they said in their hundred voices,"`No, not yet,' and the sky ssaid,`No, not there.'"
6.
Twilight of the Double Vision
Forster probably never thought to write A Passage To India as a pastoral. Yet write one he did. Or rather, the pastoral wrote itself through him, in terms of language (imagery, diction), characters (their characteristics, couplings), situation, (a society divided, oppressed by usurpers, people out of touch with each other and themselves), plot (its opening marriage theme, complications, consequent falling-outs, wallpurgisnacht-- identity diffusion and hellish chaos-- and resolutions). But it was not a devotion to the convention, per se, which compelled him to use the form, nor was it his instrument of truth. It was a mask--for the ideology that he could not totally understand and therefore did not need to or could not repress.
"Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but--Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots..." (Ch.23)
It is a pastoral with a big crack in it-- the same crack it was meant to hide. The crack was not a grand canyon, but something small. It has nothing to do with the unity of man or the friendship of Aziz and Fielding or the apotheosis of Mrs. Moore, which is as much a joke as the birthday of Sri Krishna. Nor is the double vision merely the onset of Alzheimer's or the existential doubts of an old woman in the tropics, or the long view of ancient India with the small concerns of Anglo-India, or the discrepancy between the promise of the pastoral and the reality of a drab and contentious world.
No, in a roundabout way the crack in the pastoral exposes another crack: the ideology that Forster tried to hide.
Pastoral can take many variations but it must always end happily, for all characters. Villains repent, protagonists wed, and governments are reunited. In the pastoral there is no sacrifice, no need for one, because it travels back to the Garden of Eden when man was happy and the animals spoke.
But A Passage To India's turbulent justice and placid conclusion come at a price: human sacrifice. Not all the characters are left standing at the end, and those conspicuously absent are Adela and Mrs. Moore. The latter makes frequent returns in the thoughts of the remaining characters, as a deity, but Adela, whose appearance in Chandrapore changes so many lives, and whose honesty in court notches another event in the rupture of the Raj, disappears. She is the weakest link in the structure of dominance and is disposed of, as much by the author as by her fellow characters. Poor Adela, who wants to know Indians; who trusts Aziz, regarding him as something other than a beast; who dares come to India and then break off the engagement with her host; who insists that her friend, Mrs. Moore, be spared the trial; who is humiliated for her plainness in court, but tells the truth on the witness stand, only to be vilified by the man she saves and denied credit for her courageous recantation; is finally dropped by her author in the limbo of incompletion, a fate short of fictional death.
Adela's role from the Marabar till her home journey is to apologize for her presence, the despised victim whose only use is to prove the charity of Fielding and Aziz, who earlier made sport of her lack of physical and mental allure. Adela is not unique as a the Victorian female victim, whose indiscretion demands downfall or death. She is just a homely Daisy Miller, an unconsummated Anna Karenina. "It is impossible to regard a tragedy from two points of view..." The narrator tells us. So he represses Adela's.
And therein lies the flaw, this is the price of Forster's freedom and the tag of his ideology. In the double vision of the pastoral\political reality the pastoral must be paid for, a happy ending is not for everyone. It is the woman who causes the trouble and the woman who deserves to pay. "Weak, weak." as Mrs. Turton would say, subsiding into her lemon squash.
"...Newcomers set or traditions aside, and in an instant what you see happens, the work of years is undone..." (ch.17)
So laments Turton, Chandrapore's chief official, about Adela's mingling with natives. From his official view-point, women not playing their roles always leads to man's fall, a rupture in his structure in dominance. Women are described as weak. When Mrs. Turton taunts him that he is weak, she peters out, her body giving out in the tropical heat. But this weakness is perhaps only a male dominant perception. At the Caves, as Fielding suspects something amiss because of Adela's disappearance, a moment of irritation transpires between him and Mrs. Moore as their euphoric host, Aziz brings drinks:
"Fielding thought with hostility,`I knew these women would make trouble'and Mrs. Moore thought,`This man, having missed the train, tries to blame us' but her thoughts were feeble..."
This is the secret ideology he has suppressed, or at any rate, the cost of it. Men of all groups make mistakes, disappoint, corrupt and conflict. India is a muddle, but when the overdetermined unity ruptures it is a woman's fault. The despicable Pukka men at the club perceive their women as the weak link in the Empire, but so does the author. Through Fielding and in any number of narrative comments he reveals an attitude toward women that is unsympathetic and superior. Forster's treatment of Adela exposes an ideology that is a displaced conservatism. While he demonstrates liberal feeling to Indians, he overcompensates with a view of women that is a less gallant chauvinism than Kipling's or Conrad's.
Even in this matter, Forster has covered himself with an irony.
"...His (Aziz's) poems were all on one topic--
Oriental womanhood. `The purdah must go....otherwise we shall never be free.' And he declared (fantastically) that India would not have been conquered if women as well as men had fought at Plassy..." (Ch. 34)
But on this particular issue, Forster takes a most definite stand, when Fielding talks sense to Aziz:
"...Yes, and what do they (the poems) say? Free our women and India will be free. Try it, my lad. Free your own lady first and see who who'll wash Ahmed, Karim, and Jemila's faces. A nice situation!" (Ch. 37)
The price for the brotherhood of man, Fielding suggests, is the suppression of women. Like Plato's Symposium, Forster's A Passage to India is "a boy's night out."