Miss Avery, a farm woman at Howards End who seems more an immanent presence than another stock figure, is in a sense a solution to the fragmentation of modernism, a return to the pastoral tradition that comes about when Mr. Wilcox's world collapses around him.
The end is somewhat forced, perhaps because Forster is reaching for the kind of visionary closures achieved in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, while the rest of the novel is so firmly established by the logic of character and circumstance. Through a union with Leonard Bast, Helen has a baby, and the assemblage at Howards End therefore represents a mix of upper and lower classes, business and artistic interests, urban and yeoman types, the old and the hope for the future. At the same time, Forster is too honest to ignore the 'red rust' of growing cosmopolitanism: it is perceptible even from the fields of the countryside. As Helen notes grimly, 'Life's going to be melted down, all over the world.' The old social order wavers between rebirth and apocalypse.
These darker intimations cast a longer shadow in A Passage to India, published in 1924 after a long blockage and, for all intents and purposes, Forster's last novel. The Great War does not enter into it, a conscious decision on Forster's part to deal with the era he knew best, along with its ills. Here, the imperialist theme developed in Howards End becomes the overarching frame of the work, expanding the novel of manners into a novel of cross- cultural relations. Yet, as in the style of another practitioner in this area, Graham Greene, Forster's pervasive irony undercuts the very generalities built on the particulars he observes.
Forster, who spent more time in India than in Germany and Italy combined, speaks comprehendingly of the animosities felt by both parties, but the Anglo-Indians come across mostly as bullies and prigs, while the Indians are mostly put upon. A novel of manners is, after all, generally a novel of types, partly so that the social statements are applicable to whole classes, but also because social restrictions tend to restrain character. In fact, these restrictions derive not just from the difference in societies but also from the imposition of one culture on another. The colonial mentality encouraged by imperialism is deadly to the tolerance that Forster holds as one of the cardinal modern virtues.
The plot proceeds by a series of meetings, which serve as points of either synthesis or disjunction. The British magistrate Ronnie Heaslop and his betrothed, Adela Quested, form the love interest, though Adela eventually breaks off the relationship when she realizes what his character is really like-or how imperialism has ruined it. Ronnie stands at the end of a long line of Forsterian bullies, here exposed against the background of India. His mother Mrs. Moore, on the other hand, has the same kind of mystical presence that Mrs. Wilcox has in Howards End, and when she and Aziz meet in the mosque, they feel a rapport that cannot be put into words. Similarly, when Aziz whacks a polo ball back and forth with a British subaltern, he feels a companionship that is real, if transitory.
Far more often, however, the two groups fail to connect. The Collector Turton's bridge party, supposedly an attempt to bridge the two cultures, is a failure. Fielding's get-together is not markedly better, though he is certainly more tolerant than the established Anglo-Indians. His growing friendship with Aziz is most satisfying in moments rather than over time, as if the social fabric can be pierced in small spots, briefly and unexpectedly, before inalterable convention reweaves the flaw. Even -830- within the same culture, as Forster also shows in his earlier novels, the barriers to understanding are formidable. In India, for example, caste, gender, and religion all frustrate cooperation within the society. Perhaps for this reason Aziz's attempts at a poem includes the idea 'The song of the future must transcend creed,' though the poem never gets written, and the only effect it has is to push him toward nationalism.
In no previous novel are Forster's ironies so defeating. When Aziz rips off his collar stud to lend to Fielding, who is missing his, the Anglo-Indians comment crassly on Aziz's untidy appearance. After Aziz rhetorically invites Adela and Mrs. Moore on an outing, they discommode him by accepting his invitation, though neither side particularly wants to go. Aziz's generosity is paid for with a wrongful accusation of molesting Adela in the Marabar Caves, and when the subaltern who played polo with Aziz hears of this, he wishes that more Indians were like his anonymous polo partner. Words do not imply what they mean, events are distorted by faulty recall, and appearances become reality with frightening speed.
If Forster has a claim to modernism, it is in his complex character dialectic and his inversions of the conventional. But the systemic irony in A Passage to India, undercutting all attempts at rational discourse, is a step beyond, into the depths of postmodernism. The same techniques hold, but the faith underlying them is gone. The most harrowing symbol of this altered view is the Marabar Caves, which mock all attempts at understanding with their nihilistic echo: 'Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce 'boum. Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful.' The onomatopoeia of an explosion levels all to zero without the wholeness of an O. The reference to the little worm evokes an image of the serpent Orborus with its tail in its mouth, the symbol of eternity, but diminished and without the completion of the circle.
Forster was often upset by the effects of modernism, from an unwholesome technological progress to schisms of creed and conscience. But the modernists' arguments for a reordering of society appealed to Forster in part, even if he wished to invert some of the underlying philsophy. The lesson of the Marabar Caves is of another order entirely. As the echo seems to murmur to Mrs. Moore: 'Everything exists, nothing has value.' It addles Mrs. Moore and makes Adela hallucinate. Historically, it is a precursor to European nihilism. -831-
In the end, order is restored, but to little avail. Adela recants her rape story in the courtroom, but Aziz still feels humiliated, transferring his animosity from one British woman to Western imperialism in general. When Aziz and Fielding meet again, no real reconciliation is possible. The numinous force embodied in the late Mrs. Moore comes across as only a feeble echo in her simple-minded second son Ralph. And though Aziz and Fielding attempt to be friends again, something frustrates the effort: the temples, the palace, the birds, the earth itself 'said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet, and the sky said, 'No, not there. ' The disunities are simply-or complexly-too great for liberal humanism to bridge. Hope may lie in the future or beyond this earth altogether.
Forster's last novel is really his second-to-last, Maurice (1971), whose composition and publication dates are separated by a distance of almost sixty years. The explicitly homosexual references are one reason Forster chose to suppress it in his lifetime, though the existence of the novel was an open secret after his final revisions in 1960. Another reason for the delay may have been his doubts about the quality of the work. The very barriers that made Forster such an acute social critic also prevented him from depicting anything but a sublimated homoerotic love in his other novels. When he describes what his friend Edward Carpenter called the tribe of Uranus, he loses some of his double-edged vision, perceiving only social forces of repression. The hero, Maurice Hall, is an erotic outlaw, and as Lasker Jones, one of the doctors he consults, tells him, ' England has always been disinclined to accept human behavior.'
Yet Forster never loses hold of his complex vision of love, an individual bond worth more to him than any social link. As Maurice tells the gamekeeper Alec (a figure who anticipates Lawrence's Mellors by two years), he dreams of a lifelong friend. The affection that so easily springs up between Alec and Maurice cuts across the bounds of class, convention, and character. Perhaps Forster's only misstep is in depicting such an idealized love as possible. Still, if this seems a betrayal of the Forsterian urge to get at the truth, it stems from the same throwback pastoral that concludes Howards End. As he writes in his 'Terminal Note': 'A happy ending was imperative'-and the plot suffers from this predetermination. Alec and Maurice presumably fade into a sylvan glade, the same woods in which Rickie Elliot located Pan and his satyrs.
As Forster noted in 1960, the novel seems dated not just because of the old references but also because 'it belongs to an England where it -832- was still possible to get lost.' The last paragraph in the 'Terminal Note' acknowledges ruefully that the public's ignorance and terror of homosexuality has merely been replaced by
