Lingua, Cultura e Istituzioni dei Paesi di Lingua IngleseCorso di Laurea Triennale a.a. 2014-2015

Studenti A-LDott. TANIA ZULLItzulli@uniroma3.it

“E. M. FORSTER: TRANSITION, CULTURE AND

COLONIAL IDEOLOGIES”

Edward Morgan Forster1° January 1879 - 7° June 1970

Female figures: Alice Clara Wilchelo – Marianne Thorton

“I often think of my mistakes with my mother […] I considered hermuch too much in a niggling way, and did not become the

authoritative male who might have quitened her and cheered her up. When I look at the beauty of her face, even when old, I see that

something different should have been done”

- P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 1988

- Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History. A New Life of E. M. Forster, 2010

Places

Rooksnest, Stevenage– country home (Howards End)

Eastbourne, Tonbridge – negative experience (Stawson, The Longest Journey)

1897Cambridge – King’s College

Centre of intellectual, artistic and political lifecultural education-sexual orientations

As Cambridge filled up with friends it acquired a magicquality. Body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter and seriousness, life and art – these pairs which are elswhere contrasted were therefused into one. People and books reinforced one another,

intelligence joined hands with affection, speculation becamea passion, and discussion was made profound by love.

E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Journeys

ITALY

Book p. 36

“[…] Italy had warmed Forster and had given him a vision, and ever afterwards he would think of it gratefully as ‘The beautiful country where they say “yes”’, and the place‘where things happen’”

Greece - Turkey

India1912

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Barabar-Marabar

Bankipore-Chandrapore

1921

The Hill of Devi (1953)

E. M. FORSTERPhysically he was awkward, limp and stiff at the same time. He would stand rather askew, as it were holding himself together by

gripping his left hand in his right. By contrast his gestures were mostgraceful; he had a beautiful blessing gesture of the hand, and a curious and charming habit, when drinking tea, of describing a

little circling motion with the cup. On occasion, if he happenned to be touched or grateful, he would kiss a friend’s hand with great

beauty of manner. […] Whatever the subject his talk had odd glintsand tiny surprises in it, a queer precision of vocabulary, a perpetual

slight displacement of the expected emphasis. […] One couldimagine, knowing him, that he had a ‘secret’. It is a sentimental

notion, but one that occurred to many of his acquaintances. […] He felt as if, on occasion, he could see through to ‘life’: could hear itswing-beat, could grasp it not just as a generality but as a palpable

presence

P. N. Furbank

P. 40 book

WorksNOVELS

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)

The Longest Journey (1907)

A Room with a View (1908)

Howards End (1910)

A Passage to India (1924)

Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971)

Arctic Summer (an incomplete fragment, written in 1912–13, published posthumously in 2003)

CRITICISM

Abinger Harvest (1936)

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Aspects of the Novel (1927)

BIOGRAPHIES

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934)

Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography (1956)

FILMS

A Passage to India (1984), dir. David Lean

A Room with a View (1985), dir. James Ivory

Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), dir. Charles Sturridge

Howards End (1992), dir. James Ivory

Friends

Cambridge Conversazione Society“Apostles”

G. E. Moore

FRIENDS

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 1934: Goldie’s biography

H. O. Meredith Religious agnosticism-Classical Art

Oscar Browning and Nathaniel WeddClassical World - Aesthetic vision of Art

Nathaniel WeddClassical Studies and Ancient History

“He tells me that I might write, could write, might be a writer. I was amazed yet not overawed. Like other greatteachers of the young, Wedd always pointed to something already existing. He brought not only help but happinness. Of course I could write – not thatanyone would read me, but that didn’t signify…I had a special and unusual apparatus, to which Wedd calledmy attention…”

Wendy Moffat

“Art for Art’s Sake” (1949)

“[m]any things, besides art, matter […] Man lives, and ought to live, in a complex world, full of conflicting

claims, and if we simplified them down into the aesthetic he would be sterilized”

Harmony[A work of art] is the only material object in the universe

which may possess internal harmony. All the others have beenpressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is

removed they collapse. The work of art stands by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been

promised by society but always delusively. Ancient Athensmade a mess – but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance

Rome made a mess – but the ceiling of the Sistine gotpainted; Louis XIV made a mess – but there was Phèdre; Louis XV continued it, but Voltaire got his letters written.

Art for Art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever atthe present time. It is the one orderly product which ourmuddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousandsentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the

lighthouse which cannot be hidden

MusicCambridge Conversazione Society:

Wagner and Strauss

Bach Beethoven Mozart

Howards End - Beethonven’s Fifth Simphony

Nation, November 12°Virginia Woolf:

[…] He knows from experience what a muddled and illogical machine the brain of a writer is. He knows how

little they think about methods; how completely they forgettheir grandfathers; how absorbed they tend to become in some vision of their own. Thus though the scholars have

all his respect, his sympathies are with the untidy and harassed people who are scribbling away at their books.

And looking down on them not from any great height, but, as he says, over their shoulders, he makes out, as he passes, that certain shapes and ideas tend to recur in their minds

whatever their period

Aspects of the Novel 1927

Plot (causality) –Story (chronology)

Flat-Round Characters

A Passage to India1924

A novel between “two silences”

Fifteen years after Howards End

Isolated creative act – disappointment

A study on the “self”

Forster’s Literary Carreer

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1904)

A Passage to India (1924)Edwardian Period - Modernism

Transition novel

“On or about December 1910 human character changed[…] All human relations have shifted—those between

masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at

the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature”

Novel of Transition“Reluctant Modernist”

“The Novels of E. M. Forster”-Woolf

The bookcase which falls upon Leonard Bast in Howards Endshould perhaps come down upon him with all the dead weightof smoke-dried culture; the Marabar caves should appear to usnot real caves but, it may be, the soul of India. Miss Quested

should be transformed from an English girl on a picnic to arrogant Europe straying into the heart of the East and gettinglost there. […] Instead of getting that sense of instant certainty[…] we are puzzled, worried. […] And the hesitation is fatal. For

we doubt both things – the real and the symbolical: Mrs. Moore, the nice old lady, and Mrs. Moore the sibyl. The conjunction of these two different realities seems to cast doubt upon them both. Hence it is that there is so often an ambiguity at the heart of Mr. Forster’s novels. […] and instead of seeing […] one single whole

we see two separate parts

“Only Connect”

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Onlyconnect the prose and the passion, and both will be

exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die

V. Woolf

[…] No wonder that we are often aware of contrarycurrents that run counter to each other and prevent

the book from bearing down upon us and overwhelming us with the authority of a masterpiece. Yet if there is one gift more essential to a novelist than

another it is the power of combination – the single vision. The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not

so much in their freedom from faults – indeed wetolerate the grossest errors in them all – but in the

immense persuasiveness of a mind which hascompletely mastered its perspective

Francesco Marroni on Howards End

Il frammento e la totalità – è questo il bivio dinanzi al quale la coscienza individuale si trova nel momento in cui

definisce il suo rapporto con il mondo. Ma è chiaro che, dal punto di vista forsteriano, non vi è alternativa alla scelta della connection. E, in questo senso, l’esergo non va inteso come semplice elemento paratestuale, ma esso rappresenta

una sorta di raddoppiamento della parola romanzesca: autore reale e personaggio sembrano sancire in questo modo

una sorta di connivente scambio di messaggi verbali. Per questo l’iniziale “only connect” è già la voce del romanzo, o,

per meglio dire, l’immagine riflessa di un discorso che manifesta in questa maniera il suo desiderio di immediata

intellegibilità. Eppure, nel deciso rifiuto della frammentazione (cioè dell’altro polo dialettico), e nell’urgenza di una citazione che è innanzitutto

autocitazione, la coscienza forsteriana appare prigioniera di un’idea, vittima di un’illusione […]

1904

(A Room with a View)

Where Angels Fear to Tread

The Longest Journey –some short stories

A Room with a View (1908)

Howards End (1910)

1910: creative disillusionment

[…] I think one of the reasons why I stopped writing novels is that the social aspect of the world changed so much. I had been accustomed to write about the old-fashioned

world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All that went, and though I can think about it I

can’t put it into fiction.

“E. M. Forster at Cambridge, 1958”, in The Creator as Critic and OtherWritings, ed. Jeffrey M. Heath

A Passage to India“The greatness of this novel lies not in a single vision

communicated to the reader, but in the presentation of possibilities, strands to be followed, themes to be discovered. It is not the case that there is a final,

harmonising reading which sums up all the others. As we concentrate on one strand, others may fall into the background, but they will retain their potency: the

greatness of Forster’s achievement corresponds with his success in allowing different strands to subsist together in

the matrix of his creative mind”.

John Beer, A Passage to India. Essays in Interpretation

Ideology• Oxford English Dictionary

A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy:

‘The ideology of republicanism’

• Wikipedia

It can be described as a set of conscious and unconsious ideas,which make up one’s goals, expectations, and motivations.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology. An Introduction“The word ‘ideology’, one might say, is a text, woven of a whole

tissue of different conceptual strands […]”

1. the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life

2. a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class

3. ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power

4. forms of thought motivated by social interests

5. the indispensable medium in which individuals live out theirrelations to a social structure

Political philosopher Martin Selinger:

“sets of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify ends and means of organised social action, and

specifically political action”

Imperial Ideology

LiberalismLiberalism is a political doctrine that takes protecting andenhancing the freedom of the individual to be the centralproblem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government isnecessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others;but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threatto liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer ThomasPaine expressed it in “Common Sense” (1776), government is atbest “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed tosecure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive powermay also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise asystem that gives government the power necessary to protectindividual liberty but also prevents those who govern fromabusing that power.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica

Forster’s Liberalism

Come leggere A Passage to IndiaP. 43

P. 28-29

Walt Whitman’s Poem, “Passage to India” (1871)

Plot

Tripartite Construction

‘La moschea’ (Mosque)

‘Le grotte’ (Caves)

‘Il tempio’ (Temple)

Religions

Islamism

Christianity

Hinduism

Seasons

Winter

Summer

Autumn (Monsoon period)

Relationships

Adela/Ronny

Mrs Moore/Aziz

Aziz/Fielding

Dichotomy and Opposition

Muddle and mysteryFielding-Mrs Moore/Godbole

OppositionI/OTHER

SPACEChapter One

Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the

river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. […] Chandrapore was never large or

beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. […] The very

wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. […] Inland, the prospect alters. […] The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and peepul […]

glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise, so that newcomers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not; neither does it repel. […] It has nothing hideous in it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city except the overarching sky.

The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river […].

The sky settles everything – not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little – only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into

the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so

enormous. […] No mountains infringe on the curve. […] Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves (PI, pp. 31-

33).

Social Cohesion

1. Bridge Party

2. Tea Party

3. Trip to the Marabar Caves

“invitations”

‘He meant nothing by the invitation, I could tell by hisvoice; it’s just their way of being pleasant’ (Ronny Heaslop)

Extract: Aziz and Mrs Moore in the Mosque

Extract: Bridge Party

Fielding

“[a]thletic and cheerful, he romped about, making numerous mistakes which the parents of his pupils tried to cover up, for

he was popular among them. When the moment for refreshments came, he did not move back to the English side, but burnt his mouth with gram. He talked to anyone and he

ate anything”

Extract ch 7: Fielding

Tea Party

Muslims (Aziz) – English (Fielding, Adela, MrsMoore) – Hindus (Godbole) together

Godbole’s song

“double vision”

Mrs Moore ch XXIII

Marabar Caves

“The Marabar Caves represented an area in whichconcentration can take place […] They weresomething to focus everything up”

Negation and absence

Mrs Moore/Adela Quested

The Caves – Part II ch 12

The caves are readily described. A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feetwide,leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangementoccurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is aMarabar Cave. Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three,four, fourteen, twenty -four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertainwhether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience atall. He fmds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind,for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bees'-nest or a batdistinguishes one from another. Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and theirreputation—for they have one— does not depend upon human speech. It is as ifthe surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves toexclaim "extraordinary," and the word has taken root in the air, and beeninhaled by mankind. They are dark caves.

A Marabar cave had been horrid as far as Mrs Moore was concerned, for she had nearly fainted in it, and had some

difficulty in preventing herself from saying so as soon as she got into the air again. It was natural enough: she had always suffered from faintness, and the cave had become too full,

because all their retinue followed them. Crammed with villagers and servants, the circular chamber began to smell.

She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her, couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad. She

tried to regain the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back. She hit her head. For an instant she went mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic. For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there was also a

terrifying echo.

[…] Nothing evil had been in the cave, but she had not enjoyed herself; no, she had not enjoyed herself, and she

decided not to visit a second one

Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum’, or ‘ou-boum’ – utterly dull. 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. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of

small snakes, which writhe independently

Silence“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it,and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting areobliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their ownexistence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, thehuman spirit slumbers for the most part, registering thedistinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert aswe pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day duringwhich nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “Ido enjoy myself”, or, “I am horrified”, we are insincere. “As far asI feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror” – it’s no more than thatreally, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent”

(A Passage to India)

Music and poliphony

Pattern – Rhythm

(painting and music)

Words, images, symbols, ‘tone of voice’

Corruption of the artistic word

“‘You people are sadly circumstanced. What ever are you to writeabout? You cannot say “The rose is faded” for evermore. We know

it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the “India, my India” type, when it’s nobody’s India’”

Emptiness and Silence

The Trial

McBryde:

“[…] the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but notvice versa – not a matter for bitterness this, not a matter for abuse,

but just a fact which any scientific observer will confirm”

“The tumult increased, the invocation of Mrs. Moore continued, and people who did not know what the syllables meant repeatedthem like a charm. They became Indianized into Esmiss Esmoor, they were taken up in the street outside. In vain the Magistrate

threatened and expelled. Until the magic exhausted itself, he waspowerless”

HinduismHindu Festival (ch 33) Disorder

“[the] approaching triumph of India [is] a muddle (as we call it), a frustration of reason and form”

“Thus Godbole, though she was not important to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore days. Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this

heated state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force to that placewhere completeness can be found. Completeness, not reconstruction. His senses grewthinner, he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone. He loved the

wasp equally […]”

"One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp," he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. "It does not seem much, still it is

more than I am myself"

Her vision was of several caves. She saw herself in one, and she was also outside it, watching its entrance, for Aziz to pass in. She failed to locate him. It was the doubt that had often visited her, but solid and attractive, like the hills. ‘I am not –’ Speech was more difficult than vision. ‘I am not quite sure’. […] ‘I’m afraid I have made a mistake’.

[…] ‘Dr Aziz never followed me into the cave’

Adela

I was not ill – it is far too vague to mention: it is all mixed up with my private affairs. I enjoyed the singing … but just about then a sort of

sadness began that I couldn’t detect at the time … no, nothing as solid as sadness: living at half pressure expresses it best. Half pressure. I

remember going on to polo with Mr. Heaslop at the Maidan. Various other things happened – it doesn’t matter what, but I was under par for all of them. I was certainly in that state when I saw the caves, and you suggest (nothing shocks or hurts me) – you suggest that I had an

hallucination there, the sort of thing – though in an awful form – that makes some women think they’ve had an offer of marriage when none

was made

DeathHere Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything,

except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the stars that fetter us now. As a prisoner looks up and sees stars beckoning, so she, from

the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels (Howards End)

“A ghost followed the ship up the Red Sea, but failed to enter the Mediterranean. Somewhere about Suez there is always a social

change: the arrangements of Asia weaken and those of Europe begin to be felt, and during the transition Mrs Moore was shaken off”

Mrs Moore’s Persistence

“What did this eternal goodness of Mrs Moore amount to? To nothing, if brought to the test of thought. She had not borne witness

in his favour, nor visited him in the prison, yet she had stolen to the depths of his heart, and he always adored her”

THE END