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A Study of EM Forster Masayuki Iwasaki View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DSpace at Waseda University The Aesthetics of Personality beyond Traditionalism and Modernism: A Study of E. M. Forster Masayuki Iwasaki Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...3 Chapter 1: Development and Decline of Personality…………………………………...41 I. Politics of Personality: Forster’s Early Short Stories and the Independent Review……………………………………………………………………..….41 II. Development and Degeneration of Personality in the English Bildungsroman……………………………………………………………..…58 III. Depersonalisation and Procreation in “The Machine Stops” and “Little Imber” ………………………………………………………………………..71 Chapter 2: Narratives of Hetero- and Homosexual Love……………………………....90 I. Where Angels Fear to Tread as an Anti-Bildungsroman…………………...90 II. Youth, Empire and Homosexuality in The Longest Journey……………..104 III. Untrammelled Personality in A Room with a View……………………...122 Chapter 3: Monologic and/or Polyphonic Narratives…………………………………140 I. Polyphonic Narrative in Post-War Society……………………………..…142 II. Monologic Narrative and the Fear of Modernity in Howards End………154 III. (In)fertility and Nation in Maurice………………………………………177 Chapter 4: Personal, Impersonal and Appropriated Voices…………………………..195 I. Impersonal Voice in High Modernism……………………………………196 II. A Passage to India as the End of the Bildungsroman……………………207 III. Forster in Film…………………………………………………………...234 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….…245 Notes…………………………………………………………………………………..258 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...272 1 Explanatory Note The following symbols are used in this thesis to study the scriptural changes of A Passage to India. The three dots mean one or more words. \.../ words between oblique lines inserted by Forster. <...> words within angle brackets deleted by Forster. {...} words within brace brackets inserted, then deleted, by Forster [...] words (or letters) clearly intended by Forster and supplied by the editor; or – if italicised – interpolated editorial comment. [...?] words (or letters) conjectured to have been intended by Forster, or to have been on a missing or mutilated sheet. This “Explanatory Note” is based on Oliver Stalybrass’s comment in The Manuscripts of A Passage to India (1978). 2 Introduction In this thesis, I explore Forster’s aesthetics of personality from the perspective of the dramatisation of temporality, mainly focusing on his treatment of the “symbolic moment,” and the chronological development or regression of the protagonist that is based on the mode of the Bildungsroman. This study will clarify Forster’s distinct character as a novelist and attempt to answer the question of whether or not he was a modernist, which has long been discussed amongst Forsterian critics but is not yet persuasively answered. Was he a traditionalist who rejected modernism as a regressive literary tendency, or a modernist who abandoned traditional realism to pursue the modernist self? Are his works reasonably evaluated by the notions of modernism and traditionalism, or do they have their own literary significance that is not solely interpretable by these two notions? First, in this introduction, I will discuss the arguments in previous studies of whether Forster was a modernist or not, and then move to the overall view of Forster’s aesthetics of personality principally based on the mode of the developmental novel. Forster as a Modernist Consequently while we read “The Ancient Mariner” a change takes place in it. 3 It becomes anonymous, like the “Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.” And here is the point I would support: that all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from their true significance. (Forster, “Anonymity: An Enquiry” 81) Critical evaluation concerning whether E. M. Forster should be considered a modernist has differed greatly due to his elusive, or even baffling, symbolist-realist style and various thematic purposes pursued in each novel and short story. Because of these features, he has often been positioned on the boundary between modernism and traditionalism. Forster referred to himself as “the fag-end of Victorian liberalism” (“The Challenge of Our Time” 54) and was used to being considered a traditional realist by such critics as Lionel Trilling (9-23). As a result, in the literary tradition, he has often been linked to and compared with not only George Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, but also William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Jane Austen (Herz, A Passage to India 4). His works from Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to A Room with a View (1908) contain narrative tropes typical of Austen, working with the pattern of “the conventional comedic conclusion of marriage” which contrasts “the civilized liberating atmosphere of Italy” to 4 English conventional society (Steven 210). Meanwhile, when Forster is regarded as a modernist, this label is ascribed principally to his later novels. Malcolm Bradbury argues that, after the Great War, Forster became a “Modernist, a liberal humanist novelist for whom the essence of fiction lay in its concern with manners, morals and humane values” (169). For Bradbury, A Passage to India is the only “magnificent Modernist work” achieved by Forster (169). Forster struggled strenuously with this novel to modify his narrative style of traditional realism to an incomparably innovative one beyond the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction. When he was writing this novel, Forster confessed his dissatisfaction regarding the conventions of traditional realism to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form: e.g. the convention that one must view the action through the mind of one of the characters; and say of the others “perhaps they thought,” or at all events adopt their viewpoint for a moment only. If you pretend you can get inside one character, why not pretend it about all the characters? I see why. The illusion of life may vanish, and the creator degenerate into the showman. Yet some change of the sort must be made. The studied 5 ignorance of novelists grows wearisome. (qtd. in Furbank 2: 106) The Jamesian central consciousness, or focalisation, if we borrow that term from Gerard Genette (189-94), vexed Forster by its imperative that “one must view the action through the mind of one of the characters.” He sensed that “the studied ignorance of novelists” prevented him from completing A Passage to India, which was finally completed with the narrative of multipersonal consciousness reflecting the sinister atmosphere of the colonial terrain. The shift in his writing from the nineteenth-century realist style to a modernist narrative has been partly attributed to Marcel Proust. In 1922, Forster read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and it immensely impressed him. From Proust’s narrative, Forster learned “the modern subconscious way” to perceive his characters (Furbank and Haskell 30). Bradbury claims that “the modern way” that Forster learned from the French writer is “undoubtedly the use of rhythmic composition and symbolist structure for the linear and social plot” (169). Certainly, as Bradbury argues, A Passage to India has a symbolic structure which engenders rhythm in the text. The tripartite composition of the novel indicates the cycle of the Indian seasons and the universal perception of life. Also on a different level, the recurrent image of the echo of the Marabar Caves internally stitches together every part of the text. In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster writes that 6 Proust’s In Search of Lost Time represents a “perfect whole” (113) created by the rhythm of the text: “The book is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms” (113). In Search of Lost Time is ineptly ordered, for Forster’s taste, almost lost in persuasive pattern, yet Proust’s narrative is incomparably attentive to the delicate movement of consciousness and memory, and it captures the meeting point of the present and the past in an exquisite way. The little phrase of Vinteuil appearing repeatedly in the text produces this rhythm. The phrase “crosses the book again and again, but as an echo, a memory” and “has a life of its own” (114-15). Thus it engenders wholeness, “the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader’s memory” (115). The repetition of the phrase generates an impressive rhythm in the text, surpassing the limits of narrative form. Forster’s representation of the echo of the Marabar Caves produces the same effect in his last novel. Pattern, in contrast, bestows form on the novel. James is an outstanding author who pursues this aspect of fiction. He locates the central consciousness in such works as The Ambassadors (1903), in which the action is viewed and perceived only through the protagonist’s mind. For Forster, however, this imperative of pattern sacrifices life and produces “[m]aimed creatures” that feel no sensation (Aspects 110). Prioritising pattern 7 over rhythm does not necessarily enable a writer to bring about the reality to be achieved in the novel. Though Bradbury claims that A Passage to India, the only novel amongst Forster’s works, is a modernist work, from the perspective of rhythm, other critics such as David Medalie insist that Howards End also constitutes modern fiction.
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