From Hegel to Hinduism : the Dialectic of E. M. Forster

FROM HEGEL TO HINDUISM: THE DIALECTIC OF E. M. FORSTER By CLARA RISING A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THB DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1969 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 3 1262 08642 712 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my appreciation for the help and understanding I have received at the University of Florida from both professors and staff. I especially want to thank Professor John Tyree Fain for his patience and excellent scholarship, and Professors Gordon E. Bigelow and A. L. Lewis, Jr., for their advice and encouragement. I am especially indebted to Mr. Ray Jones and Mr. Sherman L. Butler and their staffs at the Graduate Research Library for obtaining material for me, and to the Harvard Theological School for lending me a rare first volume of McTaggart's Nature of Existence . Without all their help, and the in- exhaustible patience and understanding of my husband, Stanley A. Rising, and of my children, this study could not have been completed. CR TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii CHAPTER I THE INNER WAR 1 II GREECE 19 III ITALY 89 IV ENGLAND PAST: THE LONGEST JOURNEY 141 V ENGLAND PRESENT: HOWARDS END 204 VI INDIA 254 Mosque 264 Caves 284 Temple 311 VII BHAKTI IN BLOOMSBURY: THE LEGACY 349 BIBLIOGRAPHY 368 APPENDICES 385 1. The Dialectic 386 2. The Glossary 387 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 399 . CHAPTER I THE INNER WAR born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife- Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy It has become a commonplace in literary criticism to say that most writers have one thing to say and when they have said that they become either repetitive or silent. To no other twentieth-century writer has this platitude been applied more often than to E. M. Forster. In his case the remark takes on overtones of irritation modulated into envy: he has gained fame, the critics say, by not writing novels. Although vociferous enough in articles and essays since 1924--the date of his last- published novel, A Passage to India --Forster has produced only five novels and one collection of short stories. Yet his work persists in nagging the imagination and puzzling the critical sensitivity of his detractors and admirers alike. The first group have seen him as a disillusioned Edwardian too genteel to be angry, or an effete hothouse plant snuggling, under glass, in the corner of an undusted Georgian drawing room. The second group have seen him as the champion of pale but inwardly audacious anti-heroes, or have tried to justify his fictional silence as a twentieth-century Weltschmerz , in which his India becomes a Bloomsburyian wasteland, a bog of intellectual—and hence acceptable—disillusionment The problem for both groups might be solved by shifting the focus from Forster to his work. Biography can never be severed from creative ef- fort, and it is certainly not my intention to do so here. To the con- trary, Forster 's biography contains those frustrations, fears and doubts which motivated and articulated his themes, but it should be seen as an ingredient rather than as the whole of the motivating force directing his productivity. In 1940, a year ripe with the frustrations of World War II, he wrote in "The Individual and His God": "Besides our war against totaliarianism, we have also an inner war, a struggle for truer values, a struggle of the individual towards the dark, secret place where he may find reality." It was this search for an inner reality impelled by struggle which, I believe, contains the clue to his fictional method and which, if understood, can clarify his message, the "thing" he has "said." That method uses struggle as its fuel. One cannot have struggle without two opposing forces. One cannot have two opposing forces without some form of resolution—even impasse is resolution of a sort. One can not have resolution between deadly enemies that does not demand, eventu- ally, fresh struggle, fresh resolution. Forster' s method, based on his inner war between the self and everything—nature, the state, other people— which constitute the Not-Self, became, I believe, his own brand of the Hegelian dialectic. Dialectic is a term one should use with caution and some hesita- tion. It has been applied with equal authority to Socratic cross-exami- syllogism (categorical nation ( elenchus ), Platonic dialogue, Aristotelian demonstration), Kantian transcendentalism (the second division of his Transcendental Logic Kant entitled "Transcendental Dialectic"), and to the so-called Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ( Dreischritt ) . I say "so-called" because Hegel never used the terms "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." His method was much more spiritual than is generally supposed. The central idea which dictated the con- tent and form of his Phenomenology of Mind is aufheben , the annihilation of, but at the same time the preservation of, each preceding step into a new metamorphosis which in turn demands its own annihilation and preservation, cui infinitum until one reaches Absolute Reality, Absolute Truth, Absolute Spirit. This is precisely Forster's method. Again and again, in story after story, in novel after novel, his characters, by annihilat- ing and yet preserving previous concepts of themselves, through their experiences, through their knowledge gained in visionary moments—moments almost interchangeable with Hegel's description of self-consciousness-- attain new levels of awareness which, depending on the intensity and quality of their experience, reach or fall short of that inner reality 3 which is Forster's Holy Grail. Forster, like Hegel, refuses a synthesis, even when the last step — acceptance of all things through the subconscious- is taken. He is closer to Hegel than the others because Forster, like Hegel, carries his view of man beyond Aristotle's categories; both Forster and Hegel see the Absolute, unlike Plato, as a pervasive spiritual possibility rather than as a goal to be "reached"; both see the self, unlike Kant, as a substance capable of assimilating the Not-Self rather than as an autonomous entity retaining a dichotomy with the Ding an Sicht. With both it is the connection of contraries rather than the separation that is important. "Only connect" is Forster's cry through- out his work. We must, he believes, connect with nature, with other people, with ourselves, before reality and peace can be found. When such total connection occurs, it may cause death or disintegration of the character, but still this is not a synthesis, a closing in, so much as it is an opening out, the first step in a new dialectic of the spirit where the soul rises to ever widening experiences. Thus Mrs. Wilcox's ancestors, in Howards End , can communicate with her; Mrs. Moore can "connect" with Aziz, Fielding, and Adela after her death in A Passage to India . The learning and assimilating process for Forster does not end with death, but often begins when the objects of this world—including other people—are assimilated into the self to be transmuted into a new metamorphosis capable of further learning, further assimilating. There is no "next" world: all is one, for those of us able to operate on the subconscious level of cognition, which is, for Forster, uncluttered by reason, education, or convention, and constitutes true under standing. Because he refuses synthesis, none of Forster's stories or novels have a "last" chapter or scene. "Expansion," he wrote in Aspects of the Novel, "That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out." All Forster's stories, as Alan Friedman insists, open outward rather than end. Schiller's pun, that Hegel's dialectic was really a "Trialectic , " a "Try-it-on," might, with justification, be applicable to Forster. Forster's Cambridge friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson defined the "Trialectic" as an insistence upon the tentative and experimental character, not merely of human life, but 7 of the universe as a whole. Human life is experimental for Forster; the universe is tentative. His search is a "Try-it-on." First with fantasy and myth, then with impulse, emotion, intuition and mysticism characters try to reconcile the contradictions between themselves and nature, themselves and other people. Yet those contradictions are not self-cancelling but form fulcrums for uplift onto other levels of explora- tion, to be examined in the next short story, the next novel. Thus his canon assumes a directed vacillation which, once understood, is not vacillation at all but a controlled thrust toward the final step, a mystical awareness of the Absolute through love. Forster travels up by going down into that "lower personality" where, "unless a man dips a bucket down into it occasionally he cannot produce first-class work." Forster dips and his subconscious produces, but such a psychic activity disconcerts those who would like to read his work by daylight. Forster will not accommodate them. He shies constantly away from a static, fac- tual, scientific approach; his method is introspective, intuitive, in- stinctual, and in its last stages occult. Although based on experience, his search is not empirical so much as it is spiritual. Sidney Hook, in "What is Dialectic?" might have been writing of Forster when he made the distinction between scientific thinking and the dialectical process: "The fundamental difference between dialectic and science is that scientific thinking is controlled at some point by the facts it seeks to explain, while dialectic thinking, seeking to clarify and not to explain, is autonomous, is always on the wing; the introduction of a fact spells its death." F It is so with rster.

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