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E. M. Forster's Hidden Resistance and Elusiveness: Homosexual Desire

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E. M. Forster's Hidden Resistance and Elusiveness: Homosexual Desire E. M. Forster’s Hidden Resistance and Elusiveness: Homosexual Desire and Non-Differentiation in A Passage to India Kyoko Matsui Ⅰ As Richard Dellamore writes, Forster was “ marked by continual compromise and resistance” since E. M. Forster’s published narratives evasively encode the ideal of male love （ 97）. The tensions created in the narratives between the contradictory impulses to withhold and to disclose homosexual desire are one of the crucial reasons for his elusiveness. Throughout his life Forster kept secret his sexual orientation. In 1967 only three years before Forster’s death, the Sexual Offences Act was finally passed by the British parliament. It repealed the 1885 Act （ Labouchere Amendment） which had severely criminalized homosexuals by prosecutions and imprisonments. Under these circumstances, Forster’s homosexuality had to be kept clandestine, under peril of public disdain. Therefore, the theme of homosexual love was developed unceasingly in coded form throughout most of his published novels and stories, using symbols,1 choice of language and technique. He sought a plausible form to represent homosexual reverie in the heteronormative world. When this was impossible, he often resorted to mystification. Hence, his symbols and texts are replete with ambiguities. Although A Passage to India’s （ 1924） theme is not directly about homosexual relationships, it consistently refers to male friendship between the British Fielding and the Indian Aziz: “ Between people of distant climes there is always the possibility of romance” （ 241）. However, it takes a pessimistic view of such interracial romances, and more precisely, it suggests at the end of the text that at least at that time they were not yet possible. It is curious that PI describes the failure of male friendship and homosexual － 18 － relationships across the races, while the posthumously published Maurice （1971）, which was completed in 1914 before PI, advocates human contact between comrades and the significance of homosexual relationships across the classes. To understand the failure in PI, we need to elucidate the features of Forster’s narrative in PI, since the encoded male-to-male desire in his narrative vacillates between realistic and fantasy mode, yielding two layers: a surface plot and a subplot. From the 1990s onwards, some critics, inspired by queer theory, gained a new affirmative understanding of the text’s equivocality.2 However, almost at the same time, Forster’s established reputation as a liberal humanist writer became unstable, following the publication of some essays on Orientalism in PI. Robert Martin claims that Forster’s critics around that time, influenced by postcolonial and poststructuralist analyses, focused more on a “ text’s contradictions, exceptions, and inconsistencies.” These critics’ readings are “ a rejection of an idealized portrait of Forster the liberal” （ 22）. Edward Said’s critical reading of Orientalism in PI is that Forster regards India as “ so strange and unidentifiable” and “ his ［ Forster’s］ view of India as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful,” thus concluding that Forster saw India and Indians with imperialist eyes （ 200-04）. Moreover, Sara Suleri’s reading of PI proposes that the novel is associated with imperialism and is obsessed with “Otherness,” and concludes that Forster’s India is“ hollow”（ 109）. As these critics point out, the “ unidentifiable” aspects in the novel tempt the reader to search for meaning in elusive symbols such as the Marabar Caves and the Hindu Brahman Godbole’s chanting “ come, come, come.” The strange sound “ boum” of the echoes that characterise the Marabar Caves, Adela Quested’s hallucinations in the caves, the low-class Hindu punkah wallah’s influence in the court also seem elusive. The language of the text does not offer a secure anchorage for understanding. This elusiveness might make the text vulnerable to the above criticisms. One － 19 － of the purposes of this paper is to show that contrary to the negative interpretations of Said and other critics, the elusiveness has a constructive meaning which conveys Forster’s message hidden in the text. The new biography E. M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat was published in 2011, revealing new facts about Forster’s hidden life, in particular, between the 1920s and the 1950s. These facts are helpful in the investigation of Forster’s ideas hidden in the symbols in PI. Moffat unearthed his unpublished diaries written in 1903-1967 which were finally opened in 2008 to public view at the Archive at King’s College. The biography also includes invaluable first-time interviews with Forster’s friends and his biographers who were still alive and his correspondence kept in his friends’ archives.3 She argues that Forster had no regrets about being homosexual, and did not feel isolated; rather he was more radical than previously thought. Moffat points out that Forster fell in love with an Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl in Alexandria in 1916 and lost his virginity. She emphasizes that from this point onwards his life changed direction. As Forster wrote to his friend in England that he practiced “parting with Respectability” （ Moffat 148）. He went on to have intimate relationships with working-class men in London, where a gay subcultural world was thriving after the First World War. It was a time when police zeal in hunting out homosexual offenders was rapidly increasing （ Moffat 233, Weeks 2012, 307）, but in spite of the dangerous situation for homosexuals, homosexuality was a glue connecting Forster to working-class men（ Moffat 316）. Moffat’s new findings provide us with the more surprising fact that from the 1950s Forster carefully but energetically supported an embryonic homosexual liberation movement. British “ police agents provocateurs were sent out to entrap homosexuals,” and hostile police made a “ warrantless search” of homosexual men’s homes （ Moffat 306）.4 In these circumstances, in 1964 Forster stout-heartedly offered to testify in court for the defense － 20 － that his Bulgarian friend Mattei Radev （ 1927-2009）5 was of good character. Radev had been arrested for cottaging, that is anonymous sex between men in public lavatories （ Moffat 310）. He was a picture framer to the London galleries and Forster knew him because Radev socialized with members of the Bloomsbury Group（ Machin 2009）. In testifying, Forster would have run the risk of public exposure of his own homosexuality. According to Forster’s friend Tim Leggatt, “ Mattei Radev had been arrested ’without cause,’ beaten up by policemen in a police car” （ 151）. Taking another example, in 1959, “he[Forster] also wrote a letter to The Times protesting the treatment of a seventeen-year-old suspected of homosexual offenses, who committed suicide as he waited trial” （ Moffat 309）.6 Forster’s strong wish was to see the law on homosexuality reformed（ Moffat 308-10）. A look at the newly available documents through the lens of his sexuality elucidates the new fact that Forster resisted the governing social and political attitudes. Hitherto, examinations of Forster’s work have not yet taken on board the new view disclosed by Moffat. However, I argue that these findings as well as the fact that the number of prosecutions of homosexuals sharply increased after the Great War will give new hints for understanding PI. Considering Forster’s resistance against the dominant values, as described by Moffat, this paper will show an affirmative revaluation of the effects of Forster’s sexual identity on PI by employing a queer theory approach which has been derived from deconstruction from the 1990s onwards and has challenged normativity and the dominant cultural values. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how his homosexuality is integral to PI and how it affects his ideas by focusing on symbols in the text. II In PI the omniscient narrator adopts a consistent attitude of ambiguity. We first need to clarify the equivocality in Forster’s use of the echoes in － 21 － the Marabar Caves. The echo in the Marabar Caves is, according to the narrator, “ entirely devoid of distinction” and “ 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’ . blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘ boum.’”（144）. The Marabar Caves seem to predate the logical distinctions which human speech has made possible. Generally if a sound echoes, it is heard again as repetition; however, mysteriously, in the Marabar Caves whatever words are spoken, only one sound “ boum” can be heard in the echo. No language is formed there. We must draw attention to a significant feature: the disappearance of language in the echo. If seen in conjunction with the social system and the forbidden desire for the interracial male romance in PI, the echo can be considered as an impulse to turn away from a language system and to go beyond speech. A language system, in other words, represents the society or the establishment. Interestingly, an echo is also used in “ The Life to Come” in Forster’s posthumous collection, The Life to Come and Other Stories （ 1972）. The story’s theme is same-sex racial integration. It was written two years before the publication of PI. It asserts that interracial homosexual love is related to “a midnight cry,” （ 94） that is not heard in the daytime. The cry is heard deep in the forest, a closed space like the Marabar Caves. Love had been born somewhere in the forest, ［ . .］. Trivial or immortal, it had been born to two human bodies as a midnight cry. Impossible to tell whence the cry had come, so dark was the forest. Or into what worlds it would echo, so vast was the forest.
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