Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by Brian May

Most critics regard the Edwardian and modern novelist E. M. Forster as a latter-day Victorian liberal, but one who is no less committed than belated. Such critical orthodoxy notwithstanding, liberalism of the kind that Forster promotes in Howards End (1910), the novel in which he most clearly delineates his politics, anticipates the kind of neoliberalism recently promoted by the well-known pragmatist Richard Rorty. Forster renders concretely what Rorty describes theoretically, but that is a difference which suggests finally that the two may be equally useful to liberals of the nineties. Indeed, the two authors articulate a common cultural alternative, one whose points of origin and destination and whose lines of descent still need to be traced. To plot these points and trace these lines is to suggest new readings of both Forster and Rorty, as well as a sense of the virtually Romantic possibilities still available to enterprising liberals within their own tradition.(1)

Developed at length in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1990), Rorty's idea of the "liberal ironist" illuminates the most characteristic act of the central character and liberal heroine of Howards End, Margaret Schlegel, who responds to the downtrodden Leonard Bast's climactic death by, as Rorty might write, "redescribing" it; in Margaret's hands, petty modern "Squalor" becomes a rich "Tragedy" (261).(2) An absurd death having punctuated an ethical travesty, the harsh ironies thus redoubling, Margaret nonetheless refuses to neglect her social responsibility as a liberal humanist. Which is to say, Margaret behaves as Rorty's liberal ironist would behave. A Rortian reading reveals two luminous details that Forster's more suspicious critics tend to overlook: first, that Margaret does not perceive a tragedy but rather wills one--she turns tragedian knowing well that no tragedy has occurred; second, that she practices the tragic mode thus willfully and liberally not in order to defend herself from the truth but in order to save her family from "morbidity" (219), the bleak ironism of the wasteland. Despite the contrary claims of such critics as Alfred Kazin, Fredric Jameson, Wilfred Stone, and Daniel Born, then, we may say that Margaret does face up to the most grievous of ironies--and that she does take action which betokens an explicitly communal concern.(3) Like Rortian liberalism, the Forsterian occasions several risks, not the least of which is its habit of tempting its proponents to practice an illiberalism more oppressive than the one it enables them to evade. Forsterian liberalism is also Rortian, though, in nonetheless remaining flexible and revisable.

But the comparison between Rorty and Forster--or their conversation--should interest Rortians as well as Forsterians, and historians of liberalism as well as literary historians.(4) That Margaret's technique is lyrical rather than merely narrative suggests that Rorty, who characterizes effective redescription only partially, underestimates the necessity of its being powerful, affecting, striking; Rorty also insists too finally that redescription remain a strictly private affair (Forster imagines that it may be at least familial in scope). But if the two authors illuminate one another, their dialectic illuminates something else--a genealogy of liberalism, or of the specific ironist alternative within liberal thought explored by both these writers. That Margaret's technique is sublimely lyrical, that indeed it suggests an aesthetics of the sublime rather than of the beautiful, will tell us as much about liberal origins as about Rortian destinations. The presence of Romantic aesthetics in this discussion of the liberal ironist's technique indicates the Romantic origin of liberal ironism. In so doing it indicates not only the history of this liberal alternative but also its deepest affiliation. The suggestion is that the Rorty/ Forster dialectic offers us more than a viable new liberalism--namely, a viable new Romanticism. Surprising enough is the suggestion that any form of either, even one decidedly cautious, is now viable at all.

One who desires to reconsider Forster's politics may as well begin by recognizing an immediate obstacle: Forster's critical reputation. Despite recent tokens of cinematic and belletristic interest (see Kazin especially), Forster's name was recently distinguished in the editorial pages of PMLA as one among several which have "begun to flicker" (Kronik 201). In the charged ideological atmosphere now current Forster's work has come to resemble nothing so much as a curio, perhaps a quaint old light bulb cherished by one's forebears but now destined for the Enlightenment attic. Even critics who "at the moment" still admire Forster's writing detect something "rather old-fashioned" about it, and more often than not its political filament seems more old-fashioned than any other element (Wilde 4). Ten years ago, as Benita

Parry writes about A Passage to India, many "applauded the novel's humanist political perceptions" even as many others "scorned its equivocations and limitations" (30). But now Forster's humanism and equivocation are virtually indistinguishable. Now, when a reputation for old-fashioned politics can consign one to a place even humbler than the attic, "the trough" (Wilde 5), or a space even more obscure, "the abyss" (Annan 3), Forster's politics has never seemed less fashionable.