Transvaluing immaturity: reverse discourses of male homosexuality in E.M. Forster's posthumously published fiction

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

Apart from the methodological importance of acknowledging the incommensurability of different historical moments, I would suggest there are important political and ethical reasons for doing so. An anti-homophobic reading that is committed to challenging heterosexist developmental fictions has a particular obligation to challenge historical models that ignore temporal and cultural differences: unlike a heterosexist developmental narrative which can only arrogantly conceptualize same-sex desire in its own terms and can, therefore, only see homosexuality as a failed, immature version of heterosexuality, anti-homophobic historical readings should not narcissistically frame the past solely in terms of the present. In making such a statement, I am not arguing for a positivist view of history. With Foucault, I recognize that the critic's inquiries are inevitably informed by her personal desires and interests, yet while recognizing that historical accounts are mediated, interested constructions, I would suggest that one still has the political obligation to try as far as possible to heed the otherness of the past.

Forster himself self-consciously addresses the problem of violating historical difference in several of the essays in Abinger Harvest. In "The Consolations of History," for instance, he gently pokes fun at the ways in which historians can avoid "social and moral. ... dangers" by projecting their desires onto the past: "If only a sense of actuality can be lulled--and it sleeps for ever in most historians--there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past. The past is devoid of all dangers social and moral.(8) While in the quotation above there is no explicit value judgment, in the essay on visiting Cnidus which follows "The Consolations of History," Forster implicitly suggests that there is something predatory about projecting one's indulgent desires onto the past. In this essay, he recounts how he retrospectively has revised a muddled (to use a characteristically Forsterian term) journey that he made to the shrine of Demeter at Cnidus: according to Forster, when he visited Cnidus, there was a storm, and a mysterious man attempted to join his party on its return. Although the stranger was friendly, "everyone avoided [his] attentions," and he finally "melted away in the darkness," an image suggestive of death.(9) But Forster confesses that in retrospectively considering this visit, he idealizes it. For instance, he "never cease[s] to dry up [Cnidus's] puddies, and brush away its clouds, and span[s] it over with blue sky, in which is hanging a mid-day sun that never moves" (178). Although he does not explicitly revise his deathly encounter with the extra male passenger, he enigmatically tells us in the last sentence of the essay, "even over that extra person the brain will not keep steady" (178). We do not know for sure how Forster revises that non-encounter with the stranger, and why he should characterize his revision as "not steady." Could it be that in retrospect he tries to endow that frustratingly empty, even deathlike, encounter with some more idealized homoerotic content? Regardless of how exactly he reshapes the encounter at Cnidus, it is clear that Forster sees these revisions as assaultive: The experience at Cnidus, he writes, "lies a defenceless prey to the sentimental imagination" (178, my emphasis). But Forster's scruples about appropriating the past and revising it, which are so evident in Abinger Harvest, vanish in his posthumously published texts, where he seems fairly unreflectively to appropriate Greece and other cultures in constructing his reverse discourse of male homosexuality.