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

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

The metaphorics of immaturity so central to Leavis's evaluation of Forster also shape the dominant critical narrative regarding Forster's authorial career.(21) In Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault convincingly argues that the collection of texts we consider as constituting the "works" of an author is constructed:

The problems raised by the oeuvre are even more difficult.

Yet at first sight what could be more simple? A collection of

texts that is designated by the proper name of an author. But

this designation (even leaving to one side problems of attribution)

is not a homogenous function: does the name of an

author designate in the same way a text that he has published

under his name, a text that he has presented under a

pseudonym, another found after his death in an unfinished

draft. ... The establishment of a complete oeuvre presupposes

a number of choices.(22)

Prior to the publication of Forster's posthumous fiction, the canonical critical account of his oeuvre was invested in a developmental narrative which represented him as growing through a series of novels which culminated in A Passage to India: Stephen Land, for instance, writes, "If we survey the sequence of Forster's five published novels, we see in outline a creative career of increasingly progressive achievement."(23) The title of the first volume of P. N. Furbank's biography of Forster, The Growth of the Novelist, reflects Land's story line. According to this canonical narrative, Forster falls into a mysterious silence after A Passage to India and does not write anything major again. Thus, for instance, in 1953, L. P. Hartley writes, "one of the saddest gaps in the bookshelves of contemporary literature is the space that should be occupied by the unwritten works of Mr. E. M. Forster. ... It is nearly thirty years since ... A Passage to India."(24)

However, Forster's posthumously published texts challenge the developmental accounts of his writing career. If the canonical story line represents Forster's texts as steadily developing toward the culmination of A Passage to India, how can it explain stories that were published after A Passage to India, stories, moreover, which explicitly thematize "immature" homosexuality? The heterosexist critical plot can accommodate those posthumously published texts that were written prior to A Passage to India. For even though they are published posthumously, they can be represented as the author's "immature" work which leads to the telos of A Passage to India. Thus, Barbara Rosecrance writes of Maurice: "Maurice is a painful book. We must respect the suffering it reveals, but the novel is otherwise largely distinguished by an absence of eloquence and depth that makes Forster a novelist of distinction. ... [Forster] did write another novel--his greatest [A Passage to India]--after Maurice."(25) In Rosecrance's account, Maurice is a flawed, immature, superficial symptom of Forster's "suffering," his homosexuality, but it gives way to Forster's "greatest" novel, A Passage to India. Maurice in this critical story is an unfortunate stage through which Forster passes on his way to the artistic maturity of A Passage to India. Neil Bartlett has described how, as a closeted gay schoolboy, he both internalized and resisted a version of Rosecrance's critical story: while he tried to convince his teacher at school that Maurice was better than the novel assigned by the educational authorities, A Passage to India, he was simultaneously embarassed about whether in doing so he was betraying an excessively "adolescent enthusiasm."(26) In other words, not only does this developmental critical account impose a heterosexist grid on Forster's career, it also works to discipline the taste of Forster's readers.