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

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

While Maurice, written more than a decade before A Passage to India, neatly fits the developmental account of Forster's career, The Life to Come poses great difficulties to this plot since most of the stories in the anthology were written well after A Passage to India: while A Passage to India was published in 1924, "Dr.

Woolacott," "Arthur Snatchfold," "The Classical Annex," "What Does It Matter," "The Obelisk," "The Torque," and "The Other Boat" were written in 1927, 1928, 1930-31, probably the 1930s, 1939, 1958 at the latest, and 1957 or '58 respectively. One way to cover this temporal contradiction in the developmental story line is to dismiss the quality of the stories as "immature" because of their subject matter, regardless of when they were written. Thus, they are often dismissed as "light-weight," "minor," "self-indulgent."(27) These are, of course, the very adjectives that are often used in pathologizing the "immature" homosexual. The adjective "minor" is a good example of the economical way in which seemingly formal evaluative statements are inflected by the developmental narrative. Robert Martin has pointed out that the adjective "minor" is often used in describing the stories in The Life to Come.(28) "Minor," in many of these readings, shifts between two meanings. On the one hand, "minor" implies something "insignificant" as opposed to something central, something "major." On the other hand, "minor" also implies something young, something immature. Through a tight web of associations, then, The Life to Come is seen as unimportant and trivial (minor) because it is young (minor), and its youthfulness is linked to the fact that it represents homosexuality (which is a form of youthfulness). Other related terms often used in dismissing these stories, such as "frivolous"(29) or "light-weight,"(30) do not directly refer to the stories as immature but reinforce the metaphorics of immaturity that inform representations of homosexuality. Another way to deal with the immature homosexual stories that come after A Passage to India is to represent them as a perverse byway that does not belong on the story line of Forster's authorial career at all. While grudgingly acknowledging that Forster's "pen did not dry up after A Passage to India," to use the explicitly spermatic terms of Judith Hertz,(31) these critics figure the stories as a perverse distraction from Forster's "mature" art. Thus Rosecrance chides Alan Wilde for placing the stories in The Life to Come "implicitly on the same conceptual level of A Passage to India," and she suggests that the only reason he does so is because of "their temporal position." But Rosecrance contends that since the stories deal with "a byway of experience, the thrills and punishments of homosexual passion," "these private fantasies debar themselves from consideration or judgment with the mainstream of Forster's fiction. Thus, despite their greater contemporaneity [to A Passage to India], the homosexual stories close the byway opened in Maurice with a no-exit sign [and] direct our attention to the culmination of Forster's art in A Passage to India."(32) On the one hand, Rosecrance criticizes Wilde for misjudging the stories' "minor status" simply because of their "temporal" position. On the other hand, the vehemence of her tone suggests that she too is invested in the "temporal" position of Forster's writings because she is invested in a plot in which Forster consistently grows, and the homosexual stories upset the satisfying ending of that developmental story line. So, she attempts to exclude them from her critical plot by suggesting that they are irrelevant to the "mainstream" of Forster's art. They are a mere "private," "dead end. ... byway" that should not distract us from the true "culmination" of Forster's career in A Passage to India. Rosecrance's metaphors and critical story line draw on sexological and psychoanalytic representation of homosexuality as a non-reproductive perversion. Just as a "perversion" is defined in sexological and psychoanalytic discourse as a swerving away from the path toward reproductive adulthood, so too the stories in The Life to Come are mere byways to the mainstream which leads to A Passage to India. Her phrase "dead end" is particularly sinister, given dominant culture's persistent association of male homosexuality with anal intercourse and death.(33) In other words, while Forster's true art leads to the healthy aesthetic maturity of A Passage to India, homosexual texts like Maurice and the stories in The Life to Come lead to the unproductive, "dead end" traditionally associated with sodomy.