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

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

Literature versus Immature Homoeroticism: Forster's Complicity with the Developmental Narrative

Unhappily, Forster himself at various places internalizes the homophobic, developmental account of literary production I have traced above. For instance, after burning a number of his stories in April 1922, he wrote in his diary, "Have this moment burnt my indecent writings. ... They clogged me artistically. ... When I ... began them, I had a feeling that I was doing something ... dangerous to my career ... they were a wrong channel for my pen."(34) In this formulation, Forster employs precisely the hydraulic developmental metaphors that homophobic critics use in describing his posthumous writings. The journal entry implies that the homosexual writer has to renounce the stories which thematize sodomy, "the wrong channel," for they will "clog" his artistic development. Like his homophobic critics, then, Forster too sets "true" art or Literature in opposition to the irresponsible, deviant pleasures of homosexuality. Incidentally, Forster's description of how the stories were destroyed--"Have this moment burnt my indecent writings"--intertextually resonates with this passage from Maurice also figuring a relinquishing of immature homoeroticism: Clive Durham on his return from Greece finds that he has lost his homoerotic feelings and is ready to assume his position as an adult male heterosexual subject, and the narrative voice exclaims, "the love of women would rise, certainly as the sun, scorching up immaturity and ushering in the full human day."(35) Just as Clive's homoerotic "immaturity" is "scorch[ed] up," then, Forster's homosexual stories are consigned to the flames, so he can move forward to artistic maturity. One should add, though, that while the quoted passage in Maurice is in free indirect discourse and represents Clive's position, a position from which the narrative voice maintains considerable ironic distance, the passage cited from Forster's journal seems anything but ironic.

It is not surprising that Forster should set up an opposition between homosexuality and great art, for like many modernists, he believes that great art transcends history while, as we will see at greater length in the next section of the essay, he often associates homosexuality with a movement back in time:(36) Aspects of the Novel best illustrates Forster's characteristically Modernist distrust of history. In this text, he repudiates historicist interpretations of literature and contends that rather than regarding the English novelists as influencing each other temporally, we are to think of them seated together in a circular room, writing their novels simultaneously, removed from the contingent flux of history: "We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down that stream [the stream of time] but as seated together in a room, a circular room ... [,] all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not as they sit there, think, `I live under Queen Victoria, ... I carry on the tradition of Trollope."(37) Later, he approvingly cites T. S. Eliot's contention that the "duty of the critic" is "to see [literature] not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time" (15). Significantly, Forster uses a homoerotically charged example to illustrate the difference between an immature attachment to temporality and the true critic's distrust of mere time: in a section entitled "Story," Forster declares that as a boy he "loved ... The Swiss Family Robinson ... [with its] four demigods named Fritz, Ernest, Jack, and little Franz," and that even now he could deliver "a glowing lecture" on that tale "because of the emotions [he] felt in boyhood." But, he goes on, such feelings should not be indulged in until one's "brain decays entirely." The mature critic's concern is "great literature," and "great literature" transcends temporality (21). In this example, Forster links pleasure in mere temporality, which he associates with the formal category "story" as opposed to "plot," both to pathology (the decayed brain, etc.) and the implicitly homoerotic figures of the "four demigods named Fritz, Ernst, Jack, and little Franz" of The Swiss Family Robinson. And in opposition to the suspect, immature pleasures of temporality and the male demigods of the celebrated boys' story, he sets great literature which transcends history and the temporality connected with mere "story."