Bearing the White Man's Burden: Misrecognition and Cultural Difference in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2006 by Christensen, Timothy

India and the Problem of Representation in A Passage to India

Since the publication of A Passage to India in 1922, writers and critics of the most widely disparate views have expressed the belief that E. M. Forster's final novel examines issues of representation in a characteristically modernist fashion. Lionel Trilling, in what was perhaps the most influential reading of the novel during Forster's lifetime, quotes Forster's dictum that "[possession is one with loss" in order to explain the central problems of aesthetic representation dealt with in Passage (21). Benita Parry argues that Forster examines one of the central problems of modernist representation, the confrontation of the "civilized mind" of "the modern West" with "the primitive memories dormant in man" (294). Striking a critical stance quite antithetical to that of Parry, Sara Suleri claims that A Passage to India stages a "secret attack on difference," which makes it "that archetypal novel of modernity" (108-09). More recently, David Medalie argues that Passage is a "fully fledged and seminal modernist work" because it captures the "great drama of loss and recovery" characteristic of modernism (2-3); and Mohammad Shaheen asserts that Forster's primary achievement in the novel is the articulation of "an experience of alienation expressed in the impossibility of reconciliation" that is characteristic of a modernist questioning of the principles of "order, harmony, and law which form the basis of liberal humanism" (75-77).

If a recognition of the novel's characteristically modernist examination of representational issues forms the virtually ubiquitous entry point into any critical discussion of A Passage to India, some critics have located the Marabar Caves themselves within a canon of modernist literary symbols. Such is the case when John Marx considers the Caves alongside Lily Briscoe's painting in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which is said to present the problems of a non-mimetic representation by "represent[ing] the relationship between mother and child without creating their 'likeness'" (51). This is similarly the case when Debrah Raschke situates the Marabar Caves in the company of Briscoe's painting and "Stephen Dedalus's enigmatic forging in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; [and] the culminating toothbrush hanging on the wall in Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night"-all of which capture the oscillation "between a desire for an impossible certainty . . . and a reciprocal terror that ultimately nothing can be known" (10).

Perhaps because both the novel itself, and more specifically the symbol of the Marabar Caves, have been so widely accepted as canonical examples of the modernist anxiety concerning the failure of mimetic representation, they have also frequently served as a'site of intervention for critics seeking to redefine our understanding of literary modernism. Interpretations of Passage have therefore provided a sensitive gauge of critical trends. One interpretive trend from its publication until the present day works from the presupposition that the impossibility of the complete and truthful representation of reality in language is a problem that somehow inheres in India or in Indians. It is in this vein that Trilling attributes what he perceives as the aesthetic distortion of the novel to Indians themselves. Criticizing the weakness of Aziz as a character, Trilling speculates that Indians must strike "even sensitive Westerners" as "lacking in dignity," explaining that "generations of subjection can diminish the habit of dignity and teach grown men the strategy of the little child" (24, 23). Benita Parry similarly assumes that the Marabar Caves demonstrate Forster's difficulty in representing "the archaic mind" of an "aspect of India" that is "altogether darker and more remote" than even "the Ancient Night" of "Aryan India" (287, 290). This tendency of finding the crisis of representation within Passage to be a reflection of an elusive ontological truth regarding the reality of India or Indians continues into more recent criticism. Valerie Broege's interpretation of the novel through the prism of Jungian categories transforms colonial dichotomies such as "the modern" and "the primitive," "the conscious" and "the unconscious," and "the logical" and "the emotional" into transcendental truths, once again displacing the failure of mimesis onto a failure of the "modern mind" of the English when confronted with the "primitive" nature of Indians (42-43).' Richard Clarke Sterne's account of Hindu and Muslim views of "individual moral accountability" similarly essentializes dichotomies of India and Europe, although it does so from the standpoint of contemporary multiculturalism (208-09).

While many critics have assumed alternate positions informed by opposition to the stance represented by Trilling, Parry, Broege, and Sterne, those maintaining this oppositional stance frequently accept the premise that Forster intended the representational crisis staged in A Passage to India to reflect some actual moral and political chaos indicative of Indian reality. Suleri, for instance, charges that "the failure of representation becomes transformed into a characteristically Indian failure" (a description that seems to characterize the critical reception of the novel, as discussed above, more accurately than the text itself) (107-08). Shaheen states that "throughout the novel," India signifies "some kind of 'sound and fury' muddle" that is opposed to European "order and form" (76). In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said presents an interesting variation of this argument. Said maintains that Forster, by representing the barriers to Fielding and Aziz's friendship in terms of "ontological" rather than "political" difference, merely reaffirms stereotypes about Indians by adopting the assumption that Indians cannot be taken seriously as political agents. "Forster's India," Said states, "is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful" (204). By representing difference in ontological rather than political terms, Forster effectively neutralizes Indian nationalism as a political force. Forster's Indians become a sort of "metaphysical" puzzle, and for this reason necessarily exist outside of the political realm. Said's argument, I believe, operates according to the implicit assumption that the efficacy of Indians as political agents demands their mimetic reproduction within the realm of political discourse. Because they are inaccessible to mimesis within Forster's novel, they are necessarily apolitical.