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

In Forster's India, moreover, the cultural other who always seems to be concealing an essential truth for some unfathomable reason returns to us what we experience as a distorted image of ourselves. The problem of culture within A Passage to India is, then, fundamentally one of misrecognition: the recognition of oneself in the field of the Other is always shown to be a misrecognition, in which some essential feature, the very thing that defines the truth of one's being, is withheld or concealed.7 Yet, it is from this very sense of distortion that one is born as English or Indian. Forster, the self-proclaimed humanist, foregrounds this problem of cultural misrecognition in a way that can be taken as a devastating critique of the limitations of humanism when confronted with the problem of empire.8 Good intentions, based on the desire to fully accept the cultural other as an equal within the symbolic domain through a sympathetic crosscultural understanding, is entirely inadequate in British India whenever such an attempt fails to take account of the dimension of misrecognition. Thus, we are warned that Fielding's dictum of "good will plus culture and intelligence" is "a creed ill suited to Chandrapore," and we are given repeated demonstrations of its failure (62). When Mrs. Moore attempts to overcome the hostility between Indians and English through a sympathetic identification with Aziz at the beginning of the novel, she exposes the inadequacy of this doctrine. Despite her good intentions, she is struck by the accuracy of her son Ronny Heaslop's unflattering description of Aziz as she recalls her initial meeting with Aziz in the mosque. She concedes that Ronny's assessment of Aziz's behavior "was all true, but how false a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain" (34). While attempting to distance herself from Ronny's stereotypically Anglo-Indian assumption that Aziz, in being friendly to her, is merely trying to get something from her, or "to score," she is nevertheless disturbed by the separation of what she perceives to be the facts about Aziz's behavior (which, she must concede, Ronny has entirely right) from the essential truth about Aziz himself, which somehow eludes Ronny's description despite its factual accuracy (33).

Moreover, when Aziz's "essential life" becomes incommensurable with any "summary" of his actions or any list of facts about him, the dimension of misrecognition reasserts itself. Mrs. Moore must ultimately concede that there is, indeed, something "behind" all that "the native" does, something disturbingly in excess of the totality of all of his words or actions (33). This sense of something essential but absent from her experience of Aziz, something not present but definitive of who he is, is succeeded by the thought that "no Indian animal has any sense of an interior" (35). Mrs. Moore, in short, becomes aware of a sort of absence at the center of her idea of Aziz, and her response, much like that of less liberal and less sympathetic Anglo-Indians such as her son, is to resolve her sudden awareness of a disturbing lack of "an interior" by assuming that it is some quality inherent in India and Indians themselves. And while Mrs. Moore appears to be satisfied with her resolution of this dilemma in the scene, this realization anticipates her obviously much less successful encounter with the echo of the Marabar Caves, which heralds her decline into a state of cynical and selfish nihilism.