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

The Caves absolutely resist signification. They are "primal" not only in that they contain "no carving," no sign of human existence or life of any sort, but also because they cannot be made to signify. The fact that their "reputation does not depend on human speech" is emphasized by the reiteration of the term "nothing." We are told that if "mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil"; that the Caves have "nothing ... inside them"; that "nothing attaches to them" (125,124). The Marabar Caves designate a space of primordial absence that is quite beyond the inscription of meaning. They are described exclusively in terms of negation-what they lack, what is absent. Even their physical shape is described in these terms, for they have "neither ceiling nor floor"; they are "empty" and "hollow" (125). And while the nothingness that reiteratively defines the Caves is earlier said to constitute the "underdrift" of Godbole's failed attempt to explain the Caves to Adela (76), this absence nevertheless resists the reduction to an element in any discourse, or a function in any signifying chain. The Caves, strictly speaking, do not "mean" anything, and the various ways that one might try to force them to signify are, one by one, rejected. The narrator explains, for instance, that a Marabar Cave "mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely," and can do nothing else (125). This image alerts us to the fact that the Marabar Caves will invariably frustrate Adela's wish to "see" India, for it suggests the breakdown of mimetic representation; a Cave cannot reflect any prior and external reality, but can only infinitely attest to its own nullity. The Caves, in other words, simply cannot be reduced to a mimetic function. On the other hand, it would be equally futile to understand the Caves in terms of a return of the repressed, or a haunting: one cannot describe the Caves as "uncanny" because this term "suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit" (124). The Marabar Caves therefore both precede "spirit" and exclude it: they both come before ghosts and refuse the possibility of a haunting, or the return of something dead, excluded, or repressed, for "they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen" (again, we are made aware that Adela will not "see" India here) (124).10 They cannot even be distinguished one from the other, for the very process of self-differentiation would suggest the possibility of meaning-one of the Caves might be set in relation to another-and as is frequently reiterated, the Caves cannot be made to signify.

If Adela's search for an ideal resolution to the strange sense of incompleteness she experiences in her interactions with Indians takes a predominantly visual form prior to her experience of the Caves (her desire to "see the real India"), her fall from an innocent belief in an imaginary visual resolution is marked by an encounter with the asignifying kernel of nonsense within language: "Bourn" (208).11 Upon entering the Caves, Adela is disconcerted by their effect of reducing all sound to an indistinguishable echo. As her guide explains to her, "to shout is useless" when inside the Caves, for "a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own" (much as it "mirrors" only "its own darkness") (154). And like the Caves themselves, the echo is not simply lacking in meaning, but prior to meaning, for the narrator describes the echo as "before time" and "before space also" (208). We are therefore not surprised when meaning emerges from the aural void of "[b]oum" in the form of an ideologically predominant form of imaginary resolution: race. When Adela is confronted by her own voice reduced to an infinitely undifferentiated echo upon which all attempts at making meaning shatter, she flees from the Cave (208). Her English compatriots have no difficulty, however, in explaining Adela's panic upon encountering the primal "[b]oum" inside the Cave: they determine, without hesitation, that Aziz attempted to rape her.12 Adela, within the cultural imaginary of English racism, is transformed into an archetypal virginal white woman, "an English girl fresh from England," whose sexual purity is under siege by Aziz, who in turn becomes the manifestation of an obscenely appetitive racial other who steals pleasure that is rightfully one's own (165).