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A Passage to India: Analysis and Revaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Gertrude M. White
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Extract

A Passage to India, apparently the last, and certainly the best of E. M. Forster's novels, was published twenty-nine years ago, in, 1924. It was accorded instant recognition, as a fine novel and as a perceptive and sympathetic treatment of the problem of “Anglo-India,” The years that followed saw the book established as a modern classic. It has reached a wide audience in the Everyman, Modern Library, and Penguin editions, and has challenged as well the attention of able critics. But, though the novel has received its just dues in many ways, there remains one aspect—and, I think, a fundamental one—still unexplored. It is acknowledged on all sides that thought is the most important element in Forster's novels; yet the dialectical pattern of A Passage to India has never, to my knowledge, been fully and specifically recognised. This omission has resulted not only in a certain incompleteness in critical accounts of the book, but in not a little confusion and obscurity as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 641 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 This point has been made by virtually every critic who has written on Forster. See specifically the following studies: E K. Brown, “Revival of E. Îœ. Forster,” Yale Review, N.S. XXXIII (June 1944), 668-681; Virginia Woolf, “The Novels of E. Îœ. Forster,” Atlantic Monthly, CXL. (Nov. 1927), 642-648; Lord David Cecil, “E. Îœ. Forster,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXXIII (Jan. 1949), 60-65; Morton D. Zabel, “E. Îœ. Forster,” The Nation, cxlvii (22 Oct. 1938), 413-416; Rex Warner, E. Îœ. Forster (London: Supplement to British Book News, 1950); et al.

2 Peter Burra, “The Novels ot E. Îœ. Forster,” The Nineteenth Century and After, CXVI (Nov. 1934), 583.

3 Lionel Trilling, Ε. M. Forster (London, 1944), p. 9.

4 Pp. 581-594. This article waa later reprinted as the introduction to the Everyman edition of A Passage to India (London, 1942), pp. xi-xivii. Forster himself hat praised it

5 Ε. K. Brown, “E. M. Forster and the Contemplative Novel,” Univ. of Toronto Quart., III (April 1934), 349-361.

6 Dorothy M. Hoare, “E. M. Forster,” Some Studies in the Modern Novel (London, 1938), PP. 68-97.

7 Ranjee G. Shahani, “Some British I Admire,” Asiatic Rev., XLII (Jury 1946), 273.

8 F. R. Leavis, “Ε. M. Forster,” Scrutiny, VII (Sept. 1938), 185. This article offers a perfect illustration of the misunderstanding into which even a competent critic may be led by a neglect of the novel's pattern of thought. Mr. Leavis selects, for a criticism of Footer's style, the paragraph In Chapter XXVI which describes the reactions of Fielding and Hamidullah to the news of Mrs. Moore's death, directing particular attention to the “lapse in taste” responsible for the final phrase of the sentence: “How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?” This is what he says: “Once one's critical notice has fastened on it… can one do anything but reflect how extraordinary it is that to fine a writer should be able, in such a place, to be to little certain just how serious he is? For surely that run-out of the sentence cannot be justified in terms of the dramatic mood Mr. Forster is offering to render?” (pp. 198-199). An understanding of the novel's thought and peculiar method makes it clear, on the contrary, that this phrase is one more echo in a book of echoes; as will be obvious to anyone who troubles to read carefully the account of Godbole's vision of Mrs. Moore, the wasp, and the stone in the final section of the novel. What Mr. Leavis describes as a fault in style is, in terms of thought, mood, and structure, a conscions, deliberate, and effective device.

9 E.B. C. Jones, “Ε. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf,” The English Novelists, ed. Derek Verschoyte (London, 1936), p. 262.

10 Rose Macaulay, The Writing of E. M. Forster (New York, 1938), p. 10.

11 Leaves of Grass, Incl ed. (New York, 1924), pp. 343-351.

12 “Author Notes,” A Ρassage to India(London : Everyman, 1942), p. xxxi.

13 A Ρassage to India (New York: Modem Library, 1940), p. 8 All future page references to the novel are to this edition.

14 “Îœorton D Zabel, ‘A Forster Revival‘” (review of Trilling), The CLVII (7 Aug. 1943), 158-159.