Self and Cosmos: Religion as Strategy and Exploration in E. M. Forster

SELF AND COSMOS: Religion as Strategy and Exploration In the Novels of E. M. ForsterAuthor(s): EUGENE WEBBSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 186-203Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41177991 .

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SELF AND COSMOS: Religion as Strategy and Exploration In the Novels of E. M. Forster

EUGENE WEBB

LITERARY CRITICS have had considerable difficulty dealing with the relationship between literature and

religion, and the trouble many of them have had with the question of E. M. Forsteťs interest in religious issues offers a possibly illuminating illustration of this problem. One writer on Forster, referring to an address by him entitled "Art for Art's Sake," said:

It is in this order that Forster believes, the order created by the artist in a work of art. The mystical unification of man with the divine order Forster drops as soon as he mentions it; he does not dismiss it entirely, but shrugs it off with the implication that this is not the way for himself; as we shall see, Forster has little inclination for personal mysticism. His inclination is directed strongly, however, toward the order created by the artist.1

This is a fairly typical response of critics, not only to the work of E.M. Forster but to literature and to art in general: the modern artist is too sophisticated, from this point of view, to have a genuine interest in religion in any form, rather he creates in his art a true order that replaces the false order to be found in religions. Another critic, Frederick C. Crews, is more perceptive of Forsteťs concern with religious issues, but he too finds this

Mr. Webb, a previous contributor to Soundings, is professor of Comparative Literature and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. His most recent book is The Dark Dove: The Sacred and the Secular in Modern Literature (1975).

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side of Forster difficult to account for except as an aberration. "The importance of religious questions in E. M. Forsteťs novels," he says, "though easy to underestimate, is impossible to neglect entirely. . . . Everyone knows that he is an agnostic, but his agnosticism is complicated by romantic evasions, by what we might call a thwarted fascination with the Absolute."2 Forster, that is, is an agnostic, which is to say he is basically sound, but he has this tendency to keep raising religious questions. So we will scold him a little for such evasions, but forgive him, too, for the sake of his basic soundness and of his very good, if somewhat flawed, books.

The sure giveaway in Crews' statement, of course, is the phrase that "everyone knows" Forster was "an agnostic" - a giveaway that something is being left unanalyzed on the grounds that it is too obvious for further discussion. Instead, the anomalous element in Forster that might seem to call for explanation is exorcised by the use of the formula "romantic evasions." This method of exorcism is used frequently among literary critics, and it usually serves effectively to enable them to con- tinue to study and enjoy writers whom they could not otherwise accommodate within their customary critical schemata. To reopen the question of Forsteťs interest in religion makes me, I must admit, somewhat uncomfortable, remembering what be- came of the vogue of Chinese gardening in eighteenth century England. That vogue was founded on the misconception that Chinese gardening had no aesthetic principles other than freedom and naturalness, and when Sir William Chambers finally demonstrated that the asymmetry of the Chinese garden was based on strict principles of its own, the vogue quickly waned. I am comforted, though, by the reflection that literary critics are nothing if not ingenious; if they want Forster in the canon, they will certainly find a way to keep him there. What I really hope is that in this essay I may present the issue of the modern writer's relation to religious concerns in a way that will enable us to see it in a broader, more accommodating perspective.

The issue is, after all, not simply the aberrations or evasions of a particular author. It is that of the relationship between the imagination as such and man's deep and enduring need for a cosmos, for a vision of the universe that will enable him to experience it as a home. The idea that Forster, or any other artist, is mainly interested in the order of art and not in the



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question of man's relationship to the universe is based on too simple a picture of the relationship between imagination and life. This is perhaps the product of a widespread tendency among modern critics to see the universe as without order and to see art as a factitious order substituted for real disorder. One might say that modern literary criticism has a tendency toward a version of Gnostic dualism: the idea that the real universe is alien to man and that his salvation is to be found only in an inner life in which he turns away from the world. If this is so, it is not surprising; it is a tendency frequently to be found among mem- bers of the intellectual élites of various societies, especially when they feel themselves lacking control over the social order and over their own destinies within it. This was the class and situation that gave rise to the Gnostic movement of the ancient classical world as well as to similar dualisms in other times and places. In the modern world it is a point of view particularly prevalent among literary critics, who give expression to it without, for the most part, even realizing they are doing so; it serves as a cognitive frame based on assumptions that seem so self-evident they go largely unnoticed.

A valuable corrective to this tendency may be found in the work of social scientists who have made a study of the way man constructs and uses the various cognitive frames that are possible for him, especially those who have explored the phenomenology and sociology of religion, since it is in his religious systems that man has made his most concerted effort to picture and understand the universe he lives in. Mircea Eliade, Clifford Geertz, and Peter L. Berger have all demonstrated how basic in man is the need for a cosmos and how fundamental a part this need plays in the life of any society.3 As Berger describes it, every human society is an enterprise of world-building, and religion is an essential element in that enterprise; religion is the positing of a sacred - that is to say, a phenomenologically objective and compelling - cosmos.4 Or as Geertz puts it, the essence of religion is the effort to interpret a human system of values as being grounded in the structure of reality.5 The end result of the process these investigators describe is that man, through his imaginative interpretations, constructs a world that becomes reality because it is woven into the fabric of the society he lives in. There it takes on an objectivity that enables it to confront its creator with an independent life of its own and to create him in



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turn through its influence not only on his outward behavior but on his inmost thoughts and feelings.

Now it is true that in our own period in history the social world and its implicit world-views lack much of the stable objectivity they have had in more traditional societies. This is particularly the case with the intellectual élite - among whom both writers and critics figure prominently. People in this group are acutely aware of their own subjectivity, and they are distrustful of the element of alienation or mystification they see as the source of the stability of traditional religious visions. There remain many, however, especially among imaginative writers, who still feel the need for a vision of cosmos and try through their art to create one. They have great difficulty in doing so, of course, because the modernity of their consciousness makes it impossible for them to fully lose themselves in the visions they create, and their critical audience has even more resistance to this than they. If a Yeats, for example, wishes to create a cosmos governed by gyres and lunar phases and populated with transmigrating souls and a quasi-pantheon of ghostly instructors, his readers will require him to present with it also a theory of masks that will enable them to believe he does not take his system as seriously as he tries to make it appear. Whatever vision the writer presents, he must also undermine. He may write out of a deep thirst for real being, a need for a home to live in, but he must deny it in the end lest he become ludicrous, not only to his audience, but to himself as well. To succeed, therefore, he must fail. The adherent of a traditional religious belief system may escape partially from this dilemma - T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, for example, felt no need to forgive themselves for being Christians, even if some of their critics have thought they should - but for the writer in the characteristically modern position of having to construct a new vision of his own, there is no escape. His critics will praise his destructive ironies, but they will not know what to do with the constructive, exploratory side of his effort, and to avoid embarrassment they will usually do their best to overlook it.

This, I would like to suggest, is what has happened in critical discussion of Forster. Forsteťs real choice as a writer and thinker was not between agnosticism and evasions, but between an inherited cosmos and an individually constructed one. He was an agnostic with regard to the first, and a serious religious explorer with regard to the second. To understand Forster's art, there-



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fore, we must take seriously, whether we agree with his conclu- sions or not, the effort of world-construction that he seriously intended.

This observation applies, as a matter of fact, not only to För- ster, but also to a large number of other modern writers who have been confronted with the same situation and have made similar choices. Art is not a mere game, but a struggle for meaning. Because of the decline of belief in traditional religions in the modern period and the decline in imaginative cogency of their symbol systems, many writers have felt driven back upon themselves to find a meaningful vision of human life in relation to the universe and have tried to work out such visions in their art. These have perforce been highly individual visions, but it is of the very nature of this type of effort that it must also seek to win an audience. As Berger describes it, "the world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise. "6For the vision of cosmos to become objective and stable, it must become a social phenomenon; its subjective reality hangs, in Bergeťs words, "on the thin thread of conversation."7 The individual visions of the modern writers who have made serious efforts at world-construction, writers such as Blake, Yeats, Rilke, Stevens, Mishima, Mann, and Forster among many others, amount to private religions attempting to become public - religions because they pose and explore answers to ultimate questions, and because they employ the resources of the writer's art to clothe their visions with numinous power in order to drive them home to the hearts as well as the minds of their readers.

The effort of cosmic construction involved in the creation of these visions is an attempt to define and give reality to a world in which the self can live. To understand what an individual writer, in our case Forster, is doing in works that undertake this task of creation, we must attend both to the implicit cosmos he projects and to the forces in the self that he is trying to accommodate within it. Especially in a writer such as Forster, who feels himself in some ways anomalous because his inherited religion excluded from its framework of values certain powerful forces within him, the alternative religious vision becomes a psychological strategy for building a home in which his whole self can find a place.

The recent publication of Forster's novel on the theme of homosexuality, Maurice (written 1913-1914), presents clearly



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the conflict Forster felt between some drives of his inner self and his ancestral religion. Clive Durham, a central character in the book and Maurice Hall's original mentor and first lover, is de- scribed as having been "obliged to throw over Christianity." "Those who base their conduct on what they are rather than upon what they ought to be,*' the narrator goes on to say, "always must throw it over in the end, and besides, between Clive's temperament [i.e. his homosexual tendencies] and that religion there is a secular feud."8 In the light of this novel it is understandable that Forster would in his essay, What I Believe (1939), treat traditional religious belief as a form of coercion and espouse a tolerant, anti-ascetic individualism.9 To decide on the basis of the type of statement this essay represents that Forster was simply an agnostic would, however, be unjustified. Just as Maurice makes clear his quarrel with the Christian religion, it also shows us by the end that it is something of a lover's quarrel. Clive Durham wanted Christianity to compromise with him and in an effort to find common ground sought out examples of "masculine love" in the Bible, such as the friendship of David and Jonathan and the reference to "the disciple that Jesus loved." And at the end of the book, after an Anglican pastor tries to thwart his efforts to hold onto another lover, Maurice reflects "that there is no secret of humanity which, from a wrong angle, orthodoxy has not viewed, that religion is far more acute than science, and if it only added judgment to insight would be the greatest thing in the world."10 Forster's body of novels were an effort to create just such a potent combination of judgment and insight, and one that would have room in it for all of what seemed to him good in human nature.

To suggest that Forster's novels were as a whole a sort of covert apologia for his own homosexuality would be, however, to overlook the real complexity and comprehensiveness of his concerns. Even where his own sexual anomalousness may lie behind his sympathy for the restiveness against social norms of some of his characters, their struggles for freedom are not just a mask for a special interest of his own. Rather his own suffering of intol- erance gave him insight into the similar sufferings of others, even when the particular forms taken by their conflicts with society were quite diverse. In general, what he experienced as his own creative disagreement with convention gave him a sym- pathetic interest in all forms of responsible originality, even



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some as simple as the elder Mr. Emerson's kindness to a young lady to whom he has not yet been introduced, or the young lady's own later perplexity over whether to marry the imaginative, ever so slightly socially suspect young George Emerson or his ascetic, more acceptable rival, Cecil Vyse.

I use the word "responsible" in connection with originality, because it points to one of the fundamental tensions Forster has to accommodate in the vision he constructs. On the one hand, he continually gives his sympathy to characters who challenge conventions of various sorts, while on the other he seeks balance and stability in society. This is why in Howards End (1911) he shows us two Schlegel sisters, both of whom are original in various ways, but one of whom is more responsible and balanced in this originality than the other. Helen goes to extremes in her quarrel with the standard social order of the Edwardian middle class, and in the process does a good deal of harm to herself and others. Margaret, on the other hand, reaches out to the convention-bound Wilcox males, whom Helen cannot tolerate, and humanizes them. In doing so she makes herself the true heir of the first Mrs. Wilcox and makes of Howards End a home where all extremes can meet and know, at least momentarily, a promise of peace and fulfillment.

There will not be space in this brief essay to do more than glance over a few of Forster's better known novels to see how his program of cosmic construction works out in practice. I have mentioned Maurice and Howards End; we shall also consider A Room With a View and A Passage to India. It is interesting to note that in each of these works Forster brings elements from various religious traditions into the very heart of his picture. In Maurice, of course, he brings Christianity in in order to criticize it, but in the others he uses traditional religious images and ideas as part of his constructive effort: to clothe his individually constructed visions with an aura of the sacred and thereby to give them an emotional force that will, in Berger's phrase, "objectivate" them and underscore the seriousness with which he intends them. In Howards End, for example, his task is to unite the poles of human nature, the passion and the prose, as the novel puts it. He builds into the world ofthat book two means to this end, both of which are associated with religious traditions. One is the personal, intuitive gift that Margaret shares with Mrs. Wilcox and that enables her to embrace the opposi tes in a single vision; the other



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is the fulfilling, reconciling spirit of a place, Howards End itself. The opposition is represented in the book by a number of dichotomies - Germany vs. England, mysticism vs. business, personal relations vs. the outer world, and so on. The polar tensions these dichotomies represent cannot be resolved by any compromise. "No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything," Margaret reflects. "It was only to be found by con- tinuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility."11 The resolution, when it come, takes the form of a personal attitude, an intuitive combination of insight and love. It is significant that the characters who embody this resolution, Mar- garet and Mrs. Wilcox, are people of definite religious inclination but whose religious orientations are not conventional: Mrs. Wilcox is of Quaker stock and feels that the Church of England is lacking in "inward light"; Margaret reads Theosophy.12 How- ards End, the place whose spirit fosters the type of conciliation Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox seek, has itself been hallowed through pagan cult. Mrs. Wilcox tells Margaret about the pigs' teeth stuck into the trunk "long ago" by "the country people," and Margaret responds that she loves "folklore and all festering superstitions."13 Toward the end of the book Margaret, who is growing into Mrs. Wilcox's successor, begins to see for herself the reconciling vision of which Mrs. Wilcox and Howards End had been the vehicles. She sees all of the characters, and the place too, united in Mrs. Wilcox: "I feel that you and I and Henry [Wilcox] are only fragments ofthat woman's mind," she says to her sister, Helen. "She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it."14

Behind the whole framework of thought of Howards End lies the background of philosophical idealism that dominated the British universities until after World War I. According to this system of thought, life tends to divide itself on various levels into patterns of opposition between a thesis and its antithesis and then to develop toward a reunion of the opposites in a higher synthesis. The entire process is the drama of the gradual prog- ress of Absolute Being from unconsciousness to consciousness, with man the spearhead of this movement. Man's awakening to Being is the Absolute's awakening to itself. In Howards End, in the passage just quoted, Mrs. Wilcox is all-embracing because her vision is a participation in that of the Absolute. Conse-



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quently, Margaret says that Mrs. Wilcox's vision can never perish, even though Mrs. Wilcox herself died some time ago. This vision is also the basis of the book's fundamental optimism. Whatever follies humans fall into are only elements in the pattern of oppositions that will ultimately be transcended in the awakened life of the Aboslute. "We are evolving," Margaret reflects in another one of her moments of insight, "in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate."15 Theology dares not contemplate man's true end, because traditional religion is based on a fundamental distrust of human nature, and its conception of the religious life is repressive. Christianity tries to thwart the movements of Na- ture within man's depths; true religion, as Forster sketches it, sees beyond opposition and sees in the manifold forms that human life takes the motions of Being awakening to itself.

This optimistic pantheism is also presented in A Room With a View, which was published two years earlier in 1908. Here the idealistic framework is not explicit, but the presence of Nature as a divine force working towards its own and man's fulfillment is clear, and in this case it is underscored by the frequent use of images from classical paganism. When Lucy Honeychurch pre- tends to George Emerson that she does not love him, she is said to be sinning against passion and truth and therefore against Eros and Pallas Athene. These deities are the symbolic embodi- ments of the forces working within Nature or Being as it moves through them toward its goal. That its ultimate end would be the awakened life of the Absolute is not made so explicit in this book as in Howards End, but it is clear that the forces through which it works are of irresistible power while at the same time being entirely immanent within nature: "They have sinned against Eros and Pallas Athene," the narrator tells us, "and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged."16

The critics who claim that Forster may be adequately de- scribed by so simple a term as "agnostic," should attend carefully to his use of this sort of imagery. It is not at all merely decorative, but makes serious statements about Forster's conception of the ultimate meaning of human life and its cosmic setting.

Another useful corrective to that limited perception of Forster's concerns would be to attend with similar care to the figure of the elder Mr. Emerson. As a militant agnostic and also a



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person whom Forster clearly wishes us to like for his spon- taneous kindness and generosity - in a word, for his love - he would seem the perfect picture of the sort of E. M. Forster many critics believe in, and yet if we look carefully at the way Forster presents him to us we can see that Emerson also suffers precisely the limitations of vision that are characteristic of the critics themselves. The narrator, on the other hand, does not. The way the narrator depicts Mr. Emerson reveals clearly the broader scope and deeper insight of Forster's own vision.

Mr. Emerson is clearly a good man - the finest in the book after, perhaps, his son - but there are certain profound needs in human nature that he does not fully understand, although he does grow in this respect as the book progresses. A key passage for understanding his limitations is a conversation he has with Lucy Honeychurch early in the novel. Having made the ac- quaintance of the Emersons at the pension in Florence, Lucy meets them again the next day in the Church of Santa Croce. George Emerson is fascinated by the frescos of Giotto, which disturbs his father, who knows that his son suffers some deep malaise that is associated somehow with this very sort of interest. Mr. Emerson comments on this to Lucy:

How can he be unhappy when he is strong and alive? What more is one to give him? And think how he has been brought up- free from all the superstition and ignorance that lead men to hate one another in the name of God. With such an education as that, I thought he was bound to grow up happy.17

We already know, however, what it is that holds George in its grip: on the wall of his room he keeps a sheet of paper on which he has written an enormous question mark.

The narrator tells us much later that Lucy cannot see that Mr. Emerson is in reality "profoundly religious."18 That she, and Mr. Emerson himself, cannot see this is understandable, since the form his deep religiousness takes is in part that of an attack on most of what in their world is conventionally meant by the term "religion." It attacks, that is, all systematic suppression of Nature's vitality. It is profoundly religious, on the other hand, in its affirmation of, and indeed reverence for, those sacred ener- gies. When the Reverend Mr. Eager denounces the public affec- tionateness of an Italian coachman and his girl friend, it is no accident that Mr. Emerson springs to their defense, and in doing so draws on the language of religion:



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"Leave them alone," Mr. Emerson begged the chaplain, of whom he stood in no awe. "Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there? To be driven by lovers - a king might envy us, and if we part them it's more like sacrilege than anything I know."19

In the passage in which the narrator describes Mr. Emerson as profoundly religious, he goes on to say that Emerson differed from the Reverend Mr. Beebe "chiefly by his acknowledgment of passion." One conversation Emerson has with Mr. Beebe makes clear the nature and extent of this difference. "The Gar- den of Eden," says Emerson, "which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies."20 Mr. Beebe, in response, "disclaimed placing the Garden of Eden anywhere." Not merely disagreeing, he fails even to understand the metaphoric language Emerson is using to reach beyond conventional religiosity to express his own genuine sense of what is sacred. It is interesting to compare Forsteťs own statement in What I Believe:

I am against asceticism myself. I am with the old Scotchman who wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world.21

Whatever is good in the world of A Room With a View grows directly out of Nature's life; the bad is that which is not in har- mony with Nature. This applies even to something as seeming- ly nonnatural as architecture. Windy Corner, the Honeychurch house, for example, is inelegant in comparison with others, but because it grew out of the family's "honest" love of their surroundings, it is an expression of Nature: "Other houses in the neighbourhood," we are told, "had been built by expensive architects, over others their inmates had fidgeted sedulously, yet all these suggested the accidental, the temporary; while Windy Corner seemed as inevitable as an ugliness of Nature's own creation."22 This principle applies all the more to human relations. When George and Lucy finally marry, it is the triumph of a force that is more than simply human. At the end of the book, the two young people are in Florence once again, on their honeymoon. From the window of the pension they hear the song of a coachman like the one to whose defense George's father once rose. Describing their happiness, the narrator tells us, "Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced




passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this."23 If this is not Dante's Tamor che muove il sol e l'altre stelle," it is nevertheless that of an animated cosmos pursuing its destiny.

Forster is no Pollyanna in his paganism. Beside "the great god Pan" he also places "the little god Pan," the one who "presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics."24 He knows that conflict is inevitable and that humans are as susceptible to the temptation to pettiness and voluntary blindness as they are to the call of fulfillment, but the driving force of the cosmos he creates for us will never be finally defeated. Though many men and women will turn away from it, it will always find a select few, Forster's "aristocrats,"25 fit to be vehicles of its life.

Those who read as a story of defeat Forster's acknowledged masterpiece, Л Passage to India, should keep in mind this distinc- tion between the great god Pan and the little one. The little one has quite a romp among the Turtons and the Burtons of Anglo- India as well as among the Indians themselves, but he is not the ultimate power in Forster's cosmos. Rather his presence in the vision Forster creates tempers ultimate optimism with a sense of reality and also makes clear the magnitude of the cosmic enterprise of which a few men and women become the spearheads.

What makes A Passage to India both grander in scope and more critically problematic than the other books we have considered is that it sees more clearly the full complexity of the issues it takes up, and examines them in much greater depth. All of Forster's novels try to deal with the dilemma of creative disorder vs. the necessity and value of order, but A Passage to India is the only one to project this dilemma onto a worldwide scene, presenting its tensions as elements in a larger drama of clashes between radi- cally different cultures with fully articulated religious traditions expressing their deepest concerns. In the process it also offers, more clearly than any other modern novel, a critique not only of particular religions and world-views, but also of religion as such as an expression of human hopes.

A Passage to India is Forster's most concerted attempt at a total vision that will be able to do justice to all of the heart's loyalties and longings, to accommodate the whole self. All of Forster's novels show a concern with a balance of conflicting forces, but this one presents more tensions that need to be brought into equilibrium than did the others. There are, for example, the



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conflicting cultural ideals of Britain and India, the tension between institutional demands and those of personal relation^, or between monotheistic and polytheistic, or rationalist and irra- tionalist religion, and so on. Behind all of these there is probably the tension within Forster himself between his desire for liberty for his highly personal, anomalous impulses on the one hand, and on the other the insistent humanitarian, and therefore necessarily social, sympathies of his heart. He seeks spontaneity in personal relations, but also, for the sake of those very relations, he is obliged to cherish society and public order along with the institutions that preserve them.

The complexity of the forms these tensions take frequently leads to misunderstandings, particularly to oversimplifications, on the part of readers. The trial of Aziz, for example, who has been accused of molesting a young Englishwoman and is prose- cuted for it by the British, is frequently interpreted as simply an example of the exploitation of Indians by British colonialists. The real issue in the trial is much more complex. Aziz is falsely and hastily accused, but through an honest mistake; when the mistake is corrected, it is not a triumph of India over the British raj, but rather of the British system of legal justice administered by the Indian, but British-trained, Mr. Das over the hysteria of those who so inadequately represent the rule of law.

There is similar complexity in the book's treatment of religions. Altogether something like five or six religious views are presented, depending on how one counts them. As these are subjected to searching analysis in the course of the novel, one may get an impression of mounting confusion. If, however, the reader attends carefully to what the novel is doing, the result is actually that his understanding of man's religious enterprise becomes highly differentiated. The possibility of mistaking differentiation for confusion may explain why some critics could criticize the book for offering

" no religious or mystical solution for the problems it propounds," and could say that "although Forster has a certain tenderness for religion, even this tenderness is for its aesthetic qualities rather than for its ethical or theological content."26 This is a common response to Forster's way of handling religious themes, but it grows out of a limited conception of what religion involves. The important question about the religious vision of A Passage to India is not whether it provides answers of a recognizably "ethical or theological" sort,



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as these are commonly conceived, but rather to what extent and in what manner it posits a sacred cosmos within the work. Forster's novel definitely posits a sacred cosmos; the manner in which it does so is subtle, however, and it involves first a critical analysis of a range of religious views.

These total, as I said, some five or six, but for our purposes they may be classified into three groups. One is the rationalist group. Interestingly enough, this group includes not only the secular agnosticism of Fielding, but also the Muslim religion of Aziz as well as the Christianity that Mrs. Moore believes in before the episode in the caves. I classify all of these in the rationalist grouping since each of them attempts to create order through definition and exclusion: to list the ninety-nine attributes of God, for example, to characterize God as love, to employ the "architecture of question and answer," to differentiate between good and evil, spiritual and unspiritual, and so on. It is because the book focuses on this group in the beginning that its first section is entitled "Mosque." The second section, "Caves," presents the antidote to the rationalist approach: total nihilism. This is a vision of a negative infinity, a universe completely devoid of value. In the Marabar Hills, not far from the city of Chandra- pore, the center of British power, are a virtual infinity of small, perfectly spherical caves joined by low narrow tunnels. A visitor to the caves, we are told, returns "uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. He finds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bee's nest or a bat distinguishes one from another."27 One visitor who does have a profound experience, even if one she is unable to describe, is Mrs. Moore. She enters the caves a vague but serious Christian and comes out with her vision of a humanly meaningful universe completely shattered, and we the readers participate imaginatively in that experience. By the time we have seen her Christianity dissolve - bereft of both its intellectual cogency and its emotional power - we are ready for Forster's effort of positive construction in the third and last section of the book, the "Temple" section.

The central focus of this section is on a Hindu rite which shows both the comprehensiveness and the relative lack of order that characterize Hinduism. There is room for every possible god, including the now deified "Esmiss Esmoor," and for her long



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since abandoned ethical and theological principle, now garbled as "God si love." The result, of course, is universal muddledom, "a frustration of reason and form."28 It is a step toward inclu- siveness - here there is room for mere "fun" and there would be room also for Eros in all of his forms - but it cannot be interpreted as the book's one and only answer to all of the questions it poses, any more than can the final nihilism of Mrs. Moore. The trial episode and the implicit judgment it made on moral indif- ferentism - represented most dramatically in that section by the indifference of the Hindu, Dr. Godbole, to the fate of Aziz - make it clear that the novel would demand more than that from any final answer.

As it is, the final answer is not defined, only sketched out roughly through various devices. The Hindu ceremony is one of these. We are told that as Mrs. Moore's ship sailed out of Bombay harbor, thousands of coconut palms waved farewell and called to her, "So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final?"29 It is not entirely clear just how much she heard or understood of what they were saying, but of course we hear it, and in the final section we see how India handles the sort of challenge the caves offer. Moral-theistic religions such as Chris- tianity and Islam, with their belief in transcendent deity and absolute imperatives, cannot withstand the vision of the caves; their projection of human values onto what E. R. Goodenough has called "the tremendum"30 simply collapses when chaos shows its true face. Hinduism, on the other hand, as we see it operating in the ceremony of Gokol Ashtami, projects a mask which, though human in its lineaments, is more flexible and accommodating. There is room in the Hindu vision for fun, squalor, and general "muddledom," while it still manages to see the universe as gracious to man.

What the ceremony shows us, however, is clearly a projection, and no simple projection all by itself can succeed in positing in a credible way a sacred cosmos. By itself it would be only wishful thinking. There must also be some indication that the vision it suggests of the graciousness, the human meaningfulness, of the universe has some ground in reality. This necessary element Forster provides in the figures of Mrs. Moore's two children by her first marriage, Ralph and Stella - especially Ralph, since he is the one we see more clearly.

What Ralph has that is important is a faculty of intuition. At




several points in the book we are prepared for the theme of intuition or extrasensory perception. Mrs. Moore appears to have had this faculty too. At the time of the automobile accident, for example, she has a momentary intuition of a ghost; then later we hear the Nawab Bahadur's story of how the ghost of a man he had once accidentally killed has been waiting for him for years at precisely that spot on the Marabar Road. Also, after the trial when Adela and Fielding wonder how Mrs. Moore could have known what really happened to Adela in the cave, the word "telepathy" comes up. Both are embarrassed by it and agree to drop the subject, but the language the narrator uses suggests that this is only because their own vision is too limited to encom- pass the real possibilities of the universe: "The pert, meagre word fell to the ground. Telepathy? What an explanation! Better withdraw it, and Adela did so. She was at the end of her spiritual tether, and so was he. Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? They could not tell. . . . Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell."31

We never know for sure, any more than Adela and Fielding, whether Mrs. Moore's intuitions were genuine or imagined, but in the case of Ralph we see the reality of his intuitive understanding quite clearly. When Aziz treats him for a bee-sting, he is impressed that Ralph can tell intuitively whether a stranger is or is not a friend, but what is far more significant is that when Aziz takes him out on the lake to see the ceremony, it is Ralph who leads him directly to the one spot from which the sacred image of the dead Rajah can be seen, so that Aziz feels "that his com- panion was not so much a visitor as a guide."32 Here are sacred forces to which Ralph is attuned; between him and them there is a real invisible link.

Both Ralph and Stella are said to find in the Hindu atmo- sphere of Mau some soothing for their "restlessness," and in the case of Stella it also has the effect of bringing her closer physi- cally to Fielding, who by this time is married to her. (It is characteristic of Forster's thought that transcendent divinity is seen as a divisive force, putting the flesh at odds with the spirit and one human being at odds with another, whereas immanent divinity brings opposites into union.)

Hinduism is not final truth, of course. It is significant that although Ralph and Stella "like" Hinduism, "they take no in-



202 SOUNDINGS

terest in its forms."33 They find "something" in it, but they still seek more. Both are driven by a restlessness that is in fact a vocation. Hinduism's muddledom is the face that ultimate mystery turns toward man; Ralph and Stella are called, and driven, to reach past all forms toward the very heart of Forster's sacred cosmos.

And so was Forster. That is why he put them there, at the end of his last novel. Their calling and quest were his own.

NOTES

1. David Shusterman, The Quest for Certitude in E. M. Forster's Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 18.

2. E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 7.

3. All of these are prolific writers. Some representative works of each would be: Mircea El i ade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961); Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Reli- gious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

4. The Sacred Canofrv. dd. 3-28. 5. Islam Observed, dd. 97-98. 6. The Sacred Canopy, p. 7. 7. Ibid., p. 17. 8. New York: Norton, 1971, p. 70. 9. London: Hoearth Press.

10. Maurice, p. 237. 11. New York: Vintage Books. 1956. d. 195. 12. Pp. 90 and 261. 13. Pp. 71-72. 14. P. 313. 15. P. 241. 16. New York: Vintage Books, 1961, p. 204. 17. Pp. 3O-31. 18. P. 234. 19. P. 73. 20. P. 146. 21. P. 17. 22. Pp. 205-06. 23. P. 246. 24. P. 81. 25. What I Believe, pp. 16-17. 26. Walter A. S. Keir, "Л Passage to India Reconsidered," in Twentieth Century

Interpretations of A Passage to India, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 42.

27. A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1924), p. 124. Cf. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 107: ". . . repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When



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it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity."

28. P. 285. 29. P. 210. 30. The Psychology of Religious Experiences (New York: Basic Books, 1965). Itwas,

of course, Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, who gave the term its major currencv.

31. P. 263. '

32. P. 313. 33. P. 320.



Self and Cosmos: Religion as Strategy and Exploration in E. M. Forster

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