A Voluntary Surrender: Imperialism and Imagination in A Passage to India

Jeffrey Heath A Passage to India is a book about latecomers and invaders on foreign soil. The intruders are the Hindus, the Moslems, and the British in India, but they can also be seen as novelists attempting to find shape in regions as yet uncoloni ed by the imagination.!"# $ritics themselves have made many forays into %orster&s India, and as a result, 'e no' have many different Passages( the socio)political, the biographical, the anthropological)religious)psychological, the te*tual, the linguistic. !+# In ",-., /ionel Trilling 'rote of A Passage, &the pattern remains public, simple, and entirely easy to grasp.&!.# 0ince then, %orster criticism has come a long 'ay, and by the ",12s his novel had become as elusive as the heart of the cloud at the end of its o'n penultimate chapter. /ike the faces A i encounters 'hile cycling through the ba aar 3&4ust before he collides 'ith each it vanishes&5,!-# A Passage has had a tendency to dissolve as its readers have moved closer. /ike India itself during %orster&s first visit in ","+, it invites through its hundred voices, but if 'e respond reductively )) only to part of it rather than to the 'hole )) India 'ill not accommodate us. Indeed, to the fully responsive reader, it must often seem that silence is the best reply. The novel&s core action 3or non)action, since nothing may have happened5 is the alleged assault on Adela 6uested.!7# 0eeking to corroborate her story, the police ransack A i &s home for evidence and force open the dra'er 'here he keeps the photograph of his no')deceased 'ife. 8e learn little about their relationship e*cept that A i had overcome his 'esterni ed distaste for arranged marriages to believe, in the end, that &there 'as no one like her, and 'hat is that uni9ueness but love:&3;.5. In a novel in 'hich universal inclusion is so important, the reader might 'ish to 9uestion A i &s e9uating of love and uni9ueness< nevertheless, it is the image of his 'ife, charged 'ith associations 'ith love, beauty, home, and the afterlife, 'hich is &borne 'ith triumph& in its shrine)like dra'er, to be e*posed in court, along 'ith embarrassing private letters 3"12, "1+5. This violation damages A i &s health and ruins his prospects. =et it is only one e*ample of the invasion of home 'hich comes to be one of A Passage&s most familiar gestures. The novel contains other homes 'hich are less easily infiltrated. India itself is the prime e*ample, but so, by metaphorical e*tension, are the &e*traordinary& Marabar Hills and the universe itself. >epending on 'hich arch of the metaphor 'e choose, A Passage is a political novel or a poetic, philosophical novel, and it is fascinating to 'atch ho' the narrative snaps back and forth in focus as our interest in one aspect or the other prevails.!?# %orster rings the changes on the motif of invasion in a spectrum of variations 'hich e*tends even to its mirror)image, invitation. Here 'e meet a problem( the sky &settles everything& 3.+5, but 'ill it settle us: Ho' do 'e make ourselves physically and imaginatively at home in India, or in that larger India, the universe )) through invitation or invasion: Are those large places hospitable, or are they merely un'elcoming chaos: The characters give varying ans'ers. Acceptance of things as they are characteri es that &sly and charming& Hindu, Professor @odbole. He does not interfere 'ith the course of events e*cept by omission( other people&s &arrangements& mean nothing to him. He is not a story) teller( he does not describe the caves, nor does he tell A i that %ielding has married

0tella, not Adela. But he does inform %ielding, in the tones of one 'ho accepts the 'ill of the universe, that &all perform a good action, 'hen one is performed, and 'hen an evil action is performed, all perform it& 3"17))?5. @ood and evil &are not 'hat 'e think them, they are 'hat they are, and each of us has contributed to both.& Moreover, &they are both of them aspects of my /ord. He is present in the one, absent in the other, and the difference bet'een presence and absence is great.& Aot much &discomposes& @odbole&s harmony, reconciling as he does &the products of Bast and 8est& 31,5( indeed, he embraces in his o'n name @od and the humble clay. Aevertheless, the normally imperturbable >eccani Brahman is some'hat put out by &the interminable affair& of that poisonous reptile, the &Cussell&s viper& 'hich has been &nosing round& the $ollege,!;# and he carefully avoids mentioning the &snake composed of small snakes& 'hich lurks in each Marabar cave 3"7,5. /ater on, 'e shall have a better idea 'hy snakes trouble this gentle scholar. Most of the British characters resist their environment, sometimes 'ith the aid of the national anthem 3&that curt series of demands on Dehovah&5, and at other times 'ith such mechanical &defences& as perforated inc doors, electric fans, and refrigeration. 8hile @odbole is at home in a universe 'hich he accepts as a mystery, the British handle it, as they do India, by force and brain)'ork, and by refusing to leave &a gap in the line& 3"125.!1# Cesistance is especially characteristic of that cautious young lady, Miss Adela 6uested, 'ho proclaims her refusal to be &bottled up& by the Hot 8eather but 'ho is th'arted nonetheless in her plan to &settle altogether& in India. Her idea)loving friend, the atheist %ielding, has a decent but limiting belief in &good'ill plus intelligence and culture& 3125, but in his engaging failure to have &everything ranged coldly on shelves& 31+5, he is less interested in ordering things than Adela and most of her compatriots. 0till, %ielding and Adela are not so very different. 8hen they say fare'ell, a sudden shift in focus places them in the remote perspective of the universe that they have &missed or re4ected& 3+;+5( 'ith one stroke of the 'and they are &d'arfs talking, shaking hands& 3+?+5. As it shrinks and turns them into mocking reflections of one another, the distant point of vie' also evaluates them< it sho's ho' foreign they are to a universe about 'hich they scarcely suspect ho' little they kno'. Things they don&t understand rationally can only be muddles, not mysteries. /illiputian in their spiritual capacities, they are Houyhynmm)like in their fre9uent association 'ith horses and horse)sense< indeed, 0'ift&s influence pervades A Passage, not least in the 'ay he 3like 0amuel Butler5 plays 'ith scale and inversion. The narrator 3an important and rather slippery figure5, in9uires ironically, 8ere there 'orlds beyond 'hich they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness: They could not tell. They only reali ed that their outlook 'as more or less similar, and found in this a satisfaction. Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle< they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indias 'hich fuss and s9uabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. They had not the apparatus for 4udging.3+?"5 Aot being able to &tell& 'ill prove important in this narrative about novelists seeking a home. Mrs Moore and A i are more interesting figures because their struggles to be at home are less plainly foredoomed. They both imagine a universe 'ith a human imprint on it, and they believe )) Mrs Moore ardently but 'ith failing vigour, A i only by fits and starts )) that eventually it 'ill be possible to transcend the veil of Maya to

find a lasting home and a lasting connection 'ith absolute truth. To Mrs Moore, during her &opening& 'eeks in India, the aim of being &one 'ith the universe& seemed &a beautiful goal and an easy one& 3+"+5. But 'ishful thinking can be dangerous. Mrs Moore, fatigued and taken by surprise in &the t'ilight of the double vision& 3as distinct from its healthy noon5 by the lack of anything beautiful or, in her vie', significant in her cave, collapses in selfish despair. And A i &s interests in religion, never very strong, harden into the more &sensible& ideal of an Indian motherland. India is a diverse place. 8ith its kaleidoscope of cults and factions, it is too vast to manage or comprehend. The mind can&t &take hold of such a country& 3"-15. The very &spirit of the Indian earth ... tries to keep men in compartments,& and even 'alking on its hostile soil &fatigues everyone in India e*cept the ne'comer& 3"-", -25. Miss 6uested remarks thoughtfully, &There 'ill have to be something universal in this country& 3"7?5, but religion is out, and politics don&t 'ork either. As A i says, more accurately than he kno's, &Aothing embraces the 'hole of India, nothing, nothing& 3"7?5. &8hat an apotheosis& it 'ould be indeed if such a muddle could be transformed mysteriously into a homeland 3."75. At first, A i is no more at home in India than he is in his one)roomed shanty. He longs to &escape from the net& of Anglo)India to be &back among manners and gestures that he kne'& 3-25. He be'ails the lost &glories of $ordova and 0amarkand& 3+?75, and he believes that the Bnglish circulate &like an ice)stream& through 'hat ought to be &his& land 3115. 0o, 'hen %ielding calls out to him, &Please make yourself at home& 31"5, A i is delighted< to him the invitation has &a very definite meaning& )) one that %ielding, a more recent arrival, cannot yet imagine. Bventually A i becomes an Indian nationalist. He cries, &Hindu and Moslem and 0ikh and all shall be oneE HurrahE& These are visionary 'ords, but it is likely that A i &s India 'ill be a small &one,& for he adds, ominously, that there 'ill be &no foreigners of any sort,& and that the rulers 'ill be &the Afghans. My o'n ancestors. ... It 'ill be arranged& 3."75. Dust ho' successful &arranged& homes are remains to be seen< after all, &all that is pre)arranged is false.&!,# A i &s home is invaded only once, but India has been invaded many times by marauders seeking to make it over in their o'n image. The celebrated set)piece in chapter "+ and several remarkable passages in chapters "- and "7 sho' us primordial India in the form of the Marabar Hills, still as they 'ere before the coming of the gods. These passages make it clear that in the interminable narrative of geological time, the tale of man&s life in history is only a brief epilogue. Although the novel seems to imply that among all those 'ho have invaded, the Hindus have the best chance of turning India into a home, their lack of interest in language discourages %orster 3in his role as novelist, at least5, from unreservedly endorsing them. The Mogul emperors have been the most magnificent and imaginative of all the invaders. A casual reading probably 'ill not reveal %orster&s deft criticism of the Moslems, for by comparison 'ith the British, they seem noble figures. The 'eb of art that they thre' over India 'as brilliant and e*tensive )) the diaphanous stone traceries and lattice)'ork of Daisalmer, Daipur, and Dodhpur< the Ta4 Mahal, the Ced %ort, the gardens of 0halimar )) graceful domes and &'atershoots of ribbed marble& 3"..5, and every'here, &fountains, gardens, hammams& 3115. They also left the blue) arched eighteenth)century &audience)hall& 'here A i emulates Mogul 4ustice and generosity in a scene 'hich prefigures and parodies his o'n day in court. Moslem

civili ation is, as he says, &a skilful arrangement& 3115. A i particularly admires the early emperors, 'ith 'hose armies his forefathers entered India from Afghanistan. %irst came Babur, 'ho &'ould never let go of hospitality,& 'ho &arranged& food elegantly, &'ould compel& musicians to play beautiful melodies, and died in the heat 3"775. Then came the beauties of &the Mogul Bmpire at its height and Alamgir reigning at >elhi upon the Peacock Throne& 31.5. Then there 'as Akbar and his &universal religion.& Mogul domination is an impressive story. A i complains about the >eccani Brahmans& claim &that Bngland con9uered India from them )) from them, mind, and not from the Moguls& 31-5. The Moguls governed India for three centuries and did everything but make 'ater run uphill, but the Brahmans contend that they 'ere not victorious in the end. Although history does not seem to support this curious claim, there is ample 4ustification for it in the 'orld of B.M. %orster. In fact, to ask 'hy the Moguls did not triumph is to move close to the heart of India. It is to reali e that no con9uest is ever fully accomplished by force, and not even by such graceful means as elegant entertainment, magnanimous 4ustice, or, especially, beauty. After the trial, %ielding urges A i to act generously, &like one of your si* Mogul Bmperors& 3+7+5. But %ielding fails to see that even though the Moguls dominated elegantly, they dominated nevertheless. Triumph has been the same sad tale in all ages( like %ielding&s Indian friends after their victory in court, the Moguls before them found that &the aims of battle and the fruits of victory are never the same ... their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are held in the hand& 3+715. It is possessions, or in Trilling&s 'ords, &the property sense,& that the saints fear even more than lust 3+-+5. As %orster 'rites else'here, 9uoting >ante, &Possession is one 'ith loss.&!"2# 8hat is true of military and cultural domination holds in a variety of other 'ays. A i &s se*ual elitism, for e*ample, is, &in a ne' form, the old, old trouble ... ( snobbery, the desire for possessions& 3+-+5. The inverse logic of possession also helps clarify the odd friendship bet'een %ielding and A i . After the trial, &They had con9uered but 'ere not be to cro'ned&< and later, &A i 'as a memento, a trophy, they 'ere proud of each other, yet they must inevitably part& 3+?1, .".5. Ao genuine friend can be &a trophy.& Bven hospitality, if &tainted 'ith the sense of possession& 3"7-5, can be a form of imperialism. A i &s lavish entertainment of the t'o Bnglish ladies turns out to be &a 4oy that held the seeds of its o'n decay& as he converses about &our& mos9ue and &our& caves 'hile Mrs Moore sips &his& tea 3"775. 8hile it is true that the court rules that A i is not a molester 3comple* human beings can&t be summed up in a &sentence& !AA, ;,#5, he is parado*ically guilty of never having touched his guests at all. His charmingly tyrannical method has been &to plan everything 'ithout consulting& them 3"7"5< and Adela, using a tell)tale 'ord again, remarks, &Ho' very 'ell it is all arranged& 3"7-5. Most of the many invitations 'hich the characters &e*tend& fail because they are &tainted& by o'nership or by that 'orse evil, indifference. These lesser invitations all stand in contrast to the central invitation e*tended by India herself( @enerations of invaders have tried !to take hold of India#, but they remain in e*ile. The important to'ns they build are only retreats, their 9uarrels the malaise of men 'ho cannot find their 'ay home. India kno's of their trouble. 0he kno's of the 'hole 'orld&s trouble, to its uttermost depth. 0he calls &$ome& through her one hundred mouths, through ob4ects ridiculous and august. But come to 'hat: 0he has never defined. 0he is not a promise, only an appeal.3"-,5

The ordinary person&s soul &retreats to the permanent lines 'hich habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there& 3+-;5. But India has an ine*haustible capacity for love )) or, more accurately, her soil is endlessly loving and endlessly hostile by seasons. The problem is that those 'ho ans'er her undefined invitation all too often do define, thereby perverting invitation into invasion( they come to 'hat they consider &august& but not to 'hat they think is &ridiculous.& Adela and Mrs Moore, for e*ample, in their &feeble invasion& of the Marabars, do not think the hills very attractive or 9uite 'orth visiting. They do not reali e that the guests of India, and 8hitman&s &more than India,& must come unconditionally, as T.0. Bliot 'rites, &in a condition of complete simplicity.& They must come to the punkah 'allah, the s'eepers, the &cactuses, crystals, and mud& 3715, because nothing can be loved in isolation. Ae'comers 'ho seek to be at home in India must do better than A i , for 'hom &the mos9ue ... alone signifie!s#& 3-"5. In %orster&s India, everything signifies( both the e*traordinary Marabar Hills and the ordinary &plain,& or, to use %orster&s e*amples from Aspects of the Aovel, chairs and tables as 'ell as @od 3AA, ".?5. If in everyday life 'e have either hope or fulfilment, the sublime or the ridiculous, the strange or the familiar, foreground or background, A Passage posits the need for a universal vision 'hich 'ill allo' us to grasp all at once. To see things 'hole is to be at home. But in stating that, 'e reach a cru* at the heart of %orster&s thought 3and of %orster criticism5( ho' is that unifying vision available to us )) through the po'ers of the imagination, or only through a mystical e*perience:!""# /eaving aside for a moment the central issues of imagination and mystic transcendence, it is clear enough that our more ordinary faculties are inade9uate. %orster rings many changes on the sad truth that an intangible goal cannot be attained through mechanical means like the senses or the reason. The familiar notion recurs in uncanny variations. As the novel begins, for e*ample, the t'o ladies&&romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Bgypt& in 9uest of the glamour of India leads them &to find only a gridiron of bungalo's at the end of it& 3-?5. They do not &succeed in catching the moon in the @anges.& Aor can language capture the ineffable( Adela&s dream of universal brotherhood rings false as soon as she articulates it, and the more she and Conny discuss the misadventure in the cave, the more &intimacy seem!s# to caricature itself& 3+225. As for A i , he finds that the more closely he looks at the photograph of his 'ife, the less he sees, because &the more passionately 'e invoke !the dead# the further they recede& 3;75. The &approaches& I have 4ust mentioned issue in frustration because they are attempts to reconstruct the incomprehensible in reduced form rather than accept it 'hole. To e*press the matter in narrative terms, they are attempts to tell stories about 'hat can only be e*perienced 3science does not interpret A i &s se*ual e*periences 'hen he is told about them in a manual, &because by being there they ceased to be his e*periences& !""?#5. 0uch mechanical approaches can lead to no good, 4ust as the approaches to the Marabar by car and train produce disaster. Advances 'ithout love are al'ays &insulting advances& 3";?5, figurative rapes, and so the implicit goal of A Passage is an approach, like the one in &Temple,& in 'hich the 'orshippers try to &ravish the unkno'n& 'ith love rather than mechanically kno' the unlovable. It is 'hat %orster describes as &B*pansion. ... Aot completion. Aot rounding off but opening out& 3AA, ";25. 8hile %orster often dramati es the muddle 'hich results from finite and invasive approaches 3here one thinks of the merely mechanical pro*imity afforded by Conny&s field)glasses5, he also sho's 'hat happens 'hen, so to speak, the lens dra's back.

8hen that happens, 'hat 'as once very comple* takes on deceptively firm contours as 'hole d'indles into part and foreground recedes into background. %or e*ample, as Mrs Moore plays patience, the &rough desiccated surface& of her day takes on &a definite outline, as India itself might, could it be vie'ed from the moon& 3""-5. It ceases to be the 'hole story and becomes a synopsis. 8hen %orster is at his best, he provides approach and 'ithdra'al in disorienting alternation 3&This po'er to e*pand and contract perception ... !is# one of the great advantages of the novel)form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life& !AA, 11#5. %or e*ample, the first vie' 'e get of the &e*traordinary& Marabar Hills is a reductive one from t'enty miles a'ay, then, in the remarkable chapter "+, from the far more simplifying vantage)point of the sun itself. But as the chapter progresses, the focus narro's in space and time until, passing through &tropic& heat, 'e penetrate the hills&&unspeakable& outposts, and enter a cave to look through the eyes of a certain &visitor& as he spends &his five minutes.& Then the narrative lens moves to'ards the polished 'all until 'e see, close up, a version of 'hat 'e left behind at the outset( the universe itself, or at least a beautiful image of it, 'ith &delicate stars ... , e*9uisite nebulae, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible& 3".15. %inally, in a feat 'hich depends not on the senses but 3it is important to note5, on the imagination, the narrative eye gets so close that it presents us 'ith an impossibility( an interior vie' of a totally dark cave 'hich has never been unsealed, and 'hich &mirrors its o'n darkness in every direction infinitely& 3".,5. %orster thoroughly discredits the senses and the conscious life. They 'ill never help us to love the All simultaneously< their consecutive, alternating glimpses cannot encompass the ordinary and the e*traordinary, the enormous and the small at the same time. To a limited vie'er in a limitless cosmos, the constant shifting of focus is e*hausting< if it lasts long enough, it debases everything. In Mrs Moore&s case, the mind)'renching multiplicity of India giddies her &perception of life& until, demorali ed completely in her cave by a paralysing close)up of a universe 'hich she thinks is devoid of significance, she makes an appalling mistake( she concludes that &everything e*ists, nothing has value& 3"?25. Cather like %orster himself on his first visit to India in Fctober ","+, Mrs Moore has e*pected that &4oy shall be graceful, and sorro' august, and infinity have a form& 3+"75. But India 3in a pun typical of the novel&s first t'o movements5, &fails to accommodate& her in her too)finite hopes. The events of &Temple& 'ould have sho'n her that 4oy is not al'ays graceful, indeed that everything e*ists and everything has value, even as hope parado*ically e*ists despite fulfilment 3+,,5. 0orro' is august neither for Adela, 'ho finds it more comple* than she had e*pected, nor for Mrs Moore, 'ho in her selfish disillusionment echoes the /amentations of Deremiah in believing that &there is no sorro' like my sorro'& 3+".5. /ike her, most of us have &orderly hopes& and an &itch for the seemly& 3+"7, "715, but once 'e try to arrange the universe in terms of merely human priorities, &possession is one 'ith loss.& Fur human dominance is only an optical illusion based on a futile anthropomorphism( as the narrator observes in another startling shift in perspective, &it matters so little to the ma4ority of living beings 'hat the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides. ... In the tropics ... the inarticulate 'orld is closer at hand and readier to assume control as soon as men are tired& 3"+?5. 8hen, as if in some Bscher dra'ing, the insignificant surges into focus as the significant, our &triumphant machine of civili ation may suddenly hitch and be immobili ed into a car of stone& 3+"75. Mrs Moore&s senses are not able to 'eld the &huge scenic background& together 'ith the foreground of &practical endeavour& 3+"+5. Aot only is she unable to e*perience things 'hole, but she mistakes a part for the 'hole. Fn the auditory level, she

accepts the devaluing &boum& as &the last 'ord& on India, and on the visual level she mistakes the cave&s mirror of nebulae and comets for the entire universe. True, the &visitor& of chapter "+ has found this shrunken universe &lovely& and &e*9uisite& 3".,5, but in comparison to the All, it is only &a nasty little cosmos& 3";"5. That Mrs Moore&s dreadful error stems from an image in a mirror suggests not only that %orster is attacking the perils of pro4ection 3she is demorali ed not by the universe but by her o'n stunted version of it5, but also that he is 9uestioning the ade9uacy of the imagination itself. I have already remarked that only the imagination can see inside the sealed Baster Bgg cave on the Ga'a >ol, but 'hat it imagines, both in that instance and again in Mrs Moore&s cave, is that infinity is very small, and eternity merely endless repetition. To 'hat e*tent can 'e trust the imagination and the images and metaphors 'hich it produces: The hills 'hich surround the Ga'a >ol cave are nasty or 4ust uninteresting at close range, but &look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances& 3".,5. To the reader 'ho 'onders ho' the same thing can look so different, one might reply that different perspectives or media can trick the eye, as Plato noticed long ago. Fne might add, 'ith Hirginia 8oolf, that since &nothing is simply one thing,& no one aspect of the hills is &truer& than any other. =et as %ielding 'atches the hills from the $lub verandah after having been e*pelled from the smoking)room, 'e are no longer dealing 'ith mere aspects< suddenly the narrator presents the All( they leapt into beauty< they 'ere Monsalvat, Halhalla, the to'ers of a cathedral, peopled 'ith saints and heroes, and covered 'ith flo'ers. It 'as the last moment of the light, and as he ga ed at the Marabar Hills they seemed to move graciously to'ards him like a 9ueen, and their charm became the sky&s. At the moment they vanished they 'ere every'here, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the 'hole universe 'as a hill. /ovely, e*9uisite moment )) but passing the Bnglishman 'ith averted face and on s'ift 'ings. He e*perienced nothing himself< it 'as as if someone had told him there 'as such a moment, and he 'as obliged to believe.3",;, emphases added5 %orster&s narrator tells us that the universe is a hill, a cathedral)like home of saints and heroes )) a visionary abode 'hich %ielding, 'ho &e*perienced nothing himself,& fails to see. 8e might 'ell 'onder 'hat %orster means by e9uating the hill 'ith the universe. In one sense, he simply 'ants to find an all)inclusive metaphor for the cosmos, for all creation. =et in another sense, it is evident that the 9ueenlike hill honeycombed 'ith caves is also all fictional creation, &the spongy tract& of the novel, &those fictions ... 'hich e*tend so indeterminately& 3AA, .25. More than that, the hill is all narrative creation as it might appear if e*perienced from all points of vie' at once, as if &@od could tell the story of the universe& 3AA, ?.5. But in this case it e*plicitly isn&t e*perienced, and certainly not from all points of vie' at once( it is as if someone has only told %ielding about it, 4ust as he has only been told Adela&s story about the alleged assault. He himself cannot &tell,& because he 'as not there. Here 'e might recall that Adela likes stories )) Mrs Moore&s about the &young man in a mos9ue,& and A i &s about the Mogul emperors. &Tell me everything you 'ill& is her refrain, &as if she&s at a lecture& 3,", "."5, or as if she had someho' heard %orster declare in his o'n ",+; $lark lectures, &the story appeals to our curiosity& 3AA, "7+5. 0he is in9uisitive about the story)like succession of events in the &frie e& of India, and

is especially curious about the hills, 'atching them at the Bridge Party through a gap in the cactus hedge and later from the balcony of the $lub. Her curiosity having dra'n her nearer, she returns and &tells her o'n story& about the Marabars 3";,5. Ho'ever, her tale is a very petty thing, for it is only one aspect of the event seen from her o'n point of vie'( it is the &single vision& of a poor story)teller 3AA, "-,5. I am arguing that the charge Adela &lodges& is a rudimentary story mas9uerading as a complete narrative. It is a repetition of Conny&s life)denying &summary of the man& from earlier in the novel 3775. But, although Adela has missed 'holeness, 4ust like %ielding, could any mortal have contemplated the entire 9ueenlike, universal narrative: %orster imagines that his narrator has done so. The narrator neglects to tell us all about it, but he does sho' the dangers that lie in 'ait for those 'ho mistake the ungenerous story of the bare evidence for a total narrative, 'ith its e*onerating &secret life& 3AA, ?,5. Adela&s limited story, then, is that poisonous &naked 'orm of time& 'hich %orster scrutini es in Aspects of the Aovel 3.? and else'here5. It recalls the reductive account Miss /avish gives, in her dreadful novel, of /ucy and @eorge&s mystical encounter among the violets in A Coom 'ith a Hie'. In short, it is the &undying 'orm& of Mrs Moore&s cave, 'hich descends and returns to the ceiling, reducing piety and filth to &boum,& a 'orm too small &to complete a circle& 3"7,5. In Adela&s incomplete narrative, &The 0tory& has been surgically separated from &People,&&The Plot,&&%antasy,&&Prophecy,&&Pattern and Chythm,& and all the other noble Aspects of the Aovel 3AA, .75. This separation takes place 'hen, ignoring the absence of any love for the man she intends to marry, Adela &turns into& a cave< it is the divorce of &the life in time& from &the life by values& 3AA, .?, -,5. 8e should al'ays have a 'hole narrative )) time and values, pattern and rhythm, parts ", +, and ., all e*perienced at once, as sometimes happens in the appreciation of a symphony 3AA, "?,5, but 'hen Adela&s misguided 3or Miss >erek)ted5 synopsis reduces the comple* A i simply to &the prisoner,& the 'hole is replaced by a hole( the cave of mere story. The travesty ends only 'hen Adela, unlike 0chehera ade, 'ho al'ays found more to tell her husband, &cannot be sure& 'hat happened ne*t, and has to end her story to aptly named Mr McBryde. %orster claims that to see the novel &in its other aspects ... 'e must come out of the cave& 3AA, -15, and this Adela does 'hen she &'ithdra's& the charge she has lodged. 8e normally think of the imagination as a po'erful integrating force, but the imaginative metaphor of the universe as a hill is only partial because it leaves out 'hat is attributeless. The &uncanny& 3unheimlich, unhomelike5 hills creep near to $handrapore at sunset, &as 'as their custom& 3".;, ?75, but they retain a foreignness 'hich no visitor can domesticate simply by speaking of them in terms of fists and fingers, knees, throats, mouths, belches, skin, neighbours, shoulders, and valley)faces. If the Baster)egg cave on its &cro'&s perch& bears a strange resemblance to a human head on a pair of shoulders, it is because 'e impose the resemblance )) 4ust as 'e endo' the lakes in part . 'ith &gray faces.& To perceive is to imagine, and that is to humani e and reduce. It is an error 'hich 'e find impossible to prevent, even 'hen 'e see that 'e are making it. %orster is very demanding in A Passage( 'hen the unkno'n universe of India invites, 'e should not seek our o'n image in &the mirror of the scenery& 3."-5< or, if 'e fail to see accustomed beauties, 'e must have the courage not to cry, like disfigured Aureddin 'eeping into his looking)glass, or to break do'n, like disappointed Mrs

Moore in her cave. Inless our imaginations are as all)encompassing as Infinite /ove, any of our images of the cosmos 'ill be small accounts, and the cavity of the universe 'ill give our o'n reflections back to us in mocking repetition 3one recalls that in Ho'ards Bnd, the city of /ondon, that e*panding and ine*plicable gray abode honeycombed 'ith d'elling)places, is only &a caricature of infinity&5. The un'elcoming soil of India, even the apparently hostile Marabars, can be home, but only if 'e stop trying to imagine them as such. Insects have &no sense of an interior& 3775, and are at home every'here< like them, 'e are truly at home only 'hen 'e have no sense of anything that is not home. If 'e don&t have the detachment to resist engaging in perceptual imperialism, then the &other& 'ill fight back, 4ust as the 4ungle repels houses. 0o it is that 'ith their forbidding &outposts& of clenched fists, the Marabars stand guard against our naJve human conviction that 'e are related only to the &significant& things in the 'orld. They 'ill tolerate no invasion by the human imagination< on the other hand, they 'ill not be ignored. %orster declares that art is &the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths< it is the lighthouse 'hich cannot be hidden&!"+# But the Marabars are the sentinels of an opposing army, the value)free forces of story, history, and summary. Invading artists may &'obble& to'ards them on the centipede) like train of language 'ith &its burning throat& 3";25,!".# but the Marabars resist their ineffectual attempts to &pencil shado's do'n their creases& 3"7+5. As Adela and Mrs Moore approach the Marabars in search of the romantic, &a spiritual silence& invades them( &sounds did not echo nor thoughts develop. Bverything seemed cut off at the root, and therefore infected 'ith illusion& 3"7+5. They have entered an imaginary region 'here the imagination doesn&t 'ork. This place can&t be &developed& because it simply is 'hat it is. /anguage and 'riting are no good here< although it is summer in India, it is 8allace 0tevens&s 'inter of the imagination. The Marabars 'ill countenance no attempt to embellish them by language, because they 'ill hear no story but their o'n 3&Intolerance is the atmosphere stories generate& !AA, -1#5. They stop Mrs Moore from 'riting a letter to her children, and the very earth in their vicinity is illegible and defies interpretation 3"?2, "2-5. Bven though the &inarticulate 'orld& seems only a background to human endeavour, its troops are po'erful( the Marabars are their head9uarters, and even the sun &!salutes# them to the base& 3"7+5. As tolerant human beings, or as novelists, 'e must be big enough to include the sometimes all)encompassing forces of small)minded synopsis. But our task is even harder than the usual liberal dilemma of tolerating the intolerant, because 'e must perform it 'ithout even imagining it. 8ill the force of detached inclusion prove &big& enough to include the force of indifferent e*clusion, or 'ill the reverse happen: Fr could it be that they 'ill take turns forever, as the Hot 8eather alternates 'ith the rains: There has been much debate over 'hat the caves &are.& 0ome readers have seen them as hearts, heads, 'ombs, tombs, the impulse to truth, and as the unconscious. Fthers have declared that the hills that contain the caves have &phallic energy.& =et they are and do &nothing&< at best they are the barracks of the reductive troops of metonymy. It might help if 'e remember that &a mystery is a pocket in time& 3AA, ,75, and that the caves are pockets 3"?25, mysteries 'hich should remain as such. Bven so, it is evident enough that %orster thinks of them as something small and rudimentary( ungenerous forces of decreation and devaluation, principles of some perverse primal la' of diminishing returns. It 'ould be surprising if he didn&t have them in mind 'hen he later described the characters in Tristram 0handy 3&the less they have to say the more they talk&5, and the directing principle of that novel 3&the army of unutterable muddle, the universe as a hot potato& !AA, "";#5.

Bearing in mind the image of the universe 'hich the caves contain in their polished 'alls, 'e might also 'ish to see them as unimaginable Ancient Aight humanly imagined, the void subsisting untouched belo' the masks and costumes 'ith 'hich 'e do'er it. In revealing slips of the tongue, %orster at least t'ice referred to the Marabar $aves as the &Malabar $aves,& thereby alluding to the 'ell)kno'n costume agency not far from $haring $ross 0tation in central /ondon.!"-# There is in fact a Malabar 0treet in /ondon, and it is very near the Bast India >ock Coad< 4ust around the corner is a street named Alpha @rove, and although there is no &Fmega& in the immediate vicinity, it is fitting that this information can be found in that &last 'ord& on /ondon topography, the A to K 0treet Atlas of /ondon. Aot far a'ay from Malabar 0treet is Danet 0treet. &Danet& 'as one of the names %orster initially gave Adela in the manuscript of A Passage. 0eeing the Marabars as Malabar&s lends greater resonance to the novel&s many allusions to plays 3especially T'elfth Aight5. The manuscripts confirm the idea( &a some'hat monotonous sho'&< &one of the caves rose like a prompter&s bo*&< &the larger stones radiated like search)lights&< the &undramatic tangles& of the festival are &badly stage)managed,& and so on. If, in any case, 'e remove the theatrical trappings besto'ed by language, 'hat do 'e see: %orster tells us( &the plain 9uietly disappeared, peeled off, so to speak, and nothing 'as to be seen on either side& 3"7.< emphases added5. Fr again, &solid and 'hite, a Brahmany kite flapped bet'een the rocks 'ith a clumsiness that seemed intentional. Before man ... the planet must have looked thus& 3"715. Aeedless to say, &Brahmany& things, being 'holly impersonal, have &intentions& only if 'e attribute them. Here then, 'e have an intensely imaginative version of the 'orld as it might have been prior to, or outside of, the &Malabar& 'orld of the imagination that 'e have glued on top of it.!"7# $aptain Ahab, that great creation of one of %orster&s favourite authors, 'ould have been pleased to receive this privileged glimpse behind &the pasteboard mask.& 8hen Mrs Moore mistakes her o'n cynicism mirrored in the cave 'all for the last 'ord on the universe, she stops 'riting to her children and collapses. &Ao one could romantici e the Marabar,& she thinks 3"?"5, but in her disillusionment she doesn&t reali e that there are 'ays of relating to the All that do not involve the imaginative imposition of beauty. Had she still been strong enough, she might have continued to accept it in the alternating fashion of the healthy double vision 3not its 4aded &t'ilight&5, or, had she kno'n ho', she might have learned not to imagine it at all, but simply to meditate, like @odbole, on some all)including mantric 'ord, such as om.!"?# &>isillusionment cannot be beautiful,& the narrator tells us 3+"75. Illusion on the other hand is beautiful, and that is 'hy %orster almost al'ays presents ordinary beauty as a barrier to union, 'hether physical or transcendent. 0ome readers, relying on e*ternal evidence from, say, 8here Angels %ear to Tread, believe that %orster advocates &the Mediterranean norm& and the Henetian &cup of Beauty& of the celebrated chapter .+. But in this instance, 'e do not have authorial commentary< 'e have only the indirect narration of a chameleon narrator 'ho has temporarily invaded %ielding&s mental terrain to record %ielding&s attitude. %orster&s vie' is distinct from %ielding&s< in fact, 'hile pretending to praise beauty, %orster repeatedly depicts it in A Passage as a delusive and divisive force. %or e*ample, as A i recites a poem by @halib, &the feeling !came# that India 'as one< Moslem< al'ays had been< an assurance that lasted until they looked out of the door& 3""1))",5. In short, beauty lies. Art may be, as %orster 'rote, &the one orderly product that our muddling

race has produced,&!";# but it is not nearly as efficacious as 'e like to think. %or e*ample, A i feels it is &more artistic to have his 'ife alive for a moment& and lies to Adela 3"?.5 )) but his artistry does not prevent disaster. Beauty is a barrier bet'een A i and beautiful 'omen, &for it entails rules of its o'n& 3175. %orster does not of course attack transcendent beauty( the most beautiful characters in his novel never speak, and civili ed, 'ordless gesture possibly brings &the peace that passeth Inderstanding& 3+7"5. But he insinuates every'here that mortal beauty limits and divides< through it 'e receive at best an image of something like, but less than, a transcendent, unifying vision. T'o crucial and contrasting instances of beauty as a barrier are the moment in the cave 'hen the visitor&s flame e*pires against the lovely polished rock, and the mystical moment at Mau 'hen the 'orshippers become one 'ith @od and &fling do'n ... beauty herself& 3+175. 0imile and metaphor are of no avail at Mau< &'hatever had happened had happened& 3."25, and the event simply is 'hat it is, like @odbole&s vie' of good and evil 3"1?5. 8hen 'e turn from the transcendent moment at Mau to the visitor 'ith his five minutes in a constricted Marabar cave, 'e find not union but its frustration. 8e do not have love at this point, but &something more voluptuous than love& )) that is, something less spiritual, something 'hich no doubt lacks &that link outside either participant that is necessary to every relationship& 3."+5. That countervailing detachment does not e*ist because there is only one participant in the cave, and he is not getting, as %rost 'rites in &The Most of It,&&counter)love, original response,& only a reflection of the beautiful, solipsistic universe of the self, past 'hich he cannot reach. That Adela and A i should both turn into such caves after climbing side by side but thinking only of themselves is appropriate. >espite all the matches that are struck in these chambers, no matches are struck. I have said that simile and metaphor are useless in describing the mystical event at Mau. Fstensibly, the Marabar Hills are also beyond language. The narrator tells us that they are &like nothing else in the 'orld,& 'ith &no relation to anything dreamt or seen& 3".;5, and that &the visitor& finds it difficult to discuss them. In vie' of this uni9ueness, one might have e*pected that, like the Mau e*perience, the hills could not be described in terms of anything but themselves. But once again the narrator proves himself to be an interesting fello'( in the course of claiming that the caves have no attributes, he starts conferring them. >espite his claim that the caves are pre)linguistic, he is soon busily describing them in highly anthropomorphic language. He talks about the foot of Hishnu, 0iva&s hair, the sun&s bosom, flesh of the sun&s flesh< he tells us that the hills are knee)deep, ankle)deep in the encroaching soil, and that the caves are measured in &feet.& Bspecially after the intrusion of &the visitor,& 'e hear about flames 'hich breathe and kiss, and 'hich are like lovers and imprisoned spirits. These caves about 'hich nothing can be said no' prove to have &marvellously polished& 'alls 'ith &evanescent life.& That the stars in the &skin& of this metonymic cosmos are &pink and gray& is instructive, since %orster has already established these as the colours of the so)called &'hite& race 3125. Here is an anthropomorphic, Buropean)style beauty, 'hich is pro4ected onto the 'all by the visitor himself in the very act of looking at it. Fne of these &featureless& caves, the one on the Ga'a >ol, is even discussed in terms of floors, ceilings, mirrors, and Baster eggs. Had the chapter gone on much longer, the cave might have gro'n into a human d'elling 'ith all modern conveniences. But of course, it doesn&t, and the bemused reader comes a'ay 'ith the highly orthodo* conclusion that all of this is beyond interpretation.

8hat do 'e make of a narrator 'ho contradicts himself like this: Is he an outright fraud, or is he merely incompetent: Ceflection 'ill sho' that he 4ust can&t control language, that&s all. But 'ho can: He is after all only another 'ord)bearing invader, another novelist 3the missionaries @ray and 0orley 'ith their &poor little talkative $hristianity& !"?"# in another key5, and his 'eapon, language, is here revealed in all its inaccuracy, incompleteness, and muddle. He should have said nothing, like the meditative @odbole. But once he imputes a lack of attributes to the cave, the centrifugal, metaphorical nature of language takes over, and he starts trying to domesticate the unkno'n. Inavoidably, the more he attempts to include through description, the more he leaves out, and therefore the more he must say, in 'hat could have turned into an infinite regress of cosy anthropomorphisms had %orster not 'isely decided to end the chapter. Because language is human, and because 'e understand one thing by seeing it in the perspective of another,!"1# the &nothing& that language sets out to describe soon starts to resemble everything )) an everything 'ith a human face. 0till, it is important to see that there is nothing un)kno'ing about the 'ay %orster lets language proliferate like irritation and illness in the Hot 8eather( a &voluntary surrender to infection& is ho' %orster e*plained his little &trick.&!",# He is having fun( he kno's that language is another invader 'hich can&t say one thing 'ithout saying more yet someho' less than it intended, rather like the Aa'ab Bahadur prosing and vapouring as his automobile bo'ls along the Marabar road. %orster kno's that is no easier to stop the metaphorical proliferation of meaning in one direction than it is, in the other, for Adela to stop the metonymic, reductive echo 'hich spouts like a river from the cave after she invades it 'ith Conny&s field)glasses. /anguage is 'hat novelists use to dress up story, and most value it more than they do the story it clothes. Infortunately for them, it al'ays means more, or other, than they intend. $onsider %orster&s calculating use of pun and double entendre( Adela is &the last person in $handrapore& 'rongfully to accuse an Indian 3"1;5< McBryde, 'ho pro4ects his o'n faults on others, is &the most reflective& of the British 3";75< mankind has an &itch for the seemly& 3"715< ailing Mrs Moore 'ants her &patience cards& 3+2;5. Then there are the many splendidly t'o)sided negative constructions, such as( &he meant nothing by the invitation& 3,,5< &nothing clicked tight& 3+;-5< &nothing ... 9uite fits& 3+1,5. Appropriately enough, one can look at %orster&s use of puns in t'o 'ays. %rom one perspective, it can be seen as &a good thing,& as his attempt to make us look at things in alternate 'ays. 8hile there is some merit in this vie', there is more, I think, in the claim that %orster uses puns to dramati e our inability to say or see simply the one thing 'e mean. A pun presents a double but consecutive, time)bound vision, in 'hich the background snaps into focus as a ne' foreground, 4ust as &a traveller ... suddenly sees, bet'een the stones of the desert, flo'ers& 3"+15. 8hy can&t he see both at once: The vie' implicit in A Passage, if it is e*pressed in rhetorical terms, is that the ideal state is the one in 'hich the imagination is able to escape alternation to entertain both sides of a pun )) patience and patient&s, nothing and &nothing& )) simultaneously. Dohn Beer argues that in A Passage %orster, having &learnt ... the 'ays of the imagination,& is like an early Bnglish Comantic 'ho strives to &!hold# in unity by the imagination& the &apparently irreconcilable modes of thought,& and that @odbole succeeds in this aim.!+2# My o'n vie' is that 'hile %orster indeed strives to hold irreconcilables together simultaneously in his imagination, he sees 3and his use of pun and alternation demonstrates at every point5 that it cannot be done. There is a 'orld of difference bet'een the simultaneous and the consecutive, so that the discrepancy bet'een a pun and &a religious truth& or &Pans and puns& is synchronicity 3+;+, AA, ""75. The

ordinary 'orld is a place of mere alternating se9uence< 'e 'ant the Fne, but 'e get t'o( a 'orld in caricature. The same unstoppable spread of meaning is present in %orster&s intricately ramifying image)chains.!+"# India is hard to grasp, and so 'e have the vainly reaching hands of the Moguls< the fists and fingers of the hills, hands 'hich are held, kind, and cruel< handling, manipulation, molestation, manuals, palms< and, in an interesting grouping, toddy)palms, 'aving bamboos, and the 'aving palms of Bombay. In another remarkable se9uence, there is the tray from 'hich Adela and Mrs Moore are repeatedly served their breakfasts 3things near the Marabars are repetitive and tend to caricature themselves5< the shelves at %ielding&s, 'here things are not &ranged coldly& 31+5< the train platform< the platform at the trial< the shopkeepers& platforms 3";75< the tray in the hills 'here the e*pedition stops< the ledge or terrace in front of the caves< the gigantic pedestal of the Ga'a >ol< and of course, the tray 'hich holds the model of the village of @okul. 0oup bo'ls, @odbole, cups, saucers, plates, teaspoons, tanks, and people&s capacities for love are other e*amples. The same rampant interchangeability is evident at the level of scene. The narrator claims that the caves are like nothing else, but in their associations 'ith key motifs like home, the uncanny, smoke, flames, light, mirrors, love, and so on, they thro' out a 'eb of similitude to most other scenes.!++# %or e*ample, compare &the visitor&s& ambiguous response to the symmetrical, featureless caves 3".15 'ith the narrator&s account of the $ivil 0tation( &As for the $ivil 0tation itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not, neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned !and# it has nothing hideous in it& 3.+5. T'enty miles separate the British from their mirror)image, the truth about themselves )) a truth they contemplate daily but never recogni e. Bventually, there is nothing the narrator says that doesn&t dissolve into neighbouring meanings. 0ometimes the narrator even conveys the reverse of 'hat he means. $onsider his echo of 0t Matthe' in &it charms not, neither does it repel& 3.+5< or his adaptation of Ging 0olomon&s &the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,& 'hen Mrs Turton&s voice is heard in the 'aste land of the Indian spring 3+"75. In each case, the negative sense of the &echo& contradicts the affirmative conte*tual sense of the source, and sho's again )) intentionally on %orster&s part, there can be no doubt )) ho' little the narrator&s meaning is under his control, ho' he can&t say one thing 'ithout saying t'o. Aegative puns are the central tropes in A Passage. 8ith @odbole&s &nothing can be performed in isolation& in mind 3"1?5, 'e can claim that nothing in this novel can be said in isolation either, and that it 3and perhaps any te*t5 is a model of @odbole&s universe. In one direction, the &big bang& of metaphoric elaboration takes us out'ard through one of those &very complicated organisms kno'n as novels& 3AA, .75 to'ards the circumference of a &temple& so large that it e*cludes nothing 3people turn into mos9ues and horses< leaves are like plates< tire)tracks are like snake)tracks< flames are like lamps 'hich are like stars5. In the other direction, metonymic collapse leads us in'ard to'ards the last 'ord, the simplest story about things, &the lo'est and simplest of literary organisms& )) a black hole 'hich includes nothing but itself. Metaphor and metonymy d'ell in the t'o chambers of negative pun, t'o &nations& that cannot yet be friends, like the t'o sides of Mrs Moore&s family. 8henever the imperialistic imagination invades 'ith the chatty troops of metaphor, looking for home, rebellious synopsis sallies forth from its vacancy, murmuring &boum.& In the

age)old battle of the tropes, 'hich side 'ill prevail )) the e*pansive or the reductive, e*aggeration or diminishment, metaphor or metonymy: 8ill the casualties continue, or is there a 'ay of transcending the carnage: /anguage 'ill not help us. But non)verbal symbol might be a 'ay )) a symbol 'hich might trigger, in Aorthrop %rye&s 'ords, &the pure but transient vision, the aesthetic or timeless moment, Cimbaud&s illumination, Doyce&s epiphany, the Augenblick of modern @erman thought, and the kind of non)didactic revelation implied in such terms as symbolisme or imagism.&!+.# $ertainly this seems to be the aim of &Temple& )) the attempt to reach direct revelation through the achievement of a &moment& of temporal and spatial unity( various sorts of music are heard at once< in the dance all become one. Instead of the monocular vision of label, synopsis, and story, or the binocular eitherLor focus of pun, part . provides the unifying, bothLand focus of the non)verbal symbol. In &Temple,& 'e &lay aside the single vision 'hich 'e bring to most of literature and life& 3AA, "-,5. Here, 'e note the symbolic silver doll the si e of a teaspoon< the red silk napkin< the clay model of @okul. The symbolism of part . is conspicuous< being non)specific, it is all)suggestive, and it has an o*ymoronic character. %or e*ample, &the napkin 'as @od, not that it 'as& 3+175, and by means of &little images of @anpati, ... emblems of passage,& the 'orshippers &thro' @od a'ay, @od Himself 3not that @od can be thro'n5, into the storm& 3.2,5. This o*ymoronic 9uality, in 'hich the symbolic 'ord both is and is not 'hat it symboli es even 'hile remaining itself, gives it the po'er to adumbrate the ineffable Being 'ho &is, 'as not, is not, 'as& 3+1"5. In short, one can see 'hat %orster 'ants to do( he 'ants to vault from the &tinkling cymbal& of ordinary time)bound language to the all) including symbol, by means of 'hich he and his novel may someho' instantaneously ravish the unkno'n. >oes he succeed: The novel tells a story 3&oh dear yes,& as %orster laments !AA, .-#5. But ideally, the reader should not be &told& a novel at all. The reader should not fall under the tyranny of that primal and rudimentary &naked 'orm of time,& the story, 'hich, in its everlasting &and ne*t, and ne*t:& bars him from instantaneous comprehension of the truth and of the novel as a 'hole. Ideally, he should be the novel, rather as a symbol &is& 'hat it refers to. Fnly in that 'ay can &this lo' atavistic form,& the novel, lead to &the perception of the truth.& This is 'hat %orster seems to have meant 'hen he 'rote, &Fur comprehension of the fine arts is, or should be, of the nature of a mystic union.&!+-# %rank Germode argues that A Passage actually reaches the condition of a symboliste art)ob4ect 'hich resembles the completeness conferred momentarily on the 'orld by the coming of Grishna. But it is difficult to claim 'ith conviction that A Passage engenders a direct revelation of 'holeness in many readers< 'hile it is one thing to hold that our comprehension of the fine arts should be of the nature of a mystic union, it is 9uite another to declare that it often, or ever, is. >oes A Passage itself suggest or imply that the comprehension of art is &of the nature of a mystic union&: 8ithin the novel 'e have e*amples of very poor comprehenders, listeners, or readers. There is %ielding, 'ho fails to achieve a mystical glimpse of all &creation& 'hen the Marabars advance and &the 'hole universe 'as a hill& 3",;5. 8hat he gets as the flying moment averts its &face& is not the absolute kno'ledge that comes from kno'ing &face to face,& or from being the moment, but the partial kno'ledge that comes from seeing &through a glass, darkly& )) from, in effect, being told about it. As a result, he feels &dubious and discontented.& Then there is that abysmal reader, letter)'riter, and teller of tales, Miss 6uested. >oubt affects her too 'hen, through &a sort of darkness,& she briefly achieves 'hat

she takes for an epiphany )) a &double relation ... of indescribable splendour& 3+.25. 8hat %orster&s crafty narrator omits to say is that this 'onderful double vision looks so splendid to Adela because she has never before penetrated beyond herself, beyond her routine, 'ooden, single vision. 8armer)hearted readers 'ill recogni e her &double relation& as nothing more marvellous than empathy, and failed empathy at that. All she does is deviate from priggish certainty into doubt( &0he failed to locate A i . It 'as the doubt that had often visited her& 3+."5. Germode reminds us that the philosopher @.B. Moore believed that &significance in personal relationships depends on a sense of overall unity analogous to that 'hich gives significance to art.& That is to say, the harmonious art)'ork is a model of universal unity, much as the &doll&s house& model of the village of @okul is an image of the ideal community, 'here there is no distinction bet'een tyrant and victim, Gansa and Grishna. But Mrs Moore lacks her namesake&s reading skills, as it 'ere< she takes the undying 'orm&s partial little tale for the 'hole story, and is devastated )) as if she didn&t understand metonymy, or as if she had believed someone 'ho had told her that the endless repetition of story is all there is in the universe of narrative. %orster kno's that there is more to narrative than &and then ... and then& 3AA, -15. Mrs Moore, Adela, and %ielding are all e*amples of readers 'ho fail to achieve &mystic union.& 8hat 'e have to decide is 'hether, e*treme cases as they are, %orster re4ects them. Fr, on the contrary, do their failures constitute %orster&s tacit admission that, in varying degrees, all readers fail to grasp novels as symboliste 'holes because of the intractability of time)bound story: 8hen 'e notice that even @odbole, clashing the air 'ith one unsounding &cymbal,& fails to imitate @od 'ell enough to include the rock, 'e can conclude, I think, that A Passage dramati es the failure of its characters and its readers to transcend story and ordinary life to reach final truth. True, good readers 3and 'riters5 &should& do so, in a moment analogous to mystical union 'hen, as Bliot 'rites, &8ords, after speech, reach L Into the silence.& But it is entirely likely that they never 9uite get there.!+7# Ao story can ever be the 'hole story unless, as far as the individual reader is concerned, it is the e9uivalent of the 'ord that is @od. Being told by someone else is never good enough, even if he speaks 'ith the tongue of an angel. 0tory is the snake in the garden, the Cussell&s viper in the college, the reductive &last 'ord& of Conny Heaslop 3Hiss)lip:5, 'ith his red snub nose. It is the ancient tape'orm in its cave beneath the cathedral of narrative. Aevertheless, 'e can&t do 'ithout it. As %orster 'rites in Aspects of the Aovel( &The life in time is so obviously base and inferior ... ( cannot the novelist abolish it from his 'ork, even as the mystic asserts he has abolished it from his e*perience, and install its radiant alternative alone:& He 'istfully ans'ers his o'n 9uestion( &The time)se9uence cannot be destroyed 'ithout carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place< the novel that 'ould e*press values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless& 3-1, -,5. Though 'e long for the temple of simultaneous symboliste apprehension 3and 'ho kno's, some of us may achieve it5, 'e must love story too, by necessity. 8e must accept it, in the same 'ay that 'e must love the humble bacteria inside Mr 0orley. A complete narrative universe needs, 'hether 'e like it or not, the double vision of metaphoric language and consecutive story< 'e are never more than &partially delivered from !Time&s# tyranny& 3AA, .?5. 0chehera ade, 'ife of the despotic sultan of India, and a &great novelist& herself, kne' this( because of the incomplete nature of story, she never gave all< hence, she never satisfied her tyrannical listener, and she preserved herself uncon9uered, like India herself 3AA, .75. 0he kne' that mere

story is unlovely, dull, and often valueless, but she also kne', as ostensibly more sophisticated novelists sometimes do not, that &'e have much to learn from it& 3AA, .?5. 0he valued the valueless, and it saved her life. If 'e 'ant to reach the unity to 'hich A Passage points, 'here the 'ord is @od, 'e must escape from the ma y trail of metaphor, the 'eb of simile, and all the other troops of trope. Most difficult of all, 'e must slip the toils of that ancient tape'orm, story, 'hich so often turns the cathedral of the novel into a &cave, ... stuffed 'ith a snake composed of small snakes, 'hich 'rithe independently& 3"7,5. 8ho 'ill be our Ariadne, if even symbol can&t save us: Tortured by the echo 'hich has invaded her after she has intruded on ground 'here language is alien, Adela thinks that only Mrs Moore could drive it back to its source. Adela is right in a sense that she does not perceive, because Mrs Moore has come to see that nothing &can be said& 3+275. @odbole too could have saved Adela, but that 'ould have involved him in the active 'orld of meaning and &arrangement.& Aevertheless, he acts out one possible solution all the time, and it is of course, silence( the refusal to imagine or conceptuali e )) the contemplation, perhaps, of om. As the narrator himself says, in a rather testy moment, &a perfectly ad4usted organism 'ould be silent& 3"-75. It is evident that the novel&s ma4or scenes have all been spa'ned from the germinal moment in the 'omblike cave 'hen the visitor first imagined. Perhaps he should have restrained himself, for as soon as his mind ceased to be a blank, he got himself involved in the endless train of story and the indeterminate play of signification. As the narrator slyly observes, as if in some pu lement, &This arrangement occurs again and again ... and this is all& 3".15. Art is arrangement, the result of imaging forth &nothing,& Brahma< but since art is an image of the universe, not the universe itself, it can at best be &kno'ing in part.& Ao image can comprehend everything< that is 'hy the photograph of A i &s 'ife ga es from its frame uncomprehendingly at &the echoing and contradictory 'orld& 3"+,5. Because the attempt to imagine is usually focused only on 'hat is held to be &significant,& it also calls attention to 'hat it omits. The caves are 'hat the imagination leaves out( that 'hich does not signify. %rom this vantage)point, it is easier to see that the narrator of A Passage 3especially of &Mos9ue& and &$aves&5, is not %orster himself, but some novelist 'ho seriously undervalues 'hat isn&t imagined )) in particular, story. In Aspects of the Aovel, %orster imagines the Bnglish novelists 'riting simultaneously in the British Museum reading room, that echoing dome 'ith its labyrinthine catalogue counters. Their compositions are attempts to impose meaning on Brahma. 8ithin that one particular composition that 'e call A Passage to India, as the rains of &Temple& approach, so does &the decomposition of the Marabar& 3+7;5, together 'ith the apparent end of its interminable echoes. But that end is only temporary. Permanent &decomposition& 'ill happen only 'hen authors completely cease trying to image forth the absolute )) but unfortunately that 'ill also spell the end of narrative itself. In the end language needs story, and story must reach a truce 'ith language, for both need those verbal costumes stored in Malabar&s. And novelists, for their part, must be content to perceive absolute truth partially and consecutively, in time. As 0chehera ade 'ell kne', a complete 'orld of fictive meaning pays &a double allegiance& to the clock and to values 3AA, .?5, to the conceivable and to the inconceivable, to foreground and background< it is unavoidably a double vision, our mortal vision. To use %orster&s o'n language, the novel is a 9ueenlike creature, but

in its th'arted aspirations it is also &a great king ... entangled in ignominy& 3+..5. /ike it, its readers have striven for the unifying vision and the transcendent symbol< and although 'e and the novel have fallen short, our failings are the basis of mankind&s true community. If 'e really do 'ant to pursue &the perception of the truth& to the e*clusion of creation&s fallible enchantments, 'e shall have to stop arranging the unkno'n. If 'e don&t think it is too high a price to pay, 'e shall have to stop using the imperial car, train, and victoria of metaphor< 'e shall have to 'ithdra' from the &tropics& and give up our e*peditions to the ancient caves of story. In the end 3but only if 'e really 'ant the story to end5, the creative battle bet'een home and boum may best be settled by om.

Forster began writing A Passage to India in 1913, just after his first visit to India. The novel was not revised and completed, however, until well after his second stay in India, in 19 1, when he served as secretary to the !aharajah of "ewas #tate #enior. $ublished in 19 %, A Passage to India e&amines the racial misunderstandings and cultural hypocrisies that characteri'ed the comple& interactions between Indians and the (nglish toward the end of the )ritish occupation of India. Forster*s style is mar+ed by his sympathy for his characters, his ability to see more than one side of an argument or story, and his fondness for simple, symbolic tales that neatly encapsulate large,scale problems and conditions. These tendencies are all evident in A Passage to India, which was immediately acclaimed as Forster*s masterpiece upon its publication. It is a traditional social and political novel, unconcerned with the technical innovation of some of Forster*s modernist contemporaries such as -ertrude #tein or T.#. (liot. A Passage to India is concerned, however, with representing the chaos of modern human e&perience through patterns of imagery and form. In this regard, Forster*s novel is similar to modernist wor+s of the same time period, such as .ames .oyce*s Ulysses /19 0 and 1irginia 2oolf*s Mrs. Dalloway /19 30. A Passage to India was the last in a string of Forster*s novels in which his craft improved mar+edly with each new wor+. 4fter the novel*s publication, however, Forster never again attained the level of craft or the depth of observation that characteri'ed his early wor+. In his later life, he contented himself primarily with writing critical essays and lectures, most notably Aspects of the

Novel /19 50. In 19%6, Forster accepted a fellowship at 7ambridge, where he remained until his death in 1958

Themes, !otifs 9 #ymbols

Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary wor . The Difficulty of English-Indian Friendship A Passage to India begins and ends by posing the :uestion of whether it is possible for an (nglishman and an Indian to ever be friends, at least within the conte&t of )ritish colonialism. Forster uses this :uestion as a framewor+ to e&plore the general issue of )ritain*s political control of India on a more personal level, through the friendship between 4'i' and Fielding. 4t the beginning of the novel, 4'i' is scornful of the (nglish, wishing only to consider them comically or ignore them completely. ;et the intuitive connection 4'i' feels with !rs. !oore in the mos:ue opens him to the possibility of friendship with Fielding. Through the first half of the novel, Fielding and 4'i' represent a positive model of liberal humanism< Forster suggests that )ritish rule in India could be successful and respectful if only (nglish and Indians treated each other as Fielding and 4'i' treat each other=as worthy individuals who connect through fran+ness, intelligence, and good will. ;et in the aftermath of the novel*s clima&=4dela*s accusation that 4'i' attempted to assault her and her subse:uent disavowal of this accusation at the trial=4'i' and Fielding*s friendship falls apart. The strains on their relationship are e&ternal in nature, as 4'i' and Fielding both suffer from the tendencies of their cultures. 4'i' tends to let his imagination run away with him and to let suspicion harden into a grudge. Fielding suffers from an (nglish literalism and rationalism that blind him to 4'i'*s true feelings and ma+e Fielding too stilted to reach out to 4'i' through conversations or letters. Furthermore, their respective Indian and (nglish communities pull them apart through their mutual stereotyping. 4s we see at the end of the novel, even the landscape of India seems to oppress their friendship. Forster*s

final vision of the possibility of (nglish,Indian friendship is a pessimistic one, yet it is :ualified by the possibility of friendship on (nglish soil, or after the liberation of India. 4s the landscape itself seems to imply at the end of the novel, such a friendship may be possible eventually, but >not yet.? The Unity of All Living Things Though the main characters of A Passage to India are generally 7hristian or !uslim, @induism also plays a large thematic role in the novel. The aspect of @induism with which Forster is particularly concerned is the religion*s ideal of all living things, from the lowliest to the highest, united in love as one. This vision of the universe appears to offer redemption to India through mysticism, as individual differences disappear into a peaceful collectivity that does not recogni'e hierarchies. Individual blame and intrigue is forgone in favor of attention to higher, spiritual matters. $rofessor -odbole, the most visible @indu in the novel, is Forster*s mouthpiece for this idea of the unity of all living things. -odbole alone remains aloof from the drama of the plot, refraining from ta+ing sides by recogni'ing that all are implicated in the evil of !arabar. !rs. !oore, also, shows openness to this aspect of @induism. Though she is a 7hristian, her e&perience of India has made her dissatisfied with what she perceives as the smallness of 7hristianity. !rs. !oore appears to feel a great sense of connection with all living creatures, as evidenced by her respect for the wasp in her bedroom. ;et, through !rs. !oore, Forster also shows that the vision of the oneness of all living things can be terrifying. 4s we see in !rs. !oore*s e&perience with the echo that negates everything into >boum? in !arabar, such oneness provides unity but also ma+es all elements of the universe one and the same=a reali'ation that, it is implied, ultimately +ills !rs. !oore. -odbole is not troubled by the idea that negation is an inevitable result when all things come together as one. !rs. !oore, however, loses interest in the world of relationships after envisioning this lac+ of distinctions as a horror. !oreover, though Forster generally endorses the @indu idea of the oneness of all living things, he also suggests that there may be inherent problems with it. (ven -odbole, for e&ample, seems to recogni'e

that something=if only a stone=must be left out of the vision of oneness if the vision is to cohere. This problem of e&clusion is, in a sense, merely another manifestation of the individual difference and hierarchy that @induism promises to overcome. The Muddle of India Forster ta+es great care to stri+e a distinction between the ideas of >muddle? and >mystery? in A Passage to India. >!uddle? has connotations of dangerous and disorienting disorder, whereas >mystery? suggests a mystical, orderly plan by a spiritual force that is greater than man. Fielding, who acts as Forster*s primary mouthpiece in the novel, admits that India is a >muddle,? while figures such as !rs. !oore and -odbole view India as a mystery. The muddle that is India in the novel appears to wor+ from the ground up< the very landscape and architecture of the countryside is formless, and the natural life of plants and animals defies identification. This muddled :uality to the environment is mirrored in the ma+eup of India*s native population, which is mi&ed into a muddle of different religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional groups. The muddle of India disorients 4dela the mostA indeed, the events at the !arabar 7aves that trouble her so much can be seen as a manifestation of this muddle. )y the end of the novel, we are still not sure what actually has happened in the caves. Forster suggests that 4dela*s feelings about Bonny become e&ternali'ed and muddled in the caves, and that she suddenly e&periences these feelings as something outside of her. The muddle of India also affects 4'i' and Fielding*s friendship, as their good intentions are derailed by the chaos of cross,cultural signals. Though Forster is sympathetic to India and Indians in the novel, his overwhelming depiction of India as a muddle matches the manner in which many 2estern writers of his day treated the (ast in their wor+s. 4s the noted critic (dward #aid has pointed out, these authors* >orientali'ing? of the (ast made 2estern logic and capability appear self,evident, and, by e&tension, portrayed the 2est*s domination of the (ast as reasonable or even necessary. The !egligence of "ritish #olonial $overnment

Though A Passage to India is in many ways a highly symbolic, or even mystical, te&t, it also aims to be a realistic documentation of the attitudes of )ritish colonial officials in India. Forster spends large sections of the novel characteri'ing different typical attitudes the (nglish hold toward the Indians whom they control. Forster*s satire is most harsh toward (nglishwomen, whom the author depicts as overwhelmingly racist, self,righteous, and viciously condescending to the native population. #ome of the (nglishmen in the novel are as nasty as the women, but Forster more often identifies (nglishmen as men who, though condescending and unable to relate to Indians on an individual level, are largely well,meaning and invested in their jobs. For all Forster*s criticism of the )ritish manner of governing India, however, he does not appear to :uestion the right of the )ritish (mpire to rule India. @e suggests that the )ritish would be well served by becoming +inder and more sympathetic to the Indians with whom they live, but he does not suggest that the )ritish should abandon India outright. (ven this lesser criti:ue is never overtly stated in the novel, but implied through biting satire.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures! contrasts! or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text"s ma#or themes. The Echo The echo begins at the !arabar 7aves< first !rs. !oore and then 4dela hear the echo and are haunted by it in the wee+s to come. The echo*s sound is >boum?=a sound it returns regardless of what noise or utterance is originally made. This negation of difference embodies the frightening flip side of the seemingly positive @indu vision of the oneness and unity of all living things. If all people and things become the same thing, then no distinction can be made between good and evil. Co value system can e&ist. The echo plagues !rs. !oore until her death, causing her to abandon her beliefs and cease to care about human relationships. 4dela, however, ultimately escapes the echo by using its message of impersonality to help her reali'e 4'i'*s innocence. Eastern and %estern Architecture

Forster spends time detailing both (astern and 2estern architecture in A Passage to India. Three architectural structures =though one is naturally occurring=provide the outline for the boo+*s three sections, >!os:ue,? >7aves,? and >Temple.? Forster presents the aesthetics of (astern and 2estern structures as indicative of the differences of the respective cultures as a whole. In India, architecture is confused and formless< interiors blend into e&terior gardens, earth and buildings compete with each other, and structures appear unfinished or drab. 4s such, Indian architecture mirrors the muddle of India itself and what Forster sees as the Indians* characteristic inattention to form and logic. Dccasionally, however, Forster ta+es a positive view of Indian architecture. The mos:ue in $art I and temple in $art III represent the promise of Indian openness, mysticism, and friendship. 2estern architecture, meanwhile, is described during Fielding*s stop in 1enice on his way to (ngland. 1enice*s structures, which Fielding sees as representative of 2estern architecture in general, honor form and proportion and complement the earth on which they are built. Fielding reads in this architecture the self,evident correctness of 2estern reason= an order that, he laments, his Indian friends would not recogni'e or appreciate. $od&ole's (ong 4t the end of Fielding*s tea party, -odbole sings for the (nglish visitors a @indu song, in which a mil+maid pleads for -od to come to her or to her people. The song*s refrain of >7omeE come? recurs throughout A Passage to India, mirroring the appeal for the entire country of salvation from something greater than itself. 4fter the song, -odbole admits that -od never comes to the mil+maid. The song greatly disheartens !rs. !oore, setting the stage for her later spiritual apathy, her simultaneous awareness of a spiritual presence and lac+ of confidence in spiritualism as a redeeming force. -odbole seemingly intends his song as a message or lesson that recognition of the potential e&istence of a -od figure can bring the world together and erode differences=after all, -odbole himself sings the part of a young mil+maid. Forster uses the refrain of -odbole*s song, >7omeE come,? to suggest that India*s redemption is yet to come.

(ym&ols
$ym%ols are o%#ects! characters! figures! or colors used to represent a%stract ideas or concepts. The Mara&ar #aves The !arabar 7aves represent all that is alien about nature. The caves are older than anything else on the earth and embody nothingness and emptiness=a literal void in the earth. They defy both (nglish and Indians to act as guides to them, and their strange beauty and menace unsettles visitors. The caves* alien :uality also has the power to ma+e visitors such as !rs. !oore and 4dela confront parts of themselves or the universe that they have not previously recogni'ed. The all,reducing echo of the caves causes !rs. !oore to see the dar+er side of her spirituality =a waning commitment to the world of relationships and a growing ambivalence about -od. 4dela confronts the shame and embarrassment of her reali'ation that she and Bonny are not actually attracted to each other, and that she might be attracted to no one. In this sense, the caves both destroy meaning, in reducing all utterances to the same sound, and e&pose or narrate the unspea+able, the aspects of the universe that the caves* visitors have not yet considered. The $reen "ird .ust after 4dela and Bonny agree for the first time, in 7hapter 1II, to brea+ off their engagement, they notice a green bird sitting in the tree above them. Ceither of them can positively identify the bird. For 4dela, the bird symboli'es the unidentifiable :uality of all of India< just when she thin+s she can understand any aspect of India, that aspect changes or disappears. In this sense, the green bird symboli'es the muddle of India. In another capacity, the bird points to a different tension between the (nglish and Indians. The (nglish are obsessed with +nowledge, literalness, and naming, and they use these tools as a means of gaining and maintaining power. The Indians, in contrast, are more attentive to nuance, undertone, and the emotions behind words. 2hile the (nglish insist on labeling things, the Indians recogni'e that labels can blind one to important details and differences. The unidentifiable green bird

suggests the incompatibility of the (nglish obsession with classification and order with the shifting :uality of India itself= the land is, in fact, a >hundred Indias? that defy labeling and understanding. The %asp The wasp appears several times in A Passage to India! usually in conjunction with the @indu vision of the oneness of all living things. The wasp is usually depicted as the lowest creature the @indus incorporate into their vision of universal unity. !rs. !oore is closely associated with the wasp, as she finds one in her room and is gently appreciative of it. @er peaceful regard for the wasp signifies her own openness to the @indu idea of collectivity, and to the mysticism and indefinable :uality of India in general. @owever, as the wasp is the lowest creature that the @indus visuali'e, it also represents the limits of the @indu vision. The vision is not a panacea, but merely a possibility for unity and understanding in India

4nalysis of !ajor 7haracters

Dr) A*i* 4'i' seems to be a mess of e&tremes and contradictions, an embodiment of Forster*s notion of the >muddle? of India. 4'i' is impetuous and flighty, changing opinions and preoccupations :uic+ly and without warning, from one moment to the ne&t. @is moods swing bac+ and forth between e&tremes, from childli+e elation one minute to utter despair the ne&t. 4'i' even seems capable of shifting careers and talents, serving as both physician and poet during the course of A Passage to India. 4'i'*s somewhat youthful :ualities, as evidenced by a sense of humor that leans toward practical jo+ing, are offset by his attitude of irony toward his (nglish superiors.
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Forster, though not blatantly stereotyping, encourages us to see many of 4'i'*s characteristics as characteristics of Indians in general. 4'i', li+e many of his friends, disli+es blunt honesty and directness, preferring to communicate through confidences, feelings underlying words, and indirect speech. 4'i' has a sense that much of morality is really social code. @e therefore feels no moral compunction about visiting prostitutes or reading Fielding*s private mail=both because his intentions are good and because he +nows he will not be caught. Instead of living by merely social codes, 4'i' guides his action through a code that is nearly religious, such as we see in his e&treme hospitality. !oreover, 4'i', li+e many of the other Indians, struggles with the problem of the (nglish in India. Dn the one hand, he appreciates some of the moderni'ing influences that the 2est has brought to IndiaA on the other, he feels that the presence of the (nglish degrades and oppresses his people. "espite his contradictions, 4'i' is a genuinely affectionate character, and his affection is often based on intuited connections, as with !rs. !oore and Fielding. Though Forster holds up 4'i'*s capacity for imaginative sympathy as a good trait, we see that this imaginativeness can also betray 4'i'. The deep offense 4'i' feels toward Fielding in the aftermath of his trial stems from fiction and misinterpreted intuition. 4'i' does not stop to evaluate facts, but rather follows his heart to the e&clusion of all other methods=an approach that is sometimes wrong. !any critics have contended that Forster portrays 4'i' and

many of the other Indian characters unflatteringly. Indeed, though the author is certainly sympathetic to the Indians, he does sometimes present them as incompetent, subservient, or childish. These somewhat valid criti:ues call into :uestion the realism of Forster*s novel, but they do not, on the whole, corrupt his e&ploration of the possibility of friendly relations between Indians and (nglishmen=arguably the central concern of the novel. #yril Fielding Df all the characters in the novel, Fielding is clearly the most associated with Forster himself. 4mong the (nglishmen in 7handrapore, Fielding is far and away most the successful at developing and sustaining relationships with native Indians. Though he is an educator, he is less comfortable in teacher, student interaction than he is in one,on,one conversation with another individual. This latter style serves as Forster*s model of liberal humanism=Forster and Fielding treat the world as a group of individuals who can connect through mutual respect, courtesy, and intelligence. Fielding, in these viewpoints, presents the main threat to the mentality of the (nglish in India. @e educates Indians as individuals, engendering a movement of free thought that has the potential to destabili'e (nglish colonial power. Furthermore, Fielding has little patience for the racial categori'ation that is so central to the (nglish grip on India. @e honors his friendship with 4'i' over any alliance with members of his own race=a reshuffling of allegiances that threatens the solidarity of the (nglish. Finally, Fielding >travels light,? as he puts it< he does not believe in marriage, but favors friendship instead. 4s such, Fielding implicitly :uestions the domestic conventions upon which the (nglishmen*s sense of >(nglishness? is founded. Fielding refuses to sentimentali'e domestic (ngland or to venerate the role of the wife or mother =a far cry from the other (nglishmen, who put 4dela on a pedestal after the incident at the caves. Fielding*s character changes in the aftermath of 4'i'*s trial. @e becomes jaded about the Indians as well as the (nglish. @is (nglish sensibilities, such as his need for

proportion and reason, become more prominent and begin to grate against 4'i'*s Indian sensibilities. )y the end of A Passage to India! Forster seems to identify with Fielding less. 2hereas 4'i' remains a li+able, if flawed, character until the end of the novel, Fielding becomes less li+able in his increasing identification and sameness with the (nglish. Adela +uested 4dela arrives in India with !rs. !oore, and, fittingly, her character develops in parallel to !rs. !oore*s. 4dela, li+e the elder (nglishwoman, is an individualist and an educated free thin+er. These tendencies lead her, just as they lead !rs. !oore, to :uestion the standard behaviors of the (nglish toward the Indians. 4dela*s tendency to :uestion standard practices with fran+ness ma+es her resistant to being labeled= and therefore resistant to marrying Bonny and being labeled a typical colonial (nglish wife. )oth !rs. !oore and 4dela hope to see the >real India? rather than an arranged tourist version. @owever, whereas !rs. !oore*s desire is bolstered by a genuine interest in and affection for Indians, 4dela appears to want to see the >real India? simply on intellectual grounds. #he puts her mind to the tas+, but not her heart=and therefore never connects with Indians. 4dela*s e&perience at the !arabar 7aves causes her to undergo a crisis of rationalism against spiritualism. 2hile 4dela*s character changes greatly in the several days after her alleged assault, her testimony at the trial represents a return of the old 4dela, with the sole difference that she is plagued by doubt in a way she was not originally. 4dela begins to sense that her assault, and the echo that haunts her afterward, are representative of something outside the scope of her normal rational comprehension. #he is pained by her inability to articulate her e&perience. #he finds she has no purpose in=nor love for=India, and suddenly fears that she is unable to love anyone. 4dela is filled with the reali'ation of the damage she has done to 4'i' and others, yet she feels paraly'ed, unable to remedy the wrongs she has done. Conetheless, 4dela selflessly endures her difficult fate after the trial=a course of action that wins her a friend in Fielding, who sees her as a brave woman

rather than a traitor to her race. Mrs) Moore 4s a character, !rs. !oore serves a double function in A Passage to India! operating on two different planes. #he is initially a literal character, but as the novel progresses she becomes more a symbolic presence. Dn the literal level, !rs. !oore is a good,hearted, religious, elderly woman with mystical leanings. The initial days of her visit to India are successful, as she connects with India and Indians on an intuitive level. 2hereas 4dela is overly cerebral, !rs. !oore relies successfully on her heart to ma+e connections during her visit. Furthermore, on the literal level, !rs. !oore*s character has human limitations< her e&perience at !arabar renders her apathetic and even somewhat mean, to the degree that she simply leaves India without bothering to testify to 4'i'*s innocence or to oversee Bonny and 4dela*s wedding. 4fter her departure, however, !rs. !oore e&ists largely on a symbolic level. Though she herself has human flaws, she comes to symboli'e an ideally spiritual and race,blind openness that Forster sees as a solution to the problems in India. !rs. !oore*s name becomes closely associated with @induism, especially the @indu tenet of the oneness and unity of all living things. This symbolic side to !rs. !oore might even ma+e her the heroine of the novel, the only (nglish person able to closely connect with the @indu vision of unity. Conetheless, !rs. !oore*s literal actions=her sudden abandonment of India= ma+e her less than heroic. ,onny -easlop Bonny*s character does not change much over the course of the novelA instead, Forster*s emphasis is on the change that happened before the novel begins, when Bonny first arrived in India. )oth !rs. !oore and 4dela note the difference between the Bonny they +new in (ngland and the Bonny of )ritish India. Forster uses Bonny*s character and the changes he has undergone as a sort of case study, an e&ploration of the restrictions that the (nglish colonials* herd mentality imposes on individual personalities. 4ll of Bonny*s previously individual tastes are effectively dumbed down to meet group standards.

@e devalues his intelligence and learning from (ngland in favor of the >wisdom? gained by years of e&perience in India. The open,minded attitude with which he has been brought up has been replaced by a suspicion of Indians. In short, Bonny*s tastes, opinions, and even his manner of spea+ing are no longer his own, but those of older, ostensibly wiser )ritish Indian officials. This +ind of group thin+ing is what ultimately causes Bonny to clash with both 4dela and his mother, !rs. !oore. Conetheless, Bonny is not the worst of the (nglish in India, and Forster is somewhat sympathetic in his portrayal of him. Bonny*s ambition to rise in the ran+s of )ritish India has not completely destroyed his natural goodness, but merely perverted it. Bonny cares about his job and the Indians with whom he wor+s, if only to the e&tent that they, in turn, reflect upon him. Forster presents Bonny*s failing as the fault of the colonial system, not his own.
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T2D (C-FI#@2D!(C, T@( ;DGC- !iss 4dela Huested and the elderly !rs. !oore, travel to India. 4dela e&pects to become engaged to !rs. !oore*s son, Bonny, a )ritish magistrate in the Indian city of 7handrapore. 4dela and !rs. !oore each hope to see the real India during their visit, rather than cultural institutions imported by the )ritish. 4t the same time, 4'i', a young !uslim doctor in India, is increasingly frustrated by the poor treatment he receives at the hands of the (nglish. 4'i' is especially annoyed with !ajor 7allendar, the civil surgeon, who has a tendency to summon 4'i' for frivolous reasons in the middle of dinner. 4'i' and two of his educated friends, @amidullah and !ahmoud 4li, hold a lively conversation about whether or not an Indian can be friends with an (nglishman in India. That night, !rs. !oore and 4'i' happen to run into each other while e&ploring a local mos:ue, and the

two become friendly. 4'i' is moved and surprised that an (nglish person would treat him li+e a friend. !r. Turton, the collector who governs 7handrapore, hosts a party so that 4dela and !rs. !oore may have the opportunity to meet some of the more prominent and wealthy Indians in the city. 4t the event, which proves to be rather aw+ward, 4dela meets 7yril Fielding, the principal of the government college in 7handrapore. Fielding, impressed with 4dela*s open friendliness to the Indians, invites her and !rs. !oore to tea with him and the @indu professor -odbole. 4t 4dela*s re:uest, Fielding invites 4'i' to tea as well. 4t the tea, 4'i' and Fielding immediately become friendly, and the afternoon is overwhelmingly pleasant until Bonny @easlop arrives and rudely interrupts the party. Fater that evening, 4dela tells Bonny that she has decided not to marry him. )ut that night, the two are in a car accident together, and the e&citement of the event causes 4dela to change her mind about the marriage. Cot long afterward, 4'i' organi'es an e&pedition to the nearby !arabar 7aves for those who attended Fielding*s tea. Fielding and $rofessor -odbole miss the train to !arabar, so 4'i' continues on alone with the two ladies, 4dela and !rs. !oore. Inside one of the caves, !rs. !oore is unnerved by the enclosed space, which is crowded with 4'i'*s retinue, and by the uncanny echo that seems to translate every sound she ma+es into the noise >boum.? 4'i', 4dela, and a guide go on to the higher caves while !rs. !oore waits below. 4dela, suddenly reali'ing that she does not love Bonny, as+s 4'i' whether he has more than one wife=a :uestion he considers offensive. 4'i' storms off into a cave, and when he returns, 4dela is gone. 4'i' scolds the guide for losing 4dela, and the guide runs away. 4'i' finds 4dela*s bro+en field,glasses and heads down the hill. )ac+ at the picnic site, 4'i' finds Fielding waiting for him. 4'i' is unconcerned to learn that 4dela has hastily ta+en a car bac+ to 7handrapore, as he is overjoyed to see Fielding. )ac+ in 7handrapore, however, 4'i' is une&pectedly arrested. @e is charged with attempting to rape 4dela Huested while she was in the caves, a charge based on a claim 4dela herself has made.

Fielding, believing 4'i' to be innocent, angers all of )ritish India by joining the Indians in 4'i'*s defense. In the wee+s before the trial, the racial tensions between the Indians and the (nglish flare up considerably. !rs. !oore is distracted and miserable because of her memory of the echo in the cave and because of her impatience with the upcoming trial. 4dela is emotional and illA she too seems to suffer from an echo in her mind. Bonny is fed up with !rs. !oore*s lac+ of support for 4dela, and it is agreed that !rs. !oore will return to (ngland earlier than planned. !rs. !oore dies on the voyage bac+ to (ngland, but not before she reali'es that there is no >real India?=but rather a comple& multitude of different Indias. 4t 4'i'*s trial, 4dela, under oath, is :uestioned about what happened in the caves. #hoc+ingly, she declares that she has made a mista+e< 4'i' is not the person or thing that attac+ed her in the cave. 4'i' is set free, and Fielding escorts 4dela to the -overnment 7ollege, where she spends the ne&t several wee+s. Fielding begins to respect 4dela, recogni'ing her bravery in standing against her peers to pronounce 4'i' innocent. Bonny brea+s off his engagement to 4dela, and she returns to (ngland. 4'i', however, is angry that Fielding would befriend 4dela after she nearly ruined 4'i'*s life, and the friendship between the two men suffers as a conse:uence. Then Fielding sails for a visit to (ngland. 4'i' declares that he is done with the (nglish and that he intends to move to a place where he will not have to encounter them. Two years later, 4'i' has become the chief doctor to the Bajah of !au, a @indu region several hundred miles from 7handrapore. @e has heard that Fielding married 4dela shortly after returning to (ngland. 4'i' now virulently hates all (nglish people. Dne day, wal+ing through an old temple with his three children, he encounters Fielding and his brother,in,law. 4'i' is surprised to learn that the brother,in,law*s name is Balph !ooreA it turns out that Fielding married not 4dela Huested, but #tella !oore, !rs. !oore*s daughter from her second marriage. 4'i' befriends Balph. 4fter he accidentally runs his rowboat into Fielding*s, 4'i' renews his friendship with Fielding as well. The two men go for a final ride together before Fielding leaves,

during which 4'i' tells Fielding that once the (nglish are out of India, the two will be able to be friends. Fielding as+s why they cannot be friends now, when they both want to be, but the s+y and the earth seem to say >Co, not yet. . . . Co, not there.?