In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews Forster's A Passage to India Judith Scherer Herz. A Passage to India: Nation and Narration. New York: Twayne, 1993. xvii + 151 pp. Cloth $23.95 Paper $7.95 A PASSAGE TO INDIA is one of the great achievements of twentieth -century English literature, mythic in scope and breathtaking in phUosophical seriousness. Not only is it an oddly yet deeply moving account of ordinary individuals caught at a moment of personal and political crisis, observed and presented from a somewhat startling cosmic perspective, but it is also a penetrating study of imperialism, a brooding exploration of a spiritual wasteland, and an unflinching inquiry into such topics as the subjectivity of perception, the limitations of consciousness, and the loneliness of the human condition, as epitomized by our constant yearning for "the Friend who never comes." As the blurb on Judith Scherer Herz's welcome study of A Passage to India for Twayne's Masterwork Studies series remarks, the novel "is at once political tract, personal memoir, phUosophical meditation, comedy of manners, mystery, even ghost story." Forster's most ambitious undertaking , it is in many respects the culmination of his career as a novelist. It both summarizes many of the ideas and themes of the five earlier novels, including the tenets of the liberal humanism that Forster championed so effectively, and also unsparingly—even despairingly—questions them. Moreover, A Passage to India is an intensely personal work, the fruit of Forster's extended mid-life crisis, the triumphant yet costly resolution to his painful struggle with writer's block and perhaps sexual guilt as well. Combining brilliance with common sense, Judith Herz ranks among our generation's most intelligent and sensitive readers of Forster. Hence, it is not surprising that her new book is a very helpful contribution toward understanding the nature and complexity of A Passage to India. Constrained by space limitations and perhaps by the demands of the series of which it is a part, the book certainly does not offer complete 57 ELT 37 : 1 1994 accounts of either the text or its various contexts. Yet it is a tribute to the study's critical vitality and consistently stimulating insights that I found myself fervently wishing it were longer. As her subtitle intimates, Herz concentrates on two apparently separate concerns, the political contexts of the novel and its narrative technique. Paradoxically, the result is a rich reading that unifies the political and metaphysical aspects of the work, while also demonstrating that Forster's way of telling his story is actually inseparable from the story he tells. The study is divided into two sections: "Literary and Historical Context" and "A Reading." The first section consists of four brief chapters . Much of the material here is hurriedly presented, apparently included to fulfill the demands of the series rather than to advance a larger argument. The opening discussion of A Passage to India as a modernist novel is especially frustrating for its inconclusiveness (though it later becomes clear that Herz locates the novel within modernism by virtue of its simultaneous impulses toward antithetical effects —especially its coexistent attraction for the fragmentary and the coherent, the transcendent and the contingent). On the other hand, the brief and obligatory account of the novel's critical reception expertly summarizes the most significant approaches to the work. Clearly, however, the crucial chapters of the opening section are the middle two, the ones explaining the contexts of the novel. Herz describes some of the personal contexts, including Forster's momentous relationship with the Alexandrian tram conductor Mohammed el AdI, but slights these in favor of the historical and political contexts. Relying heavüy on the work of Benita Parry, Herz economically explains the history of the British Raj and situates A Passage to India within its literature. Describing it as both "the last colonial and the first postcolonial text," she concedes that the novel inevitably inscribes the civilization and assumptions of the British conquerors and to that extent is complicitous in the colonialist enterprise; yet she rightly insists that it resolutely refuses to endorse the myths that support colonialization. After rehearsing fairly and sympatheticaUy the claims of postcolonialist critics, Herz convincingly concludes that Forster is...

pdf

Share