Pursuing (a) Fantasy: E.M. Forster's Queering of Realism in The Longest Journey

The general tone of novels is so literal that when the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect: some readers are thrilled, others choked off: it demands an additional adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject matter . . . fantasy asks us to pay something extra.²

Fantasy . . . flits over the scenes of Italian and English holidays, or wings her way with even less justification towards the countries of the future. She or he. For Fantasy, though often female, sometimes resembles a man. . . .³

When read with a knowledge of his sexual history, E.M. Forster's characterization of fantasy, one of the seven topics or "aspects" of fiction he discusses in his 1927 lectures and book, yields queer⁴ possibilities. Described in almost orgasmic terms as thrilling or choking its readers and categorized by the oddness of its method or subject matter, fantasy—conceived by Forster as an alternative to realism in fiction—becomes suggestive of alternative desires and identities as well. In his understanding, fantasy is a double-natured and -gendered beast: expressing some aspect of reality through an element of the supernatural, fantasy can take on the guise of male or female. This "aspect" is central to Forster's creative production: from his very first fictional effort, "The Story of a Panic," to his final novel, A Passage to India, and his posthumously published homoerotic writings, Forster's fiction is usually punctuated by elements of the fantastic. On a surface level, Forster's use of mythic or magical figures and places reflects a literary fashion of his day. As he put it in a radio talk, in those days Pan was "in the air,"⁵ and popular Edwardian fiction is full of pastoral fantasy tales, populated by satyrs and nymphs and set in magical woods and dells. Fantasy is much more than a faddish pursuit for Forster, however.

Fantasy's queer duality is a significant quality for Forster because he himself experienced a tremendous sense of being split in his emotional life and writing. As a young Englishman coming to terms with homosexual attractions while forging a career in the heterosexually-coded world of early twentieth-century fiction, Forster found that his life and work were constantly marked by tensions between his (then) illicit desires and social and literary conventions. Most of his novels were written during a time of sexual confusion and frustration, during which Forster wrestled with but barely acted upon his desires, never having a physically consummated homosexual experience until 1916.⁶ Because Forster believed that "it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source" (Aspects, p. 45), he needed a means by which to express his desires and experience (or lack thereof) of that hidden life. Fantasy provided a pathway through which Forster could negotiate, sometimes unconsciously, the conflicting demands of sexuality and respectability.

Forster's use of the "aspect" of fantasy and its doubling structures yields novels marked at times by frequent contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies that not only express his struggles with same-sex desire but also offer a subtle critique of the society which produces such conflict. Although many modernist works might be said to share these paradoxical qualities, several of Forster's novels (to a greater or lesser degree) can also be considered "queer" texts. Similar to what Annamarie Jagose describes as "queer . . . gestures or analytical models," Forster's novels "dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire."⁷ Expressing what Michael Warner calls a "dissatisfaction with the regime of the normal,⁸ these novels use fantasy elements to queer the literary form that is the repository of the Edwardian "normal," i.e., novelistic realism.

In many ways, The Longest Journey is probably the best example for demonstrating the queer connection between Forster...