Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy (review)

The relationship between C. P. Cavafy and E. M. Forster was undoubtedly one of mutual influence, "with Alexandria" as George Savvidis once said memorably, "acting as a catalyst." He continues: "One possibility is that Forster's firm position on the Imperial question may have crystallized Cavafy's view of the Roman Empire, just as Cavafy's erotic liberation as a poet may have contributed to the rewriting of Maurice and to the remarkable cathartic progress of some stories first published in The Life to Come (μικρά καβαΦικά [Short Essays on Cavafy], Ermis, 1985). To put it simply, Forster taught Cavafy something about politics and learned, in return, queer poetics.

In his interesting, if uneven, study of Cavafy and Forster, Peter Jeffreys tries to complicate this picture, focusing on the two writers' constructions of "Hellenism" and "Orientalism." His main argument is that while Cavafy constructed a vision of the Hellenic that included the Oriental, Forster started from quite a narrow view of Hellenism, one related to Victorian Platonism. Thus, "Forster's Keatsean Greece of truth and beauty appears to be irreconcilable with Cavafy's Hellenic continuum" (p. 81). Forster's narrow Hellenism was eventually repudiated in favor of a much more radical, politically invested view of the Orient which he may first have experienced in Alexandria but only fully developed in his later sojourns in India. The larger claim that follows from these observations is astute: Cavafy's and Forster's views of the Orient, and indeed of power and history more generally, differ because their views of Hellenism differed. For Cavafy, Hellenism was central to understanding the ruses of power and the movements of history and his notion of the Orient was bound up with this idea. Forster, on the other hand, seems to have sought in both Hellenic and Oriental cultures a heterotopia onto which he could project his artistic and spiritual projects. He found the former too distant, imposing, and self-indulgent; the latter mystical, available, and liberating.

A meticulous reader might object to some of the close readings Jeffreys offers to support his claims. Scholarship on the two writers is cited extensively, but often uncritically. At one point, for instance, the narrative fully endorses M. Haag's misleading comment that "during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Alexandria was the seat of Greek letters, while Athens was no more than a provincial town doing labour as the capital of a newfound nationalism" (p. 184).

In spite of these shortcomings, the broader claims made early on in this book are difficult to deny. As Jeffreys explains, both Cavafy and Forster seem in the beginning to be fascinated by the same Hellenism—a particularly nineteenth century Hellenism "with its fetish for exiled gods and beautiful young men" (p. 30). Even though this is a crude reference to the Hellenism promoted by figures such as Pater and Addington Symonds, Jeffreys certainly has a point. His next phrase is one of the most interesting and marks an important step in the book more generally: "Their personal Hellenisms, however, were constantly challenged by the East. For Cavafy, the Orient was absorbed into his vision of a greater Hellenistic ecumene, one that was nevertheless riddled with 'Orientalist' fantasies. In Forster's case, the Orient seduced him into a radically different world, one that forced him to part with the secure cultural perspective of European Hellenism and its inherent imperialist and totalizing assumptions" (pp. 30–31).

This is certainly a good starting ground. Nevertheless, the author does not go on to develop his own insights. He resists putting any analytical pressure on the very terms he sets up at the heart of his inquiry (Orientalism and Hellenism), which therefore remain at once too vague and undertheorized. Nor does he engage with any theoretical discussion on Hellenism and questions of modern Greek identity, Hellenism and Eurocentricism, Hellenism and the Orient. The concept of "Orientalism" itself...