Forster's Prose & Passion

BOOK REVIEWS persuaded that Wilde's life and work were entirely determined in the crucible of his mother's ambitions and his father's absence, it is always interesting to read of this extraordinary Anglo-Irish family. In the last two chapters, on the Society plays and The Importance of Being Earnest and De Profundis respectively, we see Wilde preparing the stage for his fall and the instability of his redemption, based upon his own inability to reconcile the two images of himself as martyr and hero. These are the chapters that most flesh out the meaning of the doomed child's "long and lovely suicide." The blurbs on Yale's dust jacket are by intelligent readers, even if they sound remarkably alike. Peter Gay calls Knox's "an original and important book with highly convincing psychoanalytic interpretations of Wilde and his work," and Steven Marcus says "an original and important reading of Oscar Wilde's works and life, Uluminated by an acute and informed use of psychoanalytic theory and insights." But I am afraid that, initially skeptical, I remain skeptical that such an approach as Knox's can do Wilde, his works, or his life justice. I finished reading depressed by the book's narrow view of human possibility. There is nothing lovely to me about a life-long suicide that is foretold from a child's earliest days, even if we accept that Wilde struggled nobly—and brilliantly—to compensate in his art for his fears and confusion. Early on, Knox asserts that behind the campaign for Gay rights is "the force of psychoanalysis" (xxi), but she does not explain how the determinism her book represents can be liberating, and, in any case, I am skeptical that the conscious, socially engaged Wilde, the Wilde who was one of modernity's more public intellectuals, would be pleased with such a limited view of his, or any man's, possibilities. But perhaps none of our approaches—neither Knox's psychobiography nor my contextual alternative —can do Wilde, or any man, justice. Wilde himself, at least, would have been the first to welcome the multiplication of possibilities. Regenia Gagnier ______________ Stanford University Forster's Prose & Passion Nigel Rapport. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and The Writing of E. M. Forster. New York: St Martin's Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. xi + 300 pp. $49.95 £25.00 THE TITLE OF THIS study, with its quotation from a well-known passage from Howards End, immediately alerts the reader to its ambi373 ELT 38:3 1995 tion to connect two traditional antinomies: the inscription of social realities in anthropology and in fiction, modes of writing whose descriptive technologies have usually been seen at opposite, possibly antagonistic , poles. The novelist's highly personal tone and idiosyncratic angle of vision revels in the unsystematic, imaginative, and fantastic. In the view of literary critics of an earlier generation, Northrop Frye, for instance, the work so produced by the complex interaction of the personal with the social may be seen as inner-oriented, and in a sense divorced from the world outside itself. The ethnographer, on the other hand, has historically aimed at capturing and interpreting impersonal and scientific truth and has aimed at rigor and neutrality, however elusive these might have proved to be in practice. Nigel Rapport seeks to demonstrate how inadequate and arbitrary these compartmentalized distinctions are and how illusory the contemporary social scientist's quest for objectivity by "reading" Wanet, a small rural community in the north of England, through Försters Edwardian fiction, and, conversely, by reading Forster's novels and short stories through the Wanet he experienced during the Thatcherite 1980s. His project, which deconstructs long-established ethnographic assumptions and methodologies, attempts to unveil the anthropologist as a kind of novelist dependent upon fiction's formal elements—narrative strategy, metaphor, character—both in the conceptualization and writing up of research. Rapport's aim is, then, in the manner of the present day, deliberately subversive and highly self-interrogating. In addition to conventional ethnographic concerns—descriptions of the everyday rituals and economic and social activities and structures of life in an English village as garnered through informants and personal...