E. M. Forster Criticism

31:4 Book Reviews E. M. FORSTER CRITICISM Harold Bloom, ed. E. M. Forster and E. M. Forster's Ά Passage to India'. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. $24.50 and $19.95 For books that will undoubtedly have a wide trade distribution, especially in paperback editions, these two collections of critical essays on E. M. Forster are disappointing. For one thing, it comes as something of a shock to find that Bloom has used the same introduction for both volumes. The subject of the introduction, A Passage to India, does not really suit the Modem Critical Views collection of essays on Forster's total oeuvre. An introduction to such a collection should give some notion of Forster's general achievement as a writer and not just focus on one novel. Even for someone so widely read and so learned as Harold Bloom, the editing of two hundred volumes (in print and contemplated) in the Twentieth Century Views Series and of one hundred volumes in the Modem Critical Interpretations Series is too demanding a task for any one individual in order to guarantee notable results for every volume in the two series. As for the two volumes under review, Bloom's lack of expertise in Forster scholarship substantially weakens them. The introduction to both volumes offers debatable and imprecise judgments in a rather magisterial manner. I do not feel, for example, that Forster's critics have evaded the discussion of the nature and the relative coherence of Förster 's vision expressed in Passage, though this vision is admittedly difficult to define. Bloom's assertion that Forster's purpose in Passage is to magnify the human in the divine is true, I would say, only in a relative sense; rather, it would be more accurate to say that his purpose is to demonstrate the presence of the divine in the human. Again, the judgment (made fashionable in some quarters by Trilling's patronizing view of Passage) that Forster's characters lack will is hardly tenable in an absolute sense. I would allege, on the contrary, that Fielding demonstrates a notable, even tremendous, exercise of the will in defending Aziz against the mob of his own compatriots and that it costs Adela Quested a Herculean effort to recant her accusations against Aziz at his trial. Even Aziz's suspicions concerning Fielding's later relationship with Adela elicit a strong degree of perverted will, in order for him to persist in believing them against the evidence which his heart would suggest and which he continually stifles. Bloom's judgments of an author who is paradoxical , many-faceted, and alive to all possible ambiguities both in our mundane experience and in our apprehension of the divine should, I think, be more qualified and tentative than they are. Added to all this, almost half of Bloom's ten-page introductory commentary consists of extended quotations from Forster, some running a page and a half with little comment being given for them. This is the method practiced by F. R. Leavis and is, to my mind, most unsatisfactory since it tends to substitute quoted passages for substantive analysis by the critic. 487 31:4 Book Reviews As for E. M. Forster, the selections from the books by George Thomson, Alan Wilde, John Colmer, and Barbara Rosecrance, which take us through Maurice and the late short fiction, are standard. The same discrimination deserted the editor, however, when he chose for the illumination of Passage three comparatively weak essays: Martin Price's "Inclusion and Exclusion," a pedestrian analysis of the dichotomies in the novel; Rustom Bharacha's "Forster's Friends," a pleasant but scarcely profound discussion of Forster vis-à -vis Syed Ross Masood and Mohammed el AdI; and Sara Suleri's "The Geography of A Passage to India," an essay full of opaque and cryptic statements such as these: To the western imagination, the horror of the caves is their lack of metaphoricity and their indifference to experiential time. Adela essentially plays the part of a conduit or a passageway for the aborted eroticism between the European Fielding and the Indian Aziz. With respect to the Modem Critical Interpretations volume on Passage, it seems to me that there...