Forster's Epistemology of Dying

Criticism Forster's Epistemology of Dying · Garrett Stewart "Of course this death has been troubling me. . . .But it has made me remember we must all die: all these personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now 'death spares no one' begins to be real." —A Passage to India1 We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "You are not true." —Richard Wilbur, "Epistemology" A death that selects, that discriminates, is not a notion one is likely to take away from the novels of E. M. Forster, at least those before A Passage to India, where demise is extraordinarily frequent and even-handed. Forsterian dying is also in most cases precipitous, unprophesied, and absurd. Yet commentary has had little to say on those cryptic, scrimped death "sentences" by which a swift clause or two sweeps a life from page and plot. If the underlying contention of this essay is correct, that in Forster we find the first distinctively "modern" treatment of death in British fiction, then it is necessary to lookmore closely than before at Forster's surprise obliterations, almost brutally cool and underdressed. Death qualifies in Forster what Adela Quested in the first epigraph calls "personal relations" mainly by its frightening indifference to them. Death may come swollen with irony, but void of traditional sense or solace. By this very evacuation of portent Forster's death scenes become highly self-conscious narrative feats, for each time a character drops dead on his remorseless pages the thud reverberates against English and Continental fiction's formulaic death scenes, time-honored as the locus of revelation, however negative or unavailing. Forsterian epiphanies come not by descent at death but by unhesitant ascent in life, a spiritual struggle through epistemologica! mistiness and miasmal self-delusion toward the clear air of the real. Death, by definition as surcease, ends the chance for that clarity, rather than laying the soul open to newmodes of knowing. Forsterian death scenes thus gather import from their often violent irrelevance, redirecting the itch for vision back into our allotted life in time. Hence Forster's epistemology of dying, never of death. After his rapid apprenticeship in the Italianate romanticism of Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), the first chapter of Forster's first original masterwork, The LongestJourney (1907), opens on a Cambridge epistemological debate about the "thereness' of cows—about verifiable "realities." This episode serves as prolegomenon to his career-long meditation upon last things and their leverage on the everyday, not only for the death-strewn, death-skewed landscape of The Longest Journey but for the more assured terrain of Howards End (1910) andA Passage to India (1924), the three novels that most clearly define Forster's revisionist program of fictional dying and work to divide the "real" from the illusory in his spiritual epistemology. My first epigraph draws upon the terms of THEMISSOURIREVIEW · 103 such speculation when Adela admits that the fact of death "begins to be real." But ultimately in Forsterian usage the antonym of "real" is "dead," in the full metaphoric spectrum of that most past of past participles. According to the epistemological paradox of Forsterian humanism, the real dwells vitally with the ideal, and "material" interests, in the crass rather than the metaphysical sense, dwindle to naught before the immaterial promptings of the spirit. Or if they do not, death stalks our lives in the shape of a spectral secularism. The antagonism between death and materialism is most spaciously treated in Howards End, where Helen Schlegel indoctrinates the misguided Leonard Bast in the mysteries of spirit, after his cynical outburst to the effect that "the real thing's money and all the rest is a dream." Helen answers, "You've forgotten Death," a "real thing" that limits but also illuminates other realities: "Ifwe lived for ever, what you say would be true. Butwehave to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we...