Are the Modes Mixed?

Abstract

Two external factors have led to exaggeration of the non-realist element in Forster. Forster as mystic comes from taking some playful early short stories — ‘The Story of a Panic’, ‘The Other Kingdom’ — too seriously; The Longest Journey blatantly moves beyond everyday reality. Further, his Aspects of the Novel has two unexpected sections, on Fantasy and Prophecy, showing these are important for him. Insofar as Forster is writing ‘comedy of manners’ or ‘Social comedy’ he is writing broadly in the manner of most novelists of the previous hundred years, but if he can be shown to be introducing other elements, he becomes innovative, associated with Modernism, looking more into the twentieth century than back to the nineteenth. Peter Keating phrases Forster’s position thus: ‘The self-conscious symbolism and the strain of mysticism in the novel demonstrates his additional distrust of realism, but Forster clung to realism with a desperation that makes Howards End one of the great representative novels of the age’ (1989, p. 325). I question how ‘self-conscious’ the symbolism is and the issue can equally be phrased the other way, that Forster wanted to go, from time to time, beyond realism, to introduce symbolism and mysticism.