Desire and Consciousness: The "Anironic" Forster

Abstract

From start, Forster's familiar ideal of permanent connection-which provides not altogether solid basis for his belief in relations-is more or less openly subverted by an attraction to pleasures of passing contact. Generally, connection is made to triumph. Only in The Longest Journey among early books is a protest lodged, not without ambiguity, against the code of modern morals, with its slogans of Eternal union, eternal ownership (p. 292);1 and even in that novel Romantic love is acknowledged to be greater than Stephen Wonham's more prosaically independent notions about marriage. Still, Forster's occasional tributes to discrete and discontinuous relationship, however much qualified, act (or should act) as potential threats to reader's perception of his moral design, which, in novels from Where Angels Fear to Tread to Maurice (1905-1914), depends upon possibility of integration. Divided against themselves, Forster's characters are invited to overcome through consciousness their consciousness of isolation in a disordered and incoherent world. Encouraged to live in fragments no longer (HE, p. 187), they are asked to undergo a process of transformation by adding to or absorbing into themselves primitivist values of novels' symbolic figures and landscapes. Becoming is goal of these characters; choice instrument Forster offers them; and their ambience, the sense of space, which is basis of all earthly beauty (HE, p. 204). In a world so conceived, there is, so far as personal relations are concerned, room for failure certainly but not for successes that abort psychological depths and temporal continuities implied by attainment of connecting. And yet both Forster and his characters entertain notion of just such final and depersonalized encounters. So Philip Herriton, in a manuscript passage excised from Where Angels Fear to Tread, addresses (with no irony intended either by him or by Forster) dear friends of mine whom I have made in Italy! cabmen, waiters, sacristans, shop assistants, soldiers . and ends, after his perfervid praise of these chance, passing acquaintances: oh thank goodness, I shall never