Forster's Passage to India : Re-Envisioning Plato's Cave

Abstract

Literary Modernism, as much interpretative commentary continues to reveal, oscillates between a desire for an impossible certainty (all that Western philosophy promised in various renditions until close ofthe nineteenth century) and a reciprocal terror that ultimately nothing can be known. cryptic images associated with this uncertainty are famil- iar: an ambiguous line drawn down center ofa painting in Woolfs To Lighthouse; Stephen Dedalus's enigmatic forging in Joyce's Portrait oftheArtist asa YoungMan; culminating toothbrush hanging on wall in EUot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Intractable and persistent, interpretations of Modernism still pursue collapsing centers, elusive origins, andvanishing falcons. Epistemology (even ifa failed epistemol- ogy), for obvious reasons, remains key. In this spirit of uncertainty, Platonic, which depends on fixity and stability ofboundaries, may initially seem incongruent.2 Yet attempts within Modernism to flee from constraints oftime and nar- rative so fervently critiqued by Georg Lukacs and Fredric Jameson do at least ambivalently recall Platonic vision (although not necessarily commensurate reactionary, political implications). Socrates tells us in Phaedo that philosopher comes closest to truth when he is closest to death, when material world is furthest away: The true votary ofphilosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do notperceive thathe is always pursuing death and dying (Dialogues: A Selection 56). Likewise, aestheticism functioning as a kind ofsubstitute Platonics also takes us out ofthis world, enacting yet another ruse that points reader's eyes toward symbol (and toward heavens) away from bodies, away from sexuality.3 Aestheticism underlies tension in Yeats in which at least one of his personas yearns to be gathered into the artifice of eternity or to merge into breathless starlit air where all thought is done. It underlies EUot's urge toward unity in Waste Land and culmination ofthat desired unity in TheFour Quartets, in which weighty imagery and a consistency ofmeter propels reader simultaneously toward death and a higher metaphys- ical vision. This disjuncture within Modernism between Platonic underpinnings and a ubiquitous uncertainty, however, is less strange than its evasion ofgender, particularly given poststructuralist critiques ofmetaphysics as insidiously steeped in desire. Ifknowing is inseparable from desire, then Modernism's epistemological crisis (still primarily regarded as gender-neutral) cannot be separated from a crisis in sexuality. E. M. Forster, although less stylistically experimental than many ofhis coun- terparts, is remarkably radical in his vision on this account, for he sees in Modernist metaphysical collapse, not an abyss, but an opportu- nity. Most specifically, Western metaphysics for Forster clearly informs