Tourism, tourists, humility and the humble in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of the Siren’ (1920)

Abstract

In E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of the Siren’ (1920), humility and the humble are highlighted by the empowering status bestowed on an embedded story told by an illiterate Sicilian boatman to a sophisticated English tourist and prospective Cambridge Fellow. The latter, who is also the narrator of the embedding narrative, proves to be transformed by the qualities (philosophic, ethical and literary) promoted by the humble status of the embedded one. As the existence of the Siren of the title is problematic – she never shows up – and the story offers a case of structuring a full intrigue on the invisible, there may be a connection between the humble and the invisible. In order to investigate this assumption, I propose to explore the way in which the myth of the siren, a myth that relates to desire, is brought into dialogue with Frazer’s evolutionary theory and Plato’s theory of ideas. The interplay between philosophy, anthropology and desire provides a critique of Edwardian society and a self-criticism based on Socratic irony, itself an irony of humility. I shall eventually suggest that the humble but desirable Sicilian storyteller functions like an avatar of the Siren. Instead of writing a dissertation on the Deist Controversy and becoming an academic, the homodiegetic narrator allows himself to be seduced by the ‘Siren’s song’ – the young Sicilian’s story – and (ironically) become a writer. For, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the relationship between this short story and the life of E. M. Forster is highlighted by the figure of metalepsis, a device that reveals the author, rather than the narrator, at work.