The Machine Stops - Common Read 2018: Forster's Other Work

The work of Constantine Cavafy and that of E.M. Forster are marked as much by difference as by similarity. The similarities derive largely from their shared tradition of Western Hellenism. The differences stem from their dissenting views over the evolution of Hellenism and its survival into the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. Forster's hostility to Christianity and his Gibbonesque view of Byzantine culture were in marked contrast to Cavafy's view of Byzantium. In this light, Cavafy's final unfinished poems reflect a curious nostalgia and may be read as a subtle refutation of Forster. The Asia Minor Catastrophe further complicated their relationship. Despite his efforts to promote Cavafy, Forster showed great indiscretion by soliciting for his translation project the assistance of Arnold Toynbee, who had resigned from the Koraes Chair amidst controversy. Forster's own pro-Turkish stance undoubtedly alarmed Cavafy and caused him to be less than forthright in granting Forster publishing rights. Their literary friendship was greatly affected by the political events of the Balkans.

In "The Other Boat" (1972), E. M. Forster constructs a narrative that violates yet reveals the moral boundaries defined by a distant, repressive England for its homosexual protagonist, Captain Lionel March. The mediation of his mother, or imperial memsahib, signals the figurative presence of a cautionary agency that still inhibits narrative attempts to confess one's homosexuality "unprophylactically." March's "open avowal" of having "fallen for" Cocoanut, a "wog," thus proves a "stumbling confession" that never clearly loses sight of the heterosexual or "homophobic intellectual." Thus Forster's story of homoerotic intercourse betrays his ambivalence toward breaking fully with the Edwardian voice of his published novels.

Long associated with a cosmopolitanism that this article demonstrates was equally colonial, Alexandria's space also attests to variously gendered Orientalist constructions, as feminized and/or homoerotic. The article analyzes two texts that resulted from E. M. Forster's World War I Alexandrian sojourn-Alexandria: A History and a Guide, and a contribution to a Labour pamphlet, Notes on Egypt-to argue that whereas the former articulates a Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, the latter speaks up against British colonialism. Drawing on archival material relating to Mohammed El-Adl, the Egyptian tram conductor with whom Forster shared a homoerotic relationship, read as metonymic of subalternity, these paradoxes are explored in terms of gender and genre. The relationship between the guidebook genre and colonialism is pushed further in Forster's Alexandria where the subjectivity is a decidedly male imperial one. Simultaneously, El-Adl's dehumanization by the British informs Forster's condemnation in Notes on Egypt of the colonial conditions that underwrote an elite, Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

Presents a critical analysis of the book 'A Passage to India,' by E.M. Forster. Highlights of the Krishna and Husain diety in the context of the literature; Religious ceremonies depicted in the book; Description of the literary attitude of Forster in writing the book.

Whereas inquiries into the relationship between anti-imperialism and homosexuality rely too heavily on empirical evidence, E. M. Forster's 1909 lecture on Rudyard Kipling can help us discover a more conclusive theoretical interrelationship. Forster's lecture attributes Kipling's reputation to fantasies about a certain form of masculinity and proposes to celebrate instead a Kipling whose manliness is "amalgamated" with other qualities. Forster's better judgment in this regard is motivated by insight into the homoerotic primitivism that tends to glorify masculinity—insight in turn enabled by his homosexuality. As the lecture on Kipling finally develops an anti-imperial critique, we see how Forster's homosexuality entailed a postcolonial mindset. Further evidence linking homosexuality, "amalgamated" masculinity, and postcolonial politics, apparent after we have identified it in the lecture on Kipling, appears throughout Forster's fiction, from the early novels that also subject manhood to a process of amalgamation to later novels that stress the larger political implications of that process.

Especially since the development of postcolonial and gender criticism, E. M. Forster's writing has been subject to conflicting readings as regards his treatment of race and of male homosexuality. In his description of an interracial homosexual affair in the posthumously published short story «The Other Boat,» Forster plays with the topics of British imperial discourse, questioning and subverting them to a great extent as they affect setting, character presentation and the role of language. However, the power of this discourse, together with the power of patriarchal discourses of gender and homophobia, prevents the subversion from being complete and ultimately determines an apparently inescapable tragic ending.