Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Nineteenth-Century British Ethnology and the Romance Quest

Abstract

Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India