Materiality and Mystification in "A Passage to India"
Author(s): Benita Parry
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: II (Spring,
1998), pp. 174-194
Published by: Duke University Press
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Materiality and Mystification
in A Passage to India
BENITA PARRY
Discussion on the imperial project in British literary consciousness has customarily
been confined to the colonial novel, a category of convenience covering a
range of genres and qualities. More recently work disclosing the material and
psychic dissemination of empire in the metropolis has included detecting its
symbolic, reconfigured or displaced presence in canonical and popular writing.1
The preferred procedure of critics is to trace how colonial tropes and rhetorics
were brought by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers to their dramatizations
of dominant gender and class conditions within the imperial homeland.
Such work which draws attention to the larger if blurred horizons of the English
novel has also introduced into the discussion the problems associated with the
use of analogical strategies in criticism: by reiterating the fiction's unsecured
metaphoric linkages as constituting social knowledge about the ideological
coalescence of gender, race and class, these critics conflate the sites and temporalities
of different oppressions.2 In this way, such criticism collapses the distinctiveness
of the discourses and topoi that represent those oppressions.3
Theorists of the novel, however, who address the transcoding between
historical processes and textual practices, and perceive the effects of empire in
literature as mutable, locate these signs in form rather than figurative recastings.
Edward Said, who discerns the assertion of narrative authority as characterizing
the British novel during the age of imperial consolidation connects the emergence
of literary modernism with changes in metropolitan apprehensions of empire.
For Said the turn from "the triumphalist experience of imperialism ... into the
extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive
irony ... which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in
Western society and culture, includes a response to the external pressures on
culture from the imperium" (Culture 227). In a different argument which all the
same intersects with Said's understanding of the correspondence, Fredric
Jameson maintains that the modernist crisis in the novel was intensified by
imperialism, the stylistic ingenuity of Conrad's novels providing "key
articulations of the increased fragmentation of individual consciousness in an age
of growing commodification and brutal colonization" (Political 17).4
My thanks to Derek Attridge, Laura Chrisman, John Fletcher, and Neil Lazarus for comments on a draft, and to Michael Sprinker for
his unshakable skepticism about my "too tender" reading of the novel.
See, for instance, Coombes, MacKenzie, McClintock, Pieterse, and Said.
2 As demonstrated in, for example, Ferguson, Fraiman, Heller, Lineham, and Meyer.
3 Stepan has argued that because interactive metaphors shape our perceptions and actions while at the same time neglecting or
suppressing information that does not fit the similarity, "they tend to lose their metaphoric nature and be taken literally" (52).
4 For an extensive and thoughtful examination of Said and Jameson in this context, see Chrisman.
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
The relationships of historical moment to novelistic practice observed by Said
and Jameson suggest that if we are to decipher the always fluctuating and historically
inflected marks of empire on the body of British literature, then colonial
fictions should be regarded as a subset of the English novel, and inscriptions of
empire's overt and cryptic presence in this literature should be in turn studied as
constituting the same area of enquiry. Jameson, who is singular in defining imperialism
as the dynamic of capitalism proper and therefore in recognizing imperialism
as coextensive with the globalism of late colonialism, has proposed that the
"traces of imperialism" in modernist writing, must not be sought "in obvious
places, in content, or in representation." Rather they are to be found in the invention
of "forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global colonial system
on the very syntax of poetic language itself" (Modernism 18). Thus when enlarging
on the aesthetic response to a universal imperial order, in which "internal
national or metropolitan daily life is absolutely sundered from this other world
henceforth in thrall to it," he chooses a domestic novel, Howards End, in order to
show how the representation of "inner or metropolitan space itself," becomes a
substitute for "an unrepresentable totality" (Modernism 17, 18).
A schema which restricts imperialism's signs in literature to "the stylistic or
linguistic peculiarities" particular to modernism and asserts that the specific
literature of imperialism is not modernist in any formal sense (Modernism 5), by
definition excludes those modernist novels like Heart of Darkness and Nostromo
which do negotiate "the representational dilemma" of the imperialist order and
refuse to map an itinerary of empire's ordered progress.5 How then should we
place a proto-modernist fiction in which another and distant world is manifestly
present and the disjoined spheres are brought into uneasy proximity, but which
also, pace Said, undermines imperial grandiloquence and offers a disenchanted
perspective on empire, registers a dispersed consciousness, and by reflecting
ironically and critically on its own project, manifests a waning of narrative
power?
The reputation of A Passage to India as conventional in form, language, and attested
value has inhibited discussion on an emergent modernism that is inseparable
from the novel's failure to reach the destination intimated in its title.6 Said
has remarked that for him the most interesting thing about the book is the use of
India "to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot
in fact be represented-vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions,
histories and social forms" (Culture 214). This judicious comment recognizes that
Forster's innovations were induced by an attempt to render India legible within
western fictional modes. It could be extended to observe that in the process, A
Passage to India construes the sub-continent's material world, cultural forms, and
systems of thought as resistant to discursive appropriation by its conquerors:
"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have
tried, but they remain in exile" (Passage 148). This meditation serves to alienate
This is a proposition I advance in "Narrating Imperialism: Nostromo's Dystopia."
6
Against this trend, Armstrong contests charges of epistemological and narrative naivete, while the volume A Passage to India,
edited by Davies and Wood, seeks to reexamine the novel in the light of contemporary critical paradigms.
175
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
the Raj's belligerent claim to discursive power over the sub-continent, and it discloses
the inevitable frustration of the novel's own narrative ambition.
Neither stylistically nor syntactically does A Passage to India display that
"constitutive sense of creation through rupture and crisis" which has been described
as the vocation of an aesthetic modernism (Calinescu 92). All the same, a
fiction which moves between the mundane and the arcane, gives voice to the
contingency of the material world, and is haunted by the transcendent, exists at
the limits of realist writing, the affinities with modernism evident in the prominence
of its anti-referential registers. On the one hand, as an architecturally composed
text exhibiting that "vital harmony" Forster believed essential to works of
art-described by him as "the only objects in the material universe to possess internal
order" (Two 93)-the book augurs both the pleasures afforded by an elegant
design and the reassurance of lucidity. On the other, the perplexity with
which the novel reconfigures the distant, alien complex of cultures that is its ostensible
subject, signals an anxiety about the impasse of representation. Thus the
aesthetic closure, once hailed by critics as instigated by a rage for order that issued
in a coherent and integrated text, can be seen as a formal resolution to the
historical conflicts, cultural chasms, social dissension, cognitive uncertainties,
and experiential enigmas elaborated by a structurally, intellectually, and
discursively fractured fiction.
By the time Forster wrote his novel, the romantic India of the eighteenthcentury
western imagination was dead and gone, buried under a library of
subsequent books itemizing the defects of a chaotic and degenerate sub-continent
mired in irrational beliefs and incapable of self-determination (see Parry,
Delusions). Recent studies have emphasized the contradictions and tensions
within British Indian texts (see Suleri, Moore-Gilbert). But while such discursive
instabilities are apparent to contemporary critics, the writings were delivered in a
declarative mode to the literate colonized as a preemptive reply to dissent, and
received in their own time by a metropolitan audience as a warrant for British
rule. If this literature included mythologizing a land of secret delights, hidden
truths, statically organic village communities, and intrepid "martial races," it also
construed a degraded population ruled by despots and given to thuggee, sati,
child marriage, zenanas, idolatry, temple prostitution, male debauchery and effeminacy,
female concupiscence, insensate violence, and pathetic contentment. At
stake was the creation and ordering of India's difference as deviations from
western norms of historical development, aesthetics, civil society, and sexuality
(see Metcalf).
Despite its emergence from within a literary tradition already sated with prior
configurations, Forster's fiction eschews both "the Scented East of tradition" and
the corrupt land of a febrile British imagination (233). Such a proposition does
not advance truth claims for an invention which remains wedded to the sensibilities
of the Mediterranean, never abandons its moorings in western structures of
feeling, and reiterates rumors of a recondite "India." Indeed the use of India as
an icon of the metaphysical derives from what has been described as a
"scholarship ... replete with preferences for the speculative, religious-minded,
idealist and/or Orientalist kind" (Ahmad 277). Hence alongside its many
176
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
material and sentient Indias, which act to estrange the time-honored topos of a
mysterious land, the novel also construes an obfuscated realm where the secular
is scanted, and in which India's long traditions of mathematics, science and
technology, history, linguistics, and jurisprudence have no place.
Since its publication in 1924, A Passage to India has been variously received in
the west as an existential meditation and a liberal criticism of politics and life in
British India. Its crafted thematic composition and polysemous symbolic resonances
once prompted critics preoccupied with literature's animations of the
timeless to explain the book as mythopoeic and wholly detached from history;
while its performance of a temporally-situated social drama was cherished as a
humanist affirmation of the sanctity of human relationships egregiously violated
by colonialism. If the first construct is indifferent to the specificity of the novel's
moment, the other overestimates its grasp of colonialism's charged interactions
during that moment. More recently the fiction's place in the rhetoric of empire
has been examined, and the novel read as yet another exercise in Orientalism.
Consequently praise for A Passage to India as a poised and sympathetic account of
the sub-continent's landscape, history, and culture which Indian critics of older
generations had offered, has since been repudiated by their descendants as
"emanating from a colonized consciousness" (Pathak et al. 198, 199).
Prominent amongst new glosses is a particular interest in demonstrating that
the book's sexual and gender representations are implicated in colonialist discourses,
and are determinant in the novel's version of a colonial relationship.7 I
will be offering my own understanding of how gender and the erotic are disposed
within a larger cultural, geopolitical, and epistemological canvas-and one
on which, contra Joseph Bristow and unlike Forster's private memoir, sexual
desire is uncolored by fantasies of imperial domination.8 Meanwhile, I want to
remark that ingenious commentaries preoccupied with the sexualizing of race
and the racializing of sexuality contract an orchestration of dissonant themes to a
single strain, by this overlooking that amongst the novel's many Indias is one
whose topography evades colonialism's physical invasion, and whose cognitive
modes elude incorporation within normative western explanatory systems. Were
a case for the novel's radicalism to be made, this would need to rest on the
recalcitrance of this "India," and not on its manifestly inadequate critique of a
colonial encounter.
See, for example, Sharpe, Silver, Suleri, Bhakshi, Lane, and Bristow. For Sharpe the racial significance of rape in the novel
requires that it be read "according to the narrative demands of the Mutiny reports," where "a discourse of rape" was used in
the management of anti-colonial rebellion (237-38). In Silver's view, the book's deployment of sexuality within a discourse of
power makes it possible to understand that to be rapable is "a social position" cutting across "biological and racial lines" (88).
Addressing the novel's attempt to reconfigure colonial sexuality into "a homoeroticization of race," Suleri argues that this
translation of an imperial erotic revises "the colonialist-as-heterosexual-paradigm," presenting instead an alternative colonial
model in which "the most urgent cross-cultural invitations occur between male and male, with racial difference serving as a
substitute for gender" (Rhetoric 139, 133). In more general terms, Bakshi has placed the fiction within a well-established
narrative mode of an Orientalism imbued with homoerotic desire, while Lane considers that Forster transposed the problem of
homosexuality onto race and colonialism, the shift in locale from England to colonial India alleviating his difficulty in writing
about same-sex relationships at home, and Bristow finds that for Forster "the desire for connection between colonial rulers and
subaltern peoples" is "indissociable from fantasies of dominative violence" ("Passage" 140).
8 Forster's shame at availing himself of sexual power over Indians is registered in his memoir, probably written in 1922. He was
at this time employed as Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, who in a gesture joining the abuse of his social
authority with the tolerance of a committed heterosexual for a friend's incomprehensible urges, procured servants of his court
to assuage Forster's lust, quaintly blamed by Forster on the heat. See the section "Kanaya," in The Hill of Devi. As Lane points
out, this memoir records Forster's disgust with those servicing his sexual needs; as evident is his self-disgust.
177
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
I.
The novel's cosmic reach and non-realist registers are inspired by an imagined
India whose infinite embrace offers vistas of a sphere more comprehensive than
the time-space world and intimates an ecumenical ethic admitting all animal,
vegetable, and mineral forms to its prospect. Such allusions to an atemporal,
ahistorical universe are underwritten by non-linear narrative movements which
interrupt the sequential recitation of quotidian events. Not only is the fiction's
itinerary spatial-from Mosque to Caves to Temple-but images recur in unrelated
situations: a wasp, flies, a stone, a pattern traced in the dust of Chandrapore
and repeated on the footholds of a distantly located rock in the Marabars;
marginal characters who make aleatory appearances at critical moments-Miss
Derek's providential arrivals, the presence of a young army officer on the maidan
and in the Club; and phrases which are echoed in unlike circumstances-the reiteration
of Godbole's petition to Krishna, his demurral of "Oh no," and the reprise
of invitations, both earthly and divine.
But as Forster noted elsewhere and with regret, a novel tells a story, and in
this aspect A Passage to India uses the language of realism to chronicle a tragicomedy
of cultural discord and political conflict, observing shifts within the fabric
of Indian societies and the power relationships of British India. Youths are
seen "training" (75); with Aziz's arrest, the sweepers stop work in protest, and
Muslim women, perceived by the Anglo-Indians as invisible, go on hunger
strike, inducing in the European community the fear that a "new spirit seemed
abroad, a rearrangement, which no one in the stern little band of whites could
explain" (218); a Hindu-Muslim entente is forged, and in the association between
Aziz, the descendent of the Moghuls who had fought the British invaders, and
Godbole, whose Mahratta ancestors had defended an independent Deccan
against the foreign onslaught, the novel alludes to the growth of an Indian
nationalism attracting protagonists who share different memories of armed
struggles against the British conquest.
A Passage to India, then, remains of interest for its evocations of a phase in the
Raj, registering the growing disaffection of a population increasingly disinclined
to collude in its own domination, and commenting on the demeaning effects
which complicity with their rulers had on India's hegemonized elite. But although
the indirections of its aversion to empire separate Forster's book from the
self-justifying contemporaneous "problem" novels which set out to account for
Indian discontent while reinstalling the British ideal of disinterested service, as a
novel of manners performed in a colonial context, A Passage to India now appears
circumscribed.9 The alternately gentle and irascible reprimands of Indian unreliability,
obsequiousness, and evasiveness, as well as the mimicry of Anglo-India's
ignorant beliefs and foolish self-regard, are dependent on sardonic reiterations
and parodies of the stereotypes and cliches that were the stuff of British writing
about India. Nor is the version of a colonial relationship played out in a low key
between British officials and members of an Indian middle class adequate to the
The foremost exponent was E.J. Thompson, whose A Farevell to India was at the time of its publication (irrelevantly) compared
to Forster's novel.
178
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
fraught transactions of an encounter which initially met with military resistance,
subsequently generated widespread and continuous insurgency from peasants
and laborers, and earned the militant opposition of both the educated and the
illiterate.?1
To observe the limits on the novel's heterodox version of life and politics in
the closing decades of the Raj is not to ignore that the novel also sabotages recurrent
themes in Anglo-Indian and British writings about India. These subversive
reworkings, which include ruining the notion of empire's functionaries as ethical
and altruistic Stoics, focus on Adela Quested's misprision of rape. In this event
where an Englishwoman already disquieted by India is infected by a nervous
community's fantasies of cultures charged with erotic intensities and dangers,
there still persists a heterosexual model of the colonial relationship which is
elsewhere displaced.1 To the Anglo-Indians, Miss Quested is the victim of the
infamous lust of Indian men; and in the story of her derangement, the Indian
landscape figures as a violent male principle-the rocks of the Marabar Hills
appearing to rise "abruptly, insanely," and her body pierced by the spines of
cactuses growing on the hillside (137). Much that is important to the
understanding of the novel has been written about the articulations of sexualities
in an imperial situation, and I will be returning to the many meanings adhering
to the circulation of homoerotic affect in the text. What concerns me at present is
another aspect of the fiction's sexual and gender politics as this intersects with an
ingrained political liberalism and deflects from an overt censure of the Raj.
Kenneth Burke has suggested that the social and political relationships which
the novel draws into its texture are expressible in terms of personal associations
dramatized either as sexual and filial bonds, or as friendships. Of these the only
one to be consummated across the colonial divide, and that ceremonially, is
between Aziz and Mrs. Moore. This nexus traverses generations and comes to
imitate the never-existing but idealized union of benign imperial motherland
with grateful colonial dependency fabricated by empire's ideologues. The figure
of this imagined parent-child symbiosis was Queen Victoria, Empress of India, of
whom Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali speak affectionately when lamenting the
impossibility of friendship with the chilly Anglo-Indians. Such an exemplary
imperial matriarch is incarnate in the elderly Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore has many
avatars in the novel: she is a tolerant but commonplace middle-class
Englishwoman well-disposed to the National Anthem and a banal West End play
performed at the Club; a sibyl and seer, and a spokesperson for an idea of empire
which unlike a Raj that rests on fear, would be based on "good will" (71). It is her
displeasure at the uncivil conduct of Anglo-Indians which is the occasion for the
fatuous narrative comment, "[o]ne touch of regret-not the canny substitute but
the true regret from the heart-would have made him [Ronny Heaslop] a
different man, and the British Empire a different institution" (70). Furthermore, a
10 On this history of insurgency, see the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, a selection of which appears in Guha and Spivak.
Silver's reading misconstrues Adela Quested's charge of rape as an act of resistance against the silencing of women and
Indians. It proceeds from conflating distinct and specific forms of oppression in the interest of appropriating all discourses of
discimination, as well as the counter-discourses these engender, to a feminist critique. Hence Silver privileges Quested's
exercise of female autonomy over Quested's exercise of white authority, a move which seriously distorts the fiction's exposure
of Anglo-Indian racialized sexual anxieties.
179
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
sentiment absurdly inappropriate to a colonial situation is, without benefit of
irony, ascribed to Aziz before he turns his back on British India and ceases to
conduct himself as a toady: "Mr. Fielding, no one can ever realize how much
kindness we Indians need.... Kindness, more kindness, and even after that more
kindness. I assure you it is the only hope" (128).
Mrs. Moore enters India through Mosque, passes into accidie in Caves; she is
redeemed by the enactment of universal salvation in Temple, buried in the Indian
Ocean, transmigrates into a demi-goddess, and bequeaths her benign powers to
her children, Stella and Ralph, whose presence moves the now disaffected Aziz
to "want to do kind actions all round and wipe out the wretched business of the
Marabar for ever" (312). Thus does a mother-figure of "good empire" permit the
staging of an act of formal reconciliation within the unreconciled and irreconcilable
conflicts of an imperial relationship. Perhaps a symbolic accord which simulates
the skeptically narrated ritual of universal harmony performed during the
Hindu Gokal Ashtami Festival is similarly calculated to invite disbelief, since it is
countermanded by the parting of Aziz and Fielding, for whom "no meetingplace"
exists in British India. Yet the gesture to a rapprochement effected within
the conflictual conditions of the Raj undermines an already attenuated criticism
of empire, its admonition of colonialism addressing the cruelties large and small
inflicted by Anglo-Indians, but omitting to summon either the western impulses
to colonialist dispossession or the ideology of imperial domination, for explication
and demystification. In this aspect, the silences in A Passage to India rehearse
the lacunae of British Indian texts, from which all traces of base interests-India
as a source of raw materials, cheap labor, markets and investment opportunities,
and India as a linchpin of Britain's wider imperial ambitions-were erased.
II.
The novel's dissident place within British writing about India does not reside in
its meager critique of a colonial situation, however, but in configuring India's
natural terrain and cognitive traditions as inimical to the British presence. When
discussing Georges Bataille's text on "the language of flowers," Pierre Macherey
explains that it served as
a starting point for his reflections on the natural logic of existence, which he terms
"the obscure intelligence of things." The principle behind this logic is a fundamental
clash of values governed by a polarity of above and below which testifies to "an
obscure decision on the part of the plant world." The decision is expressed in a sort
of pre-linguistic language: the language of "aspect," which exists prior to the
language of words, introduces "values that decide things." (118)
The notion of evaluations which are "the judgments of reality itself as it asserts,
primitively and immediately, its basic tendencies," is suggestive for reading the
semiotically saturated physical landscape of Forster's India as "a direct expression"
of "the truth of things" which exists "prior to symbolization" (Macherey
118). The eloquent stones, boulders, rocks, and caves of an awesome and ancient
180
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
geological formation, the animate fields and ambulant hills, the inhospitable soil,
the importunities of a prominent inarticulate world, the creaturely power of the
sun, these speak a defiant material presence which is both a scandal to the invaders'
epistemological categories, and a threat to their boast of possessing India:
"The triumphant machine of civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized
into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble
their predecessors', who also entered the country with intent to refashion
it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust" (215).
As a novel which orbits around a space which is unrepresentable within its
perceptual boundaries, A Passage to India is impelled to obfuscate that of which it
cannot speak, a self-declared incomprehension that issues in fabrications of contradictory
Indias. Hence the evocation of India's pre-linguistic language of obduracy
towards the conquerors spoken by its physical structures must compete
with intimations of India as a civilization hospitable to the unseen; while its
fluency in the meta-linguistic could signify either an intelligence of things
obscure, or that which the novel is unable to render intelligible. In response to a
question about what had happened in the Caves, Forster indicated that India had
enabled his venture into the realms of the unfathomable:
My writing mind is ... a blur here-i.e. I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain,
as I am of many facts of daily life. This isn't a philosophy of aesthetics. It's a
particular trick I felt justified in trying because my theme was India. It
sprang straight from my subject matter. I wouldn't have attempted it in other
countries, which though they contain mysteries or muddles, manage to draw rings
round them. Without this trick I doubt whether I could have got the spiritual reverberation
going. I call it "trick": but "voluntary surrender to infection" better
expresses my state. (Letter to G. Lowes Dickinson, qtd. in Stallybrass 26)
It is therefore not accidental that disquiet about the limits of syntactic
language are explored on a fabricated Indian space that is simultaneously
rendered as palpable and emblematic. On approaching the Marabar Hills, "a new
quality occurred, a spiritual silence which invaded more senses than the ear ...
sounds did not echo or thoughts develop.... Everything seemed cut off at its root,
and therefore infected with illusion" (152). This sensory and intellectual
detachment from the empirical world is translated into the severing of words
from their referent:
What were these mounds-graves, breasts of the goddess Parvati? The villagers ...
gave both replies. Again, there was a confusion about a snake, which was never
cleared up. Miss Quested saw a thin, dark object ... and said, "A snake!" The
villagers agreed, and Aziz explained: yes, a black cobra.... But when she looked
though Ronny's field-glasses she found it wasn't a snake, but the withered and
twisted stump of a toddy-palm. So she said, "It isn't a snake." The villagers
contradicted her. She had put the word into their minds, and they refused to
abandon it.... Nothing was explained. (152-53)
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
On arriving at Caves, the narrative encounters meanings, sensations, and
events that escape exegesis in its available language. Their reputation "does not
depend upon human speech" (138), and their echo-"'Boum' is the sound as far
as the human alphabet can express it" (159)-is not the resound of any utterance
the fiction can identify. This untranslatable murmur deprives Mrs. Moore, accustomed
to "poor little talkative Christianity" (161), of a trust in language: "'Say,
say, say.... As if anything can be said.' ... in the twilight of the double vision a
spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found"
(205, 212). Thus a novel which cherishes the names of the marvelous places "that
had sometimes shone through men's speech," and which discerns in "the bilingual
rock of Girnar" the transformation through language of a physical object
into a cultural artifact, also contemplates things both benign and ominous which
cannot be spoken, or of which it cannot speak (214). When trying to communicate
the attraction Hinduism holds for Stella and Ralph Moore, the rationalist Fielding
confesses, "I can't explain, because it isn't in words at all" (313). In attempting to
render comprehensible the unexplained or inexplicable significance of the imitations,
impersonations, symbols, and images invoked during the all-embracing
Hindu festival of Gokal Ashtamti, the narrative admits its inability to transcribe
an event which cannot "be expressed in anything but itself" (285).
Such allusions to the aphonic must be distinguished from the book's many
hints of the supernatural, which reiterate a predilection for mysteries also evident
in Forster's other novels.'2 Perhaps we are invited to understand experiences of
the meta-linguistic as emanating from "the part of the mind that seldom speaks"
(111), and therefore as an existential condition: on undertaking to describe the
caves, Godbole retreats into silence, just as Aziz's mind had sometimes been silenced
by "a power he couldn't control" (92). On the other hand, the many and
diverse inscriptions of the unspoken and the inexpressible can also be read as
echoes of the "spiritual reverberation" induced by an India whose religious pursuits
and eloquent landscapes provoke intellectual doubt and promote noumenal
anxieties in the novel's western protagonists: Fielding, who is a "blank, frank
atheist" (254), muses that "[t]here is something in religion that may not be true,
but that has not yet been sung.... Something that the Hindus have perhaps
found" (274), while the Indian scene troubles both him and the logical Adela
Quested with rumors of things they did not know, and a universe they had
"missed or rejected" (272).
Forster's title is borrowed from Walt Whitman's visionary poem, "Passage to
India" (1871), and the contemplation of an esoteric India may have been further
influenced by his friend Edward Carpenter, who had known Whitman and
shared the poet's conviction in India's spiritual vocation.'3 But although Forster
does juxtapose a mystified to a material and historical India, he did not follow
1 The telepathic Mrs. Moore "knows" that the accident to the Nawab Bahadur's car was caused by an apparition, "[b]ut the idea
of a ghost scarcely passed her lips" (111); Adela hears what has not been spoken affirming Aziz's innocence (209); in the
interstices of a chant to Krishna, Aziz recognizes "the syllables of salvation that had sounded during his trial" (308); the
punkah-wallah is perceived as "a male fate, a winnower of souls" (221), and Ralph Moore is manifest as "a guide."
In an essay on Carpenter, Forster wrote: "As he had looked outside his own class for companionship, so he was obliged to look
outside his own race for wisdom" (Two 207). Bristow has remarked that "[A]lthough Whitman's 'Passage to India' has
frequently been mentioned in commentaries on A Passage to lIndia ... the dissident homosexual politics implied in this choice of
title have generally gone unrecognized (Effeminate 86).
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BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
the utopian writers in affirming India as the Wisdom-land of Carpenter's expectations,
or in designating it as that farthest destination "where mariner has not
yet dared to go" (Whitman 328). For when the novel invokes the quest after transcendence,
this is for its psychological truthfulness, rather than its arrival at
Truth, for the passion of its aspiration, and not its always deferred achievement:
the calls to Krishna or the Friend who never Comes; the longing for "the eternal
promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness" (127);
the faith that confers grace on the believer during "the moment of its indwelling"
(282); the substitutions, imitations, scapegoats, and husks of the Gokal Ashtami
Festival, which are signs of "a passage not easy, not now, not here, not to be apprehended
except when it is unattainable" (309); the hope that will persist
"despite fulfillment" (299). If the novel transfigures the religious sensibility as
desire born of discontent, what it does not validate is the victory of "the human
spirit" in "ravish[ing] the unknown":
Books written afterwards say "Yes." But how, if there is such an event, can it be
remembereda fterwards?H ow can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not only
from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself cannot retain them. He
may think, if he chooses, that.he has been with God, but, as soon as he thinks it, it
becomes history, and falls under the rules of time. (285)
Such skepticism about India's access to gnosis registers an agnosticism that
abates the novel's modulated and questioning iterations of an Orientalism spellbound
by the fabled East.
III.
Amongst the many resonances of the title is a reference to cartography, and consequently
to the colonial topos of a voyage into unknown territory. About the
book's map of India's geography, we can ask: does A Passage to India reproduce
what John Barrell has described as the East's entry into the western European
imagination "as an unknown, empty space-empty of everything ... except its
appropriable resources, imaginative as well as material," its objects "covered
with decoration and imagery not understood and not thought worth understanding
discerned as "blank screens on which could be projected whatever it was that
the inhabitants of Europe, individually or collectively, wanted to displace, and to
represent as other to themselves"? (7-8). Is the major source of friction in the
novel, as Bristow argues, "the enduring contradiction between the thematics of
'friendship' ... and the sexual violence that we find at its centre, a form of violence
that does everything it can to sever East from West"? ("Passage" 147). Can
Forster's India be received as yet another textual act inflected by imperial and/or
sexual aggression, and reiterating as Said has written of Orientalism, the will "to
control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is manifestly a different (or alternative
and novel) world"? (Orientalism 12). Said was subsequently to ask "how
one can study other cultures and people from a libertarian, or a non-repressive
and non-manipulative perspective ... how knowledge that is non-dominative
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
and non-coercive ... [can] be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with
the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power"
("Orientalism" 15).
Despite misgivings about Forster's reified India, I want to suggest that the
novel approaches Indian forms of knowledge with uncertainty, without asserting
the authority of its representations, and unaccented by a will to enforce an ontological
schism.14 The book's triadic structure has been variously glossed as corresponding
to the Indian seasonal cycle (Cold Weather, Hot Weather, and
Monsoon), the movements of a musical score, the Hegelian dialectic of thesisantithesis-
synthesis, the recurrent process of birth, destruction, and re-birth
recited in Hindu mythology, and as metonyms of Muslim India, Anglo-India,
and Hindu India. In the reading I am proposing Mosque, Caves, and Temple are
perceived as figures of three Indian philosophical-religious systems. The
association of Mosque with Islam in India, and Temple with a particular
performance of Hindu devotions (bhakti), presents fewer problems than the
polysemous connotations of Caves. When the magistrate Mr. Das points out that
"[a]ll the Marabar caves are Jain" (225),15 he is disputing their official
identification as Buddhist, his disagreement having earlier been confirmed in the
narrative commentary which dissociates Caves from this tradition: "even
Buddha, who must have passed this way down to the Bo Tree of Gaya, shunned
a renunciation more complete than his own, and has left no legend of struggle or
victory in the Marabar" (138). If we take Das's designation seriously, then Caves,
although rejected by Buddhists, can be understood as inhabited by and
signifying the world-rejecting precepts of the Jain's non-deistic cosmology, its
uncompromising atheism and asceticism surpassing the austerities of Buddhism,
a related system also rooted in ancient India (Parry, Delusions).
Since the route of the novel's attempted journey becomes more arduous as it
moves from Islam through India's more speculative traditions, a puzzled version
of Hinduism's ecstatic spiritual observances is invoked, and the tenets of the
Jain's quietist stance are obliquely enunciated. If aligned with ontological goals
that are respectively daring and awesome, the monotheistic system of Islam necessarily
appears as limited: "'There is no God but God' doesn't carry us far
through the complexities of matter and spirit; it is only a game with words, really,
a religious pun, not a religious truth" (272). Instead Islam, by way of an elite
segment of the Muslim community, is manifest as a culture rather than a profound
creed. When its religious temperament does feature, it is in a mode transformed
through long residence in India, where its misshapen shrines appear as
"a strange outcome of the protests of Arabia" (293), its "symmetrical injunction
melts in the mild air," and mystical Sufi tendencies are privileged over theological
severities: just as the ragas of the Hindu Godbole invite a Krishna who always
1
Although Forster was not a scholar of Hindu philosophies, he was familiar with the myths, epics, and iconography of India's
varied cultures, and he found the dialectical style of Hindu thought congenial. On re-reading the Bhagavad-Gita in 1912 before
his first visit to India, Forster observed that he felt he had now got hold of the structure of its thought: "Its division of states
into Harmony Motion Inertia (Purity Passion Darkness)" (qtd. in Furbank 216).
1 A post-Vedic heterodoxy of the fifth Century B.C. but like Buddhism, with which it has historical and theoretical affinities,
rooted in the ancient metaphysics of Dravidian India.
184
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
fails to arrive, so do the adherents of Islam voice "our need for the Friend who
never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (119).16
Without asserting that the ontologies and theisms enunciated by the novel
should be read as authoritative expositions of Indian knowledge, I am suggesting
that the fiction, far from rendering India as epistemologically vacant, reconfigures
the sub-continent as a geographical space and social realm abundantly
occupied by diverse intellectual modes, cultural forms, and sensibilities. This
perception is not shared by critics who find that Forster's India is an empty space
and the symptom of an amorphous state of mind, its principal landmarks
Mosque, Caves, and Temple functioning primarily as cavities to contain western
perceptions of that which is missing from the East, its symbolic terrain a hollow
site which the narrative, parodying an act of rape, violently penetrates (Suleri,
"Geography"). Nor does it conform with the inference of Francesca Kazan's
rhetorical question: does not Forster in his ambitious task of representing the
Orient, also seek to control it by fixing it and rendering it mute?
When Forster is charged with representing India as null and void, Caves are
invariably offered in evidence. For Suleri the novel should be read "as an
allegory in which the category of 'Marabar Cave' roughly translates into the anus
of imperialism"-an infelicitous choice of imagery when conducting a discussion
of the novel's "engagement with and denial of a colonial homoerotic imperative"
(Rhetoric 132, 147). In Kazan's view Caves are a figure of absence and silence
which replicates the inscrutability of the East within the western structure of the
surrounding text; while Zakia Pathak, Saswata Sengupta, and Sharmila
Purkayastha, who contend that caves are described as without a history, jointly
undertake to disperse their "primordial miasma":
What we read into the representation of the caves is not the absence of history but
the suppression of history which marks the paranoid response of the Orientalists
to processes which they could not understand, since ... this knowledge was withheld
from them by the natives. "Primal," "dark," "fists and fingers,"
"unspeakable,"f earsomely advancing to the town with the sunset-these phrases
signal the fear and insecurity the imperialists experienced, confronted with what
they could not master; to reduce it to stasis was to contain that fear and hold that
threat at bay. (200)
That Caves are a symptom of what the novel is unable to comprehend intellectually,
accommodate within its preferred sensibility, or possess in its available
language, is abundantly inscribed in a fiction which adumbrates both the nonverbal
expression of a physical space and the doctrines of an exorbitantly
transcendental philosophy, circuitously, elliptically, and with perplexity. But as
the site of a cosmology incommensurable with positivism, humanism, or theism,
and as the most potent figure of an India which challenges the west with its
irreducible and insubordinate difference, the representation of Caves is neither
circumscribed by dread of a maleficent essence ("Nothing evil had been in the
cave" 159), nor is their "history" suppressed.
1 Dellamora has noted the coded homoerotic inflection which the word friend carried for Forster (159).
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
To accept Mrs. Moore's reception of Caves as a primordial miasma and the
dissolution of ethical meaning is to be deaf to the valences of the "Nothing" emanating
from Caves. Elsewhere the reiteration of negatives-no, not yet, never,
without, meager, mean, abased, ineffective, indifferent, renunciation, relinquish,
refuse-invokes a diversity of connotations reverberating themes elaborated by
the novel. In configurations of the Indian landscape, negatives mark a deviation
from English and Mediterranean scenes, and with this a disturbance of western
perceptions; when brought to events that do not happen, invitations that are neglected,
omissions which are social solecisms ("[I]t's nothing I've said ... I never
even spoke to him" is Ronny Heaslop's obtuse reassurance to a Fielding concerned
about Aziz's evident discomfiture in the company of his English guests
[94]) they register the poverty of colonial relationships. But with Caves, negatives
take on affirmative resonances whose import is anticipated by the circumlocutions
of the opening paragraph: "Except for the Marabar Caves ... the city of
Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.... There are no bathing steps on
the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no
river front ... In the bazaars there is no painting and scarcely any carving" (31).
Thus to learn that there are neither sculptures in the Marabar Caves nor ornamentation
(92), that they are not large and contain no stalactites, and that the
Brahmin Godbole necessarily refrains from describing the site of another beliefsystem
as "immensely holy" (92), is to be alerted to the possibility that negation
has alternative significations: "Nothing, nothing attaches to them.... Nothing is
inside them ... if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would
be added to the sum of good or evil" (138, 139).
In Burke's reading, the use of negatives in the novel is a "partly secular variant
of what we encounter in 'negative theology"' where God is described as
"incomprehensible, unbounded, unending, etc." (224). This understanding conforms
with the tenets embraced by Godbole for whom good and evil "are different,
as their names imply. But ... they are both of them aspects of my Lord. He is
present in the one, absent in the other.... Yet absence implies presence, absence is
not non-existence" (186). But it is the Jain tradition, which unlike Islam and
Hinduism has no sentient protagonists in the book, that has written its antique
Indian philosophy of renunciation over a material space already in possession of
a language without syntax and expressive of abnegation. As the incarnation of
Nothing doubly charged with semantic content, Caves engender the epigram
"Everything exists, nothing has value" (160), a gnomic phrase compressing the
Jain recognition of the physical world as abundantly corporeal and verifiable and
its assignment of merit to detachment from all things secular-a construction in
which nothing has value. This paradox is condensed in the mismatch between the
adamantine concreteness of the stone, rock, granite, boulder, and bald precipice
of a looming and grotesque land mass and the "internal perfection" of a cave's
sublime emptiness.17
Neither Godbole's nuanced understanding of negatives, nor the Jain version of
negation as a deliberated abrogation of the all too solid and degraded empirical
Godbole encounters the recalcitrance of stone during his religious observances when, in imitating God, he attempts and fails to
impel it to "that place where completeness can be found" (283).
186
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
universe, is available to Mrs. Moore. After (mis)recognizing the voice of Cave as
speaking of nullity and (mis)translating the echo which she hears as "entirely
devoid of distinction" into a proclamation effacing discriminations, she subsides
into moral and psychic torpor: "Pathos, piety, courage-they exist, but are identical,
and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value" (158-60). To an
Englishwoman familiar with the landscape of "dearest Grasmere" everywhere
domesticated by human labor, a geological stratum that is "older than anything
in the world ... without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere
... bear[ing] no relation to anything dreamt or seen" intensifies her dislocation
within an epistemologically inscribed physical environment that infringes on her
expectations and escapes her comprehension (137).
Since Fielding, the only other English person present, is "unimpressed" by
Caves, the phantasmagoric experience known by Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore
appears as a gendered vulnerability to India's difference, manifest to them in different
registers as an assailant. A related but different event is restaged in Picnic
at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's film of a novel by Joan Lindsay set in late nineteenth-
century Australia, where four European women-three of them virginal
school-girls, and one, a teacher possessed of a "masculine mind"-are mesmerized
into offering themselves up to the phallic rock of a land in which they are
colonizers and strangers. As with their disappearance, the catastrophic entry of
Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested into an untranslatable sphere is inseparable from
the cultural constraints on their capacity to confront the otherness of meanings
both immanent in and attached to India's material spaces and forms. That these
same restrictions are also apparent in a rhetoric at once convoluted, ambiguous
and opaque, is testimony to the novel's admission of its own incapacity to bring
this alien realm into representation.
IV.
In referring to those studies concerned with recuperating the novel's hitherto
hidden "sexual politics," I suggested that representations of gender and the
erotic should be understood as written across the multiply inscribed script of
Forster's India. This proviso is not unmindful of the extent to which homoeroticism
circulates within the text, inverting the contempt for an androgynous and
pederastic India prominent in British Indian writing (Sinha, Drucker, and Parry,
Delusions). The novel's overt homophilia is apparent in the presence of three
superb and marginal Indian male figures: the naked gatherer of water-chestnuts
who, as he listens to Godbole's song, parts his lips with delight, "disclosing his
scarlet tongue" (95); the splendidly-formed, physically perfect punkah-wallah,
viewed as a "beautiful naked god" (233); and the broad-shouldered, thinwaisted,
naked servitor officiating at the Gokal Ashtami Festival, exhibited as an
icon of "the Indian body again triumphant" (309).18 All who are of "low-birth"
and, unlike the loquacious elite Indians, have no lines to speak are offered as
18 See Bakshi on Carpenter's preoccupation with the nakedness of natives: "Repeatedly in the Ceylon section of From Adam's Peak
to Elephanta, the narrator dwells on the physique and nakedness of the natives.... Again, a yogi in Benares is approvingly
described as 'a rather fine-looking man' with 'nothing whatever on but some beads round his neck and the merest apology for
a loin-cloth"' (62).
187
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
sources of a voyeuristic excitation to be surveyed as captive objects of desire
without the expectation of a gaze returned. But although their muteness does
signify the exercise of a homoeroticized cultural power by the narrative's seeing
eye, the novel's language registers not violence but affect, and the silence
ascribed the figures has resonances other than the scopophiliac-to which I will
return.
Because the libidinal is woven into an intricate narrative web, a discourse in
the tradition of homosexual Orientalism is inseparable from the fiction's meditations
on friendships within colonial conditions. In what Suleri calls "the most
notoriously oblique homoerotic exchange in the literature of English India," a
multivalent transaction within a relationship overdetermined by colonialism is
staged when Aziz inserts his stud into Fielding's collar (Rhetoric 138).'9 If, as
Suleri maintains, this scene belongs with a discourse where "colonial sexuality"
is reconfigured into "a homoeroticization of race" (135), then it also meets with
other stagings of homosociality which impinge on both the novel's performance
of cross-cultural interactions, and its contemplation of other cultural modes. It is
noticeable that in a memoir published after his death, Forster recorded his reluctance
to use the sexual services available from Muslims in the princely state
where he was employed, because of their "general air of dirt and degradation"
(Hill 311). But fiction does not imitate life, and the Muslims in the novel are
gracious figures whose cultivated sociality is suffused by the homoerotic. The
accounts of easeful male associations to which Fielding is admitted, resonate the
courtly same-sex eroticism of the Arab-Persian-Islamic literary tradition and
fulfill a fantasy of unconcealed homosexual associations still forced into secrecy
in Britain (Drucker 81-82). At such gatherings, where guests recite the poetry of
the Muslim-Indian Ghalib alluding to intimacy amongst men, the homosocial
shades into the homoerotic. As certainly, intonations of homophilia pervade
Forster's wistful glances at his Muslim protagonists who accomplish "something
beautiful" when they stretch out their hands for food, or applaud a song. (250-
51) But in celebrating a society which accommodates homoerotic love, the novel,
which also observes the refined deportment of Aziz's wife and the Begum
Hamidullah, registers a romanticized appreciation of a cultural sensibility:
The banquet, though riotous, had been agreeable, and now the blessings of leisureunknown
to the West, which either works or idles-descended on the motley company.
Civilization strays about like a ghost here, revisiting the ruins of empire, and
is to be found not in great works of art or mighty deeds, but in the gestures wellbred
Indians make when they sit or lie down.... This restfulness of gesture-it is
the Peace that passeth Understanding, after all, it is the social equivalent of Yoga.
When the whirling of action ceases, it becomes visible, and reveals a civilization
which the West can disturb but will never acquire. (250-51)
1 For Bristow this transfer which represents Aziz's sexual potency and erotic power also represents his servility within an
exploitative imperial situation: "This incident assuredly points to the ambivalent manner in which homophile longing and
dreams of empire meet and part. Without doubt, Aziz's body provides the template for the highly conflicted desires
experienced by the European liberal author whose homoeroticism often must have felt uncomfortably close to the dominative
violence meted out by imperial rule" (Effeminate 87).
188
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
A similarly coded display of sensual desire situated in the context of a stranger's
bemused esteem for Indian cultural forms also marks the representation of the
Gokal Ashtami Festival. Although described as "[n]ot an orgy of the body," the
ceremonies are invoked in a scarcely veiled vocabulary soliciting the presence of
a homoerotic content (285). Amongst the celebrations of Krishna's birth, which
also include enactments of the merry and polymorphous God sporting with
milk-maidens, are "performances of great beauty in the private apartments of the
Rajah ... [who] owned a consecrated troupe of men and boys, whose duty it was
to dance various actions and meditations of his faith before him.... The Rajah and
his guests would then forget that this was a dramatic performance, and would
worship the actors" (299). But this yearning to discover an untroubled absorption
of homosexual love into religious devotions does not exhaust a narration which,
albeit from a distance of disbelief, also animates a hunger for the sacred.
Hence I suggest that the evocations of the homoerotic, as well as the heterosexual
disturbance assailing an Englishwoman, should be read as scenes within
the fiction's larger drama. This returns me to the further significance of the naked
and voiceless figures who, although the objects of western libidinal surveillance,
elude its narrative grasp. To the authors of a radical critique of the book's
complicity with Orientalist discourse, it is Godbole's silence when asked about
the caves which registers a refusal on the part of the colonized to impart
knowledge to their rulers, thereby constituting an instance of resistance (Pathak
et al.). As it turns out, this provocative contention is not sustainable, since on
other occasions a garrulous Godbole readily provides his European audience
with a detailed explanation of a song summoning Krishna's presence and presses
an exegesis about Hindu notions of good and evil on a distracted Fielding (96).
Whatever can be inferred from Godbole's withholding information about the site
of beliefs remote from his own, I would suggest that the import of silence within
the novel resides rather in the lowly Indians, whose aphonia alludes to their
habitation of a realm beyond the ken and the control of western knowledge, and
who join India's material being and cognitive traditions in resisting incorporation
into a western script.
V.
For Said, the novel's ending is "a paralyzed gesture of aesthetic powerlessness"
where "Forster notes and confirms the history behind a political conflict between
Dr. Aziz and Fielding-Britain's subjugation of India-and yet can neither recommend
decolonization nor continued colonization. 'No, not yet, not here' [sic]
is all Forster can muster by way of resolution" ("Representing" 223). As I read
the open-ended closing act, all the novel's reflections on social and perceptual
failure are rehearsed, but now there are gestures to a still deferred post-imperial
condition which temporally the novel has not the means to articulate-"No, not
yet"-and which in the space the fiction occupies, cannot be realized-"No, not
there" (316). For with the "Not yet" first spoken by Ralph Moore in response to
Aziz's lament that "the two nations cannot be friends" (306), and repeated in the
last lines of the book, the negatives pervading the novel's rhetoric come to
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
intimate not only a philosophical category and the prevailing constraints on both
inter-cultural associations and displays of consummated same-sex intimacy, but a
time when the existential discontents, social divisions, cultural chasms, and
perceptual restraints which the novel configures will be superseded.20
This postponement is itself a utopian greeting to an always unrepresentable
future, and is positioned within a rhetoric of the gulf between illimitable desire
and the circumscriptions of existence: "[t]he revelation was over, but its effect
lasted, and its effect was to make men feel that the revelation had not yet come.
Hope existed despite fulfillment" (299); "a passage not easy, not now, not here,
not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable" (309). The reconciliations
and separations of the closing pages happen during the monsoon, named by
Aziz as "the time when all things are happy, young and old," and which the
novel bathes in a magical aura (306-07). At Aziz's meeting with Ralph Moore, the
rains "made a mist round their feet" (297), and when Aziz rides with Fielding,
"aware that they would meet no more" (310), "myriads of kisses" surround them
"as the earth drew water in" (313). But after Aziz has completed his conciliatory
letter to Adela Quested, "the mirror of the scenery was shattered" (314), and the
symbols of harmony give way to the chasms of the quotidian: "the scenery,
though it smiled, fell like a gravestone on any human hope" (315). As earth and
rock, temple, tank and palace, horses, birds, and carrion-the material and cultural
forms of an India resistant to British rule-intercede against a premature
concordance. "No, not yet.... No, not there" now signifies in a political as well a
cognitive register the impossibility of the journey promised by the novel and
withdrawn in the narration.
When Forster is relegated as a bloodless liberal, whose understanding of and
opposition to empire was circumscribed, or whose affection for the East is suspect
because it provided him with opportunities for sexual adventures, his
considerable distance from the prevalent ideological positions of his day is
occluded. For although his deviations were performed with discretion, his
transgressive sexuality at a time when homosexuality was officially outlawed
and publicly disapproved in Britain, his socialism in a period of bourgeois
hegemony, and his anti-colonialism in an age of residual imperial enthusiasm
converged in a stance, which if not radical was dissident21 It is often forgotten
that in 1935 Forster attended a meeting in Paris of the International Association
of Writers for the Defence of Culture organized by the Popular Front to unite
communists, socialists, and liberals in defense of "the cultural heritage." In
retrospect it is possible to be cynical about the conciliatory politics which the
Congress opportunistically advocated, and to observe that Forster would have
2 Lane contends that "the ending refuses to develop or curtail Aziz and Fielding's intimacy; geography intervenes, bringing
their contact to a provisional halt without irreparable damage. The novel's closing sentences foreground a drama about the
men's sexual intimacy and the abstract forces that keep them apart" (155). See also Bristow, who traces the novel's tension in
striving to realize homophile intimacy while acknowledging "how comradeship-between men and between nations-can
only come about with the end of empire" (Effeminate 86).
21 In "The Birth of an Empire" (1924), an account of a visit to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, Forster mocks the
rhetoric of "a high imperial vision" (Abinger 44-47); and in "The Challenge of our Times" (1946), he applauds the colonial
people kicking against their masters (Two).
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BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
been quite at home in such a gathering. Yet his participation was surely an act of
political integrity by an untheoretical socialist demonstrating his opposition to
fascism and commitment to internationalism.
In his address to the Congress, Forster used the vocabulary of liberalismjustice,
culture, liberty, freedom-and conceded that the times demanded
another and more inclusive language which he could speak:
I know very well how limited, and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is
race-bound and it's class-bound ... you may have guessed that I am not a
Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and a braver man,
for in Communism I can see hope. It does many things which I think evil, but I
know that it intends good. (Abinger 62-63)
Forster's nonconformist dispositions enabled him to write a self-reflexive fiction
where the recourse to received themes and rhetorics is sublated in an engagement
with a colonial world as an agent of knowledge and an adversary to
imperial rule. The complex registers of a metropolitan novel, whose emergent
modernism is inseparable from its unreached narrative destination in a colonial
world, require that critics writing in a post-imperial era go beyond castigating its
vestiges of orientalism, whether sexually or culturally accented, and recognize
also the extent to which both the textual India of British writing and the empire
of British self-representation are disorientated.
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BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA 193
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Modern Library, 1950.

The Aposiopesis in Tristram Shandy
by George Samuel
2
Chapter I: The Infinite Book
In Volume II, Chapter 6, Uncle Toby may inadvertently use the aposiopesis (a
rhetorical "figure in which the speaker suddenly halts, as if unable or unwilling to
proceed", O.E.D.) when in any case Walter snaps his pipe in anger, making Toby unable
to proceed whether he were unwilling or not. The evidence that he is unwilling is his
modesty:
-- "My sister, mayhap," quoth my uncle Toby, "does not choose to let a man
come so near her ****. Make this dash,--'tis an Aposiopesis.--Take the dash
away, and write Backside,--'tis Bawdy.
(II,6.)
The cause of Walter's anger is this same modesty, which is a kind of silence characteristic
of Toby. Various kinds of silence are characteristic of Tristram Shandy, and indeed the
aposiopesis is its most characteristic figure. Tristram's explicit explanation of why
Chapter 24 of Volume IV is missing contains an implicit explanation of all the silences.
He has "torn out" the chapter, he says, because "the book is more perfect and complete by
wanting the chapter, than having it" (IV,25). We must understand then that all of the
silences--everything that is missing from the book, the whole world beyond its covers--all
things help complete the book and thus are part of it.
If Tristram Shandy contains the whole world, then it is infinite. Indeed, Tristram
announces at the end of Book IV that it is not until now that Tristram Shandy begins ("'tis
from this point properly, that the story of my Life and Opinions sets out", IV,32), at about
the middle. There may be a parody here of the epic practice of beginning in "the middle
of things, as Horace advises" (IV,13); there is certainly a regression to infinity, for in a
work that begins in the middle, the first half does not exist; likewise the first half of the
second half, and so on, the work continuing to divide itself into existent and non-existent
halves, to infinity. "Knowledge, like matter", Walter insists, "is divisible ad infinitum"
(II,19): this infinite book contains the infinite world. However little Walter may offer in
the way of behaviour worthy of imitation, he is at least a notable example of human
liberation: his eccentricity is an "infinitude" and "altogether different" and although
difference is what causes the "eternal squabbles" of "all the world" (V,24), it is also what
causes human beings to be able to speak to one another ("Now if I might presume, said
the corporal, to differ from your honour-- --Why else do I talk to thee, Trim? said my
uncle Toby, mildly--" VIII,28).
If space is infinitely divisible, so also is time: the "true scholastic pendulum" is "the
train and succession of our ideas". Time is all in the mind. This liberating thesis is part
of Tristram's dispute with the "hypercritic" who would insist that Tristram's narrative
obey the literary rule of the "unity, or rather probability, of time" (II,8). Tristram
frequently pretends a nervous fear that the critics will condemn his digressions and other
violations of the unity of time. For instance he puts off writing his preface until, far into
the narrative, Walter and Toby have both fallen asleep and Dr. Slop and Trim have
become engaged in actions Tristram feels no obligation to describe in detail: "All my
3
heroes are off my hands;--'tis the first time I have had a moment to spare--and I'll make
use of it, and write my preface" (III,20). Hilariously absurd though it be to imagine an
author's real-world real time stuck in this way to the fictitious time lived by the fictitious
characters he creates, nevertheless we do create time for ourselves, in which to do the
things we wish to do, within real time, but with just the same freedom as that enjoyed by
an author with regard to his fiction. Time is fictitious. Time reverses itself: Confucius
escapes the charge of digression, for "provided he keeps along the line of his story,--he
may go backwards and forwards as he will" (V,25). Tristram's mention of Confucius
illustrates his own practice of digression. Uncle Toby's possibly unintentional
aposiopesis leads to the revelation that Tristram's own narrative is reversed: in the
dispute that follows, Walter maintains that Toby does not know the right end of a woman
from the wrong, and Toby agrees (disputing that there is a dispute at all), citing the case
of the widow Wadman (II,7). Tristram's narrative begins with his conception and birth
and ends with the earlier Wadman episode: it reverses itself. Reversal is the perfect or
paradigmatic digression.
Unlike the non-existent chapter (IV,24), which we cannot read, the digression of no
location appears in plain view: it is Tristram's testimony of love and veneration for Uncle
Toby, and "why here--rather than in any other part of my story--I am not able to tell"
(III,34). Although it may be read within a certain chapter, it must be thought of as a
digression from every single passage in Tristram Shandy; it is ubiquitous, not nonexistent;
yet it is of a piece with the non-existent chapter that makes the book complete,
for all things in the world also digress from the narrative of Tristram Shandy, as well as
together making up its non-existent completing chapter. Between the digressive and the
non-existent is the very small: one of the very short chapters gets its abbreviated form
from Walter's "Pshaw! . . .’tis not worth talking of" (II,13), which ends the conversation
and thus the chapter very soon after they begin; indeed they can hardly be said to have
begun; the chapter records a very brief conversation that hardly takes place at all, a barely
existing thing that gives its (tiny) form to something that assuredly exists, the chapter,
though it is a severely truncated chapter. Part of the conversation is missing, and this
content of absence lends form of absence to the chapter.
Chapter II: Liberation
Tristram must be wearing his cap and bells when he denies any intention to satirize
militarism, predestination, free-will, or taxes (IV, 22), for these are among his main
targets. In the story of Tristram's conception, a main target is the scientific materialistic
deterministic view of human destiny. For, in blaming his life's misfortunes on his parents
(I,1), Tristram is clearly in cap and bells--he contradicts himself. The mechanistic view
of the universe expressed by his story of his conception releases his parents from any
blame; they too are merely part of the machine. Indeed even blaming Fortune "the
ungracious duchess" (I,5) is contradictory: she is a mechanical goddess, innocent, as
machines are. Triste Tristram, sad clown, is in the world to show us its tragedy and
comedy, its innocence, its liberation. For the way to liberate ourselves from the machine
is to stop blaming it, to acknowledge and forgive the machine in ourselves. The liberated
part of us Tristram calls "whimsical". Of this whimsical quality of the famous English
4
eccentrics Tristram names Uncle Toby as his example and explains it as caused by the
English climate. It is the "'great inconsistency in our air and climate . . . . which has
furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters'" (I,21; Tristram quotes
an authority his memory will not permit him to name). ". . . In this unsettled island . . .
nature . . . is most whimsical and capricious; fortune herself not being more so . . ." (I,ll).
Fortune herself--mechanical, "ungracious duchess" though she seem to those who
complain--is whimsical, and creates that liberated, whimsical quality in human nature.
The machine liberates.
Tristram says that he cannot escape his bondage to his whimsical nature, in a passage
where he anticipates criticism for using too many chapters to describe Toby and Walter
descending the stairs: ". . . There may be as many chapters as steps:--let that be as it will,
Sir, I can no more help it than my destiny . . ." (IV,10). Freedom is compulsory.
Tristram's eccentricity is a burden to him, a boon to his readers: to him it is his
melancholia, to them a gift that promotes long life: "True Shandyism, think what you
will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and . . . forces the blood and other vital fluids of
the body to run through its channels, makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully
round . . . . Unless this vile cough kills me in the mean time . . ." (IV,32). Tristram is an
innocent sacrificial victim of his own freedom. Tristram's father's case is the reverse of
Tristram's. A burden to others, and indeed himself though he be, the burden Walter
places on himself promotes his long life: "his health [is] rescued by . . . disquietudes"
(IV,31). There is no justice. But after all "it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of
human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should . . . outwit ourselves, and eternally forego
our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them" (V,16). There is an imp of the
perverse, in human nature.
Yet it is no perversity in Uncle Toby, that the two complementary sides of him are his
resignation and his courage. He fears nothing, he says, "but the doing a wrong thing"
(V,10). If failing to make contact with the widow Wadman be seen as doing a wrong
thing, then it is the victory of the passivity, the modesty, over the courage: that imp of
the perverse. Yet it is not that he has not does not love the widow Wadman. His great
gift after all is his loving nature, which makes him outstandingly susceptible (V,29). And
the passivity even works with the courage at first, for a time, rather than against it: once
fallen in love, Toby "took it like a lamb--sat still and let the poison work in his veins
without resistance . . . [and] incommoded no one mortal" (VIII,26). So, when the
passivity defeats the courage, then it is simply that Toby must be judged for his intentions
rather than his achievements. For, against Walter's argument that our power to resist evil
is within us, Toby insists "Tis by the assistance of Almighty God . . . 'tis not from our
own strength, brother Shandy” (IV,7). Toby's piety, which so irritates his deistical and
scientific brother, is renunciation of control. Walter's passion for control is expressed in
the way he characterizes his inner strength as a machine: "that great and elastic power
within us of counterbalancing evil, which [is] like a secret spring in a well-ordered
machine" (IV,8). Walter believes he is a clock.
Toby's modesty, his silence, is his liberation, though it benefits others more often than
himself. Walter's controlling is his liberation, that tyrannizes over those around him.
5
"Now, of all things in the world, I understand the least of mechanism", Tristram says
(VII,30). Tristram's father blames Tristram's sad life on Tristram's mother's
"interruption" of Walter's attempt to make Tristram's conception as near to clockwork as
possible (I,1). Indeed there are too many causes, in the story, assigned to the one effect
of Tristram's sad life: which is the cause, the bungling of the mechanistic conception, the
shortening of Tristram's nose, the giving of the wrong name, or the accidental
circumcision? But perhaps the least understandable of the doctrines of mechanism is that
of perfection, which Tristram sarcastically describes as:
the wise and wonderful mechanism of nature,--of which,--be hers the honour. --
All that we can do, is to turn and work the machine to the improvement and better
manufactory of the arts and sciences.--
(VI,17.)
This theory of "improvement" that Tristram spoofs here is the theory of capitalism, of
accumulation, and against the "manufactory" view of the "arts and sciences" as pointed
toward a goal, an ever receding donkey's carrot of perfection, Tristram sees the human
creative imagination as already perfect. "Endless is the search of Truth" (II,3), there is no
progress. Another spoof of perfection is the passage in which Tristram imagines himself
and all his readers to be great wits:
. . . With what raptures would you sit and read--but oh!--'tis too much--I am sick--
I faint away deliciously at the thoughts of it--'tis more than nature can bear--lay
hold of me--I am giddy--I am stone blind--I'm dying--I am gone.--Help! Help!
Help!
(III,20.)
This fantasy, which we might call Tristram's Apocalypse, proceeds with great
inventiveness for several pages and in several contrary directions. In another fantasy, the
arts and sciences reach perfection and inevitably fall away again in endless recurrence:
for, when perfection is reached,
it will put an end to all kind of writings whatsoever;--the want of all kind of
writing will put an end to all kind of reading--and . . . in time, As war begets
poverty; poverty peace,--must, in course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,--
and then--we shall have all to begin over again; or, in other words, be exactly
where we started.
(I,21.)
The "end" of learning, it seems, is its beginning again.
Or, put another way, the perfection, the ultimate order, is brought about by a chaos of
random causes:
Let no man say from what tags and jags hints may not be cut out for the
advancement of human knowledge. Let no man . . . say . . . from collision of
what kinds of bodies light may or may not be struck out, to carry the arts and
sciences up to perfection.
(VI,26.)
Here Tristram ironically pretends to say that the glorious effect eclipses the cause, causes
itself; but this is plainly nonsense because it is the essence of machinery that it separates
effect from cause. Indeed Tristram seems really to be saying that the liberated and
creative mind, that women's minds for instance, do not separate effect from cause, for
6
Walter says, in exasperation: "You never will distinguish, Mrs. Shandy, nor shall I ever
teach you to do it, betwixt a point of pleasure and a point of convenience" (VI,18), in
other words, between ends and means. Tristram refutes cause and effect: perfection
cannot be the effect of the random. Thus perfection is the present condition of things,
and it is chaos.
Thus Tristram calls his book a perpetual-motion machine: ". . . My work is
digressive, and it is progressive too,--and at the same time . . . . I have . . . so complicated
and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that
the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going . . . " (I,22). The next time Tristram
refers to "my book as a machine" he mockingly promises to write by the rules: "laying
my pen and ruler down cross-wise upon the table, in order to gain the greater credit to it"
(VII,1). But in the story of Dr. Slop's encounter with Obadiah's coach-horse in the lane,
making the sign of the cross is represented as a mechanistic and useless gesture,
dangerous in a crisis (II,9). But all acts of will are mechanism, as, Tristram maintains, is
shown by a human tendency to make decisions for their own sake when any other reason
is lacking: the third road from Calais to Paris has nothing to recommend it except that
"you may" take it "if you will"; and "for this reason a great many choose" it (VII,3). The
human will is a perpetual-motion machine, for if other sources of energy fail it will be its
own.
Chapter III: Hobby-horse and Digression
The hobby-horse is "no way a vicious beast . . . the sporting little filly-folly which
carries you out for the present hour--a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick--an
Uncle Toby's siege". But a vicious beast indeed is "my father's ass--Oh! mount him . . .
not:--'tis a beast concupiscent--and foul befall the man, who does not hinder him from
kicking": a beast of obsession and violent tyranny (VIII,31). A comparison then is
unavoidable, between the hobby-horse and the "Digressions . . . [which] are the sunshine
. . . the soul of reading" (I,22). The hobby-horse then is the contrary of the machine, so
that "in giving you my uncle Toby's character, I am determined to draw it by no
mechanical help whatever . . . I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his Hobby-
Horse" (I,23). The materialistic psychology which Sterne satirizes makes a machine of
the mind, prone to mechanical disorder: " . . . A plaguing thing . . . to have a man's mind
torn asunder by two projects of equal strength . . . in what a degree such a wayward kind
of friction works upon the more gross and solid parts, wasting the fat and impairing the
strength . . . ." (IV,31.) Yet the truth is that inner conflict is a human not a mechanical
affair. If everything in the world were machinery, nothing could ever happen, for all
things would merely run on in straight lines: ". . . Millions of . . . simple proposition[s] . .
. are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding,
without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest
7
drive them to one side" (III,9). Pure reason could not produce life. This little swerve in
the steady rain of the atoms is the digression, the sunshine.
Tristram attempts as nearly as possible a silent use of words; he digresses as often as
possible from his words in interruptions of gesture, mime, music, dance, sign, signature,
symbol, and signal. Even when digression and silence are themes rather than stylistic
features of Tristram's work they are also demonstrations of themselves, selfdramatizations,
gestures toward themselves, dumb show, showing off. The hobby-horse
is harmless amusement, of self or if possible shared. But Tristram's father's ass is male
dominance, which Tristram's father argues is the basis of father-dominance: the father,
he says, "acquires . . . right and jurisdiction" over the son "lst, by marriage. 2nd, by
adoption. 3rd, by legitimation. And 4th, by procreation", and he explains that the mother
enjoys no such power, because "She is under authority herself", and also because (in
procreation) "she is not the principal agent" (V,31). This cruel misogynist actually
believes he is a clock. "I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom", he says, because he
sees no "use or service" in human beings except the measurement of time through "the
succession of our ideas": "we are so used to clocks", he says, that he fears that "in time to
come, the succession of our ideas" may be of no "use or service to us at all" (III,18).
Dr. Slop, the Catholic, is the mirror-image of Walter, who is a sort of ultra-Protestant:
the reversal of left and right means nothing, for they are both tyrants. For Dr. Slop, the
end (salvation through the Seven Sacraments) justifies the means; for Walter, the means
(extreme individualism) justifies the end. Sacramentalism is mechanistic (baptism in
utero and Tristram's cap-and-bells proposal of baptism of the homunculi, I,20). As well
as Catholicism, Dr. Slop represents also the patriarchy's campaign to establish the
scientific forceps in the place of the midwife, although she has never failed (I,18). Walter
is a supporter of science against the midwife; indeed the (ancient) theory of the
homunculi is itself an attempt by the patriarchy to deny that there is motherhood. Little
does Walter know, however, that science plans eventually to replace fatherhood also: Dr.
Slop dreams of becoming also the begetter of the child, as well as its deliverer into the
world (II,18).
The critics who might criticize Tristram's digressions would be as whimsical as
Tristram himself: there is strictly no way to tell the digression from the straight line.
Hence the general air of hoax in Tristram Shandy: the book is a machine; Tristram
punishes "Madam Reader" (she must go back and re-read the whole of the previous
chapter, a punishment which is particularly cruel because the matter she seeks is in "the
last line but one": I,20. Later on, this cruelty is repeated in another context: Walter
insists Dr. Slop read the curse of Ernulphus aloud because "there is something so
whimsical, especially in the latter part", but this means that the reader must read the
whole of the dreary curse in order not to miss the latter part: III,11). The hoax is the idea
that the book controls the reader. Readers are not controlled, but are free to come and go.
When Tristram predicts a developing friendship between himself and the reader, he
seems perhaps to be referring to a fictitious reader, even as he himself is a fictitious
author (I,6). On the other hand, oddly enough, when Tristram predicts that the reader
will read of the collision between Obadiah and Dr. Slop ("which you are just going to
8
do") Tristram is correct, for if there is a reader at all then she is already well launched in
the process of reading about the accident, for the prediction is imbedded in the
description of the accident (II,9).
Tristram delights to say that as a writer he is in several places at once: "getting
forwards in two different journeys together, and with the same dash of the pen . . . and . .
. moreover . . . I now sit rhapsodizing all these affairs" (VII,28). It is a digressive world,
a perpetual motion machine:
With what velocity . . . shall I fly down the rapid Rhone. . . .And what a fresh
spring in the blood! to behold upon the banks advancing and retiring, the castles
of romance . . . and see vertiginous, the rocks, the mountains, the cataracts, and all
the hurry which Nature is in with all her great works about her.
(VII,29.)
There can be no control by clock in a world where (it is no wonder that Tristram hates
disputes, V,11, for) both sides are false (III,38), and, as well, both sides are true ("the
stranger's nose was neither true nor false. This left room for the controversy to go on",
IV, "Slawkenbergius's Tale"). And although society seems to have so much invested in
the difference between true and false, it understands affirmation and denial to be the same
thing (VI,14). Hence Walter's system of education, by "thesis and hypothesis" (VI,2).
Although the French may boast "'that they who have seen Paris, have seen every
thing'", it is in fact not possible to see Paris, for it is too complicated (VII,18). Tristram
finds it impossible even to see his own life, for he lives "364 times faster than" he writes
(IV,13). Knowledge races in vain to keep abreast with reality: the Trista-Pedia becomes
obsolete more quickly than it can be written down (V,16). No wonder then that art
avoids reality: "that all-powerful fire which warms the visionary brain, and lights the
spirits through unworldly tracts" (VII,6). In cap and bells, Tristram proves that things are
not what they are, in reverse, by insisting on the absurd notion that whiskers are whiskers
and noses are noses (V,1). By using real things as symbols of what they are not,
metaphor contradicts reality. Thus nature follows art: Toby and Trim cannot fortify or
destroy what they have not first read: "my uncle Toby, with Trim behind him, sallied
forth;--the one with the Gazette in his hand,--the other with a spade on his shoulder to
execute the contents" (VI,22).
Thus Tristram must begin to mourn Toby's death even before he "arrive at" the "page"
where he shall do so:
--Gracious powers! which erst have opened the lips of the dumb in his distress,
and made the tongue of the stammerer speak plain--when I shall arrive at this
dreaded page, deal not with me, then, with a stinted hand.
(VI,24.)
With facetious irony, Tristram confuses the real time in which an author digresses from
his writing with the fictitious time lived by his characters, and this again with the
sequence and shape the narrative gives its events: "I declare I have been at it these six
weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,--and am not yet born" (I,14). The point is
that it is the critics, who insist on the unity of time (as against digression), that commit
these confusions. This erroneous doctrine of the unity of time having come from a
9
misapprehension of drama, from the illusion of real time afforded by the dramatic stage,
in one passage Tristram pretends to impose the unity of time by dropping a curtain
(IV,13). But making a drama of the novel is after all only a part of Tristram's agenda of
bringing in all of the arts and sciences in silent digression. A human being's relation to
his or her hobby-horse is somewhat like the relation of body and soul: they are not
divided, they do communicate, and in spite of the "Sceptic" the hobby-horse does move,
whatever "the world" may think, as is proven by the way "my uncle Toby mounted him
with so much pleasure, and he carried my uncle Toby so well" (I,24). And so it is that
"the arts and sciences befriend each other" (II,17). Hence Yorick's use of musical terms
to describe his sermons (VI,11) and Tristram's pun on musical and literary "notes"
(IV,25).
When Tristram describes his father as having "reddened, pictorially and scientifically
speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour" (III,5)
he is both defending the unity of art and science (and incidentally the synaesthesia
between painting and music) and at the same time deploring the reduction of art to
science that comes out of separating them. Walter's "weakness" such that "he was hourly
a dupe to his . . . oratory" (V,3) comes from the separation in his mind between art and
science: he would know better how they differ, and when art had carried him away from
science, if he didn't arrogantly assume himself to be a man of pure science. Wit and
judgment, says Tristram, are "indubitably both made and fitted to go together" and
Locke's grave error in separating them "has been made the Magna Charta of stupidity
ever since" (III,20). Body and soul, person and hobby-horse, straight line and digression,
art and science are useful distinctions but are to be used thoughtfully not mechanically.
Walter's violence is a form of that Lockean stupidity, for example when he is seen
destroying Erasmus's literal sense with a penknife, in order to get at his "mystic meaning"
(III,37).
Tristram's theory of the Unconscious occurs in a passage where he speaks of the "sixth
sense" and says "There's often no good understanding betwixt . . . the brain [and] the
heart". It is in this moment, of division, that he says, "I felt as if I understood" (IV,1).
The distinction is ignored by Walter and all others who assume they are completely
rational, but it would be very helpful to them. A society based on reason, however,
would be a cruel one, based on dominance. Which is what Walter believes in. But
Walter owes his life to the Unconscious. Not that whimsical behaviour itself can save
him: his whimsy is no release from his whimsical distresses (III,30). He entered a
suicidal despair after writing the Life of Socrates, which caused him to retire from
business (V,12,13). But again and again what saves his life is to imagine himself in
control of something, or in some other way to distract himself unconsciously from his
feelings. Tristram on the other hand vows he never will join "the army of martyrs", and
makes a comparison between Socrates and Hamlet that does not flatter either of them
(V,11,13). Tristram's hero of course is Yorick rather than Hamlet; is Yorick a more
tragic figure than Hamlet, since Hamlet outlives him?--at any rate, Tristram's usual state
mixes laughter and tears: " . . . My usual method of book-keeping, . . . with the disasters
of life--[is] making a penny of every one of 'em as they happen to me--" and "a score of
good cursed, bouncing losses, would have been as good as a pension to me" (VII,29).
10
Though not in control, Tristram is free, hence responsible for his own existence: for his
own birth and the unlucky events connected to it, the flattening of his nose, his false
naming, and all the life's misfortunes thus portended. The agreement between Tristram's
parents that would have saved his nose ("My mother was to lay in, (if she chose it) in
London") contains a clause that protects Walter against the expense in the case of "false
cries and tokens . . . and yet, as reasonable as it was, I have ever thought it hard that the
whole weight of the article should have fallen entirely, as it did, upon myself. . . . But I
was begot and born to misfortunes: for my poor mother, whether it was wind or water--
or . . . simply the mere swell of imagination and fancy in her", Tristram chooses to be
born at the wrong moment, and there are false cries and tokens. It seems that the father
has made Tristram: the father's definition and prognostication: " . . . Unhappy Tristram!
child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake! and discontent!" (IV,19.)
Therefore Tristram has chosen his father, as a part of choosing to be himself.
Chapter IV: The Silence Gathers
The time where we live, then, is a fiction created by ourselves. Tristram is a fictitious
author: he forgives his reviewers, he says, "as long as I live or write (which in my case
means the same thing)" (III,4), so dedicated a writer is he, for one thing, but, for another,
of so tenuous an existence that it depends on the existence of his text. This conceit has
been developing and develops: Tristram threatens to tear the next page out of his book
(I,25); but is not the text already complete in the hands of the reader? There is an
autobiographical fallacy here: if Tristram the author were present in the text he has
created then he could yet be seen, crossing out words, shuffling pages. He does his best
at times to persuade us that the craft of writing is a branch of mime or of dance:
And this moment that I last dipped my pen into my ink, I could not help taking
notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appeared in my
manner of doing it.--Lord! how different from the rash jerks and hair-brained
squirts thou are wont, Tristram, to transact it with in other humours--dropping thy
pen--spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books--as if thy pen and thy ink, thy
books and furniture cost thee nothing.
(III,28.)
Elsewhere, Tristram argues that the writing of a clean-shaven man is more youthful and
of a clean man cleaner (IX,13). But if the theory of spurting as art is but an
expressionistic fallacy, nevertheless art is a kind of autobiography and the writer is
necessarily in the text: "Let us leave, if possible, myself--But 'tis impossible,--I must go
along with you to the end of the work" (VI,20).
But when Tristram makes a fiction of the reader also, as well as the author, by writing
her interruptions into the narrative and making them a part of it (IV,1), then she may feel
the joke has gone too far. Yet it seems there is no limit to the game, when Tristram
writes the missing chapter of the Tristra-pedia. Unlike the missing chapter of Tristram
Shandy, which improves that book by being missing, the missing chapter of the Tristrapedia
improves this book by being supplied by Tristram, for it covers a topic dear to his
father's heart, the disaster of Tristram's accidental circumcision, and takes exactly
Walter's point of view, as Tristram proudly explains:
11
he himself wrote that remarkable chapter in the Tristra-pedia, which to me is the
most original and entertaining one in the whole book . . . , the chapter Upon Sashwindows,
with a bitter Phillippic at the end of it, upon the forgetfulness of
chamber-maids….in order to render the Tristra-pedia complete . . . .
(V,26.)
Yet if Tristram's chapter of Walter's book was not written by Walter, surely it cannot
exist: Walter's book was written by Walter, not Tristram. Then it makes no difference
whether the missing chapter (of the Tristra-pedia) is written or (of Tristram Shandy) is
destroyed: they both do not exist.
But if the theory of art as spurting is wrong, what then of the theory of writing as
struggling to keep silence (V,16)? By this theory, Tristram would be one of the most
successful of authors, being a fictitious author, one who has in truth written nothing at all.
Or perhaps Tristram is Lawrence Sterne, who so far as we can tell truly has written
Tristram Shandy. They are both slender men dying of tuberculosis and possessed of a
whimsical sense of humour; who can say they are not the same man, except for certain
biographical points in Tristram Shandy which are presumably fictitious? Indeed struggle
not to write and struggle to write seem alike to be fictitious. Two chapters (VIII,6,11)
show Tristram struggling to write: in both he says he endures the present chapter with
difficulty and only for the sake of the next. Why not tear up the difficult chapter and go
on to the pleasant one? The answer must be that he cannot; if he could, then the next
chapter must become the present one, which it cannot do and remain the next one. It is a
nightmare fiction in which Tristram is forced to dance a pattern laid down from the
beginning of time. Worse still, the second of the difficult chapters is followed not by the
pleasant one expected but by another difficult one.
In another place, it is the present chapter that is pleasant, an interlude of freedom,
because there is a plan for the next chapter, namely, a digression. However, Tristram
wastes his freedom, in the present chapter, by returning to the theme of the previous
chapter. And then, when he arrives at the next chapter, he discovers that he has already
enjoyed the pleasure of the digression, in anticipating it (IX,13,14,15): "'How our
pleasures slip from under us in this world!'" (IX,15.) But perhaps it is only to be
expected that the chapters of a fictitious author be fictitious too. The chapter for example
that begins the previous chapter over again (VI,34) is the previous chapter: here we have
another regression to infinity. Another chapter (VIII,4) begins over again the previous
but one, except that the opening sentence when it appears for the second time is dressed
in quotation marks. These seem to imply a denial that the latter chapter is identical with
the former. But denials are not necessarily to be believed: the chapter on sleep denies its
own existence and is a digression from this denial ("I wish I could write a chapter upon
sleep", IV,15). The chapter (VIII,2) that Tristram begins over again later with a
quotation of itself is a non-existent chapter because of a digression that entirely displaces
it except for the first sentence, the only scrap of itself left to the chapter to quote in order
to identify itself when it makes its reappearance, or first appearance, or reincarnation.
The complications of the question of being open up again when Tristram withdraws a
promised chapter (V,8): there must be a special limbo for this chapter for it has been
12
called into being by the promise that it will appear, the withdrawal notwithstanding. A
text is a static phenomenon, a perfect whole, it does not change before our eyes. This and
other conventional assumptions too Tristram attacks as false structures pretending to
support a false "reason" and "reality" that are mere conventions. Yorick's "BRAVO",
deleted by being scored through, yet not deleted, but printed with the line across it, is a
text changing before our eyes: it is Yorick's expression of approval of his own sermon,
and his withdrawal of approval, and Tristram produces it as example of Yorick's modesty
(VI,11); yet it changes as we watch, for the self-praise becomes after all quite visible
through the crossing-out, and the modesty disappears again. Similarly, when Tristram
writes "further this chapter sayeth not" (VI,18) he writes a sentence that deletes itself yet
still is plainly visible, for it both refers to the chapter to which it belongs and denies that
it belongs.
When Tristram leaves two chapters blank and then places the omitted chapters within
another, six chapters further on, he commits the regression to infinity redundantly, to
many infinities, and creates noughts within noughts (IX,18-19,25). He also confuses real
with fictitious time by explaining that he was unable to write chapters eighteen and
nineteen until he had written chapter twenty-five. Of course we care not in what order he
writes his chapters provided he shuffles his papers adequately afterward. And so, clearly
he does not mean "write" in the ordinary sense: he means, create that fixed and
permanent entity the text. For he believes, he says, that his way of tangling up his
narrative is "a lesson to the world, 'to let people tell their stories their own way'" (IX,25).
This means that the text is complete and without error. It is perfect. Tristram defends
even the blankness of the blank chapters: "I look upon a chapter with only nothing in it,
with respect; and considering what worse things there are in the world--That it is no way
a proper subject for satire" (IX,25). This means that even the lengthy text where the title
"The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles" (and the same, "Continued")
is repeated seven times but the story never told, is without error and perfect (VIII,19).
Nothing is not digression, and digression is perfect. The digression that illustrates this
point is the self-contained digression: this is the story of Trim's theft and vandalism of
the heirloom jack-boots to make mortars for a siege. This story fizzles, it has no issue,
oblivion swallows it because Walter's anger vanishes instantly and he forgives Toby and
Trim out of his love of their love: "the zeal and simplicity of Trim--and the generous
(though hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle Toby, brought him into perfect goodhumour
with them in an instant" (III,22). This dead end is the more anti-climactic and
surprising because the tale of the mortars is so carefully prepared for in the tale of the
creaking hinges and even in Toby and Walter's snooze and the belated preface. A
variation of the self-contained digression is the digression within a digression: the
introduction of a foreign text, in a foreign language, and expressive of a foreign train of
thought. These silent or blank passages exclude themselves in several ways from their
context. Some three pages of legal jargon Tristram quotes in full although they can be
paraphrased "In three words--'My mother was to lay; (if she chose it) in London'" (I,15).
Another long digressive quotation, this one in French ecclesiastical legalese, appears five
chapters further on: this quotation, also, could be paraphrased in a few words (I,20).
13
The foreign language footnote is a special case of this kind of blank digression, since
the special position of the footnote both within and outside of the page of text seems
partly to invite the reader to ignore it (IV, "Slawkenbergius", Latin footnotes; IV,10,
French footnote). The spurious footnote seems to pervert the function of footnotes,
which is conventionally to help; yet the idea is not seriously to mislead the reader, but
instead merely to share a joke with her; the joke that has the fictitious author Tristram be
the real author, mediated to the reader by an editor (Sterne?--II,19,VIII,26). The spurious
footnote then seriously implies the alarming suggestion, about the whole digressive
structure of the text of Tristram Shandy, that it is entirely if not spurious mystifying. The
whole experience of Tristram Shandy for the reader, entertaining, edifying, or whatever,
is one of solving mysteries, another on each page. For when Tristram boasts that he does
not think (IX,12) what he means is that he is not methodical, not systematic, that he
avoids repetition, seeks spontaneity, creativity: "I begin with writing the first sentence--
and trusting to Almighty God for the second" (VIII,2). The whole book, being
digressive, is in a sense blank, requiring that the reader fill it with herself.
For Tristram himself is a kind of blank: " . . . My pen . . . governs me,--I govern not
it" (VI,6). There is no freedom of the will; whim is Destiny. The pen jumps about,
squirting, pulling Tristram after it, a helpless puppet. I have mentioned that Tristram
Shandy is an infinite book; it also contains an infinite chapter, "the chapter of Things"
(IV,32). Arguing that he does not commit digression, Tristram promises to follow the
chapter of Things with "the chapter upon Whiskers, in order to keep up some sort of
connection in my works" (IV,32). At infinity, all things are connected. Chaos is a
perfect unity. Toby rejects both history and philosophy (V,3), as also does Tristram's
mother (V,14). This embracing of the concrete and particular in the present is the highest
wisdom. Toby cares nothing for logical consistency: unconvinced by Walter's argument
against the existence of evil (V,3), he nevertheless is sorry for the Devil, that he is
"cursed and damned" (III,11). Walter invites Toby to "calculate . . . the chances [which]
the events of this world lay open to us"; Toby retorts "I know no more of calculation than
this baluster", by chance striking Walter on the shin, with his crutch, instead of the
baluster; by chance, Toby demonstrates that chance is a sudden blow, not a calculation
(IV,9).
It is an amazing tour de force that so clear a writer as Tristram (Sterne) may be so
digressive and blank. For it is always completely clear how the silences are to be
understood. Tristram's spurious instructions in reading the black page (it is emblematic
of mourning for Yorick, I,12), the white (for the reader to fill with the most
"concupiscible" image of woman he can generate, VI,38), and the marbled (emblem of
Tristram's "motley" costume, III,36) are no obstacle to their true and correct
understanding, which is the point that black is as "blank" as white, and marbled as much
so as either. Silence is eloquent. That Conscience, for example, is silent in the dispute
between Protestant and Catholic is a rebuke of the bigoted Papist (II,16). Mrs. Shandy's
"way . . . never to refuse her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before
her, merely because she did not understand it . . . . [which] broke the neck, at first setting
out, of more good dialogues between them, than could have done the most petulant
contradiction" tells Walter more about what is wrong with his idea of a "good dialogue"
14
than he would be prepared to hear in his lifetime (IX,11). Toby's silence when he and
Trim march back up to Mrs. Wadman's door, Trim prepares to knock, but "My uncle
Toby, contrary to his invariable way of treating his faithful servant, said nothing good or
bad", is more eloquent of his pain than any words could be.
Rubenius's silence on hooks and eyes Walter interprets as support for his own position
on the issue (VI,19): so silence is more vulnerable to abuse than is sound, easier to
misunderstand deliberately. Toby defends war as resistance of the "ambitious and the
turbulent" by the "quiet and harmless" (VI,32). Unfortunately there is an undemocratic
element within Toby's theory, for he says also that war's object [is] to shorten the strides
of Ambition, and intrench the lives and fortunes of a few, from the plunderings of the
many" (IX,8). Keeping silence is a luxury for the socially privileged. And war is an
admittedly noisy affair: loud incoherent exclamations coming from Toby and Trim while
thoughts of war excite them cause Yorick to draw "his chair a little to one side for
safety", almost as if a real battle were in progress (V,21). Oddly, though, the noisy
exclamations are silent too, for they are nonsensical. Yet neither Toby, Trim, nor
Tristram defends the slaughter itself. Tristram's sympathetic portrait of Toby and Trim
contains a protest against the neglect of the old soldier by society, and Tristram allows
Toby to say "The best hearts, Trim, are ever the bravest" (VI,13), and "Pity is a-kin to
love,--and bravery no alien to it" (VI,29), and that the brave respect the fortune of war
and are kindly toward the conquered (IX,6). The old soldier is a member of the
underprivileged class who receives Tristram's sympathy: with the Peace of Utrecht,
Toby's hobby-horse "flung him--and somewhat viciously", and Toby enters the road to
heartbreak.
Part of the reason for Toby's heartbreak is the confusion generally, regarding love, in
the world, which has "half a dozen words for one thing" (VIII,4). Another part is the
world's hypocrisy regarding it, of which the fictitious author Slawkenbergius stands as
example: he claims to know what women desire in marriage, but when he should be
telling takes refuge in the silence of a metaphor (IX,21). Confusion and hypocrisy are
two kinds of silence that, first, cause Toby to enter a love relationship with Mrs. Wadman
unprepared, and, second, to flee it in shock and pain when he might be expected to begin
to delight in it. "The world" cares too little about the brevity of life, and Tristram writes
one of his tiny, silent chapters to express through its brevity how little he cares in turn for
"the world" (IX,8-9). The brevity of the chapter mimics--the device is dramatic rather
than literary--the little value being assigned. Elsewhere Tristram complains at greater
length against human carelessness: "--Inconsistent soul that man is!--languishing under
wounds, which he has the power to heal!--" (and so forth, III,21). He accuses himself, as
well as "the world":
Inconsiderate soul that thou art! What! are not the unavoidable distresses with
which, as an author and a man, thou art hemmed in on every side of thee--are
they, Tristram, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more?
(VIII,6.)
Yet, like Toby, who, killer as he may have been is now as innocent as a small boy
playing at soldier, Tristram as author is as innocent as a fictitious person must be. The
15
lies he tells hurt no one. The title of the Sermon appears twice, first at the head of the
digression that interrupts it before it can begin (II,17): it is a lying title; yet the second
time it appears it tells the truth, although it is also the same title as before. It is the same
and not the same, like the world of Tristram Shandy and our own. Tristram is innocent in
our world, but in his own world he causes himself pain. He is of but not in the world, we
know him but could not meet him on the street. Chapter Eleven in the fictitious book by
Ernulphus corresponds exactly to Chapter Eleven in the real book Tristram Shandy
(III,11). Real and unreal texts, universes, intersect; the real book written by Sterne and
the unreal book written by Tristram touch at all points, are identical though of different
universes. When Tristram gives his reader "half a day to give a probable guess" as to the
next part of the narrative (I,10), are we to feel obliged to lay down the book for half a day
whether we wish to play the guessing-game or not, or may we feel the time has passed
within the narrative, and that we are not ourselves obliged to observe it?
Tristram takes refuge in his non-existent world, behind his silences, from the cruelties
of the world. A balance is needed in a book, he says, between wisdom and folly (IX,12).
Cap and bells: such a balance could not be wise, would have to be foolish. The satire
throughout Tristram Shandy of the learned and dignified is a warning that to lose one's
sense of humour is to lose one's intelligence. The absurdity of learned argument in
general is typified by the argument that "the mother is not related to the child" (IV,29).
And then there are the fools who believe the "knowledge and goodness" of a certain child
prove he is the Antichrist (VI,2). Cruelty comes from stupidity. In a mock harangue of
the learned and dignified, Tristram swears "by the knowledge of the great saint
Paraleipomenon" that only by application of great learning will the "truths . . . mystically
hid" in his black and his marbled pages be revealed (III,36). "Paraleipomenon" is silence;
that which is omitted. Walter claims of his scheme of education by "thesis and
hypothesis" that "The force of this engine . . . is incredible in opening a child's head--'Tis
enough, brother Shandy, cried my uncle Toby, to burst it into a thousand splinters"
(VI,2). After the accidental circumcision, Walter appears carrying not the practical,
kindly and expected herbal but the book of rules governing circumcisions (V,27).
Toby's characteristic "argument" is what Tristram names the Argumentum
Fistulatorium (I,21), the whistling of "Lillabullero", a gentle but telling silence,
impossible to ignore. Sign and signal bear simple messages. But when Toby both insists
that the Excommunicatio be read aloud and insists upon whistling throughout the
performance he is saying something fairly complex: he is demanding that the cruelty of
the curse be witnessed and at the same time that he be allowed to register his protest.
When Walter prevails upon Toby only to think his "Lillabullero" instead of whistling it,
during the learned argument that the mother is not related to the child, because Walter has
"a great desire to hear more of so curious an argument", Toby, in making himself content
with an inner, private protest, is retreating into a fiction within a fiction. Of course Toby
cannot know he is already in a fiction before he invents his fictions for himself, any more
than Tristram can know that he never really was "brought forth into this scurvy and
disastrous world of ours" (I,5) or that his mad flight from (Death) "the man with his gun"
(VII,43) never takes place. As far as Tristram knows, his suffering is as real as anyone's
16
in the real world. But Toby's "Lillabullero" is already a silence, an implied protest only:
a silent "Lillabullero" is only a little more silent than a whistled one.
In the second of the two blank chapters that do not appear until seven and six chapters
later (IX,19), "Lillabullero" is printed out in full, words and music. The part of the blank
chapter in which the song appears, namely, at the end, is the part in the printed out
version (IX,25) where Toby has proposed marriage to Mrs. Wadman, been met with
silence, and picking up a Bible has begun to read his favourite passage, on the Siege of
Jericho: that is, Toby has entered his uncomfortable, silent place, where some part of him
is making a silent "Lillabullero" protest, while another is finding what comfort it can in
Scripture. "Lillabullero", then, is in a place so deep and quiet that it does not enter the
narrative (Chapter 25) but surfaces instead in the blank chapter (19), which touches that
place so exactly that it prints the whole song, which narrative would not do, for song
would digress from narrative. "Lillabullero" is divided from itself, somewhat like the
divided sin: the abbess and the novice divide between them the pronunciation of the
words "******" and "******" without which the mules will not budge, thus dividing the
venial sin between them, and it "in course becomes diluted into no sin at all" (VII, 20-
25). (The asterisks represent words in the French language and thus are doubly silent.)
"Lillabullero" singing itself in Toby's unconscious exists and does not exist.
It is when Toby sends Trim to the garret for asterisks (IX,20) that they come their
closest to being real things, real at least in the world of Tristram Shandy. Yet throughout
this novel the silent symbols of the conventional printer's code struggle to speak, to break
out into language or even concrete reality, to digress from and transgress against the
conventional forms of narrative and print. Conventionally, asterisks silence or darken
secret or risky passages; unexpectedly, Tristram says his asterisks are "the stars . . . which
. . . I hang up in some of the darkest passages" (VI,33). Of course, all that the reader
need do is count the asterisks to identify the risky word they replace. Another printer's
device that threatens to become a real thing is the series of lines across the page that
follows the narrative statement "my uncle Toby hummed over the letter": these lines
seem redundant, they repeat what the narrative has set out; perhaps they are a pictorial
illustration of some kind; perhaps they encode the humming, on the basis that is is "flat"
(V,2). Then they become less metaphorical and more concrete as they begin to suggest
letters of the alphabet that have been squashed flat because Toby is only humming the
letter not reading it aloud; and then they suggest the straight line of Toby's closed mouth,
humming. Pictorially there is an analogy between the open look of alphabetical
characters and the open mouth.
The printer's symbols silently interrupt the text because they belong to symbolic codes
other than printed English and suggest art forms other than the written. In the statement
(and more than statement) that Dr. Slop "crossed himself + --" (II,9) the pictorial cross
symbol redundantly repeats what the text has said in English, setting up a digression, a
diversion, and a subversion. The diagrams of digression (VI,40) are interesting doodles
and contribute much to the bizarre and unusual look of Tristram Shandy but tell us
nothing about digression as a flaw or as a beauty in literature. Instead, they tell us about
the fear of criticism suffered by the spirit of creativity, the power of criticism to kill
17
creativity, and the power of creativity to spring back to life after death by criticism.
Tristram pretends to be so frightened of criticisms of his digressions that he must produce
false scientific diagrams to prove that he really is doing something about the digressions
and has all but eliminated them. The printer's symbols though neither literary nor verbal
have nevertheless as much power as words themselves to express themselves as clearly as
they need to in various contexts. Asterisks--and a dash--express the "private reasons" of
the ministers of state (VI,34): the dash quite unnecessarily punctuates the asterisks as if
they were words arranged in sentences, but then the asterisks too are unnecessary
according to the rule previously followed in asterisk use, for here they mask not
something in the text and its world but something in the fictitious world that is behind the
text and already masked by it. The asterisks merely repeat in a visual signal what is
already said by the words "private reasons". Not content with saying that the ministers
kept their reasons a secret, Tristram must keep them a secret too, with asterisks. This
deliberate confusion of fiction with reality, like the many others, shows the spirit of
creativity showing itself, showing that it has nothing else that it need do. Everyone
knows the difference between fiction and reality, no labour is required to show that.
Everyone already knows what Tristram tells before he tells it, yet is delighted with the
telling. The chapter upon chapters demonstrates the silence of the self-reference of art:
So much for my chapter upon chapters, which I hold to be the best chapter in my
whole work; and take my word, whoever reads it, is full as well employed, as in
picking straws.
(IV,10.)
Like Licetus the foetus, the homunculus who grew to such a height in literature that he
wrote a book with a title as long as himself (IV,10), the spirit of creativity silently
gestures toward itself. The "Plain Stories" pun (VII,43) is an aposiopesis, for, although it
suggests that stories can speak but plains cannot, what it keeps silent about is that stories
cannot speak either. On the other hand, in the story about Tristram's remarks dropped,
lost, and found (VII,36-8) it is obvious enough that although remarks can be spoken or
written they cannot speak. Yet such is the versatility of the silent symbol that many
symbolic systems can collaborate, even while interrupting and digressing from one
another, or telling a story such as the story of the accident with the sash (V,17), which is
told in asterisks, doubles entendres (e.g., "well hung"), and ordinary language.
When Tristram modestly declines the challenge of describing the innkeeper's beautiful
daughter, on the grounds that to do so would be to lose a contest with the great Reynolds
(Tristram pretends to believe writing and painting are the same thing), he gestures silently
instead toward the "original" of the unpainted verbal portrait, whom the reader must
travel to Montreuil to see (VII,9). Thus the reader's journey to Montreuil becomes part of
Tristram Shandy, together with the rest of the infinitude of things. Truth then is in the
silence of the gesture: the "Humph" argument that Toby and Dr. Slop both use against
each other with equal effectiveness although its use by each is perfectly understood by
the other (II,17); the eloquent stick and hat of Trim (V,7). In the "singular stroke of
eloquence" whereby the thing is produced instead of the word for it (III,14) the proof of
the argument is that the thing springs so readily to hand: the whole world of things is so
structured as to support these words in this present moment. (Although in fact this kind
18
of eloquence is mere juggling; and Tristram blames the decay of eloquence on the going
out of fashion of voluminous clothing in which things can be concealed by orators who
plan ahead.)
But perhaps the silent world of things has more to say than the speaking person; the
critics seem to think so, with their "heads . . . stuck . . . full of rules and compasses"
(III,12). Trim seems to think so, when he shakes the book to see if a wind-chariot falls
out (II,15). Walter's mechanistic philosophy is a philosophy of silence: his ideas about
names and noses have them act on the world by brute force, no thinking or persuading
here. Of course, even when at his most verbal and persuasive, Walter is trying to force an
opponent to submit, as his careful gestures sometimes suggest, bringing the physical
world into his rhetoric when possible: "laying the three first fingers of his right-hand in
the palm of his left, and stooping a little", then "holding fast his fore-finger betwixt his
finger and his thumb" (IV,6-7). On the other hand, in telling this tale Tristram shows
Walter's mechanism and materialism to be ineffectual, for here again the writer digresses
into the other arts, of "Raffael" and "Garrick" (IV,7). Thus Trim, who is no tyrant, is
aware of the elements of dance mime and music in his oratorical gift and uses his hand
and opposite arm to support "the sportable key of his voice, which gave sense and spirit
to his tale" (IX,6).
The alphabet itself is proof of the eloquence of things, and Tristram pays honour to the
alphabet when he makes a list in alphabetical order of adjectives describing love
(VIII,13). Lists themselves make up an important category of digressions in Tristram
Shandy, and this alphabetical list in particular shows how the whole world of things pays
homage to the tyrant Love. Trim's gesture with his stick shows better than words, better
than "a thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms", how preferable is Liberty to the
tyranny of Love: the printer's flourish, which represents perfectly Trim's gesture, has
then all of this power (IX,4). More power than the alphabet? No; all symbolic systems
are of equal power; all symbols are of equal power and exactly as required by context. It
is just that Toby is very much moved by this moment, of Trim's gesture and other things.
Not the symbol but the feelings are of greater or less power. Tristram avoids using he
says the "pedantic Fescue" (I,21): he seems to be saying that to point to the symbol one
is using, as well as using it, that is, to insist on the truth of what one is saying, as well as
telling truth, is pedantic, tyrannical, attempts to double the power of the symbol by
adding another symbol on top of it. Yet the printer's hand is a favourite device of
Tristram's (II,12,17,etc.), not only in parody of the tyranny he condemns but even in selfparody,
for to condemn anything is itself to become tyrannical. Overtly the pointing
symbol, fescue or finger, has no function but to point; however, all symbols point
outwards from their centres in all directions toward everything, toward infinity.
Unlike the series of asterisks which hide the ministers' private reasons, the series of
exactly one dozen dashes which hide either Tristram's suppositions or his choice not to
suppose do not tell us what they are hiding (V,10). There are always new silences to
explore. Tristram's demonstration of how phrases may be inserted "betwixt two crooks,
thus [ ]" (VI,31) is a false demonstration, it demonstrates nothing, for nothing is
inserted between the crooks. In Tristram's printed text of the Sermon, the words "Cases"
19
and "Reports" appear in black-letter, although the form the Sermon takes in the narrative
is that of a handwritten text read aloud by Trim (II,17). Black-letter does not exist in
either oral or handwritten language, but Tristram is using it in the print version to express
the idea of legalistic stuffiness. The printed version of the same text here interrupts and
digresses from the handwritten and oral versions included in the narrative. Print adds an
editorial dimension, as indeed does handwriting, oral language, the human voice, body
english. A line across the page with the command "Shut the door" injected into it (I,4)
stops neither reader nor writer from travelling onward down the page; there is no door, no
prohibition, no inhibition. There is no mediation: there is simply a chaotic fugue of all
symbolic systems raising their voices at once. Something of the kind Tristram seems to
say with his verbal fiddle music ("prut--trut": V,15), his nonsense music from the fool's
cap made of scraps of sol-fa, echoic words, and puns, arranged in a stanza (VII,26).
Of the other experiments with the stanza or monument form, this is perhaps the
simplest:
Vexation
upon
Vexation
(VII,30.)
The words, one sees, are piled up like the "vexations" they represent. Piling up words
also helps tell of the tragedy of the Two Lovers, Amandus and Amanda, because they,
and their griefs, are so similar that they look like harmony in music (VII,31). On the
other hand, piling up can also demonstrate difference, as in:
(VIII,31.)
Or a resemblance so great that it is unimaginable that the phrases could occupy separate
spaces in a series, so piling them up gives them a look of simultaneity:
Zeal or Anger--or
Anger or Zeal--
(VIII, 2. )
Thus Tristram expresses his utter contempt for both anger and zeal. The piling up of
The
Reviewers
Of
My Breeches
(VII,32)
expresses Tristram's contempt for the reviewers, not only in making them a gift of his
breeches, but in suggesting they are a monumental pile like the words that indicate them.
(These are the breeches that have caused the accident with the osier, in which the "Out
upon it!" has had to be replaced, and was "Out upon" the page.)
My father's ass
and my hobby-horse . . . .

The Poor Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in Dickens's "Great Expectations"
Author(s): John H. Hagan, Jr.
Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Dec., 1954), pp. 169-178
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044305 .
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The Poor Labyrinth:
THE THEME OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE
IN DICKENS'S "GREAT EXPECTATIONS"
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR.
I N THE SURFACE Great Expectationsis simplya notherv ery
good exampleo f that perennialg enre,t he educationn ovel.I n particular,
i t is the storyo f a restlessy oungb oy from the lowerc lasses
who comesi nto possessiono f a fortuneh e has donen othingt o earn,
foundsa host of romantica spirationus pon it at the cost of becoming
a snob,c omest o be disappointedb othr omanticallya nds ocially,
and, finally, with a more mature knowledge of himself and the
world, works out his regenerationA. s such, the novel is what
G. K. Chestertono nce calledi t, "ane xtrac haptert o 'The Booko f
Snobs."' But while admitting that Pip is a fairly good specimen of
a certaint ype of mentalitys o deart o Dickens'ss atiricals pirit,w e
cannoto verlookt he factt hatD ickensi s usingh is charactetro reveal
some still more complex truths about society and its organization.
Though its shorterl ength and more compacto rganizationh ave
prevented it from being classed with Bleak House, Little Dorrit,
and OurM utualF riend,G reatE xpectationiss reallyo f a piecew ith
that great social "trilogy"o f Dickens'sl ater years.I n the briefer
novel Dickens is attempting only a slightly less comprehensive
anatomizationo f sociale vil; thematicallyt,h e implicationso f Pip's
storya re almosta s large.C onsiderf, or instance,h ow many different
stratao f societya reg otteni nto the comparativelsym alln umber
of pagest hat storyt akesu p. In the firsts ix chaptersa lonew e meet
members of the criminal, the military, and the artisan classes,
togetherw ith a parishc lerka nd two well-to-doe ntrepreneurTs.h e
E I691
170 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
principadl ifferenceb etweenG reatE xpectationas ndt he morem assivep
anoramicn ovelsl ies morei n the artisticm eanse mployedt han
in the intellectuacl ontent.I n GreatE xpectationDs ickenss tripst he
largern ovelst o theiri ntellectuael ssentialsT. he pointo f one line of
action in Bleak House, we remember, was to show how Lady
Dedlock had been victimized by social injustice operating in the
form of conventionalm oralitya nd its hypocrisiesB. ut into that
novel Dickens also packed a great deal else; the Lady Dedlock
action was but part of a gigantic network. In Great Expectations
all such additionalr amificationsa re discarded.D ickens concentratesw
ith greati ntensityu pon a single line of developmenta, nd,
to our surpriset, his line turnso ut to be remarkablys imilari n its
theme to that of Lady Dedlock's story. For Pip's career shows not
only a hapless young man duped by his poor illusions, but a late
victimi n a long chain of widespreads ociali njustice.
The story'se ssentialf eaturesm ake this fact plain. We learni n
ChapterX LIIt hatt he primem over,s o to speak,o f the entirec ourse
of eventsw hich the novel treatsi mmediatelyo r in retrospecits a
man by the name of Compeysona, cad who adoptst he airs of a
"gentleman." Significantly, he remains throughout the book
shrouded in mist (literal and figurative), vague, remote, and terrifying,
l ike some vast impersonafl orce.T hroughh is actionst wo
peopleo nce camet o grief. First,a fters trippingh er of a greatd eal
of her fortune, he jilted the spoiled and naive Miss Havisham, and
thereby turned her wits against the whole male sex. Secondly, he
furtherc orrupteda man namedM agwitchw ho had alreadyb een
injuredb y poverty,a nd revealedt o him how easilyt he law may be
twisted into an instrument of class. The trial of Magwitch and
Compeyson is so important a key to the novel's larger meanings
that the former'sd escriptiono f it in the later pages of the book
shouldb e readi n entirety.W hat the passager evealsi s that impartiality
in the courts is often a myth. Judges and jury alike may be
swayedb y classp rejudiceT. he whole judicials ystemm ay tend to
perpetuatec lass antagonisma nd hostility.I n short,a n important
"Great Expectations" 171
element at the root of Magwitch's career is great social evil: the
evil of povertya, ndt he evil of a corruptibljeu dicials ystemT. hough
not entirelys o, Magwitchi s certainlyi,n part,a victim.T he conventional
words Pip speaks over his corpse at the end-" 'O Lord, be
mercifult o him a sinner'" -remain merelyc onventionalf,o r the
man was more sinned against than sinning. From his very first
appearancein the novel, when we see him shiveringo n the icy
marshesh, e is depictedw ith sympathya, nd by the time we get to
the end, he has risen to an almost heroic dignity.
The connection of all this with Pip is plain. The young boy becomes
for both Magwitch and Miss Havisham a means by which,
in their different ways, they can retaliate against the society that
injuredt hem. One of Miss Havisham'so bjectsi s, throughP ip, to
frustrate her greedy relatives who, like Compeyson himself, are
interestedin herf or herm oneya lone,a ndw ho, againl ike Compeyson,
t ypifyt he rapaciouas ndp redatorye lementso f societya t large.
Magwitch,o n the otherh and,r etaliatesa gainsts ocietyb y striving
to meet it on the groundo f its own specialp rejudicesT. hough deprivedf
romc hildhoodo f the opportunityto becomea "gentleman"
himself, he does not vow destructiont o the "gentleman"c lass.
Havings eeni n Compeysonth e powero f thatc lass,t he deferenceit
receives from society, he fashions a gentleman of his own to take
his placei n it. He is satisfiedt o live vicariouslyth roughP ip,t o show
societyt hat he can come up to its standardsa, nd, by raisingh is
pawn into the inner circle, to prove that it is no longer impregnable.
Thus Pip, in becomingt he focal point for MissH avisham'sa nd
Magwitch'sr etaliation-the one who is caughti n the midst of the
cross fire directed against society by two of the parties it injured,
who, in turn,d isplayi n theird esiref or proprietorshispo meo f the
very tyranny and selfishness against which they are rebellingbecomess
ociety'ss capegoatI. t is he who must pay the price forl
originalo utragesa gainstj ustice,w ho must sufferf or the wideri njustices
of the whole society of which he is but a humble part. The
resulti s that he too takeso n society'sv ices,i ts selfishnessi,n grati172
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
tude, extravagancea,n d pride.H e, too, becomess omethingo f an
impostorl ike Compeysonh imself,a nd therebyf ollowsi n the fatal
footstepso f the very man who is indirectlyt he causeo f his future
misery. Thus the worst qualities of society seem inevitably to
propagate themselves in a kind of vicious circle. Paralleling the
caseo f Pip is thato f Estella.A s Pip is the creationo f Magwitchs, he
is the creationo f MissH avishamH. er perversionh ass tartede arlier;
as the novel opens, it is Pip's turn next. He is to be the latest heir of
originali njusticet, he next to fall victimt o the distortiontsh ath ave
already been forced upon Magwitch, Miss Havisham, and Estella.
He is to be the latestp roducto f Compeyson'esv il as it continuest o
infect life.
But injusticed oesn ot comet o bearu ponP ip throughM agwitch
and Miss Havisham alone. There is injustice under the roof of his
own house. Throughout the first stage of Pip's career, Dickens
presentsd ramaticallyin scene after scenet he petty tyrannye xercisedo
vert he boy by his shrewishs ister,M rs.G argerya, nd someo f
her friends, particularlyM r. Pumblechook,t he blusteringc orn
merchant,a nd Wopsle,t he theatrically-mindepda rishc lerk. It is
the constant goading Pip receives from these people that makes
him peculiarlys usceptiblet o the lure of his "greate xpectations"
with their promiseo f escapea nd freedom.B ut more importanti s
the fact thati t is Pumblechooka nd Mrs.G argeryw ho firstp ut the
treacherouisd ea into Pip'sh ead that Miss Havishami s his secret
patronessO. ne of the veryr easonst hey insistu pon his waitingo n
the old woman in the first place is their belief that she will liberally
rewardh im, and thereafterth ey neverl et the idea out of the boy's
mind. In short, Mrs. Gargery,P umblechooka, nd Wopsle do as
much as Magwitch and Miss Havisham to turn Pip into his erring
ways. To be sure,t he novel is not an essayi n determinismB. ut
despitet he legitimacyo f the reproacheosf Pip'sc onsciencew, e cannot
forget how earlyh is impressionablme ind was stampedw ith
the imageso f greeda ndi njustice-imagest hatp resenta small-scale
versiono f the greedy and unjust world of "respectabilitya"s a
"Great Expectations" 173
whole.T he tyrannye xercisedo verP ip by his sister,P umblechook,
and theirl ike is a type of the tyrannye xercisedb y the conventionally
"superior"el ementso f societyo ver the sufferinga nd dispossessed.
T heirsi s a versioni n miniatureo f the societyt hat tolerates
the existenceo f the dunghillsi n which Magwitcha nd his kind are
spawned, and then throws such men into chains when they violate
the law. When Pumblechookb oastso f himselfa s the instrumenot f
Pip'sw ealth,h e is truthfuli n a way he nevers uspectso r wouldc are
to suspectF. or the obsequiousa ttitudet owardm oneyh e exemplifies
is, indirectlya, t the root of Pip'sn ew fortune.I t was just such
an attitudet hat resultedi n the debasingo f Magwitchb elow Compeysona
t their trial,a nd thus resultedi n the former'sf atal determinationt
o transformP ip into a "gentleman."
Injustice is thus at the heart of the matter-injustice working
upon and through the elders of Pip and Estella, and continuing its
reigni n the childrent hemselvesW. ith thesec hildrent, hereforew, e
have a theme analogous to one deeply pondered by another great
Victoriann ovelist: the idea of "consequencesa"s developedb y
George Eliot. Both she and Dickens are moved by a terrifying
vision of the wide extent to which pollution can penetrate the
different,a pparentlys eparatea nd unrelated,m emberso f society.
Oncea -na ct of injusticeh as beenc ommittedt, herei s no predicting
to what extenti t will affectt he liveso f generationsy et unborna nd
of people far removed in the social scale from the victims of the
originalo ppressionT. hough on a smallers cale,D ickenss ucceeds
no lessi n GreatE xpectationtsh ani n his largerp anoramicn ovelsi n
suggestinga comprehensivseo cials ituationN. o less than in Bleak
House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend-and in A Tale of
Two Cities as well-the different levels of society are brought togetheri
n a web of sin,i njusticec, rime,a ndd estructionT. he scheme
bearsa n analogyt o the hereditaryd iseasesr unning throughout
several generations in Zola's Les Rougons-Macquartsse ries.
Dickens compressesh is materialm ore than Zola by startingi n
medias res, and showing Pip as the focal point for the past, present,
174 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
and futurea t once. In him are concentratedth e effectso f previous
injustice, and he holds in himself the injustice yet to come. The
interest of the novel is never restricted merely to the present.
Dickenso pensa greatv ista,a "poorl abyrinth,"th roughw hich we
may see the present as but the culmination of a long history of
social evil. Society is never able to smother wholly the facts of its
injustice. As Dickens shows in novel after novel, somehow these
factsw ill comet o light again:B ounderby'ms otheri n Hard Times
risest o revealh er son'sh ypocrisyt o the crowdh e has bulliedf or so
many years;t he factso f Mrs.C lennam'sr elationshipto the Dorrit
family,a nd of society'sin juryt o LadyD edlock,h er lover,a nd her
child, are all unearthed in the end. Immediate victims may be
skillfullys uppresseda, s Magwitch,r eturningf rom exile, is finally
caughta nd imprisoneda gain.B ut the balefule ffectso f sociale vil
go on in a kind of incalculablec hain reaction.I t is the old theme
of tragicd ramar ead into the bleak world of Mid-VictorianE ngland:
the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the heads of their
children; the curse on the house will have to be expiated by future
generationso f sufferers.
Thus it is fair to say that Pip's story is more than a study of personald
evelopmentI.n his lonelys trugglet o work out his salvation,
he is atoning for the guilt of society at large. In learning to rise
aboves elfishnesst,o attaint o a selflesslo ve for Magwitchh, e brings
to an end the chain of evil that was first forged by the selfish
CompeysonH. is regenerationh as somethingo f the samef orce as
Krook's" spontaneoucso mbustion"in BleakH ouse,o r the collapse
of the Clennam mansion in Little Dorrit, or even the renunciation
of his family heritage by Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities.
Just as Darnay must atone for the guilt of his family by renouncing
his propertys, o Pip must atonef or the evils of the societyt hat has
corrupted him by relinquishing his unearned wealth. And as
Darnaym arriest he girl whosef atherw as one of the victimso f his
family'so ppressions, o Pip desirest o marryt he girl whosef ather,
Magwitch, is the victim of the very society whose values Pip himself
has embraced.
"Great Expectations" 175
II
In givingh is themei maginativee mbodimenDt ickensu sedw hat
arep erhapss omeo f the mosti ngeniousa nds uccessfudl eviceso f his
entirec areerW. ith disarmings uddennessf,o r example,G reatE xpectationso
pens with the presentationo f a physicalp henomenon
almost as memorable as that of the fog in Bleak House: the
marshesM. oret han a Gothicd etailc asuallyi ntroducedto give the
storya n eerieb eginning,t he marshesr eappeara gaina nd again,n ot
only in the firsts ix chaptersw, herei ndeedt heyf igurem ostp rominently,
b ut throughoutt he book.T hey hauntt he novel from start
to finish,b ecomingf inallyo ne of its greati nformings ymbolsT. he
varietyo f waysi n which Dickensm anagesu nobtrusiveltyo weave
them, almost like a musical motif, into the texture of his tale is
remarkableA. t one time they may flickerb rieflya crosst he foregroundo
f one of Pip'sc asualr everies;a t anothert hey mayp rovide
the materiaol f a simile;o r Pip mayr eturnt o them in fact when he
is summonedt herel atei n the storyb y Orlick;o r, again,h e may see
them from a distance when he is helping Magwitch make his getawayd
own the Thames." Itw as like my own marshc ountry,"P ip
sayso f the landscapea long the parto f the riverh e and Magwitch
traverse:
... some ballast-lighterss,h aped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat,
lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouseo n open piles, stood
crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the
mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks
stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless
building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
Mud is a peculiarlya ppropriatesy mbolf or the class of society
thatM agwitchr epresents-thed owntroddena nd oppressedo f life,
all those victims of injustice whom society has tried to submerge.
It is a natural image of the social dunghill in which violence and
rebellion are fomented, the breeding place of death. Likewise, it is
the condition of death itself upon which certain forms of life must
feed. It is no accidento n Dickens'sp artt hatw hen Pip andh is com176
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
panions stop at a public house on their journey down the river, they
meet a "slimya nd smeary"d ock attendantw hose clothesh ave all
been taken from the bodies of drowned men. In fact, the motif of
life thrivingu pon deathi s underlinedm oret han once throughout
the novel in a number of small but brilliant ways. On his first trip
to Newgate, Pip meets a man wearing "mildewed clothes, which
had evidentlyn ot belongedt o him originally,a nd which, I took it
into my head,h e had boughtc heapo f the executioner.T" rabb,t he
haberdashera nd funeral directoro f Pip's village, is still another
kind of scavengerH. e, too, like the manyu ndertakerisn Dickens's
other novels and Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, profits hideouslyb
y the misfortuneos f others.I t is this conditiont hat Dickens
sumsu p most effectivelyin the repulsiveim ageo f mud.
But together with the marshes, he uses still another symbol to
keep the idea of social injusticea nd its consequencesb efore us.
ChapterI opensw ith a descriptiono f the graveyardin which Pip's
parentsa nd severali nfantb rothersa reb uried.T hough lessp rominent
as an imaget hant he marshest,h ato f the gravep resentsm uch
more explicitlyt he idea of the death-in-lifes tate to which Magwitcha
ndo thersi n his predicamenat rec ondemnedW. e remember
that it is from among the tombstones that Magwitch first leaps
forthi nto the story;a ndw hen,a t the end of the chapterh, e is going
away,P ip has been so impressedb y his likenesst o a risen corpse
that he imaginest he occupantso f the graveyardr eachingf orth to
reclaim him. This is not a merely facetious or lurid detail. The
grave imagery suggests in a highly imaginative way the novel's
basics ituationM. agwitch,i n relationt o the "respectableo"r derso f
society,i s dead;i mmuredi n the Hulkso r transportedto the fringes
of civilization,h e is temporarilyr emovedf rom active life. But
when in the opening scene of the book he rises from behind the
tombstoneh, e is figurativelyc omingb ackt o life again,a nd we are
witnessingt he recurrenceo f an idea Dickensm adea centralm otif
of A Tale of Two Cities,t he idea of resurrectiona nd revolution.
When Magwitch looms up from the darkened stairwell of Pip's
"Great Expectations" 177
London lodging house at the end of the second stage of the boy's
career, we are witnessing, as in the case of Dr. Manette's being
"recalledt o life" from the Bastille,a n event of revolutionaryim -
plicationsF. or what this meansi s that one whom societyh as tried
to represst,o shut out of life, has refusedt o submitt o the edict.H e
has come back to take his place once more in the affairs of men,
and to influencet hemo penlyi n a decisivew ay.T he injuriess ociety
perpetrateos n certaino f its membersw ill be thrustb ack upon it.
Society,l ike an individual,c annot escapet he consequenceso f its
injustice; an evil or an injury once done continues to infect and
poisonl ife, to pollutet he societyr esponsiblefo r it.
This is suggested by the very way in which the material of the
novel is laid out. Within the first six chaptersD, ickens regularly
alternateso utdoora nd indoors cenes,e ach one of which is coincidentw
ith a chapterd ivision.T herei s a steadym ovementb acka nd
forth betweent he sheltera nd warmtho f the Gargery'hs ousea nd
the cold miserya nd dangero f the marshesT. hus,w hile gettingh is
plot under way, Dickens is at the same time vividly impressing
uponu s his fundamentaild eao f two worlds:t he worldo f "respectability"
a ndt he worldo f ignominy;o f oppressorasn do f oppressed;
of the living and of the dead.I n the firsts ix chapterst hesew orlds
are separatei;t is necessaryto come in or to go out in ordert o get
frome ithero ne to the other.B uti n his excursionfsr omt he houset o
the marshesa nd back again,P ip is alreadyf orging the link that is
to bring them together at the end of the second stage of his adventuresw
hen Magwitchr, efusingt o be left out in the cold anyl onger,
actuallyb ecomesa n inhabitanto f Pip'sp rivater ooms.T he clearest
hint of this coming revolution is given when the soldiers burst
from the marshes into Joe's house, and disrupt the solemn Christmas
dinner. The breaking in upon it of the forces of another world
shows on what a sandyf oundationt he complacencyo f Pumblechook
and his kind is based. Beneatht he self-assuredc rust of
society, the elements of discontent and rebellion are continually
seething,c ontinuallyt hreateningto erupt.T hus the alternationb e178
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
tween worlds that gives the novel's first six chapters their order
supplies the reader at once with the basic moral of the book as a
whole: the victims of injustice cannot be shut out of life forever;
sooner or later they will come into violent contact with their
oppressors.
Movingf romt he earlyp ageso f the bookt o the largerp atternw, e
discovert hat alternationb etweent wo differentl ocalesi s basict o
the whole. Pip tries to make his home in London, but he is forced
a number of times to return to the site of his former life, and each
return brings him a new insight into the truth of his position, one
progressivelym ore severet han another.T he alternationb etween
London and the old village becomes for Dickens a means of suggestingw
hat the alternationb etweeno utdoora nd indoors cenesi n
the first six chapters suggested: pretend as one will, reality will
eventuallys hattert he veil of self-deceptionL. ike the individual
who has comet o sacrificeh is integrityf or society'sfa lsev alueso nly
to find it impossibleto deny indefinitelyh is originsa nd the reality
upon which his conditionr ests,s ocietyc annote ffectivelys tiflea ll
the victimso f its injusticea nd oppressionT. here will alwaysb e
men like Jaggers-men to connect the dead with the living, to act
as the link betweent he undergroundm an and the rest of society.
As a defender of criminals, Jaggers is the great flaw in society's
repressiono f its victims;h e is theirh ope of salvationa nd resurrection.
Like Tulkinghorn, the attorney in Bleak House, he knows
everybody'sse crets;h e is the man to whom the lines betweent he
high and the low, the men of propertya nd the dispossesseda,r en o
barrierA. wise and disillusionedO lympianJ, aggersc ommentsl ike
a tragic chorus on the two great worlds that are the product and
expressiono f social injustice,f or the existenceo f which Pip and
othersm ust suffert he terriblec onsequences.