The Rhetoric of English India by Sara Suleri Goodyear;

Author:Sara Suleri Goodyear; [Suleri, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1992-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Forster’s Imperial Erotic

WHETHER A PASSAGE TO INDIA IS READ AS AN ICON OF THE LIBERAL imagination or as an allegory in which the category of “Marabar Cave” roughly translates into the anus of imperialism, the novel remains one of English India’s most troubling engagements in the fiction of cultural self-examination. The familiarity of its tropologies is an undiminished embarrassment to postcolonial discourse, in that the text continually prepares to address the latent infantilism within the possibility of cross-cultural friendship. If the question “Why can’t we be friends now?” concludes the unanswerability that A Passage to India seeks to address, it further reiterates the persistent permutations of adolescence that inform the rhetoric of subcontinental colonialism. Over Forster, the discursive ghosts of Burke and Kipling shake hands; the youthfulness that both locate as the danger of colonial power now learns that its chronology is pitiably dependent upon the mythology of “being friends,” or a fiction reliant on the dischronology of “not now”, “not yet.”

A Passage to India translates the question of cross-cultural friendship into a more vertiginous study of how cultures both issue and misread invitations to one another. As such, Aziz’s notorious invitation—“I invite you all to see me in the Marabar Caves”—indicates the incongruity of civility within a colonial context. The oblique violence of the text points both to the fraught ambivalence with which Forster invokes the category of “friendship” and to the absence of civil spaces upon which the possibility of friendship may be discussed. If A Passage to India attempts to engender an illusion of cross-cultural conversation, then it is a dialogue that is highly conscious of the limits rather than the expansiveness of cultural sympathy. As Forster himself confessed to Syed Ross Masood, “When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of the truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not.”1 Even as the narrative explores mythologies of colonial friendship, in other words, it is resolutely critical of an “only connect” rhetoric that would allow for the fiction of any transcultural male bonding.

In Kim, the protagonist’s ability to function as a “Friend of all the World” to the various cultures inhabiting the colonized subcontinent comes dangerously close to a promiscuous liability, and finally culminates in his silenced status as the lama’s beloved. A Passage to India, on the other hand, disallows any distinction between friend and beloved: both terms are precariously coterminous in a colonial world where cultural reading is predicated on the passionate misinterpretation of the art of invitation. The intimacies of colonialism are thereby translated into the social and political peculiarities represented by the question, how can a people invite another people not into a home, or into a different culture, but into that alternative civil space known as a friendship? Into what caves

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