Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton [Eagleton, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University Press of Minnesota - A
Published: 2011-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

But what we must now add, and what now returns us to our starting pint, is that London is very precisely that “infinity” of which we caught a glimpse on the Great North Road, or at least a “caricature” of it (Forster’s word, p. 280). But now suddenly a whole set of terms falls into place and begins to coincide: cosmopolitanism, London, the nomadic, the stench of motorcars, antibilious pills, all begin to coalesce as a single historical tendency, and they are unexpectedly at one with “infinity” itself, which equally unexpectedly becomes the bad opposite of place, of Howards End, of the salvation through the here and the now (and incidentally of the regeneration of some older England that never existed, the utopian England of chapter XIX). But this is not simple romantic antiurban or antimodern nostalgia; it is not at all the conservative revulsion before the faceless industrial masses of the Waste Land, the modern urban world. And that for a final decisive reason, a final identification in this linked chain of phenomena: for infinity in this sense, this new grey placelessness, as well as what prepares it, also bears another familiar name. It is in Forster imperialism, or Empire, to give it its period designation. It is Empire which stretches the roads out to infinity, beyond the bounds and borders of the national state, Empire which leaves London behind it as a new kind of spatial agglomeration or disease, and whose commercialism now throws up those practical and public beings, like Mr. Wilcox, around whose repression of the personal Forster’s message will also play, taking on new forms we have no time to examine here:In the motorcar was another type whom Nature favors—the Imperial. Healthy, ever in motion, it hopes to inherit the earth. It breads as quickly as the yeoman, and as soundly; strong is the temptation to acclaim it as a super-yeoman, who carries his country’s virtue overseas. But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey. (323)

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