Slouching Towards Bethlehem Via Chandrapore: Forster's A Passage to India

So already, I finished reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India two weekends ago, and it's been very much on my mind. My immersion in Howard's End earlier this year is definitely affecting the way I'm making sense of this later Forster novel. But so are my recent readings of Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor and The Unbreakable Soul: A Chasidic Discourse by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. In Howard's End, it's Margaret Schlegel who explicitly articulates Forster's "Only connect" idea (End, 186). Well, I'm connecting--or feeling my way towards connecting. There's so much dark and vague in this novel for me, right along with Forster's characters, to navigate.

A Passage to India is a novel about empire, nation, race, caste, religion, society, marriage, and the individual; it's also a novel about the dark yet reflecting interior of the Marabar Caves* and the callous, powerful heat and light of India's sun, characterized by Forster as a "creature" whose "cruelty would have been tolerable" had "beauty" accompanied it (Passage, 124). People and power definitely matter in this novel, and could easily be the subject of an extended and important blog post. But the novel explores something more forceful and significant than the characters' individual and intersecting lives and the often callous, harmful institutions that order them. That said, there is definitely a connection between the something and the something more.

Maybe that's why Forster's character who most senses this something more forceful and significant is named Mrs. Moore. The challenge faced by Mrs. Moore and several other characters with similar intimations is that, as Forster explains,"nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge into something else" (Passage, 91). To their credit, they don't dismiss this something more, although it intellectually confounds and emotionally perplexes them.  

Mrs. Moore's intimations surface despite--or perhaps because of--her increased attachment to her Christian belief as an older person: 

Mrs. Moore felt she had made a mistake in mentioning God [to her son Ronny whose possible engagement is the reason for her visit to India], but she found him increasingly difficult to avoid as she grew older, and he had constantly been in her thoughts since she entered India, though oddly enough he satisfied her less.  She must needs pronounce his name frequently, as the greatest she knew, yet she had never found it less efficacious. Outside the arch there seemed always an arch, beyond the remotest echo a silence (Passage, 54).

Mrs. Moore's sense of arches** beyond arches, and silences extending beyond echoes receding in space and time immediately recalls for me Margaret Schlegel's sense of England's duration and eternity. Margaret understands England's movement into the future to be rooted in something more ancient, knowing, and complex than the commercial and imperial aims of the present: "England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?" (End, 175-6). Before her conception of England is revealed, we're told that Margaret understands that she conscientiously sees life differently than does her then fiancé, Henry Wilcox: "It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered about he mysterious or the private" (161-2).

The distinction between the ways Margaret and Mr. Wilcox see life could easily apply to the different ways Mrs. Moore and her son Ronny see it. Mrs. Moore's openness to the mysterious--her willingness to encounter the different, the unknown, and even the unexplainable--eventually creates haunting dissonance in her life. But before it does, it makes her humbly curious and sincerely respectful, and therefore capable of forging relationships that other British visitors to India would not forge. Very early in the novel, for example, after she has wandered into a mosque*** and alarmed Dr. Aziz, she reassures him that she has behaved respectfully: "If I remove my shoes, I am allowed? . . . God is here'"(Passage, 18). Her willingness to engage directly with him, to observe Muslim custom, and to assert God's presence in a non-Christian place of workshop, differentiates her from other British visitors and facilitates her and Dr. Aziz's becoming genuine friends--hardly the usual relationship for a Muslim doctor and a British matron. 

Some time later, in the darkness of the Malabar Caves****, as part of an expedition organized by Dr. Aziz, she has an encounter with an echo that she can't ignore, deny, or fathom:

The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, "Pathos, piety, courage--they exist, but are identical, and so is filth.  Everything exists, nothing has value." If one had spoken vileness in that place or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same--"ou-boum." . . . Devils are of the North, and poems can be written about them, but no one could romanticize the Marabar because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind. (165)

When "Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity," its "divine words from 'Let there be Light' to 'It is finished' only amounted to 'boum'" (166). The spiritual unease that Mrs. Moore has been feeling, intensified through this experience, cannot be managed or escaped. For her, the darkness of the Marabar caves does not present itself as the fertile reservoir of truth and potentiality that it has evolved into for Barbara Brown Taylor--who has done some cave exploring herself. Nor does it present itself as a metaphor for the world of God's creation into which the human soul must descend in order to attain "the advantage it gains by fulfilling the Divine mission in actuality" before it ascends to rejoin its Divine source (Schneerson, 17). In contrast, the darkness Mrs. Moore experiences seems thoroughly devoid of elevating purpose or potential, offering mystery, but no guidance or assurance, the unknown, but no expansiveness and remoteness. Kurtz's last words in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "The horror! The horror!," seem like they could easily be spoken by Mrs. Moore after her cave experience.

Later in the novel, when the distressed Adela, Ronny's fiancee, visits her, Mrs. Moore begins to listen intently only when Adela asks her about an echo that she can't stop hearing. The ""echo's better'" only after Adela realizes and admits that she has falsely accused Dr. Aziz of attacking her in another Marabar cave (228), relying on Mrs. Moore's certainty that Dr. Aziz couldn't and wouldn't commit such an act to shape her sense of reality.

Soon thereafter, Mrs. Moore sails for England, her ill humor, disgust, and distress intact. Forster explains that "She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time--the twilight of double vision in which so many elderly people are involved" (230). Still trying to understand as her journey begins, she raises questions: "What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of granite*****? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity--the undying worm itself" (231).

When Mrs. Moore's health worsens on the journey, and she dies, she is still not at rest and at peace. Forster reports that her "ghost followed the ship up the Red Sea, but failed to enter the Mediterranean. Somewhere about Suez weaken and those of Europe begin to be felt, and during the transition, Mrs. Moore was shaken off (Passage, 285)". Mrs. Moore, who could no longer remain comfortably in India, also no longer belongs in Europe. Meanwhile, her "death took subtler and more lasting shapes in Chandrapore," where legends and other tributes spring up, some more lasting than others, due to her reputation for genuine kindness and her only vaguely understood role in Adela's retraction of her accusation (285).  

Mrs. Moore's becoming a mystical figure in the life of others recalled to me Howard's End once again. Though Mrs. Moore is like Margaret Schlegel, the second Mrs. Wilcox, in her renowned kindness and her respect for and willingness to engage with the mysterious, she is like the first Mrs. Wilcox both in her instinctive connection to the spiritual and those who are similarly connected to it, and in the power she exerts through her spirit beyond her own death. As Margaret remarks to her sister Helen (or vice versa),

"I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's [Mrs. Wilcox's] mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house [Howard's End], and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room. I don't doubt that she knew when Henry deceived her" (313-14).

As I think about this, my mind turns toward Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, another novel in which a major character defined primarily as a mother dies mid-novel, but not without leaving behind a forceful influence and/or vision--and not without significantly influencing the course of the lives she leaves behind. 

But even as I think this, I remind myself that neither Mrs. Ramsay nor Mrs. Wilcox ever had to grapple at all, let alone unsuccessfully, with the sinister, pervasive, and relentless darkness that fills Mrs. Moore's mind. The Howard's End house that Mrs. Wilcox bequeathes to Margaret Schlegel before she becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox has the power to liberate the spirit of one who sees wholely:

The peace of the country was entering into . . . [Margaret]. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes. It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came "now," and "now" once more as they trod the gravel, and "now," as the moonlight fell upon their father's sword (End, 315). 

It seems that "Wholely" and "holy" seem to walk hand-in-hand in the illuminated darkness of this scene. And that's always our assumption, or at least our hope: that seeing wholely will grant us thoughtful clarity and, ultimately, inner peace. 

But that's not what Mrs. Moore gets when she dares to see wholely, though who's to say that what she gets isn't holy? There's no deliverance here, no "peace of the present, which passes understanding." Her "boum" is not a "murmur of 'now.'" Instead, she encounters something horrifying and incomprehensible akin to what Yeats describes in the last stanza of "The Second Coming":

Hardly are those words out    
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,******  

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  

Howard's End was published in 1921, and A Passage to India in 1924. Somewhere in that time period, Forster must have felt that he wasn't done with the theme of seeing wholely: a "peaceful enough" resolution like that of Howard's End would never suffice to shake the modern world into a new kind of consciousness and connectivity. So he gave us Mrs. Moore, another country and continent, and A Passage to India. And he left us to contemplate that the genuinely kind people who see whole, and who increase the goodness and justice in the world by doing so, may fear and suffer without reprieve and without consolation from the living. And perhaps he left us all to slouch toward Bethlehem together, but without the excuse of our ignorance and assumptions.


* Screen shot from <http://www.mapability.com/travel/p2i/images/93-033-24.jpg>; Forster based his Marabar Caves on India's Barabar Caves. Chandrapore is also a fictional city.
** Image from <http://mindmillion.com/images/money/gold-arches.jpg>
*** Screen shot of interior of Jamali Kamali Mosque Interior: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Jamali_Kamali_mosque_interior.jpg>
**** Screen shot of <http://www.mapability.com/travel/p2i/images/93-034-16.jpg>.
***** Screen shot of <http://www.klettervirus.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/neues-klettergebiet-in-norwegen-Flatanger-006.jpg> 
****** <http://rexburgyoga.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sun.jpg>. 

Bibliography
Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.
Forster, E. M. Howard's End. New York: Vintage, 1921. Print. 
Schneersohn, Menahem Mendel. The Unbreakable Soul: A Chasidic Discourse. Trans. Ari Sollish. Brooklyn, NY: 
         Kehot Publication Society, 2001. Print.  
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Learning to Walk in the Dark. New York: Harper Collins, 2014. Print.