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Transvaluing immaturity: reverse discourses of male homosexuality in E.M. Forster's posthumously published fiction
Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva
Dominant ideology often represents the male homosexual as psychically or somatically arrested, and some of the critical accounts of E. M. Forster's authorial career demonstrate that this stereotype powerfully inflects literary criticism as well: these readings represent texts of Forster which explicitly thematize homosexuality as "immature" distractions from a professional developmental trajectory that reaches its aesthetic telos with A Passage to India. Forster's posthumous texts are both complicit with and resistant to the fiction of the immature homosexual, which so conspicuously informs critical reactions to them.
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To put it schematically, Forster employs three contradictory but related strategies in reinscribing and challenging the connection between immaturity and homosexuality: First, at times, he faithfully rehearses the critical developmental plot and sets up an opposition between the mature demands of great literature and the immature pleasures of homosexuality. In this version of Forster's mythology, great art gets located outside the contingency of history and stands in sharp opposition to homosexual desire, which becomes associated with a movement backwards in time. Second, at other places in the texts, he works within the developmental plot but transvalues it. That is, while he associates male homosexuality with youthfulness, he celebrates this youthfulness and sets it in pointed opposition to the destructive obsession with progress that characterizes heteronormative culture. In this version of Forster's mythology, the youthful homosexual is represented as having a special access to the pleasures of the body because of his access to lost classical culture as well as "primitive" working-class and non-Western men, an access that is denied to excessively self-conscious, middle-class, "mature" heterosexual men. Finally, there are still other moments in these texts where through the use of repetition and violent endings, Forster undermines and reflexively questions the myths that he simultaneously employs: empty repetition in these texts works to undercut their optimism and nostalgia. Further, by associating sterile repetition with normative culture's punitive response to homosexuals' transgression of racial, class, and gendered boundaries, he suggests that rather than homosexuals, it is heterosexist society that should be seen as pathologically arrested, endlessly repeating the enforcement of its rigid laws. Similarly, the violent endings of the stories work to unconceal the brutal, indeed deadly, limitations of the generational mythology surrounding homosexuality that Forster is forced to employ.
In focusing on Forster's posthumously published texts, I do not wish to obscure thematic continuities between texts published during and after his life. Clearly, certain themes and topoi repeatedly appear in Forster's work: The association of Italy and classical Greece with childlike, sensual pleasures that informs many of the stories in The Life to Come can also be found in texts published during his lifetime, such as Where Angels Fear to Tread or the stories of The Celestial Omnibus. The association in Maurice of pastoral England with a non-domestic space of homoerotic possibility also clearly underlies The Longest Journey. And, the eroticized violence between men of different races and nationalities which I examine in the stories in The Life to Come can also be found in texts like Where Angels Fear to Tread.
That the texts published prior to Forster's death are framed in heterosexualized terms does not vitiate my reading of the posthumously published works. For reasons of space, I will elaborate on just one instance of the continuity between the representations of male homoerotics in Forster's posthumously published work and texts published during his lifetime. In this essay, I contend that the violent conclusions of many of the stories in The Life to Come can be read as Forster's self-reflexively commenting on the limitations of the developmental narrative which he simultaneously employs in representing male same-sex desire. On the face of it, a novel like Where Angels Fear to Tread might seem to call this claim into question. After all, that novel, published during Forster's lifetime, represents a scene of intense violence between the Italian Gino and the English protagonist Philip. Yet, Philip and Gino are not lovers, and the novel ends with Philip meditating on his thwarted love for Caroline Abbott. However, I would suggest that the novel's triangulated homosocial configuration places it on a continuum with the texts that more directly thematize homosexuality.(1) After all, Philip learns to desire Caroline physically only by heeding the commendations of his male "friend" Gino: "[Philip] had reached love by the spiritual path: [Caroline's] thoughts and her goodness and her nobility had moved him first ... the beauties of her hair, and her voice, and her limbs--he had noticed these last; Gino ... had commended them to his friend."(2) If, in The Life to Come, male ethnic and racial others help the English homosexual to gain access to his body, in the passage above, it is through the mediation of Gino, the Italian male other, that Philip comes to apprehend Caroline physically. Further, while the narrative voice rather abstractly tells us of Philip's mediated physical desire for Caroline, the text vividly dramatizes the two men's sadomasochistic struggle (a struggle, incidentally, which begins with the sadistic Gino "approaching" Philip "from behind," thus evoking the thematics of interracial sodomy and homosexual rape so crucial to many of the stories in The Life to Come),(3) as though the imaginative energy of the novel is far more engaged by the bonds between the two men than Philip's relationship with Caroline. The logic of the heterosexual marriage plot demands that Where Angels Fear to Tread ends with a consideration of the relationships, even if thwarted, between men and women--Philip's frustrated desire for Caroline and Caroline's frustrated desire for Gino. Yet, the intense scene of physical confrontation between two men refuses to disappear as a mere stage on the way to that conclusion. It functions, I would suggest, as an irreducible supplement to the novel's ending, both allowing Forster to represent Philip and Gino's eroticized relationship and to register violently the impoverishment of the terms through which he can represent that relationship? In other words, despite the homosocial frame of the text, this scene in the novel functions in the same way as the conclusions to many of Forster's posthumously published texts which more directly thematize homosexuality.
