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Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by Brian May
roughest time that has ever been.
Even fewer critics have recognized how clearly Forster in both places articulates the rhetoric of imminent cultural apocalypse we tend to associate with such famous apocalyptists as Eliot, whose own version of Forster's "collapse of civilization" may be sought in his famous description of "contemporary history" as an "immense panorama of futility and anarchy" (passim). Leonard's little career may seem squalid, both wretched and insignificant, but his collapse under the weight of the Schlegels' books and sword, two archetypal symbols of western culture, does make the disaster culturally resonant. In the large context of modernist apocalyptism "squalor" itself takes on apocalyptic suggestiveness and thereby justifies Forster's (and Margaret's) later decision to thicken, epigrammatize, even capitalize it (before it assumes capital letters in Margaret's climactic utterance it appears repeatedly uncapitalized). Even if we resist the impulse to adapt Conrad (The Squalor! The Squalor!)--as we should, given that here we have a collapse, not an explosion, a whimper, not a bang--we may still employ the term as a rubric of modernism. It is "the modern spirit" (The Longest journey 290).
If Leonard's death thus promotes the complex negation we tend to associate with modernism, a powerful description of cultural cataclysm, social fragmentation, and personal futility, Margaret nevertheless pushes back, offering a description of her own: over Leonard's dead body she demands that we "Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn" (261). What I am attributing to Margaret could just as well be attributed to the narrator, and few recent studies of Forster's narration would provide ammunition for disagreement (see Graham especially). Yet Margaret and the narrator share a single idiom throughout the novel; besides, even if the line were the narrator's alone, the narrator here is only making explicit an idea that Margaret subsequently puts to use. In any case, the kind of tragedy evoked here is capital tragedy, tragedy with a capital "T." The suggestion is that capital tragedy should be preferred to lower-case tragedy, the "tragedy of preparedness" (84), the kind of tragedy which ends in Squalor.
As we have seen, the later kind of tragedy is the kind upon which one cannot capitalize, the kind whose exponents invoke the grand old cultural norm only in order to insinuate our own remoteness from it. We may characterize these exponents of lower-case tragedy as the commissars of an established vocabulary, one which strikes Margaret as indeed a final vocabulary. Obviously Margaret does not wish to inherit the contingencies which these exponents embrace, ones we have distinguished as modernist. But absolute freedom from such contingencies is not possible. To be sure, Margaret seems to reason, the liberal humanist indicative ("This is a good old Tragedy") is no longer viable; this consoling mode no longer compels as truth. Still, the modernist indicative, the sense of a dire and inescapable presence swelling beneath Tragedy and displacing it ("This is just the latest squalor") --need we accept this sense of reality? Perhaps not, Margaret suggests; like any true liberal ironist, she adopts the liberal imperative ("Let this be Tragedy--turn it into Tragedy"). Though it is a more consoling description, it is nonetheless a viable one.
