Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster

Brian May

Most critics regard the Edwardian and modern novelist E. M. Forster as a latter-day Victorian liberal, but one who is no less committed than belated. Such critical orthodoxy notwithstanding, liberalism of the kind that Forster promotes in Howards End (1910), the novel in which he most clearly delineates his politics, anticipates the kind of neoliberalism recently promoted by the well-known pragmatist Richard Rorty. Forster renders concretely what Rorty describes theoretically, but that is a difference which suggests finally that the two may be equally useful to liberals of the nineties. Indeed, the two authors articulate a common cultural alternative, one whose points of origin and destination and whose lines of descent still need to be traced. To plot these points and trace these lines is to suggest new readings of both Forster and Rorty, as well as a sense of the virtually Romantic possibilities still available to enterprising liberals within their own tradition.(1)

Developed at length in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1990), Rorty's idea of the "liberal ironist" illuminates the most characteristic act of the central character and liberal heroine of Howards End, Margaret Schlegel, who responds to the downtrodden Leonard Bast's climactic death by, as Rorty might write, "redescribing" it; in Margaret's hands, petty modern "Squalor" becomes a rich "Tragedy" (261).(2) An absurd death having punctuated an ethical travesty, the harsh ironies thus redoubling, Margaret nonetheless refuses to neglect her social responsibility as a liberal humanist. Which is to say, Margaret behaves as Rorty's liberal ironist would behave. A Rortian reading reveals two luminous details that Forster's more suspicious critics tend to overlook: first, that Margaret does not perceive a tragedy but rather wills one--she turns tragedian knowing well that no tragedy has occurred; second, that she practices the tragic mode thus willfully and liberally not in order to defend herself from the truth but in order to save her family from "morbidity" (219), the bleak ironism of the wasteland. Despite the contrary claims of such critics as Alfred Kazin, Fredric Jameson, Wilfred Stone, and Daniel Born, then, we may say that Margaret does face up to the most grievous of ironies--and that she does take action which betokens an explicitly communal concern.(3) Like Rortian liberalism, the Forsterian occasions several risks, not the least of which is its habit of tempting its proponents to practice an illiberalism more oppressive than the one it enables them to evade. Forsterian liberalism is also Rortian, though, in nonetheless remaining flexible and revisable.

But the comparison between Rorty and Forster--or their conversation--should interest Rortians as well as Forsterians, and historians of liberalism as well as literary historians.(4) That Margaret's technique is lyrical rather than merely narrative suggests that Rorty, who characterizes effective redescription only partially, underestimates the necessity of its being powerful, affecting, striking; Rorty also insists too finally that redescription remain a strictly private affair (Forster imagines that it may be at least familial in scope). But if the two authors illuminate one another, their dialectic illuminates something else--a genealogy of liberalism, or of the specific ironist alternative within liberal thought explored by both these writers. That Margaret's technique is sublimely lyrical, that indeed it suggests an aesthetics of the sublime rather than of the beautiful, will tell us as much about liberal origins as about Rortian destinations. The presence of Romantic aesthetics in this discussion of the liberal ironist's technique indicates the Romantic origin of liberal ironism. In so doing it indicates not only the history of this liberal alternative but also its deepest affiliation. The suggestion is that the Rorty/ Forster dialectic offers us more than a viable new liberalism--namely, a viable new Romanticism. Surprising enough is the suggestion that any form of either, even one decidedly cautious, is now viable at all.

One who desires to reconsider Forster's politics may as well begin by recognizing an immediate obstacle: Forster's critical reputation. Despite recent tokens of cinematic and belletristic interest (see Kazin especially), Forster's name was recently distinguished in the editorial pages of PMLA as one among several which have "begun to flicker" (Kronik 201). In the charged ideological atmosphere now current Forster's work has come to resemble nothing so much as a curio, perhaps a quaint old light bulb cherished by one's forebears but now destined for the Enlightenment attic. Even critics who "at the moment" still admire Forster's writing detect something "rather old-fashioned" about it, and more often than not its political filament seems more old-fashioned than any other element (Wilde 4). Ten years ago, as Benita

Parry writes about A Passage to India, many "applauded the novel's humanist political perceptions" even as many others "scorned its equivocations and limitations" (30). But now Forster's humanism and equivocation are virtually indistinguishable. Now, when a reputation for old-fashioned politics can consign one to a place even humbler than the attic, "the trough" (Wilde 5), or a space even more obscure, "the abyss" (Annan 3), Forster's politics has never seemed less fashionable.

One could respond to Forster's critical devaluation by invoking the politics of literary reputation. To what extent should a writer's politics determine his or her literary valuation, inclusion in the canon, and so on? It is a fundamental issue, but here I propose to argue--with Rorty's help--that Forsterians simply need not address it. The reason is simple enough. Forsterian liberalism is neither old-fashioned nor contemptible; it is not the silly relic many critics have taken it to be. Rather, Forster's liberalism is chastened and concentrated, and yet made provisional, by the presence of an ironist attitude toward language, the self, and the community. Which is to say, Forster's liberal anticipates in remarkable ways Rorty's neoliberal, the "liberal ironist."

Rorty's liberal ironist should not be conflated with Arnold's liberal humanist. For Rorty, traditional or unreconstructed liberals--those who pursue not only (in Born's simple and useful formulation) "aesthetic contemplation, friendships, [and] spiritual formation" (141), but also "the politics of conscious altruism" (Trilling 123)--are complacent. The problem is not that they are concerned, as Bradbury writes, "with what is decent, human, and enlarging in daily life" (130). Their ambition to create a kinder new self that is also a more "responsive" and creative self (130)--a more "refined sensibility" (Langbaum 38), if one which is yet more capable of "moral action" (action occasionally taking the form of morally principled inaction, a refusal to dictate to the less refined)--that is not the problem. For Rorty the problem with Arnoldian liberalism is Arnoldian High Seriousness. It is not the aim itself but the way it is pursued: so inflexibly that signs of its inefficacy or unethical quality disrupt it.(5) That is why liberals who hope to survive sudden and unexpected contact with these signs need to find a source of staying power that is nonliberal; nothing in the liberal sensibility will prevent its own collapse.

One source of such fiber may come from deliberate contact with the unsettling signs. According to Rorty, the liberal will be better off for realizing early and often that the liberal self is not the autonomous entity usually imagined--that it is a constructed or "contingent" self (CIS 23--43). The premise here is that early and distinct knowledge of our contingency will render its later vagrant intimations less devastating, even more or less quotidian. Wanting to "recuperate" liberalism (Gunn 84), to find a means of rendering liberal sentiment flexible enough to stand up to shocking negations, Rorty prescribes "ironism": the conscious recognition and even acceptance of our contingency (Shapiro 23). In Rorty's view ironists "are never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus their selves" (CIS 74; my emphasis). If ironists become liberals only when they adopt the vocabulary of liberalism as their tentative vocabulary, liberals become ironists only when they recognize "the contingency and fragility" of the liberal vocabulary and self and begin to practice liberalism not seriously but provisionally, well aware that changing conditions could suddenly demand that they abandon it for some more efficacious set of ideas and practices, but also aware that they have every reason to embrace it even amid doubts about its validity, or even a certainty of its invalidity, when no more enabling practice has arisen as an alternative.

Clearly the acceptance of contingency can both edify and stymie. In ironist hands the liberal project of self-invention suddenly turns sober: the liberal ironist aims, not to remake self and world politically, but simply "to get out from under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own" (CIS 97). The liberal ironist seeks nothing larger than the discursive elbow room one needs to write or speak an autonomous self As small as the quest is, underlying it is a possible negation, since the acceptance of contingency betokens an acceptance of groundlessness, the groundlessness of the liberal's own vocabulary and self as well as other vocabularies and selves. About all final vocabularies, about the very possibility of a final vocabulary, then, the liberal ironist must be absolutely skeptical. Inevitably, then, any liberal hoping to be an ironist sort of liberal must adopt a skeptical attitude toward her own vocabulary, as well. Ironism originates in a skepticism which borders on the radical and which attaches to the liberal ironist's own project as readily as any other. Still, the ironism in the liberal ironist enables as surely as it disables; if it disables the traditional liberal philosopher, it enables the tentative liberal scriptor. According to Rorty the liberal ironist, like the pragmatist, insists that "redescribability and irreducibility are cheap. It is never very hard to redescribe anything one likes in terms which are irreducible to, indefinable in the terms of, a previous description of that thing" (EHO 4). Rorty here suggests, somewhat negatively, the promiscuity of things; they invite many independent or "irreducible" descriptions, none of which possesses any transcendental value. But he also suggests the ironist's consequent freedom, even facility. In inviting multiple descriptions things incite autonomy, not just a freedom from other descriptions but also a freedom to describe as the ironist sees fit.

In exploring Forster's liberalism Rorty's description of the liberal ironist will prove useful: it will illuminate Forster's most characteristic representation of liberal behavior. For at the climax of Howards End Forster's most characteristic liberal, Margaret Schlegel, emerges as Rorty's chief early modernist exemplar. In an act of meditation and mediation very near the end of the novel, Margaret demonstrates that she is capable of Rortian ironism and Rortian liberalism alike. On the one hand, in the face of the powerful previous description she here faces she demonstrates the liberal ambition--and enabling skepticism--that liberal ironists always demonstrate. Proposing an alternative, and very humanistic, description, redescribing as "all her own" a specific set of "inherited contingencies," she "gets out from under" them. Thus Forster, too, explores a more or less standard (if more sober) liberalism. Like Rorty's liberal, Forster's is no complete ironist; he seeks a stay against confusion. But, on the other hand, Forster also represents the estranging skepticism about redescriptions that liberal ironists also need to practice. As we will see, and at some length, Margaret proposes her liberal recovery from disabling contingencies only in full and humble awareness that her liberalism is itself equally contingent. Like Rorty's ironist, Margaret does not simply accept the liberalism handed down to her. Sensing that straight, uninflected liberalism will not serve in a world of postliberal, anarchic ironies, being too rigid, too easily refuted, Margaret knows that she must practice it ironically--not faithfully but tentatively. As she knows, it will stay flexible enough to last only if she regards it as just one among several equally truthful ways of constructing experience, one which the liberal can continue to practice warily as long as no more useful way presents itself, even if the liberal way no longer seems the one true way.

What are the contingencies that Margaret inherits, shoulders, and must shrug off? Certainly they are wretched ones. Prior to his climactic collapse Leonard Bast has lost his job and his home and discovered his wife's disreputable past; in both achievements he has been guided by members of "the upper classes," the materialistic Wilcoxes and the intellectual Schlegels. Worse, having arrived at Howards End, the country home to which he has traveled in order to confess his sin against Helen Schlegel (their sexual encounter) to Helen's sister, Margaret, he suddenly dies, a victim of heart failure as well as a broken heart (just as he is confessing he is savagely attacked by Charles Wilcox, who in trying to "save" the Schlegel's name ruins his own). Few would disagree: the conditions of this death are, like the conditions of this life (as Margaret and Helen note), those of "squalor" (89). If either the life or the death signifies anything, it is insignificance, a purposelessness which "like a faint smell" somehow nauseates (90). If the death intimates a condition of panicky disorder ("ordered insanity," 260), even absurdity (Leonard's sense of "supreme adventure" may seem ridiculous [256]), it also provokes "sudden revulsion" (61). These sensations of muddle and decay are "odours from the abyss" (92). The chief contingency Margaret here inherits, then, is a suggestion of contingency itself--the brute sense that our "true selves" are governed largely by "senseless" coincidence, empty correlation, "a jangle of causes and effects" resistant to interpretation (260), and one which disgusts as strongly as it dismays.

Clearly, then, we should recognize Forster's interest in posliberal ideas about experience, ones which Rorty collects under the rubric of "ironism." Forster, too, is an "ronist," one who (in Rorty's definition) "faces up to the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires" (CIS xv)--to their constructedness, their conditionality, their absence of any secure psychic or spiritual foundation in the self or in God. That Forster more particularly belongs to the tradition of modernist apocalyptism, a tradition which includes T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and others, has been recognized just as rarely.(6) Few critics have noted that Helen Schlegel's memorable vision of catastrophe, the vision of "her career" that she suffers during the performance of Beethoven's Fifth, "Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall" (26), is suggestively echoed in one of Forster's most telling descriptions of his own career -- or what he saw as the career, the trajectory, of his time ("A Note on the Way" 73):

Matthew Arnold's |bad days' are Halcyon when compared with

our own.... The collapse of civilization, so realistic for us,

sounded in his ears like a distant and harmonious cataract,

plunging from Alpine snows into the eternal bosom of the Lake

of Geneva. We are passing through a rougher time, perhaps the

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.

Of course, capital Tragedy itself may seem to be an utterance that belongs to just another old final vocabulary. In reminding us of Aeschylus and Sophocles it may seem to emanate from one of the most ancient vocabularies of all. Thus Margaret may seem to be grasping after a moribund old self rather than creating a new one. But Rorty's term is "redescription," not "neodescription." One's alternative description need not be absolutely new, just relatively so. Thus Margaret's way of figuring tragedy--humanistically, as "eyes" and "hands" suggest--is truly innovative, and ironist, even if the figure is itself an ancient one. For it is by means of this figure that she tropes the contemporary, faceless figure of tragedy as nothing but aimless disaster, just another outcome of muddle--just the latest squalor. To be sure, Margaret's image of tragedy is not as innovative as it could be; she could trope squalor more radically. She could employ what Nietzsche calls "the Dionysian"; the humanistic kind of tragedy she does propose is remarkably Apollinian and thus, according to Nietzsche, "illusory": "the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world" (128). Nevertheless, there is wisdom in preferring the Apollinian to the Dionysian--could Leonard's story sustain Dionysian wonder? Early in the story Helen Schlegel remarks that Leonard "isn't capable of tragedy" (89). Of course, it is Helen who isn't capable, and one may celebrate Margaret for deciding that Leonard is. But Margaret's sense of proportion is even more impressive than her generosity; she alone chooses the kind of tragedy which Leonard may better instantiate. Knowing well which mode would better serve, she knows best the limits of her own redescriptive power. Clearly she is not suppressing radical possibility; she does not advocate the humanistic, Apollinian mode of tragedy as a means of escaping from the Dionysian. The contingencies she deplores are not Dionysian so much as decrepit, decayed--distinctly modern.

One admires Margaret's decisiveness no less than her redescriptive savvy or figural resourcefulness. Still, her powerful command of the figure suggests a certain risk inherent in liberal ironism: the ambition to evade one kind of modernist description, that of apocalyptic Squalor, may drive us to practice a more debilitating modernism, that of the imperial narcissist. In a revisionist essay on modernism and imperialism Fredric Jameson argues that "Modernism [in Howards End] ... emerges in [a] spatial gap within Forster's figure[s]"--it "is at one with the contradiction between the contingency of physical objects and the demand for an impossible meaning, here marked by dead philosophical abstraction" (55).(7) Jameson's example of a contingent physical object is Forster's Great North Road (Howards 14-15), but he may as well be talking about Leonard's dead body, that embodiment of contingency, the appearance of which also seems to elicit a "demand for impossible meaning." Though here the demand is marked not by a philosophical concept ("infinity" [15]) but by an aesthetic mode ("Tragedy"), here too it may be wiser to embrace the local and contingent (Squalor) than to seek the spacious and the transcendent; for the latter ambition issues in figuration which is narcissistic and thus, at least potentially, both self-destructive and oppressive--which is even, as Jameson declares, "imperialistic."

As Rorty himself suggests, the narcissistic ambition of self-creation sometimes transforms the pursuit of a merely autonomous sense of self (and a new or merely different vocabulary) into the pursuit of absolute self-freedom (a final vocabulary). Such selves in such moments "attempt to rise above the plurality of appearances in the hope that, seen from the heights, an unexpected unity will become evident--a unity which is a sign that something real has been glimpsed, something which stands behind the appearances and produces them" (CIS 96). To such hubristic transcendentalism even liberals are susceptible. Allowing their ironism to wane, thus leaving unchecked their liberal ambition, even they may engage in hubristic attempts to achieve a "sublime" independence from all appearances, whether they be cultural, material, or metaphysical (CIS 105). Like Jameson, Rorty accordingly warns us against the sublime; like Jameson's sublime ("infinity"), Rorty's sublime creates two kinds of danger. The more obvious and immediate kind confronts other scriptors. If the liberal ironist in a flush of inspiration forgets that the glistening new vocabulary is just another provisional vocabulary, just one description among many, he or she may discount all other descriptions, may even repudiate them--and thus repudiate their purveyors, the custodians and commissars of the extant vocabulary. "Redescription often humiliates," Rorty writes (EHO 90). "Inherited contingencies" may be restrictive ones, but clearly it is kinder to observe them than to reject them outright. Those who maintain their own set of appearances may suffer when another's sense of the "real" is wielded against them; the sadder case would involve youthful or underprivileged scriptors, those whose sense of autonomy is so fragile that it could easily be suppressed or obliterated by an imperialist self-creator. The other and more insidious danger is the one sublimity poses to the self rather than the other, the danger simply of missing out on life. Like anyone who, nerving herself against crises, "prepares" a self against eventualities, Rorty's liberal ironist runs the risk of missing opportunities for creative engagement, "romance," those "great chances of beauty and adventure that the world offers" (261). The pursuit of autonomy may negate any possibility of novelty.

How does Margaret's advocacy of Tragedy occasion these two risks? Perhaps it does not: who would not prefer Tragedy to Squalor? But in preferring this mode Margaret tries to refashion Leonard's history. She appropriates it to her own ends; Leonard's ends simply disappear. Once she decks his arms with "narcissi, crimson-eyed and white" (261), her redescription may also seem equal parts lyricism and narcissism. In her grand image of Tragedy as a kind of Giant Form spanning time ("the sunset and the dawn") as well as space ("whose eyes are the stars"), the human form divine stands triumphant. But it stands in negation of the personal. When Helen laments her inability to remember Leonard as [her] lover," Margaret reproves her. "Forget him," she counsels. "Don't drag in the personal when it will not come" (267). But what suggests that the personal "will not come" in this case? Like Mary Pinkerton, one could accuse Forster himself of promoting Leonard's impersonalization, even of crafting it through the course of a number of late revisions. Forster and no one else has Leonard die (and thus become "horribly" impersonal [260]); he and no one else renders Jacky "so bestially stupid" that she has no personality to express (177). About their own demise Leonard and Jacky are not allowed to speak for themselves. Worse, what either member of this family would think of Margaret's imperative the reader is not encouraged to imagine.

If the image of Tragedy satisfies Margaret's desire to rearrange the peculiar facts of Leonard's death into something impersonal and typical, it also palliates the class issues evoked in this story of aristocratic bungling and proletarian suffering. Indeed, it may virtually obliterate the aristocrat's sense of responsibility for the latter--and thereby obliterate at least one chance of prevention. To push our attention toward some giant, vague, and impersonal force, even when the giant force is as beautiful as it is vague, proves reprehensible when Leonard's own thoughts and feelings are erased thereby. Such transcendentalism proves doubly reprehensible when one notes that it also obliterates the more external aspects of his history, the complex "tangle" (265) of familial, social, and economic conditions responsible for his demise. With good and bad intentions members of the two aristocratic families unwittingly conspire to ruin Leonard fiscally, Helen tries to atone in a way which ruins him "absolutely" (250) (her sexual offering mortally widens the "rent" between the romantic [96] and the "Brute" [266]), Henry Wilcox fails to see any connection which implicates him in the disaster (243), and the marriage of the families collapses in mutual recrimination. All these links are simply dissolved by Margaret's performance. In advocating that we see Leonard's career Tragically she transfigures her own past conduct and that of her social coevals just as radically as she does Leonard's.

The maneuver also suggests the second danger which attends upon the ambition of self-creation, the danger to one's own self rather than other selves. As in Rorty, in Forster the urge toward autonomy can give way to the urge to become emotionally remote, socially isolated, physically untouchable--the urge to "prepare." The prepared kind of character is one who "nerve[s] ... for a crisis" (83), who "defend[s] ... against the unknown" (28). Opting for self-containment, disengagement, disconnection, this nervous or defensive self ignores or rejects otherness that might prove enlightening. If Margaret's turn toward Tragedy may silence the victim, it may also eradicate her own sympathies. Throughout the novel Margaret "mean[s] to keep proportion" (153); her sense of irony is prized, but she is also the very avatar of connection. But with the late turn, one could argue, even she succumbs to preparedness. Defending her own new vocabulary as if it were the one true vocabulary, she is not interested in any other vocabulary. As she and Helen talk at the end we hear that "Margaret did not answer" Helen's comments, that she "made no answer," that she "regarded" Helen and her child "absently", when at all, that but for a moment she "never stopped working" (266). One remembers Margaret's own description of Henry Wilcox, that avatar of preparedness. Henry has "worked very hard all his life, and noticed nothing" (265); at the end Margaret herself is working hard and noticing little. She seems to occupy a mental area as remote from current events as that occupied by the Fates. While the Wilcoxes discuss the future of Howards End she is knitting silently in the garden (266). But she will act to silence others. Her chief concern is that the calm surface of the "new life," one "gilded with tranquility," remain unruffled (266). She is defending the life gilded--and arrested--with her own terms.

This governing concern suggests a governing fear. Having retired to Howards End Margaret "could not read or talk [or knit?] during a westerly gale" -- "every westerly gale might blow the wych elm down and bring the end of all things" (265). Since the elm "leans a little over the house" (1), it is the fragile old house at Howards End which somehow embodies "all things" and whose demise will be apocalyptic. This is a change: though earlier the elm and ruddy bricks and attendant fruit trees have provided hopes of continuity and "eternity" "on this side of the grave" (162), now her fear is more palpable here than elsewhere. The elm does not just lean over the house; it also borders on the lawn and the meadow. That which threatens to bring "the end of all things"--or the end of her final vocabulary--is a pastoral thing; it is an element of the "sacred ... field." Margaret thus could be imagining its collapse as the most natural thing in the world, not an apocalyptic attack on her autonomy. But if the Western Cultural wind is threatening the Pastoral pleasance, the Pastoral is threatening the Personal; now even beauty should be kept at a safe distance. Margaret's attitude at the end may even remind us of Helen's earlier response to Beethoven's Fifth. As Helen withdraws from the concert hall and her friends she vows to become yet more prepared, yet more "final" (23ff); the reality just revealed is that of glorious battle giving way to inglorious collapse. In the end a similarly estranging paranoia seems to descend upon Margaret. Perhaps even she lacks the "sense of proportion" every ironist must possess.

The suspicion that even Margaret prepares is not an idle one. If Margaret prepares, no one does not prepare, which is to say, none of the major exponents of the two major families can connect. If Margaret prepares, then preparedness is epidemic--then, indeed, the reflex to prepare, the unthinking compulsion to contain, conserve, preserve, governs both the materialists and the aesthetes, both parties to the dialectic. Neither type will open up to its dialectical other, for dialectical things are dispersing, falling apart; the dialectical center will not hold. Perhaps this suspicion finds its clearest voice in Wilfred Stone, for whom Forster's "forces of value do not |connect,' but pursue each other in a lonely and circular futility" (266). It is a dire description. To one who accepts it, either Margaret fails to become a liberal ironist or liberal ironism itself turns out to be a spurious alternative to sheer nihilism.

Character witnesses may feel that the "prosaic" Margaret has been all along too self-conscious, too exactly aware of what she is doing, suddenly to have panicked.(8) The sense that preparedness--or any other unexamined and selfish concern--is driving Margaret's redescription diminishes more fully when we recall that at the end she is worrying more about another's future than about her own: that of Leonard and Helen's child. For Jameson, Forster casts "impossible meaning" over the "contingent physical object" in defense against the incompleteness or even "emptiness" (Forster's term) of imperial life; "Because in the imperial world system [national daily life] is now radically incomplete, it must by compensation be formed into a self-subsisting totality" (58). The motive force at hand, though, is not a simple absence; it is not just the contingent physical object freshly dead but also the one just about to be born.

We have seen that those who forswear Tragedy run the risk of exposing themselves to Squalor. We should now observe that such a rejection might also expose others; indeed, it might bequeath Squalor to the next generation. If it is hubristic to turn Squalor into Tragedy, would it not be fatalistic simply to accept Squalor? For Margaret the possibility of "morbidity" (219) is very real, the possibility that we might accept as final a description which would only disable us for life. With the morbid and even "ghastly" Helen hovering nearby (232), having moved beyond "liberal guilt" in her own radical way, being ready to denounce everyone and every mode of description--not just Henry's but her own, not just that of the irresponsible proponent of business, but also that of the too-responsible proponent of social responsibility--Margaret's transparent quietism may be the only auspicious response.(9) If not a painless response, it may be the least painful among alternatives. Leftist "morbidity" and right-wing "preparedness," the two other alternatives, are equally undesirable. Margaret buries the past not in order to obliterate it but in order to free the future from its "propagation" (219). After all, "There was nothing else to be done; the time for telegrams and anger," for action and passion, "was over, and it seemed wisest that the hands of Leonard should be folded on his breast and filled with flowers" (261). To whom did it seem wisest? Who would fold and fill the hands? As even the phrasing indicates, Margaret advocates a wise passivity: "Leave it at that" (261). Requiring that the broken, even truncated members of the two families (Henry and Helen, both of whom are "ended" [264, 266]] "merely settle down" at Howards End (267), she acts against action.

If Margaret's concern is not selfish but communal, her redescription is not final but tentative. In the end Margaret would oppose Tragedy as well as Squalor, if it meant that Romance were possible, even if it also meant going along with a description offered by someone else. If her first hope is that somehow in this pastoral circle of differences unproductive kinds of Wilcoxian/Schlegelian conflict will die away, her second hope is that Helen's child will manage to unite Wilcoxian and Schlegelian virtues and live out neither Squalor nor Tragedy but those "great chances of beauty and adventure that the world offers" (261). Admittedly we have no good reason to think that he will; but neither is it reasonable to expect failure. "One's hope" lies, Margaret asserts, "in the weakness of logic"--the weakness of one's own logic as well as that of another (268).

As we have seen, Rorty anticipates Margaret's two bad moves. But he also anticipates her means of avoiding them. As he insists, the liberal ironist, like the liberal humanist, is sympathetic, even humanitarian, and not just self-creative. Rorty's model scriptor cares about other selves, and even at the expense of his or her own. Like any old-time liberal, the liberal ironist prizes a desire which when acted upon may inhibit the violent pursuit of the sublime: "the desire to avoid cruelty and pain."(10) Since it is hard to think of sublimity as anything less then an absolute, the liberal ironist may be expected to subordinate every other pursuit to its pursuit. One may also expect that most encounters between ironists and the authors of established vocabularies might be humiliating to one or the other. Yet liberal ironists regard sublimity as but a means to autonomy. Liberals that they are, they know that autonomy won by cruel means could not be enjoyed. Thus Rorty himself is not self-divided or disconnected; indeed, he prizes most the desire to integrate the often opposed desires for sublime self-creation and for innocent, guilt-free enjoyment of the prize. He does not want to pursue the sublime so far as to take himself beyond the communal. His only alternative, then, is to subordinate the sublime. As he writes, only "by subordinating sublimity to the desire to avoid cruelty and pain" may one satisfy the impulse toward "human solidarity" without sacrificing the impulse toward autonomy (CIS 197). Redescribe, Rorty advises, pursue the sublime. But pursue it as painlessly as you can. Or, he counsels, avoid the cruel redescription to which unbridled sublimity and self-actualization, what Forster calls "preparedness," will always lead, but do not avoid preparedness at all costs. Pursue preparedness at the right price, the price of certainty, security, the illusion of intellectual safety, the price, even, of whatever personal pain you incur when you make your every description a tentative one, one that is open to redescription.

The vicissitudes of redescription suggested by Forster and delineated by Rorty are remarkably comparable. They are by no means identical, though, and the most important difference is the most obvious one: Forster's scriptor betrays public ambitions which Rorty would forbid. The forum in which Margaret utters her liberal imperative is a semi-public one. It is constituted by an extended family, and a family over which a patriarch, Henry Wilcox, presides. Margaret is not the gentlest of scriptors, especially when opposing an imperial vocabulary ("You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry" [243]). She issues edicts which are equally private and public, marital and martial: in "the battle against sameness" Margaret proclaims, "Differences, eternal differences" are worth fighting for (267). But the war on cruel conventionality is perhaps the one form of militancy liberal ironists will choose to pursue; such more or less public declarations of doctrine do not seem as scary when one notes that they are forbidding cruelty. Whatever one thinks of Margaret's ultimate severity, it is clear that the pursuit of autonomy in Forster does not always turn cruel when it turns public. Like Rorty's liberal critique of ironism, Howards End shows that the modern was not so compelling that liberals could not redescribe it; but it also shows that redescriptions are not so dangerous that they should never be "shared" (CIS xiv). If the novel thus points a way out of the liberal/ironist impasse in which modernists and even some post-modernists have languished, it also points beyond the public/private distinction which has set so many against Rorty.(11)

Rorty curtails the issue of publicity; the issue of power, on the other hand, he virtually ignores, thus providing a second good reason why we should explore Rorty as a Forsterian with no less vigor than we explore Forster as a Rortian (and also suggesting something about Rorty's--and our own--historical situation). We have noted that Margaret's redescription allows her to reaffirm the most liberal "connections" the narrative has both evoked and suspected, and Rorty helps us to see this. But nothing Rorty says reveals how weak the reaffirmation will be if the redescription is not powerfully lyrical. Though in the course of the novel the liberal attitude loses its theoretical basis, it gains a basis in practical ethics; this is pure Rorty. So is the claim that there is nothing logical about this, basis. Rorty even supplies the terms: swallowed by the modern, he would say, the liberal must harden into a discursive "lump" ("Texts and Lumps"). Liberal ironists need more than the logos, the rational, the logical, the syllogistic; they need what lumps betoken, the narrative as though it and only contains everything he needs to effect a redescription. Forster, on the other hand, makes it clear that rediscription may depend on certain modal possibilities merely allowed by narrative, not intrinsic to it. Liberal ironists, Rorty argues, seek "narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other" (CIS xvi). But narratives which "connect" may depend on images of connection, verbal phenomena less discursive and more poetic than narratives. Indeed, even as Rorty is praising narrative as the proper redescriptive tactic he is employing an image whose potential sublimity Forster exploits. Rorty's arch-narrator holds that titanic Tragedy's sunset ("The past") in the "one hand" and its dawn ("utopian futures") in "the other."

Even though in highly theoretical moments Rorty advocates a subordinated sublime, in practice he prefers the aesthetic of the beautiful. The sublime, he suspects, tends to incite metaphysical practice of one's vocabulary (EHO 176). When one notes that Margaret's redescription seems to articulate a species of the sublime rather than of the beautiful (though of what Thomas Weiskel names the "positive" or "egotistical sublime" rather than of the "negative" or Kantian, the kind Rorty tends to talk about (12)), the suggestion is that Rorty underestimates the dynamic basis of the redescriptive strategy. Rorty is so warry of the powerful redescription that he tends to neglect the entire issue at hand--that of the relation between redescriptive power and rhetorical power. One can cite compelling reasons why Rorty might either neglect this topic or consciously avoid it. Heidegger's astonishingly new and sublime set of redescriptions, his private battery of terms (Dasein, Openness to Being, authenticity, Techne, Richtigkeit, et al.), now seems to symptomatize his complicity with the Nazis and his ambition to set himself up as a kind of academic fuehrer; despite himself, Rorty may be correlating both of these behaviors with Heidgger's late farewell to irony and sudden turn toward the sublime.(13) Closer to home, the 1980s American political arena witnessed the triumph of a harsh new set of illiberal scriptors, both left and right. With so many Americans caught in cruel redescriptions, perhaps Rorty is being only pragmatic when, having preached against the new essentialists, he cheers only twice for the "cultural left" (EHO 129-39).

If Forster suggests that more powerful and public redescriptions need not be illiberal ones, he also suggests something about the history of the entire liberal ironist project: that liberal ironism is a late but nonetheless direct descendant of British Romanticism to the extent that "positive sublimity" is (as Weiskel claims) a Romantic category. That the project affiliates with Romanticism becomes even clearer when we specify the liberal ironist's chief motive. For ironists, Rorty suggests, one desire ultimately supersedes the others. It is the desire to create an identity which owes little or nothing of its shape to preceding identities; it is "the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy" (CIS xiii). Since Rorty identifies "romanticism" as "the insistence on individual spontaneity and private perfection" (CIS 30), Rorty's ironist is in one important respect nearly indistinguishable from the Romantic; both insist on being original; both crave autonomy. The last thing either wants is to be someone's disciple, nothing but the product or exponent of a schoolteacher or parent, a writer, politician, or television producer. Even if one believes that the ironist's discourse should remain private (for Forster, we know, it may be familial, even semi-public), one has to admit that most Romantics also forswore public revolution for more private forms of renovation.(14)

It might also be objected that the ironist desire for self-creation does not accord with liberal desires, that it is indeed distinctly illiberal. Rorty himself tends to associate this desire, not with social critics (such as Dewey and Habermas [CIS xiii-xiv]), but with self-obsessed, poetic novelists (Proust, for example) as well as self-obsessed, poetic philosophers (Heidegger). Like other thinkers we are used to regarding as illiberal, Rorty's liberal ironists do more than just desire freedom; they will battle for it. At their most intrepid they seek to become what Rorty terms a "knight of autonomy" (EHO 194). And Forster's own description of the liberal includes the words "Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy," not autonomy and creativity. Nevertheless, critics are wrong to dissociate the impulse to autonomy from the image of the liberal, and Rorty himself might be wrong to attribute the impulse to ironists rather than liberals. To identify liberalism solely with the desire for social justice, let alone to caricature it as nothing more than Great Society forbearance, fellow feeling, and freehandedness, is to ignore its history. The kind of liberal who prizes originality as much as sympathy, indeed who prizes an independent identity as an end in itself before worrying about other selves, is perhaps the oldest kind of liberal. For the attitude thus endorsed descends more or less directly from the Romantics' attacks on their contemporary establishment, especially on "the laissez-faire industrialism that threatened to destroy the countryside and men's souls" (Langbaum 39). In defense of their own souls the Romantics' first generation of liberal inheritors desired "a laissez-faire of the spirit" (38). Though the latter and their descendants (such as Forster) were aware, as the Romantics often were not, that this enterprise probably would not be spiritual or metaphysical, it was nonetheless a powerful desire. If Rorty is correct, it is still powerful even in these so-called postmetaphysical times.

In his epilogue to The Visionary Company (1971) Harold Bloom finds no authentic sense of Romantic possibility among his contemporaries (465); in the eighties his Romantics remain beloved figures even though he now doubts that they were themselves Romantic (Agon 50). Is Bloom's current admiration for Rorty related to this ambivalence? Certainly Bloom is apt to associate Rorty with a Romantic whom he regards as distinctly pragmatic:

Rorty is splendidly useful when he sees that pragmatism and

currently advanced literary criticism come to much the same

cultural enterprise, and I add only that Emerson, more than

Carlyle or Nietzsche, is the largest precursor of this merger.

(Agon 20) Forster's readers may fairly celebrate him as an equally distinguished (if smaller) precursor, a writer who commits himself to a no less Romantic cultural enterprise as cautiously as anyone.

NOTES

(1) As Daniel Born writes, "It seems now that liberalism is not as doddering as either Forster or his critics believed, or at least one can say that liberalism's rivals are equally bedeviled by disabilities" (144-45). Even a cursory look at such recent predictions and postulations as Abbot and Levy's and Shapiro's is enough to suggest that Born is correct. Obviously Rorty is not the only thinker now working against "the contemporary dismissal of liberalism" (Abbot and Levy 4). What distinguishes Rorty and such fellow neoliberals as Michael Oakeshott, Shapiro, Judith Shklar, Glenn Tinder (see Abbot and Levy), and even the famous South American law professor Robert Unger (in his later writings, at least), is their common attempt to reinvent or renew liberalism for our time. Their enterprise should be sharply contrasted with that of such writers as the heady Robert S. McElvaine, who predicts "a return to liberal idealism" (3) and fails to engage the old liberalism ironically or even critically (thus making opponents of "neo-Kantian" or philosophically grounded forms of liberalism like Michael Sandel and Thomas Spragens seem especially wise). What distinguishes Rorty from John Rawls and Oakeshott and other authentic neoliberals is not his pragmatism, his specific advice that we "junk the neo-Kantian metanarratives liberals typically invoke to justify . . . liberal institutions" (Shapiro 31), so much as his rhetorical cogency. (2) References to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity will be noted parenthetically as "CIS." Rorty's Essays on Heidegger and Others will be cited as "EHO." (3) Meisel and Graham mark the postliberal attitude sometimes found in A Passage to India (1926) even as early as 1910 (with Howards End). More historical-minded critics will insist that Forster's liberalism is not a mere inherited mask. Such critics will treat Forsterian liberalism just as Rorty treats liberalism at large; they will try "to recuperate, albeit cautiously, what may have been glossed in this process of postmodernist revisioning" (Gunn 84). Rorty thereby urges us to connect opposed perspectives--to liberalize the ironist reading even as we ironize the traditional liberal account, the one initiated by Trilling (though inadvertently) and sustained in a long series of explications, some celebratory, some suspicious.

Recent examples of the celebratory include those of Colmer (whose Forster is the belated Victorian liberal humanist who suffers intimations of apocalypse-a latter-day Arnold) and Page (for whom the novel "can be taken as expressing a faith in meliorism," 94). Among suspicious readings Stone's magisterial account of Margaret's "cheap playing to the Bloomsbury galleries" (249) and her "strange spiritual autism" is still the most ferocious (260), though the most lucid is still Crew's account of the novel as only "schematically" critical of its liberals (122). Such responses are now more popular than ever. In one of the most thorough recent readings (1982), Rosecrance suggests that the novel is politically quiescent, even escapist (Margaret enjoys a distancing "intuition of divine harmony," 147). Yet more recently Kazin has argued that the novel's resolution is appropriate to a "fairy tale"; it is "absurd--hardly an answer to the class war" (30). This interpretive issue, distinct as early as 1962 (see Bradbury 128), is not insoluble. Rorty enables us to see Margaret's closing activity as conscious liberal "scheme" rather than visionary flight or meliorist gesture.

In fairness to Trilling we should note that the celebrations and suspicions of Forster that Trilling initiates are not by and large sensitive responses to Trilling own's stated position on Forsterian liberalism. According to Forster, Trilling writes, "Liberal intellectuals have always moved in an aura of self-congratulation"; self-flattering, defensive, dismissive, blind to the "vices" which good will and the "love of humanity" may generate--ultimately they are "sad but comic" (124), and they must "not to be what most of us are--eschatological " (22). As well will see, Trilling's Forster can at times sound remarkably Rortian, as in his refusal to be "conclusive" (16; Rorty's term is final"). (4) Though Born misunderstands Margaret's final performances, confusing her pragmatically ironic distance from passion with an essential and final "coldness" and "detachment" which is the result of her finally achieving her "goal" (one formulated "early on") of "moving beyond liberal guilt" (157), he, too, aptly perceives a Rorty/Forster connection which works both ways: "The activity of reading Rorty through the lens of Howards End may prove as informative a task as reading Howards End through the lens of Rorty" (144). Armstrong is another who believes that Forster's "politics has much in common with Richard Rorty's notion of |liberal irony'" (367). (5) Though some political thinkers, ironist and other, dismiss liberalism as impractical (Spragens, for example), my assumption here is that "bourgeois liberalism" is at least one of several sensibilities and politics which it may now be pragmatic to adopt. Rorty himself has found it pragmatic to describe "bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far" even as he admits that it is "irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the people of the planet" (CIS 68). (6) Though Bradbury celebrates Howards End's admixture of Platonism and liberalism (it is a novel that "postulates an end that can be achieved, a contact with the infinite" [130]), he nevertheless notes, in a formulation much like Eliot's, "a pervasive sense of anarchy, which is central to this book as it is to its successor, A Passage to India" (143). For an account of the modernist apocalyptist's critique of their own apocalyptism, see Longenbach (844). (7) For Jameson the uneasiness with contingency creating the modernist demand for large meanings is produced, not by a desire for personal autonomy (as in Rorty), but by a desire for imaginative coherence and completeness. Jameson links the sensation of incompleteness to the imaginative experience of imperialism. The British, home-bound imperialist--the modernist is an example--suffers sensations of incompleteness ("a generalized loss of meaning" [50]) because "internal national or metropolitan daily life is absolutely sundered from this other world henceforth in thrall to it," the world of "the colonized" (58). For Rorty, Jameson sees an afflicting absence originating in a particular social arrangement when he should be seeing a constraining presence endemic to social life. (8) Though Crews argues that the novel "qualifies Forster's previously oversimplified antithesis between the inner and outer worlds" only "schematically" (122), he describes (contra Jameson et al.) Margaret's "nature" as "firmly rooted in prosaic fact" (121). What Parry terms "emblematic resolutions" Margaret does not embrace unironically (40); neither does she try "to articulate a new synthesis, to penetrate to a new metaphysic" (Rosecrance 148). (9) In arguing that Helen's "often-destructive actions" are "generated by liberal pity" Born ignores the definite change that comes over Helen after her very brief affair with Leonard and, presumably, her discovery that she is pregnant (157). Having met "Monica," "the crude feminist of the south, whom one respects but avoids" (233), Helen has herself turned into a kind of feminist separatist ("But for [Monica], I am and have been and always wish to be alone" [232]). All along Forster may be associating Helen's more "destructive" tendencies not with liberalism but with a capacity for what he regarded as social and intellectual radicalism. (10) "I borrow my definition of |liberal' from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do" (CIS xv). One might argue that Rorty inscribes a line of descent between Victorian Liberals and neopragmatists with every sentence he begins with "We liberals . . . " (198), and he begins a lot of sentences with these words. Nevertheless, some recent commentators (Shusterman 612ff; Conway 202--04) have tried to erase the "liberal" from Rorty's "liberal ironist." Treating Rorty much as revisionists have treated Forster, they have placed him squarely among postmodern and postliberal writers like Jurgen Habermas and Jameson. See Gunn, who shows how "pragmatism, or neopragmatism, as it is sometimes called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal" (82). Gunn argues that Rorty's "project amounts to the most important critical and political attempt since John Dewey to resituate the tradition of American pragmatism within the broader framework of modern Western liberalism" (83). (11) See, for just a few examples of this most common objection to Rorty's enterprise, Conway, Born, and Shapiro, each of whom feels that "the idea of privacy Rorty invokes is deeply problematic" (Shapiro 40). As Shapiro writes, "the idea that it is possible to divorce public policy from competing philosophical conceptions of human nature, to make it neutral among them, is not plausible ... as the abortion debate over the past two decades reveals" (39). (12) Weiskel defines the positive sublime as one which suggests "a familial concord of mind and nature so that the power of each aggrandizes the other" (50). The experience of the beautiful patently lacks the element of power and grandeur--it is agreeable rather than aggrandizing. On the other hand, Margaret's image of a human Tragedy which is both vague and titanic suggests just this mutual aggrandizement. (13) As Rorty writes, "Although the young Heidegger worked hard to free himself from the notion of the philosopher as spectator of time and eternity, from the wish to see the world from above |as a limited whole,' the older Heidegger slipped back into a very similar idea" (EHO 51). Rorty eschews any causal relation between this slip and that "pretty nasty character" 's 1930s politics ("On the general question of the relation between Heidegger's thought and his Nazism, I am not persuaded that there is much to be said"--"the |turn' would still have been taken" [111] even without Hitler). But he does suggest a correlation; perhaps no philosopher who does not see himself as "the spectator of time and eternity" will have the confidence to set himself up as "a philosopher of our public life," "a commentator on twentieth-century technology and politics" (120). (14) So common is this claim that Abrams has codified it for undergraduates; "When the later events in France dashed their faith in political revolution as a means to the millennium, a number of Romantic writers . . . transferred the agency of apocalypse from mass action to the individual mind" (Norton Anthology 14).

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