Modernist Ethics, Critique, and Utopia
p. 49-63
Résumé
In this paper I argue that the modernist obsession with ‘making it new’ harbours a fundamentally ethical impulse to critique the status quo and a commitment to remaking the future in a qualitatively different form. Borrowing from Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on novelty in Dialectic of Enlightenment, I argue that the modernist passion for the new is crucially different from the illusion of variety generated by capitalist over-production of commodities. Turning to E. M. Forster, I suggest that ethics enters into the discussion where modernist critique shies away from prescribing the precise nature of the future. Instead, it creates the conditions of possibility for a future that is perpetually deferred—a future-to-come (avenir à venir)—and that is perpetually open not only to specific alterities, but to alterity itself.
Texte intégral
1As my title indicates, I presume and argue for a fundamental ethics to modernism: modernism was a fundamentally ethical set of projects, even when specific modernists disagreed with one another over the specific content of the ethics they sought. In this respect, my reading is somewhat at odds both with older understandings of high modernism as amoral and with the more recent critical models that have concentrated on restoring the full breadth of modernist cultural production. One of the few points of convergence between the New Criticism’s model of modernism and the identity politics critiques of modernism that brought it so low was their agreement that modernism had no ethics per se. For the New Critics, with their emphasis on intrinsic criticism, the issue of ethics simply had no role to play in modernism: it was the realm of philosophers and best left to them. This distance allowed critics to concentrate only on aesthetics, and on accessing the deeper truths about the human condition in modernist works. For those who attacked modernism, however, this distance became a point of censure, grounds on which to charge modernism with homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, elitism, ethnocentrism, and so forth. By cutting ethics off from modernism, the New Critics had opened it up to the charge of being actively unethical. In this view, modernism promoted aesthetic difficulty against ethical understanding, consistently ‘othering’ marginalised groups and using its high-cultural status as justification. In sum, for the New Critics, modernism did not have an ethics, for later critics of this model of modernism, the absence of an ethics itself made modernism unethical.
2More recent models of modernism have tried to balance this equation by restoring the full historical density of modernism in reaction against the partial model of High Modernism constructed and institutionalised by critics such as T. S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, and Herbert Read. The advent of the ‘New Modernist Studies’ has tried to replace this restrictive, narrow model of ‘muscular modernism’ with a model that is more accurate because more expansive: geographically, temporally, and materially.1
3The success of this revision and revival of modernist studies has been extraordinary and hugely valuable. Not only are new approaches to canonical figures actively encouraged, but new figures from unlooked-for times, places, and venues are also being welcomed into the fold. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there is a fundamentally ethical disposition in this expansion, as the New Modernist Studies seeks to embrace the arts and artists that were so quickly, often rudely, marginalised by the model of High Modernism. There can be little doubt that modernism’s others have ever felt—and been—so welcome to the party.
4Nonetheless, the New Modernist Studies have failed to address two sides of the problem of modernism and ethics: first, whether modernism had an ethics, and second whether the study of modernism is itself ethical. These are complicated issues, into which I have gone in other contexts but for now I hope they will serve to establish the framework into which I’m trying to intervene. For some, that modernism had an ethics is simply obvious—just look at the representations of women, homosexuals, Jews, adulterers, people of colour, and animals. For others, that modernism was profoundly unethical is equally obvious—just look at the representations of women, homosexuals, Jews, adulterers, people of colour, and animals! Some others will allow that particular modernists had an ethical perspective—Virginia Woolf, say—while others were profoundly unethical—e.g., Ezra Pound. Very few critics have asked whether there is in fact an ethics that is characteristically modernist.2 It is no simple task, since the range of people we are discussing is so various, they grew to artistic maturity in such disparate settings, and the topics they engaged and the terms in which they did were so various that we might well throw our hands up in despair with the Abbé Alfred Loisy and pronounce that ‘il y a autant de modernismes que de modernistes!’3
5I prefer, however, to advance a different idea. To be direct about it, my vision of modernism’s ethics begins with a particular crisis in epistemology that produced doubt on two key fronts in the early twentieth century: it was no longer possible to know with certainty the salient facts of a situation; and it was no longer possible to be certain of one’s own motivations. The certainties behind Kant’s categorical imperative, Hegel’s or Marx’s dialectics, and even Nietzsche’s celebration of the will evaporated with the influence of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Planck. Sexual confusion, the decline of empire, the discovery of non-Western cultures as cultures (rather than simply the opposite: savagery, barbarism), the psychopathology of everyday life, and the accompanying decline in the Victorian consensus regarding providence, the white man’s burden, and natural hierarchies gave a savagely ironic turn to the Victorian platitude that ‘God’s in His heaven—/ All’s right with the world.’4
6Instead, the young men and women who would revolutionise western aesthetics and give us a whole new lexicon for culture, history, politics, and ethics found themselves face to face with ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth, /... a botched civilization.’5 To the modernists, theirs was a world of radical uncertainty, so distinct from the world of their parents and even some of their elder contemporaries like Yeats, Conrad, or James, that they repeatedly declared radical breaks with history itself: think here of Rimbaud’s ‘il faut être absolument moderne,’ Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Woolf’s ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed,’ and Lewis’s prophetic labelling of the ‘men of 1914.’ Viewing with the kind of clarity that historical transitions sometimes provide, and no doubt motivated by the sorts of generational prejudices that make all teenagers feel themselves smarter than their parents, the modernists recognised the inherent weaknesses and often violent otherings that had so consolidated Victorian cultural supremacy.
7It should be acknowledged that in this they were no wiser than the average teenager, seeing only a reductio ad absurdum of their forbearers and attacking a straw man rather than the real thing. The age of Victoria was far more complex, variegated, and dare I say it modernist (particularly in France) than the twentieth-century modernists could allow. Their Bloomian strong mis-reading of the past was no doubt a key component in their ability to produce the wonderful effusion of aesthetic material they did. The self-periodisation of the modernists is no doubt an elaborate fantasy, a caricature that gave them the sense of having cleared the ground for their inventions. However much this is the case, though, the fact remains that the modernists felt a massive discontent with the conditions in which they matured, and sought with near-manic productivity to produce real alter/natives, to imagine the unimaginable, to think the unthinkable, and above all to represent the unrepresentable. In pursuit of these ever-receding horizons the modernists entered into an age of continual renewal, experiment, innovation. Each stage, once achieved, was declared more or less a failure, and further innovation deemed necessary. So, in painting alone, impressionism was succeeded by Futurism, Futurism by Vorticism, Vorticism by Cubism, Cubism by Surrealism, Surrealism by Abstract Expressionism—and that doesn’t even mention even more interstitial movements like Fauvism and the gradations of Cubism and Surrealism introduced as refinements. This mania for the new likewise led many modernists to contradict themselves openly over time. Pound first promotes Imagist minimalism (in ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’) and then later pursues the ‘conspiracy of intelligence’ (Kenner) by transcribing the Founding Fathers’ prose into The Cantos. Or, we have Eliot chronicling the collapse of old models of faith in The Waste Land and then renewing them in Four Quartets. We have Henry James’s high-realist social novels such as Daisy Miller, and then his triumph of pure style in The Sacred Fount. And, Dada’s self-conscious assault on art produced some of the greatest works of the century. Each modernist –ism brought with it a new set of proclamations, a new way of viewing the world it tried to admit to consciousness, to representation, alternatives—alterities—that had been foreclosed by previous regimes of culture and aesthetics. Even where there were outright hostilities over the best way to proceed, one thing was always clear: there could be no question of going back, of reviving the Victorian past.
8I read this restless drive to novelty, to produce ever new alternatives to the current state of things, as fundamentally ethical. An important distinction needs to be drawn here between what Horkheimer and Adorno identify as the illusion of novelty or choice produced in mass culture by capitalism: ‘The permanent compulsion to produce new effects which yet remain bound to the old schema, becoming additional rules, merely increases the power of the tradition which the individual effect seeks to escape.’6
9The key difference between mass culture’s predilection for ever newer models of Ford or ever newer widgets is that their production is only illusorily new. It is what Adorno will go on in Negative Dialectics to call simply nominalism; it only calls the next product new (‘new and improved!’) when in fact there is no qualitative change to it. The impulse behind this strategic production of the appearance of the new is actually to guarantee the reproduction of the status quo. As Marx noted, and Althusser took as a starting point, the basic aim of capitalism is to reproduce the conditions of production, and capitalist nominalism is one of the primary means of achieving this by selling the habitual as though it were novel.
10To invoke one of the key terms in my title, part of the reason this strategy works so well for capitalism is that it plays upon a fundamentally utopian wish. With each ‘new’ product, capitalism promises that we have come one step closer to the ideal, to the world in which work takes care of itself and all one has to do is find fulfillment in self-actualising leisure pursuits (rather than alienating labour). The irony that we must work to obtain the goods that will absolve us of the need to work, chasing an ever-receding horizon and in fact perpetuating the conditions that keep us from escaping the cycle is masked by the putatively objective enjoyment we experience through the culture industry.7 The eternal repetition of the same with slightly different window dressings and blaring assurances that this time it really is ‘our best ever!’ is both the aim of capitalist mass culture and the task to which it puts its target audience, the worker/consumers whose entire life is structured by the rhythms of labour: ‘mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself. [...] The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 109). The serial culture of episodic television, formulaic films, hit music, and all other forms of disposable culture simply mimics the repetitive rhythms of mechanised labour in the register of entertainment. The off-duty worker watching a series of television shows after dinner is not only isolated from the communal life around him, but also continuing the process of bodily and mental discipline that demands only repetition of the same, and forecloses true qualitative novelty.8
11By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno indicate in passing that they consider the innovations of the avant-garde to differ from those of the hit song in that ‘they serve the truth’ (102). Without placing too much emphasis on their thesis of the gulf between mass culture and the avant-garde, and without troubling overmuch as to the precise nature of the ‘truth’ served by the avant-garde, I would suggest that there is a kernel of truth in this distinction. The avant-garde elements of modernism in its early manifestations (i.e. before it was institutionalised as the official art of the twentieth century) have some key differences from capitalism’s manic overproduction of variations on the same commodities. In the first place, though modernism was certainly not as free from the taint of the marketplace as some of its early champions liked to make out, it remains true that modernist works were never in their moment big sellers. Though they may technically have been commodities, they were hardly commodities of the same sort as the Model T. They were not circulated in mass mechanical reproductions, they were not marketed to wide audiences, and though they fed directly into the advertising techniques of the second half of the twentieth century they did not rely upon commercial advertising to create their aura of novelty.
12More importantly, the products of the modernist avant-garde sought precisely to disrupt the habitus of modernity, rather than to reinforce it. Where mass culture’s nominalism merely dressed the old product in new clothes and ensured the repetition of the same, modernism’s avant-garde sought to disrupt, trouble, shatter, and even BLAST! (as Wyndham Lewis had it) not just the material culture of modernity but more significantly the affect of comfort, certainty, optimism, and complacency it produced in consumers. If mass culture’s nominalism produced only quantitative novelty, modernist avant-garde innovation sought qualitative shifts that would sweep away the detritus of modern culture and replace it with something raw, authentic, and above all new—unheralded, unlooked-for, uncomfortable. That it failed more often than not to reach any but the smallest audience, and that it was more easily absorbed by capitalism than any of its practitioners might have thought possible does not give the lie to this impetus. Rather, we should consider the threat it was perceived to present, the felt disruption it articulated and enacted. What other forms of cultural production caused riots when first performed (as did the Ballets Russes performance of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps), provoked censorship on a massive scale (as did Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and numerous others), or—more significantly—were deemed degenerate and burned by both Nazis and Americans in the 1930s?
13This is the context in which I argue we must approach modernism’s fascination with the new. I contend that there is a direct correlation between formal experimentation, critique as a fundamental dissatisfaction with the status quo, and an ethical impulse to improve upon the status quo. Horkheimer and Adorno locate the force of critique in works of art as a disruptive force that refuses totality and ‘transcends reality’ in the name of something new:
The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (103)
14Ironically, the New Critical insistence on the unity and wholeness of the work of art emerges as lacking in precisely those elements of critique that are fundamental to the social power of art for Horkheimer and Adorno. The New Critical belief that modernism lacked an ethics (mentioned above) is suddenly revealed as a fundamental element of the New Criticism, rather than of modernism.9 For Horkheimer and Adorno, by contrast, stylistic innovation is the very modality of critique in artistic production, and the ruptures it produces are the means by which that critique is felt. Whether we call it an alienation effect (Brecht) or defamiliarisation (Shklovsky), modernism’s preoccupation with making its consumers uncomfortable is exactly what makes its aesthetics operate as critique. And though Horkheimer and Adorno do not adduce thereby an ethical dimension, I would argue that it is not far to look: modernist formal experimentation is at least in part a model of critique that rejects present conditions on the ground that they are inadequate to realms of alterity—alterity in content, but also alterity in forms, modes of articulation, possibilities of human expression and interaction—that ought to be engaged. This is the latent meaning behind the Marxist-inflected claim that the disjunctive work of art ‘transcends reality.’ It helps explain the massive effusion of aesthetic innovation in the first quarter of the twentieth century, as so many artists sought a way out of the historical impasse in which they found themselves. In the wake of the vanished or vanishing Victorian consensus, modernist writers felt a need for a new ethics, but were unable to formulate it with any clarity or precision. Instead, in typically modernist fashion, they concentrated on form, on producing the form of ethical possibility in the absence of any definable ethical substance: they sought innovations in style that would disrupt that impasse and create new conditions of possibility even where they could not imagine what they might be the conditions of possibility for. In this they did not abdicate ethical responsibility, but founded a new approach to ethics that takes indeterminacy as a positive value and resists closure in a struggle to the death to preserve space for alterities they could not even begin to imagine.
15At this point I would like to turn to a characteristic modernist novel, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, to demonstrate the ways in which such narratives at once invite readers to seek ethical and narrative certainty, and yet prevent them from doing so. In this respect, A Passage to India reveals the extent to which modernist writers such as Forster actively toyed with the readerly desire for closure and stability, all the while both denying its fulfillment and critiquing the desire itself. With this strategy, equally formal, thematic, and critical, Forster and the modernists more generally force the reader into an ethical relationship with narrative itself.
16I have chosen A Passage to India because the novel is so explicitly engaged with problems of Justice, especially in contrast to the Law: Ronnie is the town’s civil magistrate, the accusation and trial of Aziz take up a third of the novel, and the question of the justice of the Raj itself pervades the narrative. A Passage to India is also an exemplary text for this sort of exploration because of the rich mix of alterities it engages and variously combines. Just in terms of ethnicity alone, the novel features perspectives of and on Hindus, Muslims, Eurasians, English, and Anglo-Indians, with each of these variously subdivided further, often in minutely fine gradations of distinction. With this novel, Forster challenges taboos on representing racial others, female sexuality, homoeroticism, cross-racial desire, and the hypocrisy of the British Raj. It is a compendium of alterity in modernism, with filaments of otherness stretching out in all directions and governed by an urgent concern with how to honour alterity in its otherness, and how to move towards justice without seeking closure. For the purpose of concision, I will restrict my discussion to the novel’s central episode: the car accident on the Marabar Road.
17Though many—practically all—critics have taken the incident in the Marabar Caves to be the novel’s central episode, I side with the minority who have seen the car accident as of at least equal importance. I may be alone in my assertion that it is in fact even more important, though I make this assertion with some cause: the car accident establishes all of the main elements of the incident in the caves, including sex and sexuality, cross-racial desire and prestige, violence, psychological aberration, mystery, and the tension between justice and the law. Moreover, following conventional theories of the traumatic that can help account for why the incident in the caves (whatever actually happens) is so deeply disturbing to Adela: because it replays the earlier episode of the car accident in all its key particulars, triggering a traumatic response that is otherwise out of all proportion to the events. The violence and threat to stability offered up by the car accident are all too easily absorbed by Adela in the first instance, but resurface as traumatising elements in the second instance so that the incident in the caves can only be understood as psychologically layered for her. In this respect, each incident ends up referring to the other for its full significance, generating a mise en abyme that renders futile any attempt to provide a unitary totalising explanation.
18The crash on the Marabar road happens as Ronny and Adela, who have just agreed not to get engaged, take a ride in the Nawab Bahadur’s car. Behaving as well as two young English people with a strong sense of decency can, Ronnie and Adela yet experience an erotic thrill when their hands touch. Suddenly the car swerves, bounces off the road, and comes to rest against a tree. The cause of the accident is the source of much speculation, which ultimately yields two preferred possibilities: the rationalist English and the supernaturalist Muslim.
19In the rationalist English explanation, Ronnie and Adela determine that the car hit a hyena that was dazzled by the car’s headlights. They even go back to look for its tracks to substantiate their theory though it is extremely unlikely for a number of reasons: their notion that the car hits a hyena ignores the fact that whatever it was hit the car, and not vice versa; no hyena on earth is big enough to knock a moving car off the road; there’s no physical evidence that it was a hyena and not some other creature; neither Ronnie nor Adela knows the first thing about the local fauna; and even though Adela supposedly saw the creature all she can say for sure is that it was larger than a goat, possibly a buffalo or maybe a hyena. Though they present their theory as the outcome of reasoned inquiry in the best English rationalist tradition, Ronnie and Adela’s determination that the accident was caused by a hyena is in fact extremely tenuous. Their impulse to provide a totalising explanation that solves the mystery and keeps it from descending into a muddle overcomes numerous gaps and flaws, revealing the truth of Derrida’s claim that ‘coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.’10
20A similar problem dogs the alternative explanation advanced, the Muslim supernaturalist account provided by the Nawab Bahadur. In this version, the thing that hit the car is a demonic revenant, the spirit of a drunken man the Nawab Bahadur had run over nine years previously. Though he has made restitution before the law and God, the Nawab Bahadur remains convinced that the dead man waits for him by the side of the road ‘in an unspeakable form’ to take revenge.11 The Nawab Bahadur’s explanation achieves the kind of totality denied to Ronnie and Adela’s explanation, but only if we suspend our impulse towards rationality and accept that a supernatural agency is at work. If we opt not to do so, however, his account is even less compelling than the English rationalist account, unless we transform the register of the supernatural into that of psychic disturbance and bring the machinery of psychoanalysis to bear. In that case, however, we should have to account for why the driver would drive the car into the ditch if the psychic disturbances for which we have evidence belong only to Adela and the Nawab Bahadur.
21Moreover, in a subtle but enticing move, Forster even provides a discursive means for unifying the two apparently opposed versions of the cause of the accident. Carefully laying his trap for the reader, Forster uses the Greek etymology of hyena to reinforce the Nawab Bahadur’s claim that the car was attacked by the avenging spirit in the form of a savage pig. Though he tells us that the spirit assumes an ‘unspeakable form,’ Aziz almost immediately identifies it as a familiar narrative concerning a ‘savage pig on the Marabar road’ (90). Up to this point, no one has mentioned swine of any kind anywhere in the book, so Aziz’s reference appears completely mysterious until we discover that hyena is Greek for female swine. This connection can only function on the level of novelistic discourse since none of those to whom the Nawab Bahadur is speaking is aware that the English believe the accident to have been caused by a hyena. The etymological link between the hyena and the ‘savage pig’ functions only on the level of the narrative discourse, and cannot serve any of the characters in producing a coherent account. Reciprocally, the Nawab Bahadur’s claim that the accident is caused by an unhappy spirit is affirmed by Mrs. Moore in her own variation on the English explanation. When Ronnie and Adela return home and tell her they have had an accident, she immediately and without incitement attributes it to ‘a ghost!’ (88). For the reader intent upon resolving the mystery of what happens on the Marabar road, Forster thus lays a cunning trap. Though neither the English rationalist nor the Muslim supernaturalist explanation suffices in terms of the novel’s reality, a committed reader can produce a hermeneutically complete account by fusing the two accounts as twin halves of a dialectical whole. The product is interpretively ingenious and perhaps even satisfying as a solution to a textual puzzle embedded in the novel by the author.
22But it also misses the point: solving the puzzle is short-sighted, when its real significance can only emerge if one ponders the reason for its presence in the first place. In this respect, we have to turn again to the text itself to locate clues as to how to proceed. The key lies in Forster’s cautions about efforts to produce unity, and the tendency for all such efforts to yield only spurious wholeness. Twice in the lead-up to the accident Forster uses the phrase ‘spurious unity’: once to describe the transient sense of connection between Adela and Ronny—that erotic thrill when their hands touch—and once to describe the night itself during which the accident happens (80, 80–81). This repetition reduces unity to a subjective experience: only Ronnie and Adela experience their unity as genuine, and only those in the midst of the night experience it as unifying. Neither the touch nor the night itself is unifying; rather, only the experience of them can produce a sense of unification. The distinction is crucial, and goes right to the heart of the modernist insistence on a post-impressionist aesthetic that seeks to express artistically the truth of experience rather than the objective truth sought (vainly) by science. The warning thus articulated gains traction in the narrative of the car accident, alerting us to the dangers of seeking unity, of attempting to reconcile the various oddities of the episode into a single totalising explanation. Every effort to do so not only yields fantastic tales, but ends up soliciting its contrary as its guarantee. Such ‘spurious unities’ not only fail to explain anything, they also foreclose alterity: loose ends are either forcibly integrated or brutally cut off. In a sense, Forster is intentionally redundant here: I imagine that for him ‘spurious unity’ is repetitive inasmuch as all unity is spurious and thus to be doubted. The implication that if there is ‘spurious’ unity there must also be ‘authentic’ unity is misleading, I would argue, except perhaps as a tantalising glimpse of the avenir à venir, as Derrida has it, that forms the utopian undercurrent to Forster’s brilliant critique.12
23But Forster is far from didactic. Even as he signals the dangers of ‘spurious unities,’ he baits us, inviting us to seek yet more unifying explanations even after we have seen through those of Ronny and Adela, and the Nawab Bahadur. This bait comes in the form of other plausible explanations that are introduced into the narrative only to vanish silently. First, a perfectly reasonable explanation is advanced and then lost: someone— we can never be sure who—says, ‘Wasn’t the bridge. We skidded’ (Forster 81). Adela repudiates the second half of this, but the first half—the possibility that the car hit the bridge—simply disappears. If, as seems likely, the speaker is the driver, then his unprovoked denial that he hit the bridge smacks of a protest registered suspiciously early—no one has suggested that the car hit the bridge. Was he perhaps nodding, and clipped the bridge, causing the accident? Indeed, this seems like the ideal clue, hiding in plain view the truth of the accident. Or, if your preference runs to the psychoanalytical, we could take up the other bit of bait. When Adela and Ronny are trying to find the animal’s tracks on the road, her skirts mess things up to such an extent that ‘it was [Adela] if anyone who appeared to have attacked the car’ (82). Indeed. Adela is the only one who sees—or claims to have seen—the animal, and its appearance coincides with her entry into dense ambivalence about her sexuality, identity, Englishness, etc. Perhaps she merely hallucinated the animal?
24Of course, Forster’s warnings about spurious unities apply here equally. Though either of these explanations could function as a unified account on its own, and they present a nicely totalised explanation when put together, they are little more than bait. If we have been paying attention at all, and if we are to approach ethically that which remains ultimately unreadable—then we have to resist the urge to supplement the characters’ explanations with anything ostensibly more stable, rational, complete, likely.
25The point, as it is for the ‘real’ India, is that there is no arche, no primary source version either of India or of the accident that can be definitively and singularly categorised, captured, tamed, and made to account for itself. Nor does Forster regret this impossibility—he does not lament the lack of a clear final explanation, but recognises it as the only possibility for justice, for a genuinely ethical orientation in the world. It’s ethical because it retains an openness, an incompletion. It is founded in and on an ‘otherwise’ which none of the narratives produced can ever fully encompass. This is its tendentially utopian dimension: the impossibility of arriving at the final explanation is the possibility of Justice rather than a verdict, the openness that always permits of a better version, a truer connection. The evidence of this is ultimately encoded into the final lines of the novel:
‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said [Fielding], ...‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not here.’ (289)
26The novel thus concludes with a vision of temporal and spatial dislocation—not yet, not here—that gives the lie to all unity. The refusal of coincidence, of full identification at this crucial point insists upon an alterity that can only be resolved in a future elsewhere. The impossibility of identity is a key moment of victory here, as the closing separation of Aziz and Fielding preserves the alterity of the other for each. Only their inability to come together can create the necessary space for them to honour that alterity rather than presuming to annihilate it. The narrative here does not prohibit interpersonal connection, but only defers it to elsewhere, else when. It insists on attending the future to come, the avenir à venir. Which is, of course, Derrida’s definition of Justice and the very condition of possibility for ethics.
27In this sense, the novel offers both critique and the possibility of ethics, precisely because it doesn’t have all the answers. It repeatedly prevents us from arriving at a determinate explanation that would transform the muddle with which we are presented into a mystery that can be solved. As my final bit of evidence, I will recall the ending of the trial. Just when the full might of British administration, embodied in the juridical-legal apparatus of the criminal court system, is trying to ascertain Aziz’s guilt or innocence, the rug is pulled out from under it. Adela withdraws her charge, Turton claims that the trial should be adjourned because she is not well, and the case is dismissed. There is never an official recognition that Aziz is not guilty of what he is accused of. Legally, he has not been acquitted, but only released because the charge has been withdrawn. Double jeopardy does not apply here, and there is every possibility that Adela could renew the charge if she wished. The key point is that the issue is never resolved. Instead, it is held in abeyance. Suspended and unresolved. Moreover, it does so in a register that implies that arriving at a verdict—either way, mind you—would have been to miss what is essential. What happened to Adela in the cave can never be known. It will forever be lost to knowledge, and is as such impervious to the depredations of any regime of truth, however hostile or friendly.
28And yet Forster does not seem to indicate that the novel’s refusal to pronounce upon Aziz’s guilt or innocence is unjust or a failure of justice. Instead, his narrative seems to indicate that the suspension of any decision is precisely what makes justice a future possibility. This is the possibility of ethics that goes with the force of critique in A Passage to India. It sustains the possibility that another explanation may be better than the one we have. It allows us not only to imagine, but to reach for a better account, one that is more just to all concerned and that strives its utmost not to foreclose or oppress.
29Naturally, this is not simply to celebrate indeterminacy as inherently good, or to say that as long as we can refrain from making a decision we remain ethical. Clearly, there are many cases in which the only just thing to do is to render a verdict. In terms of A Passage to India, Forster creates an acid test for ethical decision-making: to be just to Aziz necessitates being unjust to Adela and vice versa. There is no path of decisiveness that guarantees justice for all those who deserve it—providing we could even know what that might look like. Indeed, what Forster illustrates more clearly than any other writer I know of is the unethical element in deciding finally—of the dangers latent in assuming, as Levinas has it, that truth and knowledge can be made to coincide.13 Transforming the epistemological limits with which they were confronted into a point of strength, modernists such as Forster made not knowing into the key condition of ethics rather than its impossibility. The claim to know, to have access to the truth rather than to a partial perspective, begins with Forster and other modernists to be identified as the quintessence of the unethical.
30Faced with the insuperable difficulty of forging a clear ethics in a new world, modernists like Forster held the door. They committed themselves to rejecting harmful solutions simply to have done with the muddle—at least in the early going. In doing so, they discovered an ethics of indeterminacy that would gradually find clearer and clearer articulation as the century wore on. In this respect, modernism founded what has perhaps been the most lasting aspect of contemporary theory, and the one with the greatest significance.
Notes de bas de page
1 In their survey of the New Modernist Studies, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz prefer to call this expansion ‘spatial, temporal, and vertical’ (737). Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’ PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737–748.
2 Lee Oser, Todd Avery, and Jewel Spears Brooker are exceptions to this rule, though they concentrate more on the content of modernist works in their search for an ethics of modernism, rather than concerning themselves with the larger structural, formal, or discursive elements with which I am concerned. Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007).
3 Quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1987) 79. Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘To Murder and Create: Ethics and Aesthetics in Levinas, Pound, and Eliot,’ Rethinking Modernism. Ed. Marianne Thormählen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) 55–76.
4 Robert Browning, ‘Pippa’s Song’ ll.7-8. www.englishverse.com/poems/pippas_song. Accessed 11 July 2011.
5 Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ in Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957). Section V, ll. 3–4.
6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 101.
7 On this point, see Slavoj Žižek’s argument in The Sublime Object of Ideology that the laugh-track in television situation comedies enjoys the shows for us so that we can only say that we had a good time objectively, whether we laughed or not (35). Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).
8 In the context of the post-mechanised world of labour in the West, many of these points may seem quaint rather than critical. They remain true in their essence, though, certainly for the developing world in which mechanised labour remains overwhelmingly the norm. Likewise, the massive proliferation of web sites and options for supposedly controlling one’s viewing options in the world of the West’s information economy is not appreciably different in terms of its capacity to habituate individuals to seriality without true novelty. For example, one could easily argue that so-called ‘game changers’ like Apple’s iPad tablet computers in fact alter only the means by which seriality is delivered without producing any qualitative departure at all.
9 The difference between unity in the object and the experience of its unity by an observer is crucial, and forms the basis of much of the second half of this paper, when I turn to Forster’s cautions against ‘spurious unities.’
10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, trans. And ed. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 279.
11 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; New York: Penguin, 2005) 90.
12 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intr. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (1993; New York: Routledge, 1994) 17 passim.
13 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’ in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (1989; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) 75–88.
Auteur
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Stephen Ross
University of Victoria, Canada
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