Language and Silence in A Passage to India

Abstract

Forster’s delicacy of style in the novels that precede A Passage to India almost guarantees the rectitude of his attempt to understand the alien worlds of Islam, Hinduism and ‘British India’. Elements of potential condescension or of patronising naïveté in the class attitudes of some of the characters of Howards End are carefully noted by the novelist, a useful starting-point for one whose last-written novel will share their position of attempted understanding.^1x Over fifty years after the first publication of A Passage to India it is possible to measure the success of that book in the context of renewed attempts at discovering the relevance for the industrialised nations of cultures whose assumptions have been so different. Forster goes incomparably further than the instinctive refusal to articulate that has often accompanied the quest. Yet A Passage to India justifies this disengagement with language. More, it explains, while enacting, the strategy behind such refusals to communicate.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. Wittgenstein, Tractatus