A Passage to India, the French New Novel and English Romanticism

Abstract

When I first wrote about A Passage to India some years back, I was mainly concerned to trace the continuities within Forster’s fiction as a whole and their relationship to some central themes in English romanticism. His interest in the human imagination, with its power to betray those who indulged it too easily and to act as an important guide to the nature of reality in those who knew how to and on what terms to trust it, had emerged for me as an important clue in understanding his achievement as a whole, and I argued that it was still at work within the largely negative vision of his Indian novel, contributing to its unusual shape and organization.¹ In a more recent essay I have taken a closer look at some romantic images, notably those involving echoes and reflections, which are used in that novel and help suggest the ambiguous status of the individual in the universe.² I want now to approach it from a different point of view again, looking primarily at those elements in it which have led critics to acclaim it as one of the first great ‘modern’ novels. In spite of all that has been written about it in recent years, there has been comparatively little attempt to determine its nature as a body of fiction.