SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in The Fiction of E. M. Forster, Wayne State University Press, 1967, pp. 56-88.

[Here, Thomson, a noted Forster scholar, discusses the mythical and archetypal aspects of Forster's short stories.]

In Forster's stories, one way of symbolizing the complete division between innocence and experience is the two-kingdom geographical setting. We have this in "The Other Side of the Hedge," "The Machine Stops," and "The Celestial Omnibus." The stories we are now looking at create the same kind of effect by more indirect means. In "The Story of a Panic" the tourists are intruders in Pan's kingdom and must flee from the place of incarnation. Later the boy must flee from the inn and garden—the world of the tourists—into the open country. In "The Road from Colonus" Mr. Lucas is alone in the grove during the moments of his vision. The rest of the party are intruders. The importance of place is beautifully symbolized when, an hour after leaving the Inn, they come round the spur of a mountain and behold the grove of trees far below them. It makes its final appeal to Mr. Lucas but Ethel intervenes and he moves on toward the sterile inanity of his life in England.

In "Other Kingdom" the sense of a place apart is equally strong. But before coming to that, something should be said about the narrator of this story. Mr. Inskip is the employee of the prosperous, pompous, and impeccable Harcourt Worters. He is tutor to the master's ward, a very young man named Ford, and to the master's fiancée, a very unsophisticated and spirited Irish girl named Evelyn Beaumont. He is the most lively and entertaining of Forster's narrators. The first source of his allegiance to Mr. Worters is his salary; the second is a certain similarity of outlook. But the similarity is far from complete and he is able to appreciate, though never to support, Ford's scathing reactions to Mr. Worters. He is more complex than Forster's other narrators and is admirably equipped to convey the conflicting forces that ruffle the complacent surface of the Worters demesne. But he is incapable of understanding Miss Beaumont. Forster will not allow her glorious innocence and primal power to be more than guessed at by the mind of this worldly and corrupt narrator.

The characters are revealed to us through a very simple situation. Other Kingdom, a beach copse standing opposite Mr. Worters' house on the other side of a stream, is bought by him as a present for Miss Beaumont. She is in love with her property until, on a picnic to Other Kingdom, she learns that he plans to put a high fence all around it and build a path and bridge into it. Apparently broken in spirit, she at last agrees to these plans. But during a second visit to her Kingdom she escapes the deadening control of the Worters way of life by disappearing dryad-like in her beech grove. Except for the transformation, this sketch hardly touches the heart of the story which is to be found in the first visit to the wood.

Miss Beaumont, in a green dress, leads the procession. She dances in imitation of the trees and especially the beech. As they enter the woods, she induces them to sing, as if it were a litany, a line she and Ford had been translating from the classics: "Ah you silly ass gods live in woods." Once within her wood, she welcomes them and they bow to her. For the picnic she makes the seating arrangements and takes special care to have Ford stand in such a position that he will blot out her view of the Worters mansion, which the narrator cynically describes as looking "like a cottage with the dropsy." She goes further: "Just pull back your soft hat, Mr. Ford. Like a halo. Now you hide even the smoke from the chimneys. And it makes you look beautiful." And so, like a presiding deity, over them all stands "the silent, chivalrous figure of Ford."

Mr. Worters is not pleased. He chaffs Ford and tickles his ankles and legs. When Miss Beaumont again refers to blocking out the house, he runs his hand "up around the boy's ankle" and tumbles him to the ground. What follows is supposed to pass for play but Ford's cry is one of anger and pain. Later after Mr. Worters has indulged in a perfect Sir Willoughby Patterne rhapsody on the theme of the isolated and secluded bliss he and Miss Beaumont can look forward to, he stretches out his hand to cut their initials into a tree and reveals, to her horror, the "red stuff on his finger and thumb.

Mr. Worters is accustomed to imposing his will on others in a coldly sadistic manner. Here we have a physical symbol of his sadism. And we have more. He knows that Ford is his enemy and in precisely what way he is an enemy. The hand running up round the ankle with thumb and finger poised is a castration gesture. But unlike the parallel episode in "The Machine Stops," this one leads to a symbolic affirmation: Ford has made a blood sacrifice to the fulfillment of Miss Beaumont' ritual and, at the same time, has sealed their relationship in blood.

This brilliant scene deepens our understanding of the characters. Harcourt Worters, as we learn from the finest of hints, has purchased Other Kingdom by taking advantage of a widow. "Radiating energy and wealth, like a terrestrial sun," he has only to touch a thing and it turns to gold. He is Midas. Ford has told Miss Beaumont about Midas: "He just comes, he touches you, and you pay him several thousand per cent, at once. You're gold—a young golden lady—if he touches you." And Mr. Worters has told his mother that "in time Evelyn will repay me a thousandfold." When Evelyn insists on remaining alive and green and enlists Ford in the carrying out of her life-giving ritual, Mr. Worters reveals the full extent of his coldly perverted selfishness.

At the same time Ford reveals his heroic nature through a kind of stillness and radiance. In his role as presiding deity and devoted lover, he belongs with Forster's archetypal primitives, Gennaro, Gino (Where Angels Fear to Tread), and Stephen (The Longest Journey). He has their kind of wisdom. But unlike them he is educated, intelligent, a biting critic, and a wit. And for good measure, he has a notable quality of virility, a characteristic rare in Forster's men. He is the most complex and finely presented male character in the short stories and a match for any in the novels.

Evelyn Beaumont is equally fine. Few novelists can convey happiness and few can portray simple, spontaneous high-spirits. Forster can do both. He can catch, too, the suddenness of collapse when liveliness is thwarted. Because he can do these things, we believe in Evelyn Beaumont and accept her extraordinary transformation. Her visit to Other Kingdom prepares for this transformation by giving symbolic value to the flowing green dress, the tree dance, the ritual procession to the wood, and the feast presided over by Ford. The preparation is continued later in the image of the large branch torn from the wood and rolled by the wind over the bridge and up the path to the very front of the house, the image of Evelyn Beaumont torn from her Kingdom. Finally, her transformation is prefigured in the magnificent description of her flight to Other Kingdom: "She danced away from our society and our life, back, back, through the centuries till houses and fences fell and the earth lay wild to the sun."

She becomes one with her Kingdom. As they search for her, the narrator describes their feeling that she "was close by, that the delicate limbs were just behind this bole, the hair and the drapery quivering among those leaves. She was beside us, above us; here was her footstep on the purple-brown earth—her bosom, her neck—she was everywhere and nowhere." She is the Earth-Mother.

The tree of life and the wood of life are traditional mother symbols. That Other Kingdom belongs in this tradition is confirmed by the mythology of the story. Boys and girls have always come up to the wood to cut their initials together in the bark. "It's called the Fourth Time of Asking. . . . They cut their names and go away, and when the first child is born they come again and deepen the cuts. So for each child. That's how you know: the initials that go right through to the wood are the fathers and mothers of large families, and the scratches in the bark that soon close up are boys and girls who were never married at all." These are the words of Evelyn Beaumont and are followed by her plea to Mr. Worters not to fence her in by fencing her Kingdom in: "I must be on the outside, I must be where any one can reach me. Year by year—while the initials deepen—the only thing worth feeling—and at last they close up—but one has felt them."

Harcourt Worters learns that the earth, our mother, and all that is beautiful and joyous in it, cannot be bought and cannot be confined. Evelyn Beaumont has escaped him "absolutely, for ever and ever, as long as there are branches to shade men from the sun." But she embraces Ford in her shade for ever. No one can break him, for he is confirmed both as divine son and mortal lover of Earth, the bride-mother.

In probing the symbolic implications of "Other Kingdom," I have no doubt fallen into the error of making the story seem unduly portentous. Let me conclude by stressing the sureness and lightness of touch with which Forster handles his profoundly suggestive material. "Just pull back your soft hat," Miss Beaumont says. "Like a halo," and suddenly Ford stands before us as a radiant young god.

The central vision of this and all the best stories is the ecstatic experience of oneness with nature and an ideal past. About the past Forster is vague but evocative. It is a primitive pastoral world that looks with direct eyes on the power of nature and knows neither fences nor barriers; it is a youthful civilization in which even the old and the blind may regain youth and vision. Above all, it is the world of our ancestors which reaches into the present to give us strength and consolation. There is "no such thing as the solitude of nature, for the sorrows and joys of humanity [have] pressed even into the bosom of a tree." And silence, which so often heralds the moment of spiritual revelation, "is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone." Whatever the image, this sense of the past gives depth to man's experience of identity with nature. Moreover it implies that what has taken place is the integration into the conscious mind of ancestrally based unconscious elements.

Such an interpretation is confirmed by the preponderance of symbols representing an expanded, enhanced, or transcendent self. The hero conveys this sense of a reborn, renewed, and greater self; and the impression of a new self is supported by symbols which convey the same meaning and which frequently act as catalysts in the process of renewal. These symbols may be characters implied or present in the narrative: Achilles, Pan, the dying Oedipus, the family of man presiding over the Inn, Castor and Pollux, and Orion the hunter and hero. They may be objects of the natural world: the constellation of Orion, the shield of Achilles with its imaged universe, the everlasting river and the gulf-transcending rainbow, the valley like a vast green hand, the beech copse of Other Kingdom, and the grove of plane trees with its three equally impressive objects, the Inn, the bubbling spring, and the overflowing vessel which is both tree and shrine. All these are traditional symbols of the self or transparent modifications of traditional symbols. Sometimes the symbol is an event and represents directly the rebirth of the self as a greater and more inclusive being. Examples are the rebirth through water into the garden on the other side of the hedge, Harold's fierce rowing which induces a mystic state of pure being, the boy's leap onto the Mount Olympus of Achilles' shield, and the religious ritual at Other Kingdom.

Forster's heroes enter into an experience which can only be described as visionary. As a result of this experience they feel a sense of strength and renewal, of expansion and fulfillment. This feeling invariably arises from their achieving identity with nature though it may be nature mediated by the poetic imagination. And nature is always rooted in the human past. Thus, for example, Harold's ancestors call to him as he rows across the estuary. Since the experience of identity is, by definition, unconscious, it is reasonable to suppose that man's ancestral past is not simply inherent in outer nature but is inherent in his own inner nature, in the unconscious reaches of his own mind.

Once the bucket has been lowered and its contents brought up into the light, the unconscious may be mediated by the conscious mind and the renewed and greater self may enter into daily life. Such a transition is not easy. The subliminal nature of the vision calls from the depths, evoking the peacefulness of death-like oblivion; the supraliminal nature of the vision calls from the heights, evoking the exultation of splendid isolation.

In the short stories Forster is not much concerned with the way vision enters into and transforms daily life. But he gives full expression to the attraction of death and isolation as they exercise their power over the newborn self. A strange destiny awaits all those characters who are overtaken by vision. Harold in "The Point of It" dies immediately. Mr. Lucas is intended to die immediately. Gennaro dies that Eustace may live; and he can live only by escaping from society. The hero of "The Machine Stops" suffers both isolation and death. The hero of "Albergo Empedocle" is driven to the ultimate isolation of insanity. Both the divine child of "The Celestial Omnibus" and the bride-mother of "Other Kingdom" enter a place set apart; they have broken through the closed circle of the egocentered and unimaginative worlds from which they came. Only in the thoroughly inferior stories are death and isolation of no significance—proof, if more is needed, that in these stories Forster has falsified or failed to project the deeper implications of his vision.

The achieving of identity with nature, like the breaking down of the barrier between the ego and the unconscious, can best be described as a primitive experience. The elemental and absolute nature of the experience isolates the individual from the world. In prose fiction, the first great expressions of the phenomenon of primitive identity are Wuthering Heights and Moby-Dick. In comparison with the worlds created by these fictions, Forster's world of nature may appear to be romantically conceived: the same spirit informs both man and nature, and awareness of their unity gives to the individual such a sense of expansion and fulfillment that he experiences an escape from isolation. At a superficial level, Forster is inclined to regard nature in this way. But at a deeper level, he shows by the development of his stories that union with nature isolates the individual from humanity though at the same time it reveals to the individual the primitive power and joy that lies at the root of all being. The short stories, then, are a series of probings by Forster into the immediate elemental reality of his vision. The emphasis is on the power and joy of the experience of identity; death and isolation are accepted with a kind of exultation as the price demanded by the vision; indeed they appear as the guarantee of its supreme reality.

Though Forster's interest focuses on the immediate impact of vision, he begins in three of the stories to explore the question of whether the vision can survive and become operative in the world at large. "The Point of It" approaches the problem. It shows that the vision is easy to forget but that the desire to remember can bring personal salvation. "The Eternal Moment" tackles the problem outright, thus showing its uniqueness in yet another way. Miss Raby's vision has inspired her first and most ambitious novel, it has given her the courage to hold unpopular opinions and the integrity to act straight from the center of her being, and it has made her conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly fact, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human.

At least that is what we are told. What we feel amounts to much less—namely, that her memory of the eternal moment helps to sustain her in the face of a series of bitter and ironic disappointments. As a memory, her vision has conviction; as a continuing reality which transforms her day-to-day life, it has neither joy nor luminousness. In other words, it has lost most of its essential quality. It has become a kind of moral residue, good for clearing the eye and stiffening the spine but no good for anything else. The truth is—and Forster practically says so at one point—Miss Raby's Italian guide and her beautiful mountain are the only things she has ever loved deeply. Though her eternal moment is one of love, that love has not entered into the world. It has touched no one, it has tranformed no one; it is a piece of movable property the possession of which gives her security and strength. This is not the impression Forster wished to create; rather it is the impression arising from his failure to portray the vision as both a continuing and a living reality. His failure here may be contrasted with his success in "The Story of the Siren," which approaches the same problem symbolically rather than psychologically.

"The Story of the Siren," the last of Forster' s tales to be published, is one of the supreme achievements of his shorter fiction. It has been left to the end so that the fullest range of insights might be brought to its discussion. Let me add that in concentrating on its symbolic highlights I run the risk of making the story sound sensational. In fact, its power and scope are so quietly and unobtrusively conveyed that the casual reader might at first overlook them.

"The Story of the Siren" opens with a group of English tourists in Sicily. Among them is the narrator who is writing a dissertation on the Deist Controversy. Beyond this silly society is that of the town corrupted by commercialism; and beyond that again is the truly evil society of the Church and its black-clad priests. The Siren never leaves the sea because the priests have blessed the land and the air. Yet, for reasons the priests cannot understand, she reveals herself only to good people. When Giuseppe, a strong Italian youth, dives into the sea without crossing himself and sees the Siren, his life is forever changed. He is appalled rather than exhilarated for his vision is one of desolation. He becomes unhappy, "unhappy because he knew everything. Every living thing made him unhappy because he knew it would die." When he discovers a girl who has seen the Siren, he brings her home and marries her. But love cannot alter the knowledge that makes them unhappy. Then the priests turn the people against them and it is whispered that their child will be Antichrist. Before the child is born the girl goes down to the sea one stormy night and is pushed over the cliff by a priest. Giuseppe leaves his village and roams the world, searching until he dies for another human being who has seen the Siren.

What does she represent? Homer's Sirens sing, "For lo, we know all things .. . yea, we know all that shall hereafter be upon the fruitful earth." Jane Harrison, whose book on the myths of the Odyssey Forster is likely to have read, notes that Homer left them "shrouded in mystery, the mystery of the hidden things of the sea . . . —knowing all things, yet themselves for ever unknown. Nor is the manner of the death of their victims more clearly told. If, smitten with fell desire for knowledge, they hearken to the forbidden song, they must die—as, in the Semitic saga, they perish who taste of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge . . . —die not at once, but by a slow wasting; . . . the hapless seafarer is cut off henceforth from all simple, human, wholesome joys of wife and babe, and consumed by a barren desire" [The Myth of the Odyssey in Art and Literature, 1882]. If we allow that in Forster's story knowledge of all things is simply given rather than fatally desired, this seems a fair account of Giuseppe's encounter with the Siren. . . .

Forster's Siren is a vision of youth. She too is the elemental and unconscious current of life. In her, too, every death meets. But she is also the permanent and eternal source of life. And though man, in ignorance and superstition, has confined her to the depths, she will some day—so the vision of youth asserts—be summoned into the light. When Giuseppe sees the Siren he sees life in its permanence and death in its everlastingness and he is desolate, for he knows that the vision of life's permanence is absent from the world and that death reigns over all.

"Nothing of it but will change into something rich and strange," warbles the chaplain with no slightest notion of how apposite his words are to become. Out of the vision of the world subject to death and infinite sadness comes a realization of the need for rebirth or renewal. So to a child born out of such sadness there might, as the Italian proverb says, come gladness. This is confirmed by the prophecy of the witch: "the child would always be speaking and laughing and perverting, and last of all he would go into the sea and fetch up the Siren into the air and all the world would see her and hear her sing. As soon as she sang, the Seven Vials would be opened and the Pope would die and Mongibello flame, and the veil of Santa Agata would be burned. Then the boy and the Siren would marry, and together they would rule the world for ever and ever." Giuseppe's brother interprets the prophecy: "never in my life will there be both a man and a woman from whom that child can be born, who will fetch up the Siren from the sea, and destroy silence, and save the world!" Then he adds: "Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing."

Here we have a kind of visionary map of the nature and range of the experience Forster is to explore and develop in his novels. The story does not solve the problem of how the vision can be assimilated and made operative in the world at large. But it gives fuller expression to the dark side of existence by representing death as inherent in the vision—a persistent theme in the novels. And it pictures, with greater boldness than elsewhere, the world that might be hoped for if the vision could prevail universally.

Salvation will mean the end of silence and loneliness. From his first work of fiction to his last, Forster makes splendid use of silence and loneliness. They may be associated with a revelation of spiritual power ("The Story of a Panic") or with the negation of spiritual power. In A Passage to India the silence beyond the remotest echo is a premonition of the nonexistence of spirit; and the cave is a symbol of narcissistic isolation, man's spirit turned inward upon itself in perfect aloneness. It is silence and loneliness of this order that the Siren will destroy. She will come up from the indestructible life-giving sea when a man, born out of the knowledge that all things must die (the preliminary truth which destroys the evil dream of the Church), recognizes the reality of death as a challenge and fashions another and greater reality: a vision of song and laughter, of love and companionship, a vision of the realities which are the highest fulfillment of man's spirit and which are coeternal with his spirit. And when the song of the Siren is heard, the Babylon of evil superstition will crash in ruin; and when the Siren marries the young man born out of the knowledge of death, it will be a sign that man's spirit reigns for ever and ever.

Forster frequently uses expressions like "eternal" and "for ever and ever." They have misled some of his readers and confused others. In fact they are a simple expression of the profoundly archetypal nature of his imaginative vision. Though most men are nonentities, one man may express the strength or beauty or wisdom of the human spirit. He is the hero whom Forster's imagination seizes upon. He is the one who in each of the short stories defines the essential character of the human spirit. It may be the poetic imagination or the active and joyous state of pure youthful being or the mighty affirmation of love and joy whose power is over death; but whatever it is, the hero or his surrogate gives expression to it. In that sense he is eternal.

In "The Story of the Siren" the total vision has a scope and profundity greater than that in any of the other stories. As a result the archetypal hero and heroine who embody the grandeur of this vision must be presented with immense skill and care if we are to believe in them. In this situation, Forster for the first time in the short stories resorts to the technique of extreme distancing. An Englishman narrates a story told by a young Italian about his brother who has seen the Siren but whose marriage fails to produce a son. The possibility of a permanent and life-enhancing vision is prefigured. But the divine child who is destined to become the hero remains unborn; the Siren, who is all unconscious life, individual and general, and the great universal bride-mother, remains in the sea; and the black priests like vultures remain guarding the cliffs.

By thus distancing the purest and grandest of his archetypal romance characters, Forster makes credible the most apocalyptic of all his visions. It is the boldest and farthest stretch of his imagination and the most absolute expression of his moral vision. With its two sharply divided worlds, with its boldly simple and elusively powerful symbols, and with its complex awareness of a new goodness not yet born out of the knowledge of death and an old evil not yet eradicated by the spirit of life, "The Story of the Siren" may fairly be given the central place in Forster's created world as the archetype of all his fictions.