SOURCE: "The Stories II: Narrative Modes," in The Short Narratives of E. M. Forster, St. Martin's Press, 1988, pp. 48-63.

Forster's stories are complex fictions whose significance and accomplishment are far from exhausted by identifying their mythic materials. Indeed, it is precisely because they are strong fictions and not, as they have too often been considered, juvenilia or whimsical exercises in turn-of-the-century Hellenism, that they can sustain an inquiry directed at identifying their multiple levels of meaning and the strategies invented to present (or conceal) these meanings. In a Forsterian narrative several stories are proceeding simultaneously—that is, one set of words may 'tell' several stories, or, alternatively, the story may exist apart from the words that tell it. Nearly all the stories, moreover, have some form of double structure and participate in two or more genres or modes—story/essay, story/novel, fantasy/realism, homosexual romance/heterosexual romance. This doubleness in part results . . . from Forster's development of a complex narrative voice that enlarges the story beyond the primary narrator's comprehension. It is also related to the creation of a voice that functions as a filter for other voices, and it is most interestingly related to a structural pattern that situates meaning in the gap between the overt and covert text.

A passage from 'The Road from Colonus' offers a suggestive text for these concerns. The group of travellers is in ecstacies about the beauties of the grove but Mr Lucas finds their enthusiasm 'superficial, commonplace'. He tries to explain his own feelings:

I am altogether pleased with the appearance of this place. It impresses me very favourably. The trees are fine, remarkably fine for Greece, and there is something very poetic in the spring of clear running water. The people too seem kindly and civil. It is decidedly an attractive place.

Not surprisingly, one of the others calls his words 'tepid praise'. They all join in, full of their literary enthusiasms: it is just like the Colonus of Sophocles they exclaim; Ethel is Antigone, and, of course, Mr Lucas is Oedipus; these two must stop for a week at least. Of course, none of them means a word of any of this—except Mr Lucas. For him, words may be inadequate counters for his experience, for that sense of clarification, that feeling of continuity and presence he had met in the hollow of the tree. But inadequate as they are, they point to that experience; they carry an irreducible minimum of meaning. What the scene makes painfully clear, however, is that this minimum can be as readily baffled by words as communicated by them, and that it is as difficult to be an adequate narrator of one's experience as a reader of another's narrative (the other characters are all, of course, false readers, first of Sophocles' play and then of Mr Lucas's 'story').

There are thus two distinct functions embedded in Mr Lucas's role. As a mythic character, he is presented as one who has lost his 'moment', defeated by his daughter and Mr Graham, his 'supreme event' nullified as water and children become the substance of his querulous complaints, not the source of his rejuvenation. But as a narrator of that experience he retains his integrity to the end, summing his diminished experience as he had summed that supreme event: 'I shall write to the landlord and say, "The reason I am giving up the house is this: the dog barks, the children next door are intolerable, and I cannot stand the noise of running water'".

Within the fiction, each of his narrative attempts, from the point of view of the other characters, is a failure. His 'tepid praise' hardly prepares the enthusiasts for his belief that he and his daughter were indeed to spend a week at the khan, that 'he would be a fool .. . if he stirred from the place which brought him happiness and peace'. And his letter to the landlord is only so much babbling to the distracted ears of his soon-to-be married daughter. The story's narrator, however, affirms these attempts, no matter if they have failed. His narrative, in fact, is the successful version of Mr Lucas's failed efforts. But the poignant incapacity of the sub-narrator puts even that competent voice in jeopardy as it signals the disjunction between story and words on the one hand, words and meaning on the other.

The story that makes such disjunction its explicit concern is 'The Curate's Friend' (1907), although that text usually enters discussions in terms of its variations on the Pan motif. But what is most interesting about its handling of that motif is the way it makes it emblematic of the essential doubleness of fiction, a doubleness that is also duplicity in terms of the story's generating metaphor of the curate's bewitchment by and subsequent happy life with the to-everyone-else-invisible faun. This doubleness is given a specifically generic definition in the story's concluding sentence:

Therefore in the place of the lyrical and rhetorical treatment, so suitable to the subject, so congenial to my profession, I have been forced to use the unworthy medium of a narrative, and to delude you by declaring that this is a short story, suitable for reading in the train.

That is, to delude you, the reader, into thinking this is a story about fauns. The subject is poetry ('that evening, for the first time, I heard the chalk downs singing to each other across the valleys'); the medium is prose.

Using prose is indeed what the story is about—that is the curate's adoption of the necessary strategies for survival so that he can remain 'an asset to [his] parish, [instead of being] .. . an expense to the nation'. Bursting into song is as dangerous, the curate senses, as declaring the truth about his present life. Both readers and parishoners require the delusion of narrative. Whereas Mr Lucas is not conscious of the gap between his words and his listener's understanding, the curate certainly is and thus constructs his account in such a way that vision and epiphany can be flattened between the covers of a book 'suitable for .. . the train' (Claude Summers nicely points out the comic allusion here to Gwendolen Fairfax's diary in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest [E. M. Forster, 1983].) A whole range of potential readers is thus satisfied, from the amateur geologist interested in mapping the chalk downs to the train travellers who keep up with their reading enough to know that fauns are in fashion this year.

Not only are there several audiences, but the speaker's voice is multiple as well. At the centre of the story there is the conversation between the narrator and the faun, the voices closest to lyric for the undeluded reader, but they are contained by a prosing narrative voice that comically illustrates its own dullness. In this voice, the narrator chatters on about his preference for a countryside that is 'snug and pretty', how he had turned away from the 'great sombre expanses' that the view revealed 'as soon as propriety allowed and said "and may I now prepare the cup that cheers?'". But this demonstration of how he had 'presented the perfect semblance' of a fool in the unawakened torpor of his life before the faun, comes through a narrative voice that has already completed the process of correction and transformation (hinted at in such phrases as 'in those days'). For this narrator the gap between words and meaning is a necessity in his relation to his audience, but it also allows for the comic misunderstanding of the confrontation scene and is thus necessary for the readjustment of all internal relationships that constitute the story's peripeteia. 'Miscreant . . . you have betrayed me', shouts the curate to the faun, as he bursts upon the scene where his fiancée and the friend who had accompanied them on this eventful picnic are embracing. (The setting on Box Hill is an even more topsy-turvy and chaotic scene than was staged in Emma.) The friend naturally assumes that he is the one addressed and responds in comically inflated terms: 'I know it: I care not. . . . You are in the presence of that which you do not understand'. But in moments the reversal is complete. There has been no betrayal at all and it is the friend who has not 'understood'. The curate's subsequent protestations dwindle rapidly away, and, as earlier, in 'Aliseli', the moment of release comes when he is able to laugh.

Thus, at its conclusion, 'The Curate's Friend' provides a happy, albeit somewhat subversive, revision of the earlier 'Albergo Empedocle', a story whose main character does indeed end up as an 'expense to the nation'. It also offers a partial reversal and then extension of 'A Story of a Panic'. Its most important affinity, however, is with The Longest Journey, which was not only published in the same year but similarly used the Wiltshire setting as an imaginatively generating, mythic space. For the kind of narrative that the story proposes, poetry disguised as prose, is precisely that of the novel—indeed, provides in miniature a model for reading the novel. Like the story . . . The Longest Journey maintains a double story line, a surface heterosexual romance in counterpoise with an interior homosexual romance, and it is from the tension between surface story and suppressed inner narrative that both novel and story derive much of their energy. The story, however, dissolves the tension in its happy ending, and in this way it is closer to the essay than to the novel. Since the story characters can simply bear the ideas out of which they were constructed, resolution can be achieved on an essayistic rather than on a fictional level; statement is sufficient.

The sort of doubleness I am discussing, observable throughout Forster's writing, is visible in its most schematic form in 'The Obelisk' (1939). There the resolution of the double structure takes the form of a good joke consummately well timed and delivered. In that story the two 'romances' are literally played out together. The wife's story (the heterosexual romance) and the husband's story (the homosexual romance) contain the same characters, setting, events and words. But the stories absolutely oppose each other and, because the wife's story finally includes the husband's (she realizes what must have happened; he does not), the comic punch line turns on itself and both wife and reader are left with an awareness that the laughter cannot quite displace.

The story, however, that presents the most complex investigation of doubleness, both on the level of plot and characterization and on the level of narrative procedure (i.e. the disposition of the story's elements and the narrator's relation to his materials) is 'The Other Boat'. It is a story that doubles back on itself and replays itself. Indeed the actual writing was itself a replaying, a taking-up of earlier work and changing it, not by rewriting but by resetting it, thereby both reinterpreting and re-creating it.

The original pages were written sometime in 1913 while Forster was working on Arctic Summer, and were most likely intended as an exploration of the early life of one of the two main characters, Clesant March (the names shift from fragment to fragment; in the story he is Lionel). Although the entire project was shortly abandoned, these pages may have hastened that process, since the direction they point in is quite different from that of the other extant fragments. The novel that had already begun to take shape was centred on the 'antithesis between the civilised man, . . . and the heroic man'. 'The Other Boat' fragment, by contrast, pits heroism against fate and cunning, the real against the unreal, the known against the unknown, and it does so in terms that could have had no outlet in the novel as it then stood. With that impasse it is no wonder that Forster put the whole project aside.

The title under which those pages were published thirty five years later, 'Entrance to an Unwritten Novel', might better have been 'Exit from ...' . By freeing them from their Arctic Summer matrix, Forster simultaneously proposed a complete fiction, for there is a form of closure, at least of enclosure, in the figure of the chalk circle which seems to enfeeble Mrs March as it empowers Cocoa, and the possibility of an entirely new beginning. The new story, finished around 1958, in many ways draws together the whole of Forster's oeuvre, and is particularly related to two important writing projects of that 1948-58 period, the rearranging and editing of his Indian letters for The Hill of Devi, and the writing of the libretto for Britten's Billy Budd. The former certainly brought back the Anglo-Indian world of privilege and power suggestively and dangerously embodied in the story by the Arbuthnots and Mannings; the latter provided a focus for the quasi-mystical conclusion, at once tragic and transcendent.

The story proposes an interesting symmetry between the act of writing and the subject of the writing. Just as the writer, in fact, recovered his past efforts and went back over his material, his two characters are similarly engaged in a process of repetition, a reliving of an earlier set of events. The voyage home of the first section is now a voyage out; saloon deck and forecastle have become upper deck and cabin; playing at soldiers—in particular, playing at dying—has ceased being a game and Death is no longer acting.

The world Forster sets out in the story is at once completely self-contained (the ship) and utterly divided, its two characters, Cocoa and Lionel, the human embodiments of this configuration. Cocoa, from the moment he entered the chalk circle, becomes a unitary figure, his power totally deriving from the self, exempt from all contingency ('the door shut, the door unshut, is nothing, and is the same'). But Lionel is a completely split figure; in him there is no mediating space, no possibility of compromise. Deck and cabin worlds are thus analogues of the split within, of the knowledge of self masked by the lie of self, that leads inevitably to violence and death. A reader may be uneasy with the violence of the conclusion, but it is neither arbitrary nor gratuitous, for it is the only means of bridging the fatal split in Lionel. Thus the union allowed can occur only after death, both with the mother, as she is a figure of the sea itself (Lionel had communed with her/it moments before the last encounter), and with the lover when Cocoa's body moves northward against the current, the undertow carrying it toward Lionel.

Thus both the structure of the story and the history of its composition enact its central thematics of separation and closure. But one of the curious features of the story is that closure is achieved in the symbolic mode, whereas separation, fissure are proposed in the realistic mode. The manipulation of these two essentially antithetical modes gives the story its extraordinary edge, for each event has its daylight and its dark side. Thus the highly detailed foreground action—the deck-life rituals of bridge games, drinks and sleeping arrangements—is made part of a larger, essentially mythic action in which the journey out is felt both as descent into Hell and ecstatic, mystical release. The figure that links the two modes is the mother; at the start a 'character' in the conventional sense, she is pure symbol at the close.

The story opens on a journey home from India, where, from the mother's point of view, relationships do not matter, for the boat world is taken to be unreal. But it is precisely the so-called unreal relationship, that between Lionel and Cocoa, that the story realizes, while the mother's world turns into shadow as she is doubly deserted, first by a husband gone native, and now by her son, a scandalous suicide in the Red Sea. Although a felt presence throughout the story, she is a purely negative creation, a dimmer, indeed inverted, version of Mrs Moore, whose death and burial at sea provide the paradigm for the mother-sea association in Forster's writing. Yet she understands the story better than the others; she can reconstitute it from its partial narrations, from Colonel Arbuthnot's letter after the fact, from Lionel's transparent letter beforehand. Both these letters omit our 'story' completely; together they compose it through their silence. But the story is entirely consumed in her reading: 'and she never mentioned his name again'.

However, Forster plays that reading against another. For, if Mrs March's reading denies the story, the crew's response to the burial of Cocoa affirms it:

There was a slight disturbance at the funeral. The native crew had become interested in it, no one understood why, and when the corpse was lowered were heard betting which way it would float. It moved northwards—contrary to the prevailing current—and there were clappings of hands and some smiles.

.....

In 'The Other Boat' he both corrects and vindicates his earlier misreading of Melville, for it is in some such mystical terms as I have indicated that Forster set the closing, uncanny moments of that story. The solace he allowed his characters, however, was not that of a Christian consolation, but of a Liebestod (to borrow another literary—musical analogy). At the same time he continued to direct his irony toward the ship-deck world where propriety and decorum maintain their sway. His crew does not break into song, but there is a similar note of celebration in their response to the lovers' fate.

Yet, despite this almost mystical conclusion, 'The Other Boat' remains one of the most novelistic of Forster's stories (second only to 'The Eternal Moment', although that story was once described by Edith Sitwell as 'the most horrifying ghost story' she had ever read). Indeed, except for the final detail of the body moving against the current, nothing that happens is strictly inexplicable. But, as in many of the stories, everything seems immersed in some other element, making the story world at once magical and real. This mingling of the real and the fantastic is, as we have seen, a marked characteristic of much of Forster's writing. But it is less a literary device in its own terms than a direct function of the double plot structures that I have been discussing in this chapter. The fantastic, for Forster, identifies not so much a separate genre, or even a mode within a genre, as a tonal variable, a means of modulating a set of simultaneous narratives within a fiction. . . .

Furbank, from the perspective of the biographer, remarks how liberating an experience the writing of[' The Story of a Panic'] must have been for Forster, as it expressed Forster's own 'feelings of standing in the sunlight at last and possessing his own soul'. Nonetheless, within the fiction neither author nor creation seems fully to comprehend what has been unleashed. For, if the author was not completely in touch with the sub-plot of his own story, Eustace passes through the pages as a character only in spite of himself. Although the centre of the text, he decentres it by his silence. All the other characters are concerned with interpreting his actions, with reading him. But he takes his actions and his pre-language ('a strange loud cry, such as I should not have thought the human voice could have produced') and simply leaves the story. What comes to conclusion, as a result, is the telling, not the told. For, in so far as Eustace equals the told, the story absolutely resists closure. On the other hand, the story as Mr Tytler's telling is complete—the parodied Christian elements of betrayal, the thirty talents, death and rebirth closing it off even more completely than the account of his own complicity in the dénouement. Thus closure is verbal, the using-up of the story's language, rather than narrative, the exhaustion of the predicated experience.

Although 'The Story of a Panic' obviously uses several of the devices of fantasy—the strange footprints, a sudden demonic irruption, an ambiguous conclusion—it is primarily the narrator, in his meticulous documenting of what he imagines himself to have seen, who supplies what Todorov considers the precondition of the fantastic: 'that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event [The Fantastic, 1975]. But, unlike the writer of fantasy, Forster is not really interested in that 'hesitation', for the fantasist's aim, to authenticate the unreal or supernatural, is not his. Rather than emphasize the otherness of the supernatural experience, he dwells on the otherness of the natural. There is a blurring of boundaries, but in this story, which develops a poetics of desire rather than of fantasy, it is the object of desire that is blurred rather than the boundary between the real and the unreal.

It is worth recalling Edith Sitwell's odd reaction to 'The Eternal Moment' in this connection. For what she identified in describing it as 'the most horrifying ghost story' she had ever read, is precisely this sense of the otherness of the natural, where the uncanny is firmly fixed in the quotidian yet liable to sudden eruption. Indeed, one way of describing the central event of that story is as an encounter with a ghost, the 'dead' lover, Feo, now materialized as the stout and greasy concierge. The encounter is terrifying in so far as it is this 'ghost' that defines the present reality. But it is a displaced reality, for what seems real is the result of a fiction, has, in fact, its origins in a fiction. (It was the success of Miss Raby's novel that both made and unmade the village, creating its ghastly/ghostly present.) Here, however, the uncanny evolves from within; it is both a form of heightened seeing and a means of redefining reality: 'In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily'. There is not, as there is in 'The Story of a Panic', an intrusion from without. But 'The Eternal Moment', like that story of the previous year, also depicts the triumph of solipsism. In fact, reading it in the context of 'The Story of a Panic' and 'The Road from Colonus', particularly in terms of its handling of the final moments of vision, clarifies the endings of all three stories. Here the writer-heroine wills the unreality of the other characters as she triumphantly re-enters her own fiction. She is not a failed narrator like Mr Lucas. Although it may seem as if she had lost her moment those years ago on the hillside, she is able now to restore her fiction and render her moment 'eternal'. Thus at the story's end she is far closer to the position of Eustace than to Mr Lucas. The 'shouts and laughter of the escaping boy' have their parallel in her epiphanic recovery of her own past:

She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise. From the view-terrace she looked down on the perishing and perishable beauty of the valley, and, though she loved it no less, it seemed to be infinitely distant, like a valley in a star. At that moment, if kind voices had called her from the hotel, she would not have returned.

Like Eustace she is entirely true to her own vision. There is no breaking of faith, although it is worth noting the ironic echo in the name of the concierge, Feo, with its allusion to 'faith', but in a poetized or literary form that is appropriate to the false story in which he figured (the ordinary Italian word would have been fede).

Many of the early stories depend on a pattern involving a rupture between character and setting which is then generalized to individual and society. The details vary, but the pattern remains constant. All the characters, save the hero(ine), merge into a single and complicitous 'other': Colonel Leyland and Feo in 'The Eternal Moment', the narrator and Gennaro in 'The Story of a Panic', Inkskip and Worters in 'Other Kingdom', the daughter and the tourists in 'The Road from Colonus'. Although the fictions derive much of their energy from their vivid realizing of a 'real world' in all its specificity and comic detailing, that world is nonetheless repudiated in the central character's solitary and transforming vision. (This is true even of 'The Road from Colonus', where, in the querulous aftermath of the failed vision, Mr Lucas is still granted a human presence allowed no other character.) The fantastic in Forster's writing is entirely in the service of that vision, functioning both as a strategy of concealment for the writer and, from the perspective of the central character, of revelation.

However, there is one form of the fantastic with which Forster experimented where he, at least superficially, followed the norms and conventions of what we now know as science fiction, or, as it was called at the turn of the century, 'scientific romance' or 'scientific fantasy'. But 'The Machine Stops' (1909), the often-anthologized evidence of this experiment, is at least as much a polemic against as an example of the genre whose practices and forms it so deftly uses. Forster himself described it as 'a counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells', referring, most likely, to such texts as 'A Story of the Days to Come' (1899), 'When the Sleeper Wakes' (1899), Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1902) and A Modern Utopia (1905). All of these depend in varying degree on the assumption of a technologically advanced future society. Even the somewhat more fancifully imagined The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) and In the Days of the Comet (1906) may have been the object of Forster's 'counterblast'. These last two were in fact described by Wells some years later as 'distinctly on the optimistic side'. Not that Wells's view of human nature was particularly Panglossian; he claimed to be 'neither a pessimist nor an optimist . . . [for] this is an entirely indifferent world in which wilful wisdom seems to have a perfectly fair chance' [Preface to Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells, 1978]. But for Wells, 'wilful wisdom' could properly be directed at inventing machines that would ease life's physical difficulties, thus transforming society and solacing the spirit. Such a meliorist point of view was, of course, totally antithetical to Forster's. In a diary entry of 1908 (the year in which he was writing 'The Machine Stops'), Forster makes this clear in terms that are particularly pertinent to this story: 'No more fighting, please, between the soul and the body, until they have beaten their common enemy, the machine.'

Indeed, such a statement could well be regarded as the essayistic kernel of his fiction. For this story, like 'Mr Andrews' and 'The Other Side of the Hedge', develops its generating idea both fictionally and discursively. The idea both precedes and is embedded in the story, taking its fictional form in Kuno's defiance of the machine by his physical strength. Since it was then 'a demerit to be muscular', his refusal to let his body become 'a swaddled lump of flesh' was in itself a moral act which had the practical consequence of allowing his escape. It is precisely because he resists the machine on a physical level, because he insists upon presence and touch, that he can fight the machine with his soul. Unlike the others, he is not 'seized with the terrors of direct experience'; on the contrary, he seeks that experience, searching, like Dante's pilgrim, for a glimpse of the stars.

The metaphor for Kuno's quest—the constellation Orion—is, like Hermes as the spirit of fantasy, part of Forster's private myth-making. From The Longest Journey onward, Orion, in his frosty glories, rising in autumn with his promise of freedom, provided a nucleus of important associations and constituted a radiant image of desire. Within the story, the image has both personal significance for Kuno and a generalized relevance for those fragments of humanity who were waiting 'in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops'. When the whole hideous edifice of Our civilization' comes crashing down, the 'untainted sky' and the stars remain, especially those stars that suggest a man: 'The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword'.

His attempts to make his mother understand this 'idea' fail, for she still believes that it is the machine that is the measure of all things, not man as Kuno has come to understand. But Kuno's insight, won even at the cost of his hideous maiming by the worm-like mending apparatus, that 'a man of my sort lived in the sky', is literally as well as metaphorically true. Even the landscape partakes of this anthropomorphic quality: 'to me they [the hills] were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled'.

It is Kuno's voice, especially in his account of his attempted escape, that is closest to the narrator's, but the narrative point of view stays with Vashti. The effect is, in a sense, to split the narrator's function, for he is both satirist and meditator. But, as the story moves to its climax, the satiric voice that in the first two sections parodied Utopian language and, for a large part of the third, dystopian conventions, merges with the meditative in an apocalyptic vision of the end of things. Primarily, however, the narrator is an essayist, looking for a fictional analogue for a metaphysical speculation. Indeed, from the very first line, when he invites the reader to assist him in this search ('imagine, if you can ...') , it is clear that the fiction is subordinate to the discourse: 'It was thus that she opened her prison and escaped—escaped in the spirit: at least so it seems to me, ere my meditation closes. That she escapes in the body—I cannot perceive that'. The narrator is both inside and outside the fiction; what he is looking at is an abstraction that temporarily has assumed human, i.e. fictional, form.

The story thus conflates a fictional and an essayistic perspective through a voice that would seem intrusive even in so highly determined a fiction as 'The Celestial Omnibus' but that here seems perfectly at home. For in 'The Machine Stops' the voice is the story; everything else is secondary to it. The conventions of 'scientific fantasy' function chiefly to give human scale to ideas, but these ideas are what the story is about. (This nicely reverses one of the points of satire within the fiction. In this future world everyone always talks of 'new ideas', but only if they are detached from direct experience. To Vashti, Kuno's 'idea that they [the stars in Orion] were like a man' is incomprehensible.) Thus, if in 'The Story of a Panic' closure was achieved in the telling but not the told, here the process is reversed. What is told is complete: 'The world, as they understood it, ended'. But telling—here coextensive with a voice located on the boundary between essay and fiction, and speaking through those figures it has asked the reader to imagine—is not confined by fictional closure and is, indeed, the major creation of the text.

'The Machine Stops' focuses many of the issues raised in the first four chapters—story as essay, story as private myth, story as vehicle for voice. It further illustrates what may be called the salvation paradigm that Forster described in his Commonplace Book: Two people pulling each other into salvation is the only theme I find worthwhile'. Certainly the movement from confusion to salvation is both organizing principle and primary thematic concern in nearly every story. Sometimes the line between the two poles—confusion and salvation—is straight, as in 'Mr Andrews' or 'The Celestial Omnibus'; sometimes curving, as in 'The Other Side of the Hedge', or even more indirect, as in 'The Machine Stops' when Vashti finally breaks her complicity with the others to take the hand of her son; and sometimes it is involuted and tortuous, as in 'The Life to Come' and 'The Other Boat'. Even in stories where it doesn't function, 'The Eternal Moment' or 'Arthur Snatchfold' for example, it offers an oblique comment on the ironically disclosed turn of events. Indeed the later story presents the exact reversal of the ending of the much earlier one. For in that story it is as if the Feo of 'The Eternal Moment' had become a worthy object. As the unheroic Sir Richard Conway is forced to confront his own diminished life, he knows that he is not saved in the terms that the salvation paradigm would suggest, although Arthur Snatchfold had certainly saved him in the more worldly terms Conway has based his life on.

Finally one may observe that 'Arthur Snatchfold' is not only an example of the story as novel in all its finely ironic social detailing, but, even more, like 'The Machine Stops', an example of the story as essay. Its great achievement is to endow Conway's moment of recognition with enormous human weight, making that moment comment on his entire life in the way such revelations do in Chekhov and Mansfield. Unlike Mansfield, however, who constructed such moments chiefly to illuminate her character (or to shock the reader into an equivalent illumination), Forster continues to speak through his character, never losing sight of the discursive argument that the character is made to bear, and bear the more impressively because of the human specificity with which he is invested.