SOURCE: Niederhoff, Burkhard. “E. M. Forster and the Supersession of Plot by Leitmotif: A Reading of Aspects of the Novel and Howards End.” Anglia 112, no. 3-4 (1994): 341-63.

[In the following essay, Niederhoff examines similarities between Forster's discussion of novels in Aspects of the Novel and Howards End.]

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes about Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, “The book is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.”¹ To illustrate what he means by “rhythms”, Forster mentions a leitmotif well known to the readers of the Recherche. “There are several examples […], but the most important, from the binding point of view, is his use of the ‘little phrase’ in the music of Vinteuil. This little phrase does more than anything else […] to make us feel that we are in a homogeneous world” (113 f.). Forster does not tell us in so many words that Proust's novel needs the binding and stitching provided by its rhythms, because it is otherwise lacking in structure and cohesion, but the passage at least implies a relation between the absence of one kind of narrative unity, which he does not specify, and the presence of another, which he does specify: the coherence created by rhythms, or leitmotifs². This implication is spelt out by David Lodge, who seizes on Forster's remarks on rhythm to describe the formal features of modernist fiction:

To compensate for the diminution of narrative structure and unity, alternative methods of aesthetic ordering become more prominent, such as allusion to or imitation of literary models or mythical archetypes, and the repetition-with-variation of motifs, images, symbols—a technique variously described as “rhythm”, “Leitmotif” and “spatial form”³.

Lodge adds a new aspect to Forster's idea by arguing in historical terms. Whereas Forster does not claim that the way in which Vinteuil's phrase stitches together the otherwise fragmented Recherche is typical of the writing of his contemporaries, Lodge maintains that this structural feature distinguishes the modernist fiction written by novelists like Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce from the realist fiction of the 19th century, which dominated the literary scene until World War I and reemerged in the thirties with Orwell, Greene, and the later Isherwood⁴.

One of the traditional coherence-creating devices that modernist writers like Woolf and Joyce abandon and replace by leitmotifs is the Aristotelian plot, i. e. an arrangement of incidents that are causally connected and form a unity with a beginning, middle, end and no or relatively few loose ends. Ulysses does not have a plot in this traditional sense. From the point of view of the causal logic of such a plot, Joyce's novel is an immense collection of loose ends, and this is one of the reasons why the first-time reader usually experiences it as a sequence of disconnected fragments and details. However, if we reread the novel or use the leitmotif index compiled by William Schutte⁵, we will be able to make sense of many phrases or details by relating them to their other occurrences in the novel. Arguably, in Ulysses this reading via remembering and anticipation is more important than the ordinary kind of reading, i. e. the linear progression from one word or sentence to the next.

If it is possible to summarize one of the structural features of modernist fiction with the slogan “exit plot—enter leitmotif”, it appears that we cannot include Forster's novels in this kind of fiction. Although these novels contain many leitmotifs, they also rely on traditional plot devices, as has been pointed out repeatedly, for instance by Peter Burra⁶. One example from Howards End is the way in which the various plot lines and the three different families (the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts) are linked to each other. Henry Wilcox first interferes in Leonard Bast's life when the Schlegel sisters ask him for his opinion on Leonard's situation. Henry's advice that Leonard quit his job leads to the clerk's ending up in constant unemployment. When the enraged Helen Schlegel takes the Basts to Oniton to demand that Henry compensate them for the consequences of his advice, there is an anagnorisis reminiscent of 18th or 19th century novels in that it combines a far-fetched coincidence with a moral lesson: Ten years ago Henry had an affair with Jacky Bast. Thus he has not only ruined Leonard's professional prospects but also the moral and social standing of his wife. V. Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway features a constellation of characters which is similar to that of Howards End; Septimus Warren Smith and Mrs. Dalloway are socially at least as remote from each other as Henry Wilcox and Leonard Bast. Woolf, however, does not link her characters by a plot device of the Forsterian kind. She establishes connections between Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway through other means, e. g. by leitmotifs that are associated with both of them, or by abruptly shifting the narrative perspective from him to her (sometimes via an object or sound perceived by both of them, as the ringing of Big Ben).

In spite of these obvious differences between Howards End and such modernist novels as Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses, I will argue that Forster's novel participates in the modernist project of “exit plot—enter leitmotif”. Woolf and Joyce express their discontent with the Aristotelian arrangement of incidents by simply discarding it. Forster expresses a similar discontent by creating a plot and making it fail. Howards End is not only a novel about houses, people, views, and values, it is also a novel about the various aspects of the novel, a poetological experiment in which plot is tried and found wanting. A passage which is crucial for this view of the novel occurs at the beginning of the penultimate chapter, when Margaret reflects on Leonard's death and the events and complications that led up to it.

Events succeeded in a logical, yet senseless, train. People lost their humanity, and took values as arbitrary as those in a pack of playing-cards. It was natural that Henry should do this and cause Helen to do that, and then think her wrong for doing it; natural that she herself should think him wrong; natural that Leonard should want to know how Helen was, and come, and Charles be angry with him for coming—natural, but unreal. In this jangle of causes and effects what had become of their true selves? Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king⁷.

The poetological implications of this passage are underlined by its similarities with Forster's remarks on plot in Aspects⁸. Margaret thinks of the events she has witnessed as a “jangle of causes and effects”; Forster defines plot as “a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality” (60). Furthermore, we find in Margaret's thoughts the king and the queen also used by Forster in his well-known examples of story and plot, which will be quoted below. This is not just a superficial and irrelevant coincidence, but a signal of the deeper underlying similarity between Aspects and Howards End. Just as Margaret rejects the “jangle of causes and effects” as “senseless” and “unreal”, Forster has misgivings about the causal structure of the plot, and just as Margaret feels that there is or should be something beyond the “ordered insanity” of the logical turn of events, Forster looks for other aesthetic aspects that enable the novelist to go beyond fabricating a plot, and the most important of these aspects, as we will see, is the leitmotif. To substantiate and flesh out this comparison between Howards End and Aspects, I will analyse the remarks on plot and leitmotif contained in the latter work before embarking on a reading of the novel.

In the introductory chapter of Aspects, Forster rejects a historical approach to the novel, stating his intention to “exorcise that demon of chronology” (8) and to treat novelists from different periods as if they were all simultaneously at work in one room (9). What may seem like a whimsical metaphorical ornament (“exorcise that demon of chronology”) is in fact revealing and crucial, because it reflects one of Forster's basic tenets, his profound aversion to time, an aversion which surfaces in many arguments, metaphors and rhetorical manoeuvres in Aspects⁹. Having thus settled on a typological rather than a historical approach, Forster selects seven aspects which will be treated in the subsequent chapters: “The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy and Prophecy; Pattern and Rhythm” (16). The most relevant for our purposes are of course plot and rhythm, but we will also have to glance at the other aspects, since Forster's book on the novel is, despite his assertion that one cannot approach the “spongy tract” of the novel with “principles and systems” (15), underpinned by a coherent system of ideas and values, and thus the remarks on one aspect often have implications for the others.

According to Forster, the most primitive element of the novel is the story, a mere “narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence” (18), the appropriate audience for a story being a group of “cave-men”, whose only response is the question “‘And then?’”, the curiosity to learn what happens next (60). As the story is governed by the “demon of chronology” so much feared by Forster, his opinion of this aspect is a very low one: “When we isolate the story like this from the nobler aspects through which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps—wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time—it presents an appearance that is both unlovely and dull” (19). To distinguish the story from other aspects of the novel, Forster opposes a “life in time” to a “life by values”. The story is limited to the former, and if the novelist wants to include the latter, he has to do so by “using devices hereafter to be examined” (19), i. e. the other aspects of the novel enumerated above. The distinction between a “life in time” and a “life by values” is a heavily loaded one, as it implies that time is without value and even opposed to it. From a logical point of view, the cogency of the distinction is easily challenged. Values may be atemporal, but so are a host of other abstract notions. Why not oppose time to space, character, stability or eternity? Thus the distinction may not be a very compelling one in logical terms, but it certainly is a revealing rhetorical manoeuvre that reflects Forster's hostility to the “demon of chronology”.

According to Forster, a plot differs from a story in that it adds two features to the mere narrative of events in their chronological order: causality and mystery (it does not become quite clear whether the second criterion is an obligatory or an optional one, and this vagueness about the definition of plot is something that we will have to return to later on):

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

(60)

Plot is superior to story because it requires intelligence and memory on the reader's part. The illustration of why these are required focuses on mystery rather than causality, and we will presently see why. A mystery “occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence”, it is “a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in ‘Why did the queen die?’, and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead” (61). As readers of plots with mysteries, we need memory to retain an adequate picture of the “pocket[s] in time”, and we need intelligence to recognize the solutions that belong in these pockets when we come across them later on in the novel. I suggest that Forster's appreciation of mystery stems from his dislike of “the naked worm of time” and his esteem for anything that emancipates us, however modestly, from chronology. Forster's first plot criterion, causality, does little to do so; on the contrary, it implies chronology, since causes precede effects. When mystery with its “pocket[s] in time” comes in and makes Tuesday precede Monday and effects precede causes, it has to suspend causality along with chronology.

In his remarks on Meredith, Forster gives us another reason why plot should be appreciated: It can produce surprises like the horse-whipping of Dr. Shrapnel in Beauchamp's Career. Here Forster praises plot for something that, once again, does not follow from its first defining criterion. For causality implies predictability; particular causes make us expect particular effects. In order to create surprises, novelists may opt for the easy way out by simply dispensing with causality and introducing a coincidence or a deus ex machina, or they may attempt to produce an unexpected effect by contriving a particularly sophisticated arrangement of causes. Thus surprise resembles the two other praiseworthy aspects of plot (the gratification of intelligence and memory) in that it does not follow from its first defining characteristic. It is a triumph over rather than a result of causality.

Forster mentions two further features of plot, both of which, in his eyes, amount to limitations and drawbacks for the novelist. First, the demands of plot clash with those of character. In one of the most delightful passages of Aspects, Forster visualizes the plot “as a sort of higher government official” who holds forth on the lack of public spirit in the population of the novel (59). Second, plot is planned. The plot-maker “plans his book beforehand; or anyhow he stands above it, his interest in cause and effect gives him an air of predetermination” (67). Forster regards both features as limitations which are inescapable in drama but which the novelist might perhaps replace by something else:

It [the contribution of a character to the plot] is accorded, and of necessity, by the people in a drama; how necessary is it in a novel? (60) After all, why has a novel to be planned? […] The plot is exciting and may be beautiful, yet is it not a fetish, borrowed from the drama, from the spatial limitations of the stage? Cannot fiction devise a framework that is not so logical yet more suitable to its genius?

(67)¹⁰

I will argue that the framework envisaged here is provided by the aspect of rhythm or leitmotif, but before we can move on to this aspect, we have to look at an intriguing and rather surprising passage of Forster's chapter on plot. Describing how the reader recognizes clues and establishes chains of cause and effect, Forster introduces a new idea.

The final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact […] We come up against beauty here—for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at being there.

(61 f.)

As well she might—because Forster does not mention her again in the chapter on plot. And by the time he finally conducts her to her proper place, she may be a little irritated, because he has left her waiting until the final chapter, “Pattern and Rhythm”. Beauty also involves Forster in a clear-cut contradiction. Thus, plot is planned and premeditated (67), while beauty should not be aimed at (i. e. planned and premeditated) by the novelist; nevertheless she is part of a completed plot (61 f.). The uncertainty about the proper place of beauty and the ensuing contradictions result from the fact that the term plot has to cover a very wide semantic area: all the structural features between the lowest aspect, story, and the highest aspects, pattern and rhythm. Forster uses the term very loosely; sometimes he thinks of plot in broad terms including structural aspects like mystery or surprise and reaching into the realm of pattern, rhythm and beauty¹¹. However, sometimes he thinks of it in narrow terms as the planning of a causal chain, as “hammer[ing] away all the time at cause and effect” (22). This second, narrowly defined type of plot occupies a very low rank in the Forsterian value system; it adds nothing to the primitive and time-bound aspect of story but causality and planning, and as we have seen, none of these two features elicits any positive comments from Forster. That the two are related is shown in the statement already quoted above that the plotmaker's “interest in cause and effect gives him an air of predetermination” (67, my italics).

It is important to be aware of these shifting definitions because otherwise the appreciative remarks on plot in Aspects might obscure the close relations between this book and Howards End, and furthermore the relations between these works and the project of “exit plot—enter leitmotif” in modernist novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. It is plot in the narrow sense, confined to the features of causality and planning, which is tried and found wanting in Howards End. I have already pointed out that causality is the dominant theme in the passage at the end of the novel that reviews the events from Margaret's point of view, and we will see the relevance of the related criterion of planning for an analysis of the novel later on. One might add that even the metaphors of Aspects and Howards End match up with each other, if one looks at those passages in the theoretical work in which Forster thinks of the plot in its narrow causal sense. If you “hammer away all the time at cause and effect”, is not what you produce the “jangle” perceived by Margaret?

Let us proceed to pattern and rhythm. A pattern is a large-scale structure of events, for instance, the “hour-glass” (104) or chiastic one of Henry James's The Ambassadors. Whereas the plot appeals to our intelligence, pattern “appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole” (103). This seeing of the book as a whole is of course a far cry from the cave-dweller's question “And then?”; and the beauty ascribed to pattern is a consequence of its triumph over chronology: “Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book, the book as a whole, the unity” (104). However, patterns have their drawbacks. Like plots, they have to be planned (105), and they take a heavy toll on the characters and on the demands of realism in general (112). After praising James for the beauty of The Ambassadors, Forster claims that most readers cannot accept the sacrifices entailed by a pattern, finding it “‘beautifully done, but not worth doing’” (112).

After this dismissal of pattern, Forster finally passes on to rhythm: “Still, this is not the end of our quest. We will not give up the hope of beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method than the pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of ‘rhythm’” (112). This is not the language of an impartial narratologist, but that of a writer who has a stake in what he analyses. If Forster has not given up the hope of beauty yet, it is implied that the aspects he has looked at so far have been tried and, at least partially, found wanting; and if he is near the end of his “quest”, it seems that rhythm is destined to bring about the final fulfillment of his hope for untrammeled beauty. We might also note in passing that the simple fact of the final position has an evaluative function. Stone aptly characterizes the table of contents in Aspects as a “hierarchy of value” (110), and Forster generally makes the superior aspect succeed the inferior one: plot comes after story, round character after flat, prophecy after fantasy. Rhythm is indeed the successful end of Forster's quest. By establishing links between various passages of a novel separated in time, it exorcises “the demon of chronology”, achieving “the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader's memory” (115) and making “us feel that we are in a homogeneous world” (113 f.). Thus, rhythm is like pattern in liberating us from the tyranny of Forster's archenemy, time, and in the creation of order and beauty; but unlike pattern, rhythm achieves all this without being planned and “without mutilating the characters” (115), i. e. without the sacrifices that make Henry James's hour-glasses “‘beautifully done, but not worth doing.’”

It is high time we return to Howards End, a novel in which the ideas, values and implications of Aspects are embodied in fictional form, and we may as well begin with a quotation from Helen's opening letter to Margaret.

I looked out earlier, and Mrs Wilcox was already in the garden. She evidently loves it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday—I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it. The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing and had to stop. Then I hear more cliqueting, and it is Mr Wilcox practising, and then: “a-tissue, a-tissue”: he has to stop too. Then Evie comes out, and does some callisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked on to a greengage-tree—they put everything to use—and then she says “a-tissue”, and in she goes. And finally Mrs Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers.

(2)

Before pointing out the relation of this narrative vignette to Aspects, plot and leitmotif, I would like to focus on its most noticeable feature, the contrast in characterization. Mrs. Wilcox does not seem to engage in actions that have a purpose extraneous to themselves, whereas the other members of her family “put everything to use”, most of all themselves. The males do not play croquet, they “practise” it; and Evie does “exercises”. They tack machines on to plants, whereas Mrs. Wilcox prefers to smell and view them. This contrast between useful exercise on the one hand and non-purposive activity on the other derives a paradoxical twist from the fact that Mr. Wilcox and his children engage in games and sports, while Mrs. Wilcox is the only one who actually accomplishes something useful (fetching food for the rabbits). However, even in doing so she does not give her visitor that impression. What strikes Helen is not that Mrs. Wilcox carries the hay somewhere, but that she smells it. This contributes another, seemingly trivial contrastive feature to our interpretation of this passage. The hay Mrs. Wilcox so loves to smell is what makes the rest of her family go “a-tissue”. The contrast in characterization is supported by a contrast in structure. Mr. Wilcox's, Charles's and Evie's attempts at useful exercise are single, isolated, and abortive. After they have been driven back into the house, Mrs. Wilcox reappears and repeats what she did before: She looks at the flowers, smells the hay, and her dress trails over the soppy grass. These actions frame and enclose, as it were, those of the rest of her family, and the stability and continuity involved in the repetition of Mrs. Wilcox's actions emphasize the superiority of her non-purposive activity over the others' frustrated attempts at putting themselves to use.

Helen herself indicates that there is something special and significant about the scene described in her letter. “It really does seem not life but a play” (2). This brief “play” is indeed significant because its structure prefigures that of the novel as a whole, with Mrs. Wilcox's reappearance corresponding to the repetition of leitmotifs and to the recurrence of Howards End (which may not, strictly speaking, be a leitmotif itself, but at any rate is composed of leitmotifs¹²), and the Wilcoxes' frustrated attempts at useful exercise corresponding to the major plot lines, by which I mean planned, purposive actions initiated by one or more of the characters. As the Wilcoxes are driven back into the house, so the plot lines tend to end in failure and defeat. Margaret anticipates these failures in one of the first scenes, echoing, on a different level of course, Forster's lack of confidence in planning and premeditation. “‘Plans, lines of action—no, Aunt Juley, no’” (7), she opines when she argues with Mrs. Munt about how to react to the news of Helen's engagement to Paul Wilcox. Mrs. Munt's trip to Howards End is one of the many examples of the frustration that typically befalls planned and purposive action in Howards End. Mrs. Munt, who argues in favour of a plan (6) and who wants to make sure that Helen's prospective husband is a suitable choice, intends to go about this delicate project very diplomatically. However, by the time of her arrival at Howards End, she has managed to mistake Charles for Paul and get involved in a heated argument with the former about the respective worth of the Schlegel and the Wilcox families, an argument that is all the more pointless and ridiculous since the engagement has already been broken off. Further examples of plots that are thwarted in various ways are Margaret's attempt to prevent a renewed acquaintance with the Wilcoxes, Leonard's endeavour to raise himself through culture, Helen's efforts to help him in doing so, and Henry's elaborate scheme to catch Helen. There appears to be one exception to the rule, Mr. Wilcox's proposal to Margaret, which is both elaborately planned (he manoeuvres her to London on the pretence of offering his flat for rent) and successful. However, we do not experience the proposal as a planned and plotted action, since our point of view in the scenes preceding it is with Margaret. For her and for us, it comes as a surprise, i. e. as the opposite of plans and premeditation.

The prime antagonist to plans and premeditation is Howards End. When it intrudes on the characters' lives, it usually comes as a surprise, and sometimes runs counter to their intentions. The Wilcoxes, for instance, are astonished and far from pleased when they discover Mrs. Wilcox's pencil-written will leaving Howards End to Margaret. When Margaret and Mr. Wilcox have become engaged, they think so little of Howards End as a place to live that they use it as a storage facility for the Schlegels' furniture. On two of the three occasions that see Mr. Wilcox and Margaret at Howards End, they have to go there because of incidents that run counter to their plans: the tenant's leaving the house with the intention to sublet it, and Miss Avery's furnishing the house with the Schlegels' belongings. The third occasion is Henry's scheme to catch Helen, which leads up to the denouement, in which everybody's plans and purposes are defeated. Before this denouement, Henry and Margaret have decided to build a house in Sussex, since Howards End does not suit their needs; Helen wants to go to Munich to move in with an Italian feminist; and Leonard simply wants to apologize to Margaret. Although none of these plans are realized, the stage is not strewn with corpses, and the novel ends on a moderately happy note. Helen, Margaret, and Mr. Wilcox find a refuge at Howards End, and Leonard finds his death (which is more than a defeat, because his son will inherit Howards End, and because death is part of the cyclic order symbolized by Howards End, as I will try to argue below¹³). Although the plot persistently points away from Howards End, the latter keeps on reappearing and finally reemerges as the place and symbol of a sane order which is superior to the “ordered insanity” of plans and premeditation. Thus it encloses and proves superior to the characters' plotted actions in the same way in which Mrs. Wilcox's repeated smelling of the hay frames and supersedes the other Wilcoxes' attempts at putting themselves to use.

The hay does not only recur in the scene from Helen's letter; it also recurs throughout the novel, establishing, with the other leitmotifs, that cohesion and order which the various plot lines fail to achieve. I will conclude this essay by analysing the hay motif and another very important one, the word connect. This word is related to what is arguably the most important theme in Forster's writings: the connection between antagonistic and fragmented positions or people¹⁴, in the case of Howards End between the aesthetic Schlegels and the utilitarian Wilcoxes, and furthermore between both of these upper middle-class families and the lower middle-class Basts. In addition to its thematic import, the word connect indicates its own structural and aesthetic function as a leitmotif. After encountering it for the first time in the epigraph, “‘Only connect …,’” we should observe it while reading the novel in the same manner in which a musician observes the composer's andante or allegretto at the beginning of the score: Only connect the various instances of this and other leitmotifs, and you will perceive something beyond the “jangle of causes and effects”, the fragmented realm of the plot. In my analysis of the motif, I cannot treat all its wide-ranging thematic implications in the novel, instead I will attempt a close reading of the motif in some of its contexts, with special emphasis on the question of who it is used by.

In the first occurrence in the epigraph, which I have just quoted, both the quotation marks and the ellipsis are significant. Forster quotes the motif from Margaret's thoughts, thus establishing an alliance between her and himself and making her the most “authoritative” character of the novel. The ellipsis indicates something which is true for most leitmotifs and this one in particular; the motif is not meant to stand in isolation, but to attract and connect various contexts throughout the novel. We next encounter the word when Margaret hesitates to accept Mrs. Wilcox's spontaneous invitation to Howards End. “The nine windows, the vine and the wych-elm had no pleasant connections for her, and she would have preferred to spend the afternoon at a concert” (83). Thus Margaret's first encounter with the motif is not a very enthusiastic one. She is reluctant to connect, because it is risky and difficult, as her sister's disastrous failure to establish a lasting connection with the Wilcoxes has proved. After this first inconclusive instance, however, Margaret uses the motif in an affirmative and emphatic way. In a quarrel with Leonard, she reproaches him because he has not established a connection between his adventurous and romantic nocturnal walk and his everyday life as an insurance clerk (140). In the next instance of the motif she urges Mr. Wilcox in an imaginary plea, “Only connect!” (183). This is the phrasing of the motif that Forster quotes in his epigraph, thus emphasizing Margaret's role as the character closest to the authorial views and values. There are several other instances in which Margaret urges Mr. Wilcox to connect or regrets his inability to do so (206, 246, 329); the most important of these is her demand that he acknowledge the connection between his own affair with Jackie and Helen's affair with Leonard (305).

Although connect is Margaret's motif, we also encounter it in the words and thoughts of Helen, Leonard, and Henry, but we will find that these characters have difficulties with the motif. Helen uses it twice, the first instance being somewhat complicated by a doubling of perspectives. On her first visit to Howards End, the solitary and slightly uncanny atmosphere makes Margaret think that she has left the ordinary world behind and entered a new one. “How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, nothing alive but houses and gardens. The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and—no connection at all between them. Margaret smiled. Would that her own fancies were as clear-cut!” (197). Unlike her sister, Helen revels in a lack of connection—if we can trust Margaret's view of her. That we can do so is confirmed by the second instance in which Helen uses this motif, once again failing to connect. When the sisters are reunited at Howards End after their long separation, Helen discovers the greengage tree and asks, “‘Why do I connect it with dumb-bells?’” (295). However, she does not remember why and goes on to talk about something else. The answer to her question is that, on her first visit to Howards End, she saw Evie doing callisthenic exercises at the tree, but Helen's lack of memory prevents her from establishing this connection, and memory, our resource against time, is a prime virtue both in Aspects and in Howards End. The very scene in which Helen asks her questions about the dumbbells shows the two sisters regaining their intimacy by recalling the past and relating it to the present.

Leonard uses the motif twice in a quarrel with Margaret and Helen, which is triggered off by the arrival of Henry and his daughter Evie. Leonard complains that the Schlegels invited him because they want to gather information about the company for which he works. Margaret does not defend herself against this allegation, but starts to talk about his romantic nocturnal walk. Quite understandably, he interrupts her saying that he fails to see the connection (140), a remark which triggers off her speech urging him to connect the romance and adventure of his nocturnal walk with his daily life. During the same quarrel, Leonard appeals to Henry for justice and introduces himself with the words, “‘I'm connected with a leading insurance company, sir’” (139). This is almost like a parody of Margaret's use of the motif. The word “connect” is not used in an attempt to bridge the gulf between business and culture, but in a statement that signals the separation of these worlds and the related separation of the sexes. Talking to a business man, Leonard falls back on his role as an insurance clerk (just as he thought it appropriate to talk culture with the Schlegel sisters in the preceding conversation, while they insisted on discussing work and money). Leonard's appeal to Henry of all people is further undercut by the fact that it is the latter's false advice that will lead to the end of Leonard's connection with the insurance company and his constant unemployment.

Henry uses the phrase once. Plotting with his son Charles how to make Margaret and Helen leave Howards End, where they are spending the night against his will, he says, “‘To my mind this question is connected with something far greater, the rights of property itself’” (323). From a purely grammatical point of view, this is an affirmative use of the motif; it does not occur in a question as in Helen's case, nor is it overtly negated as in Leonard's statement that he fails to see the connection. Nevertheless, the phrase itself signals that Henry's use of the motif is a problematic and imperfect one, since it contains a dramatic irony, i.e. a discrepancy between his intention and the interpretation of a reader who knows how to remember and to connect. When Mr. Wilcox talks about “‘something far greater, the rights of property itself’”, he argues in legalistic terms, but the reader thinks of Mrs. Wilcox's pencil-written will leaving Howards End to Margaret, of Miss Avery's prophecy that Margaret is going to live there, and of the sisters's appreciation for the house. The negative and insufficient way in which Henry, Leonard and Helen use the motif distinguishes them from Margaret, the character who is responsible for connecting the fragments and reconciling the extremes. However, it also distinguishes them from Charles, Tibby, Mrs. Munt and the other characters in whose words and thoughts it does not occur at all. To use it, albeit in a negative or insufficient way, is a privilege, and we might note in passing that the four characters who share the motif with which the novel begins are those that are connected in the final synthesis, that live or die at Howards End.

A second important leitmotif in Howards End that we have already encountered twice is the hay¹⁵. It plays an important part in Mrs. Wilcox's repeated walks across the garden at Howards End in Helen's opening letter, and it also occurs in Margaret's reflections on the “jangle of causes and effects”: “Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity” (327, my italics). The conjunction “yet” separates this passage into two parts. The first belongs to the realm of the plot, in which Leonard's death is nothing but the final link in a causal chain of events; the second part is associated with the realm of the leitmotif, and, significantly, it is not only about death, but includes life as well. The style and the structure of the second part express the contrast between fragmentation and lack of connection on the one hand and the unity and coherence provided by leitmotifs on the other. If we look only at the passage itself and its immediate context, it will remain a jumble of arbitrary and enigmatic metaphors; if we remember the other occurrences of the images, in other words, if we read the passage in terms of its leitmotifs, we shall recognize its meaning and enter a world of order and cohesion, as I will try to show for one of the enigmatic phrases, the “wisp of hay”, which is part of the hay motif¹⁶.

If we look at the instances of this motif that occur before the statement that “death [was] a wisp of hay, a flower”, we will find none in which hay is overtly associated with death, but in one instance the motif occurs in precisely the same form as in the passage quoted above. Listening to the sophisticated chatter at Margaret's lunch, Mrs. Wilcox feels out of her depth. “Clever talk alarmed her, and withered her delicate imaginings; it was the social counterpart of a motor-car, all jerks, and she was a wisp of hay, a flower” (71, my italics). Thus the association of hay with death mostly builds on the associations of the motif with Mrs. Wilcox, as she is the only major character who has died and whose death has played an important part in the novel, when Leonard's sudden end makes Margaret think that death is a wisp of hay. It is Mrs. Wilcox's death that we have to think of in interpreting the motif, and this in turn helps to explain why the passage does not rigidly distinguish death from life (“life and death were anything and everything”). While Mrs. Wilcox was alive, she “cared about her ancestors, and let them help her” (19), and after her death she continues to be a helping and shaping influence on the other characters, especially on Margaret who becomes her successor and heir in several ways and who comes to think that she and Helen “‘and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind’” (311).

The two passages about Leonard's death and Mrs. Wilcox are linked to each other not only by the wisp of hay, but also by the motif of the flower. Leitmotifs are gregarious, the contexts in which they occur are very often other leitmotifs, and the collocation of hay and flowers is not limited to the two passages I have quoted; it also occurs in the passage from Helen's letter in which Mrs. Wilcox smells the hay and looks at flowers at the same time. The association between flowers and death has been prepared for by previous instances of the motif. When Leonard goes to St Paul's to look at an allegorical painting, death is depicted with a “lap of poppies, on which all men sleep” (316), and when he lies dead in the garden of Howards End, Margaret gathers narcissi because to her it seems “wisest that the hands of Leonard should be folded on his breast and be filled with flowers” (328). The most important and intriguing instance of the flower motif occurs in the chapter on the incidents after Mrs. Wilcox's funeral. When it is over, a young man who has been pollarding trees on the cemetery, wrenches a chrysanthemum from the sheaf sent by Margaret, presumably for his girl-friend, because he is thinking about her when he passes by the grave, and when he returns the next morning after “a night of joy”, he regrets not having taken all the flowers (87).

The cemetery worker and his “night of joy” disrupt and oppose the contextual association of flowers and death, and there is a similar disruption and opposition of meanings in the hay motif, since we find it associated with young children in several instances. Tom, Miss Avery's grand-nephew, likes to turn somersaults in the straw (266, 296f., 299), and in the final chapter he asks whether Helen's baby is old enough to play with hay (333). Helen takes him and her baby out into the meadow which is being cut, and a little later, holding Tom by one hand and carrying the baby on the other, she rushes into the house to close the novel with her enthusiastic outburst that “‘it'll be such a crop of hay as never’”. Thomson points out an important passage in the final chapter in which Helen picks up a bunch of grass from the meadow, which has just been mowed, and looks at the different species contained in it. Immediately before, Margaret has reassured her sister that the differences between the two sisters are to be welcomed because they provide “‘colour in the daily gray’” of life (336). Thomson is right in pointing out the parallel between these two passages, but the conclusion of his interpretation of them is somewhat cryptic: “Hay represents not just individual man, but man in his individuality” (182). The contrasting meanings of the motif discerned above and the logic of the passage rather suggest that the motif represents a totality that encompasses individual differences. The hay consists of different species, is part of a seasonal cycle that involves different stages of growth, and it moves through a series of different contexts that associate it with such various and opposed meanings as the uproarious somersaults of Tom, the worker's “night of joy”, and death. Thus it attempts on a structural and symbolic level what Margaret attempts on a spiritual and personal level: to connect in order to achieve a vital synthesis.

There is one further aspect of the hay motif that needs to be considered, the way in which it creates alliances and oppositions between the characters. While hay, grass, and straw in general are smelt and appreciated by Mrs. Wilcox and the Schlegel sisters, the other Wilcoxes do not appreciate it at all, since they suffer from hay fever. This has been noted by several critics; but to my knowledge it has not been pointed out or sufficiently explained that Margaret's younger brother Tibby is also prone to this allergic complaint. His hay fever is the reason why Margaret cannot accompany Helen on her first visit to Howards End; and when Miss Avery maliciously asserts that “‘there's not one Wilcox that can stand up against a field in June’”, Margaret reminds us again that her brother also gets it (270). Thus the aesthetic and intellectual Tibby is, surprisingly, grouped with the practical and utilitarian Wilcoxes, although he seems to be at the opposite end of the character spectrum from them; with Charles, for instance, he has “nothing in common but the English language” (306). What is the point of this disruptive grouping of completely opposed characters and contexts? The point is that Howards End does not favour one world view, family, or group of people over another, but advocates a synthesis of the opposed realms. It condemns extremes like the purely utilitarian Charles Wilcox and the purely intellectual Tibby Schlegel and underlines their resemblance as extremes that contribute nothing towards bringing about the desired synthesis. Even those who do not heed the epigraph of the novel are connected with each other, if only by their refusal to connect.

Notes

1. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, 12 (London, 1972), p. 113. Henceforth cited as Aspects.

2. I have decided to use leitmotif rather than rhythm because it is a more common and accepted term for the repetition of phrases and images throughout a novel. Furthermore, rhythm is also used in a different sense by Forster. Besides the “easy rhythm” or leitmotif exemplified by Vinteuil's phrase in the Recherche there is a “difficult rhythm” which Forster defines, in a very tentative way, by a musical analogy: “Is there any effect in novels comparable to the effect of the Fifth Symphony as a whole, where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never actually been played?” (115) For an attempt to use the elusive concept of “difficult rhythm”, see Audrey A. P. Lavin, Aspects of the Novelist: E. M. Forster—Rhetoric, Pattern and Rhythm (Alcala de Henares, 1989). The present paper will only deal with “easy rhythm” or leitmotif; in my view, Forster's “difficult rhythm”, the subject of the concluding pages of Aspects, is not a concept that can be clearly defined and used in criticism but rather a final rhetorical gesture towards a utopian perfection of the novel.

3. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Chicago, 1977), p. 46. The concept of spatial form mentioned by Lodge is a very broad one, including a variety of literary techniques that summarize or compress time. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, in The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), pp. 3-66. Besides the influential article on spatial form, which was first published in the 1945 issue of Sewanee Review, this book contains a response to Frank's critics and further reflections on the concept of spatial form.

4. See his chapter “Two Kinds of Modern Fiction”, The Modes of Modern Writing, pp. 41-52.

5. Index of Recurrent Elements in James Joyce's Ulysses (Carbondale, Ill., 1982).

6. “The Novels of E. M. Forster”, Forster. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), pp. 21-33, 23 f. This important article, which won Forster's approval, is also available in the Penguin edition of A Passage to India.

7. Howards End, The Abinger Edition, 4, p. 327.

8. Although Aspects does not contain a single reference to a novel or short story by Forster, it is by no means an objective and detached treatise on the novel but a plea for and a comment on Forster's own works. This has been recognized by various critics, e. g. by E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto, 1950), pp. 4 f., but there are further insights to be gained from a close comparison between Aspects and the fictional works.

9. Wilfred Stone also points out some of the instances of this antagonism to time in Aspects (The Cave and the Mountain. A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford, Cal., 1966)), pp. 110 and 113. According to Frank, modern literature in general is characterized by an attempt to escape from the change and flux of historical time into a stable world of myth or cyclical repetition (footnote 3, pp. 61-64). Forster, who is not mentioned by Frank, could be cited in support of the latter's idea of “spatial form”, because his aversion to time is matched by an appreciation of space. “Very few [novelists] have the sense of space”, Forster writes in Aspects, “and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time” (27). Margaret, the character who is closest to the views and values of the author of Howards End, also has this “sense of space” (196, 198, 202).

10. Forster's misgivings about authors who plan are more fully explained elsewhere. In his essay “Anonymity: An Enquiry” (Two Cheers for Democracy, The Abinger Edition, 11, pp. 77-86) he argues along Freudian or Jungian lines that there is a lower, anonymous personality in each human mind. According to Forster, this second self contributes much more to a work of art than the upper, individual self. For a fuller exposition and analysis of this belief, see Rukun Advani, E. M. Forster as Critic (London, 1984), pp. 94-99. In a way, Forster's misgivings about planning are surprising, since anticipating the future involves an emancipation from the tyranny of time; perhaps one might speculate that Forster's aversion to time is ultimately nostalgic, biased towards memory and the past.

11. At the beginning of the final chapter, for instance, he introduces his definitions of pattern and rhythm by saying, “Now we must consider something which springs mainly out of the plot” (102).

12. Full-blown leitmotifs associated with Howards End are the hay, flowers, the Six Hills, the wych-elm, and the vine. An answer to the question whether Howards End is itself a leitmotif or rather an ensemble of leitmotifs would require a full discussion of the definition of the term. This would take up considerable space and is not essential to the present argument. For a recent attempt to define the term, see the chapter on terminology in Peter te Boekhorst's valuable study, Das literarische Leitmotiv und seine Funktionen in Romanen von Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf und James Joyce (Frankfurt a.M., 1987), pp. 5-29. To my mind, Boekhorst's definition is a little too narrow since it requires a verbatim repetition, i. e. a recurrence of the same word or words. However, sometimes leitmotifs are translated (as in the famous French chapter of Der Zauberberg) or they are repeated through synonyms.

13. This death and the way it is presented, especially in chapter 41, suggest a purely religious solution for the social and economic problem posed by Leonard. Of course, this is a highly questionable and perhaps an evasive solution, but a full discussion of this question is beyond the scope of the present paper. I am aware that Howards End is a problematic and uneven novel, but this paper is an analysis and interpretation rather than a critical evaluation. For a vigorous statement against the evasive tendencies of the novel and its treatment of Leonard Bast, see Stone, pp. 235-66.

14. The following quotation shows that the theme is of paramount importance, and that it also applies to the diverse aspects of one individual. “My defence at any Last Judgment”, Forster writes in a letter on Maurice, “would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with’—well you had it exhaustingly in Howards End, and Maurice, though his fragments are more scanty and bizarre than Margaret's, is working at the same job.” This letter is printed in P. N. Furbank's introduction to E. M. Forster, Maurice (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 9.

15. Some of the aspects of this motif have been dealt with by previous critics. Brown regards it as an “expanding symbol” that, by the end of the novel, has been “linked with everything that stands out against Wilcoxism” (51); James McConkey analyses how “Margaret's spiritual progression towards Mrs. Wilcox and Howards End is at least partially conveyed by Forster through the association of the hay image with Margaret herself” (The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), p. 126); George H. Thomson interprets hay “as an image for the individual seen under the aspect of death”, while the related image of grass “stands as an image for the individual seen under the aspect of life” (The Fiction of E. M. Forster (Detroit, Mich., 1967), p. 181).

16. Thomson offers an interpretation of this passage in a short note, “Forster's Howards End, Chapter 43”, The Explicator, 30 (1972), 64. Thomson rephrases the part of the passage that I will focus on as follows: “Life was a house, death a wisp of hay; (life was) a flower, (death) a tower.” This neat distribution of images and meanings, which is related to Thomson's interpretation of the motif summarized in the preceding footnote, misses the point of the hay motif which connects, as I will try to show, the meanings of both life and death, as it moves through various contexts. This mistake in interpretation partly results from a shortcoming in the premises of Thomson's and also, to a certain extent, Brown's approach. The latter regards the leitmotif as an expanding symbol, the former as an archetypal object; thus they focus too exclusively on the meaning of the motif itself and neglect its structural and contextual functions. It is interesting to see what the various contexts of a motif contribute to its meaning, but it is just as important to realize what the motif does to its contexts. James McConkey interprets the passage in question more adequately, he sees that “each of the images of Margaret's moment of horror […] contains its opposite as well” (129), but he does not sufficiently analyse how this implication of the opposite is achieved through repetition in various contexts.