SOURCE: Meisel, Perry. “Howards End: Private Worlds and Public Languages.” In The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850, pp. 166-82. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Meisel explores the influence of major writings and thoughts of the Bloomsbury group on the themes in Howards End.]

The senior Forster's Howards End recapitulates the myth of the modern at the level of story while simultaneously putting it into question at the level of narration. The manifest thematic that leads Forster, quite ironically, to ask that we “Only connect” in the book's epigraph turns out to be evacuated by the conspicuous connections systematically demonstrated by the behavior of its language, especially those between the supposedly sundered realms of the private and the public. Like The Mayor of Casterbridge, Howards End has a calculating myth of the modern that is the wittingly defensive function of a belatedness that its rhetoric takes into account.

Like The Waste Land, however, the novel as a whole appears to be the romance announced at its conclusion, replacing at its terminus the loss of Leonard Bast with the gain of a pastoral child—a lost one now found—who serves as the ideal of a primal harmony that is as wishful as the elf's own ritual invention. Howards End itself, of course, is a garden or paradise regained, with the child's resurrective emergence a symptom of the novel's ironically willful romance rather than a guarantee of the epistemological surety it appears to represent instead. Unlike Hardy's Elizabeth-Jane or Joyce's Rudy/Stephen, Forster's child is still partly privileged in his twin social genealogy, half-rich, half-poor, as though the novel wishes to leave a clear trace of its ambivalence about the impossibility of the ideal of landed or grounded identity that Joyce and Hardy alike plainly eschew. As in Eliot, moreover, the pastoral conclusion emphasizes the ease with which the structure of romance at large contains the redemptive romance of Christianity. But while the two are identifiable ideals for Eliot himself, for Forster they are positioned as structures of irony rather than as assertions of truth. As the book's secular Eden, after all, the property of Howards End is a symbol of that realm beyond culture to which literature may appeal when it is in the kind of crisis required to produce such desire. The book's goals are apparently those “endless levels beyond the grave” (1910:332) that signify an eternal truth represented by the summary figure of “the sacred centre of the field” (335) at the narrative's close. With the “wych-elm” (3) serving as a protective “boundary between the garden and meadow” (3), Forster obviously—perhaps too obviously—grounds a mythical primacy in the figure of the enigmatic Mrs. Wilcox. “‘Already in the garden’” (4) in the early morning early in the novel itself, Mrs. Wilcox is located in a fanciful landscape of redemptive origins consonant with her primal beatitude whose light overrides the kind of imaginative despair betokened by Coleridgean twilight or Gastonian dimness. “From the garden,” says Forster at the novel's close, “came laughter” (342). The ground or property of Howards End is, in short, consecrated as a center, a home, an origin that the will to modernity uniformly produces as a defense against the belatedness that assails it.

So suspiciously programmatic are Forster's spiritual homologues, however, that not only is Christianity but one token of the generic type of romance. So, too, is the structure of native, pagan religiosity that identifies in sequence the will to modernity in its Renaissance, Romantic, and properly High Modernist forms. Howards End has “goblins” (33-34) as well as a garden, the intimations of Shakespearean romance suggesting in turn the Romantic strategy, as in Blake's early sonnets, of invoking indigenous deities in order to regain original inspiration. By so identifying “folklore” (267) and the “Holy of Holies” as alike “transfigured” (85) in their primacy or simulation of godhead, the novel allows Christian and pagan romance to coalesce. Not surprisingly, then, a “halo” (68) surrounds Mrs. Wilcox's hands as she lies ill. Like the romance ideals with which she is thematically coincident, she represents, at least in Mr. Wilcox's mind at her funeral, “unvarying virtue” (89), almost absolute “innocence” (89)—in short, a static and eternal ideal of virtue and spirituality, although one that remains in the ground of Howards End even after she dies, since it subsequently transmutes or transfigures itself into Margaret. The origin represented by ground or property—the “end” or telos that Howards End is—is, in the pagan sense, the function of a genius loci for which Mrs. Wilcox is but a transient habitation and a name, as Margaret will be too. Mrs. Wilcox's divinity is, of course, a product of the ground of Howards End, not the other way around, its spirit allowing Margaret to become its vessel in her turn, and also situating the novel's overly obvious symbol for lost primacy not in a personality but in actual—not metaphorically philosophical—ground, real estate, property. In fact, once “under the earth” (90), Mrs. Wilcox becomes a double emblem for her representation of the soil, roots, ground to which the novel aspires in its synonymous romantic, Christian, Romantic, and modernist terms.

If the term “genius” means spirit or indwelling of origin, the equivalent aesthetic ideality of originality it also represents is, of course, the formal underbelly of what Howards End and Mrs. Wilcox signify from the point of view of literature proper. A wonderfully reflexive instance of the modernist desire she represents from the point of view of literary belatedness, Mrs. Wilcox predictably “worshipped the past” (22) and has “that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy” (22)—the same name to which Forster's elfin child remains partially attached as well. Like the garden she inhabits both dead and alive, Mrs. Wilcox is the paradise lost of the soil at large and the belated imagination in particular, the latter the former's projective condition of representability. Thus Forster's litany of ideals grows more explicitly literary as the novel proceeds—from “aura” (153) and “supernatural life” (171) to the “nymphs” (197) and “new sanctities” (222) of a “Fairyland” (223) that, says Forster openly, even “Prospero” (230) could have commanded. If Mrs. Wilcox begins the novel as an emblem of modernist literary desire, the Shakespearean conclusion is its balancing reflexive counterpart in the text's almost overcoded disposition of motifs that are ideological objects of scrutiny rather than expressive messages. Preparing us for the novel's climax and functioning also as the prototype for Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse is the aptly named Mrs. Avery (aery, sprightly), who looks after Howards End after the original Mrs. Wilcox's death and resurrects it for the transmigration of Howards End's genius into the new habitation of Margaret. True to her name, Mrs. A(v)ery is to be found “airing,” of all things, the “books” (264), as though the text means to remind us that its ideals are calculated exercises in dealing with a literary problem rather than Forster's personal lament as to the fate of civilization. Forster even admits the real nature of his motivating anxiety:

Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. … England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

[267]

Though it is an inversion of this latter possibility from which the idiomatic art of reflexive realism will be made (“common talk” passes into literature rather than the other way around), Forster's implicit identification of “the great poet” with the role of mythologist is of special concern. While a “great poet” may well be a mythologist—a self-evident identity for the pioneers, especially of epic—for the latecomer, by contrast, strong art can no longer be persuasion or belief alone; it is, rather, an interrogation of the categories by which one dreams, not a rank presentation of dreams alone. Forster's novel is, to be sure, just such a metacritical art, taking as its raw materials, not some avowed chaos in or of the real, but the ideological grammar that produces the real—structuring mythologies like Hardy's “ache of modernism” or Pater's “modernity.” Howards End even looks rather like The Mayor of Casterbridge in the efficiency and clarity with which it seeks to catalogue and question the chief ideological assumptions that govern modernist speech and desire in both novelistic discourse and general cultural competence.

Whether religious, romantic, or Romantic, then, Howards End is a catalogue of the will to modernity rather than an example of it. It is a meditation on modernism at large, finding among its other players the same structure of assumption to be found in Mrs. Wilcox despite the many differences that otherwise appear to divide them. The world the novel depicts is, in fact, one constituted by the ideology of a will to modernity that the novel itself will attempt to account for by describing the structure that produces it. The buzzing name “Schlegel” is probably the clearest instance of the novel's focus on the structure of the ideology of modernity, particularly its Romantic genealogy. Whether it is a question of “truth” (195), “earth” (199), the “fertility of the soil” or the “intensely green” (200) season of “Easter” (198), all such modernist notions of regenerative primacy—of the “earth and its emotions” (214), in a decidedly deliberate pathetic fallacy—are nonetheless shared notions or representations to which Schlegels, Basts, and Wilcoxes all alike subscribe, even if they differ in their particular interpretations of what living “deeply” (214) may mean. The soil of the colonies is as basic to Paul Wilcox's imperialism as the soil of England is to his mother's romanticism.

Like the “life of the body” trammeled by the unnecessary “appliances” (218) of the moneyed classes, it is the category of the original or the eternal that remains central to almost all the characters' recurrent and shared ideality of regeneration in a world of forms to which they come late. Even Bast has a partially direct connection with the earth in his ancestry; his forebears are, as he puts it, “‘agricultural labourers’” (237) whose roots are in that “unspoilt country” (88) that represents what is left of the natural in the urban sprawl that threatens it. Pop Romantic modernist that he is, Bast wants simply to get “‘back to the Earth’” (117), despite the phrase's equal foreshadowing of his subsequent death. Indeed, much as the soil upon which London sits precedes it, so Forster's staged myth of the modern, prescient as it is of Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility” eleven years later, also requires “an elder race” of “rural” folk (268) to whom “we look back with disquietude” (268) because of their more direct relation to the soil than ours. Forster even goes so far as to try to equate, like Wordsworth, the images of the garden and of childhood, both versions of primary innocence that Forster wittingly identifies as the kinds of assumptions that predetermine our ways of thinking and living. It is, in short, “the peace of the country” (315) that makes up the book's set of consistent ideals, all of them based on a notion of truth epistemologically intact beyond history, circumstance, and, apparently, beyond language as well. Margaret gives us the ideal in a compelling summary form: “Her conclusion was,” says Forster of her mind's development as a little girl, “that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied” (30).

So astute—so scholarly in Pater's sense—is the apparently breezy Forster in his interrogation of the forms the myth of the modern takes as an ideological formation that Howards End is almost an encyclopedia of the kinds of permutations its oppositions can produce. The opposition between the aesthetic Schlegels and the worldly Wilcoxes is, of course, only one example among many in the novel's scrupulous catalogue of the dualities that structure the myth of the modern, and one isomorphic with the equally recurrent opposition between nature and culture. Even in Bast's imagination of the composing process, for example, the poet Jeffries must work by having a prior state of feeling that he only subsequently turns into the secondariness or belatedness of writing: “the spirit,” as Bast thinks, “that led Jeffries to write” (120). Here, and again symptomatically, the imagination of imagination is figured as identical with the structure of its religious and romance ideals: the certitude of a prior state of nature upon which or against which civilization uneasily sits, and the desire for which the novel readily identifies as a will to modernity defensively understandable but empirically problematic. One's job in life is to get to the “‘real thing’” behind the “‘husks’” (145), to the “root” of the “earth” (150); to penetrate the “husks” that “enclose … emotion” (311). In short, to keep, impossible as the mixture of metaphor already predicts, “‘memory green’” (152) in the hope that such a realm beyond culture really exists.

Much as Bast assesses writing as a function of an opposition between the primacy of feeling and the secondariness of language, so the opposition between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes is likewise one between depth and superficiality, art and business. To the Schlegels early in the novel, the Wilcoxes are a “fraud,” with only “emptiness” behind them (26)—affectation as opposed to authenticity or sincerity (10), the “lips” to the “heart” (37), the “eyes” to the “smile” (48). So, too, to see the world “half sensibly and half poetically” (12) not only tells us that Margaret is a balanced and judicious woman, but also that the informing oppositions that allow us to make such a judgment are in turn those between, for example, pose and reality, “‘romance’” and “‘prose’” (174), “prose” and “passion” (186); hence, too, the notion of a “rainbow bridge” between them (186), one of a number of Forster's phrases to be repeated by Woolf. And along with oppositions such as reason and passion, sense and sensibility, male and female, come other logical permutations, especially the key opposition between outer and inner worlds (174-75), the vaunted separation of “public” and private, the without and the “within” (28), “the outer life” (103) and the inner, one's “head” and “the universe” (50). The opposition between private and public is likewise aligned with the opposition between “surface” and depth (220, 240), much as the narrator distinguishes between “true imagination and false” (121), and, just as paradigmatically, between “Romance” and “work” (138). Epistemologically akin to the split between public and private, the split between civilization and soil also leads to the oppositions between “imprisonment and escape” (86), “trade” and “spirit” (84), body and soul or spirit (102, 115, 186), “cold culture” and real “art” (310); even the “orderly sequence … fabricated by historians” as opposed to the “chaotic nature of our daily life” (106). Nor should we fail to note the familiar opposition of “dirty” and “pure” (167) and Forster's accompanying lament about “muddles” (e.g., 308). Thus the differences between Schlegels and Wilcoxes—between spirit and trade, intimacy and “‘telegrams’” (103)—also inform the notion that the “stench of motor cars” (15) and “metallic fumes” (53) “cut off the sun” (56) and desecrate the “soil” (47). Even at Howards End, a garage replaces the old pony paddock (71), reminiscent of the various urban technologies that replace the rural ones in Hardy's Wessex. Within such a world, the Schlegels “breathe … less of the air” and see “less of the sky” (107). “Nature,” in short, “withdrew” (107-08). Indeed, Forster goes so far as to admit his quaintness in maintaining such oppositions, since “the Earth as an artistic cult,” as he puts it, “has had its day” (108).

The myth of past freshness is so general in the political unconscious of the contemporary world that the novel depicts (and of which it is itself a function) that even the visit to Simpson's with the Wilcoxes displays the novel's selfsame literary and religious ideals in quotidian form: “Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that … criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones” (153). In such a world structured by Romantic or modernist desire in its popular mythology as well as in its literary history, “‘Houses are alive’” (155), at least according to the central animating Romantic trope of personification that Ruskin recognized by condemning and trying to outlaw. So different is modern life from the wishful glories of the past that the “nomadic civilization” (261) of modern cities, says the narrator, will “receive no help from the earth” (261), the sacred soil that the urban scorns and seeks to destroy or neutralize.

The novel's most famous trope in the organizing mythology its oppositions produce is surely the “civilization of luggage” (150), the wasteland into which we moderns have fallen and whose coherence as a target of attack relies on still another series of organizing oppositions, chief among them the opposition between transit and rest, hurry and serenity, luggage and home, and, of course, city and country. As though the real had really changed on its own, modern ideas, too, are “portable” (61) rather than secure. People, likewise, are always “‘moving’” (137) and speaking “the language of hurry” (109), both counterposed to the natural stability of home, rest, and leisure; of seeing things “steadily” and seeing them “whole” (161), as Forster says in his wittingly Arnoldean refrain (see also “empires of facts” [30]) that is perhaps chief among the officially literary motifs included in the novel's survey of (its) hegemonic ideological presuppositions. Forster even soliloquizes, with hidden irony, upon the metacritical rather than mimetic status of his project through Margaret's maintenance of the familiar myth of the modern that has structured her youth as it does the ideology of modernism at large: “London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth” (261). With such oppositions so securely in place and so capable of organizing the world the book represents—a world divided between earth and civilization, steadiness and “flux” (261), private and public—the novel is almost merciless in the thoroughness of its inventories. Forster's catalogue of modernist ideology may therefore be said to formulate a grammar that will account for the symptomatic manifestations of the will to modernity in all its forms. By so isolating the means of production of its wishful primacies, Forster can thereby simulate the reality they engender in his (meta)realism while, at the same time, go on to disassemble it in the simultaneously reflexive arrangements of his prose by which the oppositions upon which the myth of the modern is based are, with equal systematicity, also identified by the language that expresses them.

If we begin to inspect the novel's language in any detail at all, then, we find that Forster's vaunted (and only apparent) thematic intent—his myth of the modern—is simultaneously undermined as programmatically as it is set up by a rhetorical contamination or slippage of the oppositions that put it in place. Central among the novel's dualities is the classic modernist antagonism between self and society, private and public, and one that leads Forster to recommend the Moorish ideal of “‘personal relations’” (174) as a means of building that “rainbow bridge” (186) between self and community that turns out to be unnecessary because the two are already conjoined. Even Terry Eagleton remains captive to the belief in a straightforward “Forsterian affirmation of the ‘personal’” (1981:138), as though there is no real irony in Forster's art. “Personal relations” is, however, an oxymoron, since, as Pater and Joyce—and even Eliot—have shown, self and world are mutually constitutive in the semiotic play of culture that produces subjects and objects alike in a series of gestures that privileges neither side of what is a productive rhetorical opposition rather than one expressive of a condition in the world. A thorough focus on Forster's vocabulary will show just how the oppositions that organize his manifest myth of the modern also turn into one another so as to wreak semantic havoc with the categories the novel's manifest thematic has erected.

If Bloomsbury is indeed programmatic in its use of the unseen poetic arrangements of ordinary language, the real object of a text such as Howards End is to join linguistically those colloquial terms that are customarily articulated as oppositions. Thus the novel's oppositions turn out to link, paradigmatically, human and fiduciary relations—private and public, spiritual and material, “personal” and “relations”—in a common set of signifiers, throwing the relationship between denotation and connotation into chaos as one of the numerous side-effects that render privacy a function of its dependence on the publicity to which it is normally counterposed. Most pervasive as well as most focused are the similarities rather than differences between psychic and real economy and their mutual interdependence in the tropology that identifies the vocabulary of business or the Wilcoxes with the vocabulary of private emotion or the Schlegels. Private virtue itself, for example, is thereby always grafted, linguistically at least, to the same terms by which we calculate the world of material value to which it is customarily opposed (“worth …,” 165, 259, 262, 292), making it no wonder that an idiom such as “‘tender hearts’” (169) suddenly reveals an economic aspect to the figure that cautions the degree of epistemological integrity we like to assign to our private worlds. Thus a surprising parade of tropological identifications: one can be “‘worthy’” (66) or “‘unworthy’” (244) as a person; “tender” (245) emotionally; repose “trust” (37) in another person (shades, too, of The Confidence Man); or take an “interest” (103) in someone else. Even more exactly, Helen's stocks, like her emotions, are characteristically “reinvested” (256), while the contrastingly stable Mrs. Munt possesses stock in her more appropriate style of “safe investments” in “Home Rails” (14). One can, moreover, “cancel …” one's “mistrust” (37) in a person by means of the same idiom by which one cancels a check. Thus, too, a “‘girl with no interests’” (57) is, like the otherwise comfortable Helen, tropologically at least, nevertheless akin to a girl with no money at all—Jacky, for example, with whom Helen in fact changes places when she becomes Bast's lover. Likewise, “‘the will to be interested’” (57) directly implicates the vocabulary of the personal in that of the public. “‘The very soul of the world is economic’” (61), admits Mr. Wilcox, not only for the materialist reasons that escape him even in the first instance, but also because of the semiotic spillage that thwarts his like investment in the absolute difference between what is one's own and what is another's.

The vocabularies of the marketplace and stock exchange, in short, programmatically collide with the vocabulary of personal relations. Even throwaway colloquialisms denoting (connoting?) one's private mood such as “on Helen's account” (70) or to give an “account” (85, 106) of something coincide figurally with the public language of commerce and exchange. Such common or idiomatic usage almost endlessly infects the difference between private and public throughout the novel, whether we “‘make a great deal of it’” (75), “evoke our interests” (79) or “withdraw” them (79). Thus an emotional “check …” (96, 109) has fiduciary connotations, much, amazingly enough, as does Mrs. Wilcox's extraordinary “tenderness” (89) and what is “tender …” (182, 193, 318, 325) in others throughout the novel. The property of Howards End has “tenderness” chief among its manifest atmospheric qualities (206), legal tender as it is of the value of the property as real estate. Indeed, one goes on “trusting” one's “husband” (93) or shows “mistrust …” (79) for someone in implicitly economic figures meant to describe the private alone, even when it comes to one's “life interest” (99). Though life is, says Forster, “unmanageable” (107), his descriptions of it are, by contrast, scrupulously managed by a language that joins the “alien associations” of the public discourses of management, finance, and exchange with those we (also) use to describe what is most private to us.

Hence the sudden resonance of apparently innocent idioms such as “‘on no account’” (112, 248), “on her account” (162), “on his account” (320); the wish to “‘tender … apologies’” (116); the economic murmur of phrases describing personal relations such as “‘managed him’” (144), “trading on” (147), “deposited” (149), “cost” (158), even the matter-of-fact “owing to” (157). People try in short “to balance their lives” (150) through the management of psychic investments etymologically laced with economic ones such as those that make up Henry's bank balance. Thus Margaret's annoying recollection of “the stock criticism about Helen” (277) raises still another series of economic murmurs in an otherwise purely personal idiomatic signification. Even to be “rent into two people” (315-16) by psychological shock carries the quite alien associations that intimate the settled or unsettled state of one's psyche as a form of tenancy. Late in the novel, Helen's “‘interests’” (305) slip between fiduciary and psychological meanings almost overtly, the family “‘goods’” (306), like Moore's, both blessed and tainted by the oscillation of philosophical and material meanings in the same signifier. And once Forster describes the condemned Leonard as one who does not “count for much” (311), his fate is sealed tropologically and representationally in the same figure.

Hardly random events in the novel, Howards End's linkage of the public and private in an exemplary set of shared or common expressions not only projects a Keynesian vision of the interdependencies that represent society as a matrix of relations rather than as a set of autonomous atoms, but also serves as a continual reminder of our nonimmediate relation to the world altogether, whether private or public, a world in which we are always belated because “‘some medium of exchange’” (155)—some social mediation—is always required for anything to signify at all. Neither self nor world is in itself either independent or immediate; as a set of representations in the first instance, life is a secondary rather than a direct phenomenon from the start it can never be said properly to have (had). Foreshadowing Woolf's rather more overt vision of a world without a given self, Forster must conclude by implication that nothing exists autonomously, and that autonomy itself—the very token of the will to modernity whose typology and nature as a notion the novel elaborates—is a defensive reaction to its own impossibility within the semiotic grid of a culture to which we come belatedly and as a function of the bewildering overdeterminations of its signs and history. The novel's characters may try to act out the will to modernity in their various quests for the self-erasing ideal of “personal relations” that stands for a directness supposedly lost after an implied Eliotic “dissociation” divides modernity from tradition. As Forster's language shows, however, such acting out fails to work through the paradox of liberation that forever forbids the possibility of immediacy or of any kind of transcendent autonomy at all.

If the self-contamination of Forster's metaphors begins to emerge in the novel's habitual identification of psychic and real economy at the level of language—of “goods” and “goods,” “worth” and “worth”—such an identity is even more trenchant and etymologically exacting in the movement of another of the novel's chief tropological systems, that of property. As we have seen in Pater's deconstruction of Arnold's selfsame ideals of originality and cleanliness, “property” is a figure etymologically bound to a series of what are, for Forster as well, epistemologically identical structures of desire: for property as such (as in Mrs. Wilcox's “property” [72] or in simple “possessions” [98]); for propriety in manners and sensibility (refinement and serenity); for the properness or integrity of a work of art; and for that self-possession or stability of ego that we equate with mental health. We should recall that propre also means what is clean or unspoiled, the graphic and/or tactile representation of the wishful desire for originality or autonomy central to the will to modernity in art and experience alike. Forster's use of the tropology of “property” is both exact in the novel's enduring deconstruction of its myth of the modern, and exacting in the strategic play of the figure throughout the text. Even one example suggests that behaving “‘properly’” (9) and avoiding “impropriety” (13) will result in “self-possession” (17)—the possession of oneself is metaphorically akin to the solidity or ground of epistemological certainty and of plain real estate as well.

The figure's strategic vicissitudes organize the novel's language in a striking way. One wants one's “muddles” or dirt “tidied up” (69), for example, so as to let “self-possession,” the propriety of one's own being, take on its apparently proper privacy (hence Bast's role as a grossly thematic reminder that the state of one's psyche and of one's economy are disastrously intertwined). Similarly, a “sloppy” soul (104) and the physically “untidy” (123) are figurations that epistemologically join what would otherwise be put asunder. Any “truth” is, as the Arnold to whom Forster sometimes alludes would have it, one of “clearness of vision” (182), freed from the haze or uncleanliness of outside influence. Thus Margaret's Arnoldean desire that Leonard “‘wash out his brain and go to the real thing’” (145). We are in fact all in a “‘mist’” (238), and therefore want our “vision cleared” (239)—we want to make a “clean breast” (247) of things. Even the apparently universal and nonliterary ideal of love is figured in the register of property and cleanliness, too: “She loved him,” says Forster of Margaret's feeling for Henry, “with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness” (220). The metaphorical chain is maintained when, for example, Jacky Bast's affair is described as “one new stain on the face of a love that had never been pure” (236). Of course, in a precise instance of Forster's wit, the last figuration again returns us, not to the will to modernity undiagnosed, but to the structure of modernism that produces its emergence. The origin or home—Jacky—to which Leonard wishes to return is, like Molly, already admittedly stained, the figure contaminating the origin as a precondition of the desire for it, its warmth a function of its distance.

With the categories and structure of modernism Forster's subject, then, Howards End, otherwise a proto-wastelander picture of London as full of “‘rubbish’” (157, 161), “‘slime’” (173), and “‘heaps’” (175), is neither mimetic transcription nor a rehearsal of Eliot's anxiety about tradition as it will be projected in the ruinous landscape of The Waste Land. Instead, Forster's myth of the modern, with all its detailed characteristics, is, like Hardy's, an enormously prescient anticipation and prior critique of the ideology of a High Modernism yet to be misread. To say, then, that “the mind is overtaxed” (321) by the novel is to describe the effect of Forster's apparently flat prose as well as to cite still another example of its surprising spillage that scrambles the oppositions necessary to maintain a myth of the modern without being obvious about it. The privacy of the “mind” is troped as the form of a public system, “taxation.” The sanctity of privacy itself—that “paradise within thee happier far” still sustaining English Romantic tradition as late as 1910—can, must be signified, alas, only in relation to that which it is not, the public, the traditional, the outside. Because property is, ironically, privacy, it is public enough for Forster to dub the age itself the “Age of Property” (149). Like “personal relations,” “Age of Property” is, however, also an implicit contradiction, implying as it does a shared or communal belief in the kind of privacy such a public articulation forbids.

If, moreover, what is private is available only as a function of what is public, the belated status of modern experience and of the modern imagination are once again redoubled, too. Like literary language, the lineaments of being itself are already used, handed down—woven and rewoven, to recall Joyce. This is why Forster grows reflexive as a direct function of his realism rather than as a reaction against it. If the world itself is already taken to be a world of signs or representations from the start, it not only puts all its denizens in the belated role that the modern writer has toward tradition; it also makes the practice of writing about such a world an inherently reflexive procedure, since narrative representation must thereby be a representation of a world already understood to be a set of representations. As taxonomist and diagnostician of the ideology of modernism, then, Forster finds the lifelike objects of his fiction to be already fictions or representations in their own terms. As with his own burlesque pathetic fallacies, Forster will sometimes even provide us with clues as to just how equivalent life and letters (another version of the supposedly opposed public and private) can get to be, sometimes by affirmation, sometimes by negation. Helen, for example, writes to Margaret very early in the novel that though (as Meg has said) “‘life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama,’” “‘it really does not seem life’” at all “‘but a play’” (4-5). Tibby's sense of family life as scripted (“a scene behind footlights” [280]) is also in line with the novel's habitual systems of usage by which Forster's reflexive realism represents the real by representing the representations that compose it in the first place. Like his own mock-heroic allusions (e.g., 101), the terms by which everyone lives derive from quite discernible mythologies rather than from a natural expressiveness on Forster's own part. London is a “vast theatre” (129); Mrs. Munt “rehearse[s]” (13) for actual events, expecting her niece to “imitate” (14) her in turn; even Leonard's oaths are “learnt from older men” (49), a rather overt sign that the vocabulary of candor and earthiness, too, is belated because derivative or learned. Margaret's desire to have Ruth Wilcox as a friend is likewise figured in an overtly textual metaphor (“Desiring to book Mrs. Wilcox as a friend, she pressed on the ceremony, pencil, as it were, in hand” [79]), while the mourners surrounding Mrs. Wilcox's “grave” (another recurrent term that connotes writing and links it with death) are described as virtual letters in another writerly metaphor: they “moved between the graves, like drops of ink” (88). The life Forster represents in all its forms is, in other words, represented in the first instance as a system of texts or codes already in place when any new or original subject arrives on the scene.

Woolf and, more especially, Strachey will go on to show us, with even greater precision and far clearer intent, the world itself as a set of texts or representations like the textual representations that represent them. Even the various pastoral landscapes upon which Howards End dwells so fondly—and tries to separate from the “theatre” of the “Satanic” (84) city—are figured by Forster as “system after system” (167) in their own right, much as Charles and Dolly's newest child is, however humorously, “a third edition” (185). And while such vocabulary may be taken to suggest the dehumanization of life under technology, the measured repetition of Forster's strategic figurations should remind us instead that his focus is not on a world as such, but on the “reverberations” (23), as he puts it himself, of the dominant codes or discursive polarities by means of which the discourses of ideology produce rather than merely respond to the real.

What, however, is the point of the elaborate romance machinery at book's end? Does it mean to repress the contamination of its modernist categories in the hidden service of the kinds of ideals it otherwise puts in question? But while the book's modernist wishes may be summed up in Helen's rather Moorish remark that “‘One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions’” (170), we know that “one's own” is hardly certain as a category. Ironically, the aesthetic pleasure of the book's ending is its most enduring source of pain. The ending of Howards End is an overcompensatory romance whose desire to soothe despite the horrors involved is sociologically pathetic and, epistemologically, symptomatic of something else. Its attempted (or merely staged) dialectical resolution—the kind of structure made readily apparent in the tripartite shape of the later Passage to India (1924)—may or may not be but another programmed moment in a novel that is otherwise really a metatext that represents and interrogates the systematic self-representations of life itself rather than our chaotic experience of them. Not only must we ask why Bast dies, but also why it is Charles who kills him. In fact, Charles kills Bast as the function of a double Oedipal displacement. After all, Charles's father has not once but thrice slept with women Charles himself desires—his real mother (naturally), but also Jacky and Margaret, the latter he once fancies flirting with him early on in the story. Thus Bast, who has a sexual connection to Charles's father through his wife Jacky's affair with him, provides Charles with a reason for investing him with a son's displaced fury. Bast thereby becomes his ironic surrogate father as the husband of the Jacky with whom his father has slept. As a subjective structure, it also has the effect of psychologizing away class differences in favor of personal ones, even though, as we shall see in a moment, Forster's psychoanalysis is political as well as poetical. Symbolically, Bast represents the father that Charles cannot in law kill, though he can—and almost does—ruin him by his attack upon the poorer man. More than that, however, Bast as displaced symbolic father substitutes not just for Mr. Wilcox himself, but, in the process, also suggests, by virtue of his own mobile symbolism, that even the real father is not an immediate origin either. The real father is real because he is a symbol, and a symbol of authority because he is a real father. The father actually represents, not himself, but the law that he serves by symbolizing or substituting for it in the eyes of the futurity that will organize itself retrospectively around his legacy. Even the ambiguity in the possible historical play of the Wilcoxes' Christian names, Charles and Henry (both kings of England, it is up to the reader to fashion a relation in accord with a given interpretation), encourages ambiguities as to whom it is that gains the ultimate, if sad, privilege, and encourages in turn the startling psychoanalytic ambiguities that Forster's Oedipal structure is designed to provoke. The father is himself the symbol or surrogate for something else even more primary than his own supposedly seminal authority. The original original—the father—is belated in relation to himself, ironically prior to himself as father since he can only stand for his purported natural authority by virtue of his symbolism. Even Freud himself (in James Strachey's translation) is momentarily explicit about it. Writing of the Wolf Man, Freud says, “He resisted God in order to be able to cling to his father; and in doing this he was really upholding the old father against the new” (1918:66). “The totem, I maintained, was the first father-surrogate, and the god was a later one, in which the father had regained his human shape” (1918:114).

What is repressed in the killing of Bast, then, is not just an expression of Charles's personal Oedipal rage, but the constitutive protest of subjectivity against its formation through categories that make its autonomy impossible. Thus Forster's machinery at novel's end performs double duty, framing Bast's murder in apparently suavely psychoanalytic terms so as to keep us away from the deeper problem to be repressed, not just in the static sociology of English life, but also in the epistemology of psychoanalytic reasoning (another instance of Forster's early scrutiny rather than expression of modernist ideologies): the failure of the notion of the Oedipus complex itself as a route to original truth. Hence Forster allows us to see just what Arnold has tried to hide more than anyone else: that origins, fathers central among their (ironic) figurations, are themselves but symbols or substitutes for something else absent but supposedly more primary, more original than the father even in the immediacy of his flesh.

Also a caution as to the ease or certainty with which we use the notion of authority at large, the novel's surprising psychoanalytic implications are at the same time at the hinge of the poetics of reflexive realism as a project in its own right. The original father's only symbolic power suggests that, in its narratological counterpart, the immediate—the thing represented—is also already a sign for something else at the very moment that it is what it is. A sign is what it is because it is, by the definition that allows it to signify in the first place, something different from itself to begin with. Hence, too, in both reflexive realism and in the transference that structures the analytic session (at least in the younger Strachey's formulation [1934]), the real is only symbolic, while only the symbolic is real. If Forster's text is reflexive because of its realism—because the world it refers to is already a tissue of signs—Forster's implicit notion of symbolism here suggests in turn that the real is precisely the symbolically authoritative.

Forster's reflexive realism in Howards End, then, is, like the later work of Woolf and Strachey (and of Conrad and Hardy before them, along with Ford), implicitly but efficiently pedagogical as well. Taking as his subject the systems by which we exist and the by-products or effects of them that make up our lives, Forster produces an allegory of reading in Howards End that asks its reader to decide—or not to—a mode of response within the wide spectrum of possibilities the book's complex operations may detonate reader to reader. If Joyce focuses on the minute paroles of life, forcing the reader to deduce from them the langues or codes that contextualize and so give each the meaning the reader requires them to have, Forster instead appeals directly, if invisibly, to the langues or ideological paradigms themselves in a cultural metafiction that sets the model for Bloomsbury prose to come. So organized are the components of the ideology of modernism in Forster's text that we can in the final instance only classify Howards End as a novel of classification that in turn asks us to classify it. Much, for example, as one may ask fruitlessly who one really is once the vagaries of “property” are exposed, so, too, may one read the book's famous “wych-elm” (the preeminent sign of fixity and established grace in the novel's myth of the modern) as the rather more transient sign to be found in reading it interrogatively—as a Joycean pun that asks instead, through an inversion of its normative meaning, the reflexive question “which elm?” that both frees the text from its denotative referents while simultaneously reaffirming their coherence by virtue of such educative transgression. The novel thereby demonstrates the ever-shifting possibilities produced by the play of both fixed codes and floating signifiers, enjoying just the kind of pleasure The Waste Land in particular cannot.

Like Helen's desire that Margaret “‘Burn’” (5-6) her letters at the novel's start, or like the Wilcoxes' decision to “tear the note up” (99) with which Mrs. Wilcox has bequeathed Howards End to Margaret, the novel itself functions—like the psychoanalytic transference—as a double operation that asks us both to absorb and destroy its variously incompatible messages at one and the same time. It wishes to leave “no traces behind” (102), even if its language continues to broadcast both its myth of the modern and the contamination of the dichotomies that sustain it. Such simultaneous absorption and cancellation—a structure also figurally identical with Freud's representation of the unconscious in the “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” (1925)—is a strong and decisive response to the problematic of modernist belatedness. Like psychoanalysis, it secures the wishful primacies its representations of them habitually undercut.