E. M. Forster: The Problem of Imperialism
Out of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) comes a compassionate plea for British understanding of India. But even understanding is not enough; there must also be love. This great subcontinent, divided by geography, economics, caste, and religion, has a heritage of misery and discord. The book’s two great themes are the divisions which sunder India and the love which alone can make it whole. It has been taken by the British without love in a union which is rape. In one of the parallels which inform the theme, this action is represented on the interpersonal level by the projected loveless marriage of Adela Quested and British civil servant Ronny Heaslop. The novel moves to a climax when the hysterical Adela mistakenly accuses the sensitive Dr. Aziz, a Mohammedan Indian, of attempted rape in the sinister Marabar caves. Aziz is acquitted, but his career is ruined and his spirit desolated. But the influence of Ronny’s dead mother, Mrs. Moore, returns, through the memory of her and the presence of her two other children, to dispel some of the evil. At the book’s end Aziz achieves a partial reconciliation with Cyril Fielding, the Englishman who has defended him at the cost of ostracism. But as they part Aziz shouts:
If it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then ... you and I shall be friends.
As an appeal either for love or withdrawal from India, the book is a political instrument. It is also a revealing commentary upon one of the causes of what Winston Churchill called “the dismemberment of the British Empire.”
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984, which followed it seventeen years later, are political instruments through the honor and revulsion they will create in any reader whose political beliefs are formed by the democratic tradition. Although both these fine novels are written in the future, neither is a fairy tale spun from air. Their only resemblance to fairy tales is a horde of enough all-too-real goblins and witches to make a month of Walpurgisnachts. Huxley, using godlessness and immorality, and Orwell, using totalitarian government, create nightmares well calculated to increase resistance to tendencies in modern life which could produce the results so strikingly conjured up in their novels.
THE CONTINENT
Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and Its Rejection
In his helpful introduction to the Modern Library edition of Fathers and Sons, Herbert Muller writes that Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, which appeared in 1852, had created an effect similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in America. Fathers and Sons (1862), treating revolutionaries like most of Turgenev’s books, had an even more lasting effect. Although both the uproar and the Nihilist movement died down, Muller declares that the novel “helped to form the mentality of the later revolutionaries who established the Soviet Union.” The story deals with the return from college of Arkady Kirsanov and his friend Yevgeny Bazarov. Nihilist Bazarov dominates his disciple Arkady. Conflict quickly erupts. Arkady’s father Nikolai is hurt by the distance between them, and his uncle Pavel seizes upon a pretext for a duel in which Bazarov wounds him. Bazarov’s father Vassily, pathetically eager to be close to his son, finds the gulf between them even greater than that separating Arkady and Nikolai. The two generations—one giving allegiance to religion and the old regime, the other to science and revolutionary Nihilism—have lost almost all rapport with each other. Turgenev treats the perennial aspect of this theme, yet he particularizes it to mid-nineteenth century Russia. Eventually the gap between the Kirsanovs is narrowed as Arkady marries and returns to administer the estate with his father. But before Bazarov leaves he lashes out at Arkady:
You’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence.... Our dust would get into your eyes ... you’re admiring yourselves unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re sick of that—we want something else! we want to smash people!