Word: forster
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...Excitement? Part of the reason, perhaps, was the recent renewal of interest in India, and the realization that Forster's 20-year-old novel, by approaching the problem through India's humanity instead of through India's politics, was far & away the most revealing book on the subject. But most of the current Forster enthusiasm was due to the realisation, which has been slowly percolating for years, that Edward Morgan Forster is probably the most distinguished living English novelist...
Trilling's book, part biography, part criticism, attempts to tell why. The heart of Trilling's book is the brilliant chapter called Forster and the Liberal Imagination, which set liberal tongues fussily wagging when it appeared in somewhat different form in the Kenyan Review last year. For this chapter is a shrewd study of the prevailing mentality-the liberal mind-and the first successful attempt to set Forster in the context of his time, to explain why Forster irritates so many people by "his refusal to be great," why he is a liberal "at war with liberalism...
Critic Trilling approaches this paradox by way of Novelist Forster's literary "manner." "That manner," says Trilling, "is comic; Forster owes much to Fielding, Dickens, Meredith and James. . . . Stendhal believed that gaiety was one of the marks of the healthy intelligence, and we are mistakenly sure that Stendhal was wrong. We suppose that there is necessarily an intellectual 'depth' in the deep tones of the organ; it is possibly the sign of a deprivation-our suspicion of gaiety in art perhaps signifies an inadequate seriousness in ourselves. A generation charmed by the lugubrious-once...
Whim of Iron. "What Forster wants to know about the human heart must be caught by surprise, by what he calls the 'relaxed will,' and if not everything can be caught in this way, what is so caught cannot be caught in any other way. Rigor will not do. Forster teases his medium and plays with his genre. He scorns the fetish of 'adequate motivation,' delights in surprise and melodrama and has a kind of addiction to sudden death." He has, says Trilling, "a whim of iron." And "to accept Forster we have to know that...
...runs a barricade ; the opposed forces on each side are Good and Evil in the forms of Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Fertility and Sterility, Courage and Respectability, Intelligence and Stupidity- all the great absolutes that are so dull when discussed in themselves." But the comic manner, which Forster affects, "will not tolerate absolutes." It stands on Novelist For ster's "barricade" and smiles with maddening good humor on both sides. In this comic manner lies a method: "The fierce plots move forward to grand simplicities, but the comic manner confuses the issues, forcing upon us the difficulties...