Chapter 4 - E. M. Forster’s Nonhuman Bundle

Summary

This chapter focuses on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) to explore Forster’s repeated, if sometimes reluctant, interest in modes of animality that threaten to unravel his humanism and complicate what critics, most notably Edward Said, have claimed to be his orientalising descriptions of the country and its people. It begins by looking at Forster’s depiction of beetles and wasps in the novel, examining how his later paratextual notes, added in 1942, undercut taxonomic precision. When placed in the context of the rise in popular entomology, Forster’s ‘unentomological’ approach to insects emerges as an important aesthetic feature of the novel. In part, it signals Forster’s hesitancy to impose western systems of knowledge on India, while it also differentiates his use of beastly language from writings by René Maran and Mulk Raj Anand. Bringing in intertextual material from Forster’s earlier novel Howards End (1910) and later account of visits to India, The Hill of Devi (1953), the chapter goes on to explore how he stages encounters with vaguely understood animal figures in which his anti-imperialism becomes, ironically, clearer.