Take two

Don’t you hate it when you’re typing something up on e-mail or this blog thing or whatever and you somehow lose your internet connection and it all disappears and then you have to try to remember what you said?

Here we go again.

I thought I would try to type something up from the books I’m discussing for my class, “Global Modernism.” Here is the book list:

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Samuel Beckett, Murphy

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Tsisi Tangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Because my class is composed largely of freshmen, our class discussions are not at all theoretical. I do have to keep tying the text to “real life experiences” to help my students relate to the text (hence the tone and style of the blog entry).

(There are also a number of secondary readings as well. Will post as we go.)

First up was the Forster. Briefly, for those of you who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, the book takes place sometime between 1912-1921 in British India. An Englishwoman accuses a Muslim Indian man of raping her, but as she is giving her testimony at his trial, she realizes that she has made a terrible mistake and recants. The novel also investigates the complexities of social interactions within British Indian society, from the range of racial attitudes in Anglo-Indian administrators to the heterogenous religions, classes, and castes that make up Indian society.

Forster, I like to tell my students, is the hippie of the Modernist bunch. The declaration that “God is love” takes various permutations throughout the novel; its final form is misspelled on a poster during a Hindu festival as “God…si…love.” Because the novel does foreground social relationships so much, one of the most common discussion topics for the novel is the theme of friendship. In an effort to push my students away from sappy adolescent paeans to universal love (as well as from the SparkNotes/Wikipedia reading of the novel, barf) I brought in the excerpt above from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (if you click on the image, it should expand).

Kant, as my students were quick to realize, has a rather paranoid definition of friendship: true friends are able to keep each others’ secrets. We don’t normally think of secrecy as the primary attribute of our truest friends; a lot of other attributes such as common interests or shared background come to mind first. But the Kant exposition of friendship is interesting for two reasons:

1) First off, Kant draws our attention to the way that our conduct in the public sphere (the world of politics and civil society) can condition our conduct in the private. Certainly there is a relevant biographical context. The excerpt is from a later period in his life when, just as he is finally prepared to take on the topic of religion after writing copious Critiques, he faces censorship from the Prussian government. Many of his later religious and political writings were only circulated around his closest friends and colleagues; it would have been disastrous if these writings were discovered by the censors. (I’m not sure what prison was like in Konigsberg, but I’ll put my money on cold, damp, and old gray herrings.) Turning to Forster’s novel, we can see how the public conditions one’s behavior in the private. Practically speaking, the Indians in the novel cannot express dissent, even to sympathetic Anglo-Indians (the British in India), without fear of reprisal. And indeed, without true political equity, friendship is impossible between the characters, even with the most promising friendship in the book, that between Fielding, the British college administrator and a generally enlightened character, and Dr. Aziz, a cosmopolitan Muslim Indian.

2) Yet I think there is another way to read the function of the secret. When we think about our friends (so our class discussion goes), it is impossible to encapsulate exactly why we are friends. Each friendship, or so I like to think, is unique and singular, and thus will always in some way escape expression; the essence of friendship is both incommunicable and incommunicability. (Much of what I’m writing I hope is intuitive; I don’t think I’m making an overly theoretical point, but I have been influenced here by Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.) Perhaps the real secret that is maintained between true friends is the fact of friendship, the experience of friendship, this singular relationship that is incomparable to anything else. Furthermore, it seems to me that in addition to seeing how the public conditions the private, we can also see how the private can condition the public. This is where the hippie part of Forster comes in: the idea of the politically transformative potential of true friendship. Rather than attempting to make others (or coerce others) to be like ourselves, perhaps we can learn, from this very basic experience of friendship, to respect others in all of their unfathomable difference.

Many of my students took a very simplistic reading of the last chapter of the novel. Since I’m writing from memory here, sorry about some vagueness. In the last chapter, Fielding and Aziz are taking a ride together in the jungle, and Aziz expresses his wish that the English leave India. They wonder if they will ever be friends. The last lines of the novel run something like “The sky said, ‘No, not yet,’ the earth said, ‘no, not here.’” The students all read the last line as being Forster’s definitive statement on the impossibility of friendship between the races. On the other hand, the first words of the chapter are “Friends again.” It is the narrator who says so, not the sky or the earth, so it seems to me we should take this phrase seriously. How can Forster claim that these two are “friends again” at the same time that they are “not yet” friends? I think the emphasis should be “friends again.” That is, we don’t think of our friendships as static entities, but as dynamic ones that continue to evolve and grow, not necessarily along the same paths but always somehow inexplicably intertwined. That’s part of the thrill and surprise of true friendships – growing together. I prefer to think that Forster was trying to avoid defining friendship so that true, original, singular friendship might be possible. Don’t get me wrong – there are many frankly racist moments in the book, and ultimately I do think the book takes the very paternalistic view that Indians are fundamentally immature and unprepared for modern government. But I think that insight into friendship – “friends again” – is what makes Forster’s A Passage to India such an interesting text for me.

So, “God…si…love,” my friends. Rushdie is next.