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Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster in search of a transcultural space

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Mukherjee N.

Yearbook of Conrad Studies

2017

vol. 12

159-172

“Only connect,” this is the philosophy E. M. Forster popularizes in Howard’s End and it becomes the central idea in his subsequent writings. Both Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster speak of crossing the boundaries of culture and reaching out to the ‘Other,’ thereby turning their fictions into grand narratives of transculturalism. Conrad, in his novella, Heart of Darkness, and E. M. Forster, in his novel A Passage to India, feel an urgency to bridge up the gap between European imperialists and the natives, between the colonizer and the colonized, the exploiter and the exploited, whites and blacks, between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ thus advocating obliteration of all binary oppositions. Achebe might have criticized Conrad for his ‘racist’ bias but throughout his novel the focus is on tansculturalism, going across boundaries. Kurtz failed because he could not ‘connect’ properly. Forster speaks of the same in A Passage to India on a larger scale but in a more explicit manner. There are several attempts to ‘connect’ at personal, social, cultural, political, and even spiritual levels in the book. In the course of the novel Forster is in search of a ‘lasting home’ (“The Hill of Devi”) under an open sky where people can come together on equal terms putting aside their racial and religious identities. Both Conrad and Forster are, thus, to be examined not just from a post-colonial perspective but from a broader philosophical one, where all lines of demarcation become dissolved and human entity is upheld. In this respect, both writers cross temporal and spatial boundaries and become universal.

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1 Yearbook of Conrad Studies

1 Mukherjee N.

1 2017

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Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster in search of a transcultural space