Forster's quiet power of survival springs from his special gift for treating crucial problems in human relations in a style showing not even a chemical trace of journalism, a style marked by grace, delicacy, and a pervasive sense of comedy. Comedy, rather than satire. Except for a generally liberal view- point (which he was quite capable of mocking) he was an uncommitted writer. His values are those of civilization—not Anglo-Saxon civilization or even European civilization, but a kind of timeless civilization of the heart unlinked to any special group or creed.
In A Passage to нndia there are no heroes or villains. The Hindus, the Moslems, the English—they are ali at times "right," at times "wrong." Each character, even those the author dislikes, has a certain dignity; each character, even those the author admires, has a certain absurdity. But one quality they ali share: they are incapable of perfect communi- cation. This strange and wonderful book (see whether the worn adjective wonderful does not properly apply to the scene in the Marabar Caves) is not about the claims of Indian nation- alism; nor about the obtuseness of English imperialism; nor about the appeal of Hindu mysticism. Ali three themes are involved. But if their involvement were the book, A Passage to нndia would now, since the liberation and partition of that sub- continent, be unreadable. This novel is about separateness, about the reverse of Donne's sentence [40], for every man is also an island unto himself. It is about the barriers we or Fate or God throw up and that isolate us one from another. It is about that permanent tragic condition in human intercourse arising from poor connections.
If you have read A Passage to нndia, reread it. If you have
reread it, try Forster's other major novel, Howards End. Many consider it his masterpiece.
C.F.
109
LU HSЬN
1881-1936
Collected Short Stories
The twentieth century has on the whole been a terrible time for Chinese writers. For most of the century repressive govern- ments, civil and international wars, poverty and social disloca- tion, and outright political repression have choked off the careers of many writers, killed some, and turned many others into party-spokesmen hacks. Chinese literature has only begun within the past few years to recover from these onslaughts.
Lu Hsьn [Lu Xun] had the good fortune to spend the prime of his life in the 1920S, when a modernist movement briefly flourished in China before it was killed in adolescence. He was a leading light of what is known as the May Fourth Movement, named for a student-led demonstration on May 4, 1919 protesting pro-Japanese provisions in the Treaty of Versailles. This protest movement came to symbolize a decade or so of relative intellectual and artistic freedom, during which young writers and thinkers questioned traditional Chinese cul- ture and society and found them wanting, and began to look for substitutes to take their place. (The pro-democracy stu- dents who protested and died in Tiananmen Square in 1989 consciously modeled themselves on the students of the May Fourth generation.)
Lu Hsьn's real name was Chou Shu-jen [Zhou Shuren]. He was born into a prosperous and socially progressive family and, along with his brothers, studied Western science and medicine. (His brother Chou Tso-jen [Zhou Zuoren] became a psy- chologist, and translated the works of Havelock Ellis into
Chinese; Chou Chien-jen [Zhou Jianren] was a biologist and eugenicist, the first translator of Darwin into Chinese.) Lu Hsьn abandoned his medicai studies to play a full-time role in the May Fourth Movement as a pioneering writer of mod- ernist, socially criticai fiction. His reputation was assured with the publication in 1918 of "Diary of a Madman" (the title deliberately taken from Gogol [74]), which depicted Chinese society through the madman^ eyes as cannibalistic. His story collection Call to Arrns, published in 1923, included his most famous story, "The True Story of Ah Q," in which a hopelessly befuddled Chinese everyman bumbles his way through life until he is eventually dragged off to the execution ground for reasons he cannot understand; this is plainly an allegory for a traditional Chinese culture that, in Lu Hsьn's eyes, has left China utterly unprepared to deal with the impact of Western culture and technology.
Beginning in the mid-ig20S Lu Hsьn closely associated himself with the nascent Chinese Communist Party, but infuri- ated the party's leadership by refusing to join the party for- mally. A resolute independent at a time when it was extremely difficult for people to avoid choosing sides in Chinas growing civil conflict, Lu Hsьn maintained his status as an independent but leftist artist. Perhaps it is fortunate in some respects that he died before the Japanese invasion of China and then the Communist-Nationalist civil war would have made his inde- pendence insupportable. Since his death he has proven his independence by making ali political factions in China slightly nervous about his legacy. But from our point of view his legacy is plain: No matter who claims or repudiates him politically, he is China's greatest twentieth-century writer.
There are many translated editions of Lu Hsьn's selected or collected stories; read "Diary of a Madman," "The True Story of Ah Q," and a good sampling of others. You will find him a deft and entertaining storyteller as well as a penetrating social critic.
J.S.M.
JAMES JOYCE
1882-I94I Ulysses
With Ulysses we at last meet a novel that seems impenetrable. It is best to admit that this mountain cannot be scaled with a single leap. Still, it is scaleable; and from the top you are granted a view of incomparable richness.
Here are five simple statements. They will not help you to enjoy or understand Ulysses. I list them merely to remove from your mind any notion that this book is a huge joke, or a huge obscenity, or the work of a demented genius, or the altar of a cult. Here is what a large majority of intelligent critics and readers have come to believe about Ulysses since its publication in 1922.
It is probably the most completely organized, thought-out work of literature since The Divine Comedy [30].
It is the most influential novel (call it that for lack of a better term) published in our century. The influence is indirect— through other writers.
It is one of the most original works of imagination in the lan- guage. It broke not one trail, but hundreds.
There is some disagreement here, but the prevailing view is that it is not "decadent" or "immoral" or "pessimistic.', Like the work of most of the supreme artists listed in the Plan, it proposes a vision of life as seen by a powerful mind that has risen above the partial, the sentimental, and the self-defen- sive.
Unlike its original, the Odyssey [3], it is not an open book. It yields its secrets only to those willing to work, just as Beethoven's last quartets reveal new riches the longer they are studied.
These statements made, I have three suggestions for the
reader:
н. Read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is fairly straightforward, as compared with its greater sequei. It will introduce you to Stephen Dedalus, who is Joyce; and to Joyce's Dublin, the scene of both novйis.
In this one case, read a good commentary first. The best short one, I think, is by Edmund Wilson, the best long ones by Stuart Gilbert and Anthony Burgess.
Even then Ulysses will be tough going. Don't try to understand every reference, broken phrase, shade of meaning, allu- sion to something still to come or buried in pages youve already read. Get what you can. Then put the book aside and try it a year later.