E. M. Forster among the Ruins

1 (This is a pre-print version of a manuscript, since published, which may be cited as follows: “E. M. Forster among the Ruins”. Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature. Ed. Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett. Gainesville, Fl.: UP of Florida, 2019. 55-78.) E. M. Forster among the Ruins It is certainly the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me—has so outstripped my theories. The whole ending of Maurice and its handling of the social question now seems such timorous half-hearted stuff. —E. M. Forster to Florence Barger1 cupiditas est ipsa hominis essentia (Desire is the essence of man.) —Baruch de Spinoza2 Like his younger contemporary, Walter Benjamin, E. M. Forster at middle age viewed the general prospects for modernity bleakly, from atop bastions of class privilege and when peering down onto the ruins of a European culture presently failing. Both thinkers interpreted the catastrophe of the Great War (1914-1918) similarly: as symptomatic of a global crisis of culture bred of excessive materialism, with the stench of the Somme long preceding that of Auschwitz. If civilization were to be saved at all, its fragments would have to be rebuilt, reassembled, and repurposed “adaptively” using the “orts, scraps and fragments” culled from more ancient traditions—the Indus for Forster, the Sephardic for Benjamin.3 Jessica Berman writes that the 2 “events of the First World War irrevocably alter[ed] the place in which the story of community can be narrated, thereby also altering the way that we [. . .] tell that story.”4 Hence, experiencing the world at war was not simply the projection of one country or its suite of colonialist representations as these routinely evolved in theatres and spaces far from Europe. Claire Buck notes: “Contemporary British war studies needs to decouple our late-twentieth and twenty-first century interpretations of the First World War from a historical formation of the imperial nation, which too often governs our assumptions about whose experience matters.”5 Following Berman and Buck, I would like to tell the story of Forster among the Alexandrian ruins differently, embedded as it is within a long and already sedimented scholarly history. Once repurposed and rebuilt using different parameters than those provided by established conventions within Forster studies, tropes of the elegiac and fragmentary may be transformed into an emboldened search for conative community. In Forster’s case, the catastrophe of world war in Flanders and the Dardanelles was off-stage. For Forster the war found him in Alexandria, Egypt, where he first found love during the late spring and summer of 1917, the whiff of tamarisk and oleander in the air. Far from the combat zone, Forster initially encountered, and then contributed to, what the editors of the present volume call an “affective ecology,” a stance which radically altered his commitment to the writing down of experience—to textuality-—as, in any sense, an adequate register of modern experience as it is lived in the surrounding built environment. While not privileging the terms “built environment” or “affect” as such, David Seamon and Adam Lundberg emplace human experience phenomenologically. An extension of Kant’s notion of Ding an Sich (”thing in itself”), and supplemented by Heidegger's notion of “being in world” (in-der-Welt-sein), emplaced being—-with, the human subject as merely one object 3 among many—-may be considered distinct from strictly measurable or empirical registers. Following Kant and Edmund Husserl, Seamon and Lundberg extend the phenomenal toward the nuomenal, in the interests of a “wider-ranging mode of discovery whereby [any] phenomenon [is] given time and space to present itself.”6 These scholars further note two distinct, at times complementary, emphases for such emplacement as, alternately, “explications of experience” and the “interpretations of social worlds.”7 These twinned, evaluative purposes—-explication and interpretation—-are relevant to any re-examination of the modernist literary built environment which, as I theorize it, does not dispense with representational texts “about” modernity so much as subsume them within a broader array of phenomenological events that texts may be said only provisionally to encode. Beyond the apparent critique of textuality—by which I seek to rebut prerogatives embedded in the act of writing asserting the primacy of text over being—my interest in the literary built environment correlates to humanist geography’s resurgence in recent years. Referring to groundbreaking work by Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas, Seamon and Lundberg assert that “place is a primary ontological structure that encompasses both human experience and the physical world in which that experience unfolds. . . [The] human being is always [a] human-being-in-place.”8 Seamon and Lundberg continue: “places are not material environments existentially apart from the people associated with them but, rather, the holistic unit of human-beings-experiencingplace. Sometimes called lived emplacement or embodied place, this phenomenon [is] understood to be complex and dynamic, and to incorporate generative processes via which a place and its experiences and meanings shift or remain the same.”9 Human emplacement in the built environment results in “complex and dynamic” interactions between and among objects that “incorporate [phenomenologically] generative processes.” 4 Yet, as AbdouMaliq Simone has argued, such subject emplacement in space and time is only ever provisional. Emplacement also attends the gaps and seizures of infrastructural processes, physical as well as ontological, and reveals what Simone calls an “aesthetic of incompletion.”10 Such incompletions also contribute to world-building, signaling “not so much a specific stage in some aspirational development trajectory [. . .] as an incessant gathering up of what was at hand in order to make something often without clear precedent.”11 Found objects in the surround are neither quite finite nor simply finished in time: the completion (or resolution) of a thing, structure, or presence in one place may result in the incompletion, disassembly, or disorganization of another object (whether near or far in scale) someplace else. Embodied emplacement correlates Simone’s “incompletions” with Seamon and Lundberg’s “generative” shifts as I understand them; sufficiency of being-in-world emerges as a function of ontological complementarity, occurring across myriad and ever-shifting interactions. The ontological fulfillment of any one entity or object at least impacts (and quite possibly displaces or impinges upon) the in/completions of any other entity or object in a gradable and increasingly complex array. For the present analysis, it becomes necessary to grasp ontological being as the transiting of a complex system of interacting and as yet “incompleted” emplacements undergoing ceaseless infrastructural adjustment. Such a process-orientation allows any presently emplaced object to inhabit a multivariate and multidimensional existence at once reduced and enlarged. For Baruch Spinoza, abroad in the world as we are, we are never in isolation from the divine. In the Spinozistic register, the ontological gradability of human emplacement—its motility—allows for the return to faith despite (or given) the ceaseless mutability of emplacement proper. Faith occupies, equally, sites of nowhere and everywhere and all momentary (ecstatic) emplacements in between. Such an emplaced faith is recovered by means 5 of worldly experience, including the experiential transformation of that material world across sites of shimmering revelation.12 The power of Spinoza’s underlying critique of rationalism lies in its assertion of the knowingness of desire in service to the rational, an agency he calls the conatus (Latin for “striving”), which may be defined as an individual’s “endeavor to persist in his [or her] own being.”13 The conatus animates the brutish facts of material existence by rendering the experience of desire miraculous, desiring itself constituting the proper function of transiting toward the good. Against such a backdrop, any arrogant presupposition of ontological sufficiency is rightly thwarted by the (conative) impulses to move through, and to be moved by, the built environment as we perceive it lovingly, and when striving toward the “highest possible acquiescence [to God].”14 In this context of Spinoza’s conatus, Forster’s critique of the ruined colonial becomes more productive. In Alexandria, he came to reconsider coloniality as an embodied experience as well as to question his own founding (racialized) assumptions based upon the received notions conveyed by colonialist texts.1516As I shall argue, Forster’s abandonment of such texts became the necessary precondition to his subsequent re-enchantment of the object-world, by means of his reading askance objects and beings colonial texts could not entirely totalize, explain, or exhaust. By contrast, affective emplacement and situatedness require externality (world) in any exercise of the living imagination. Unlike the exercise of the intellect (ratio), imagination “requires the interaction of the human body with external things,” things in and of themselves are “efficient causes of desire.”16 As such, worldly externality determines the forms and avenues for desiring, even as desire precedes those affective emplacements and temporalities afforded to it by the built environment. Following Jane Bennett’s pioneering analysis in Vibrant Matter, the built environment ultimately constitutes a shimmering and vital potential, linking the ontology of the 6 modernist figure to his or her material experience as vibrant. At least in principle, such a vibrant materialism offers the deft fusing of ontological presupposition—a “positive ontology” —with lived experience.17 Forster’s official role in Alexandria, as a volunteer “Searcher” with the International Red Cross (1915-1918), was patently bureaucratic and decidedly minor. His on-going task was to interview hospitalized soldiers about their missing comrades as they became eligible for demobilization and the return passage home or were returned to the front.1819In turning his gaze from the bedsides of wounded “Tommies” to the physical spaces, persons, and aspects of the surrounding Egyptian world, Forster was forced to revise radically his own prejudicial perspectives. These included the questionable convenience of his rhetorical anticolonialism, parroted in the very midst of colonial privilege and power. Ultimately, for Forster, the spirit of civilization would have to be repurposed as distinct from the failing compensations of ideological humanism, resurrected ghost-like from what Jonah Corne has described as the “ruination” of the surrounding modernity.19 In making the turn from queer shame toward a more affirming sexuality, moreover, Forster sought to look beyond the half-hearted, pastoralized cul-de-sac the ending of his earlier novel Maurice had allowed.20 Its merely textualized premise became increasingly diminished by the immediacy of Forster's lived experience, as aestheticized treatments of the local scene (with precursors in period neohellenist pastoral) clashed with the energies provided by the metropolitan surround.21 In her celebrated biography, A Great Unrecorded History, Wendy Moffatt omits reference to the sentence in Forster’s letter immediately following the phrase which titles her book: “I have never had anything like this [kind of love] in my life—much friendliness and tolerance, but never this—and not till now was I capable of having it, for I 7 hadn’t attained the complete contempt and indifference for civilization that provides the necessary calm.”22 Forster’s task in Alexandria, as Adela Quested discovers to her great peril in the Marabar Caves, was not to find the “real” Egypt, but to participate, as far as a foreigner can, in the recovery of truths arrayed around the ruins of the colonial. This was an ambitious project, since the totality of colonialist writings and authority were presently abusive of the material surround. Forster’s anti-humanist embrace of space and perspective in Alexandria, then, was also de-idealizing; it contested the humanizing claims of colonial modernity.23 In order for his perspective to change, Forster would have to allow Alexandrian space to surround colonial textuality, to refuse to be enunciated by its tropes; and, ultimately, to subsume them within the local built environment on its own terms. As Moffatt’s biography affirms, Forster’s love for el’Adl was decisive in that it allowed the writer to emerge as a sexual subject at the same moment he turned to the contemplation of the material world anew. Forster’s emplacement in everyday Alexandrian places permitted him a degree of separation from the understanding of existence as defined by its texts: “I wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice now. I now know so much more.”24 Of course, Forster didn’t rewrite Maurice then, in 1917, or indeed, until much later. Nor did he necessarily want to, because the love he was presently building in Alexandria not only sufficed but likely conquered any subsequent textualization. The critique of textuality, in turn, allowed Forster to endorse the ruination of colonial civilization as a necessary precondition for his affective ecology, one which might be ordered more constructively and lovingly. The search for an affective surround: after Forster’s landlady got wind of his and el’Adl's trysts in her home, they were forced to explore their love in the open air—hidden in plain sight—wandering as tourists might, meeting clandestinely and yet openly together: “Then we had 2 Sunday mornings together—one at 8 Pompey’s Pillar and the Catacombs, the other at Nouzha Gardens [. . .] sometimes we meet of an evening in the gardens in the middle of the town. We have laid down certain rules.”25 The prospect of exploring a ruined Alexandria with his lover offered Forster a calming itinerary—the suspension of old rules superseded by new ones—in the face of a colonial order rapidly destroying itself. As we have seen, the presence of the ruins also allowed for his rejection of a putative philosophical idealism: namely, that the perspective of the (Western) viewer is the only perspective that constitutes rationality and hence the only one that matters. By means of his love for el’Adl, Forster's contemplation of the surrounding space was transformed. He no longer prescribed the “greenwood” but its displacement, by means of the conatus presently reordering the ruined world and his loving emplacement in it. His hand-drawn map (Fig. 2.1) not only signifies given locations in a colonialist imaginary but the emplacements, over time, of his desire in a process of fulfillment. {Fig 2.1 here} Fig 2.1. Hand-drawn map of Alexandria. By E. M. Forster. Repr. in Michael Haag. As such, Forster's spatializing critique involved his own kind of “redistribution” of the present (colonial) dispensation of materiality which Bruno Latour requires of any modernizing claim.26 The everyday presence of ruins in Alexandria constituted rich ground for the corresponding emplacement of modern life. Tombs housing the remains of the Alexandrian dead likewise offered materiel for the present redistribution of touristic spaces marked only notionally as “past” in a shared process of Forster and el’Adl’s reconstruction. As Heather Love has suggested, the disentombment of shame, the refusal to let the dead bury the dead, transforms ruins, in memory and place, into more defiant—and happier—sites of inversion.27 For Love, the over-turning of the limit conditions of queer identity imposed by 9 period texts—as damaged or diseased, as romantically exceptional and yet abject—may also determine recuperative reactions, as the living exhume and liberate the ghosts of the past.28 Hence Forster’s excitement, as expressed in a letter to Siegfried Sassoon: “[v]ery often I’m happy. . . Ancient Alexandria . . . is proving a most amusing companion. I’m constructing by archaeological and other reading an immense ghost city.”29 We now know that el’Adl's companionship afforded Forster the loving and present emplacements making their shared relationship with the ghostly Alexandrian past “real.” Establishing this triadic correlation—between embodied lovers, ghostly matters inherited from the past, and present ruins crowding the Alexandrian built environment—requires more than the scholar’s sudden realization of the built environment's impact in liberatory or romantic terms. It also re-centers the shaming “darkness” Love’s analysis has exhumed, yet in a theatre her Feeling Backward does not address directly: the colonial abbatoir. Forster had ready to hand an entire Weltanschauung of colonial texts with which to read, to dehumanize, and to diminish his Alexandrian surroundings and its peoples.30 This colonialist corpus proved woefully insufficient when rediscovering the ruins of Alexandria and establishing the love he eventually found there. Prior to their imaginary reactivation in the surround, such texts only matter as matter: they deserve no greater privilege than any other element, property, or object on the loose in the field of the built environment. Even so, the prospect of the imaginary re-emplacement of these texts, objects, and concepts confers affective privilege in support of the conatus and its fulfillment, primed for any subsequent instance of reinterpretation or adaptive reuse.31 Key features of the then-contemporary built environment, the Alexandrian ruins accordingly served Forster’s purpose of “redistributing” ontological presuppositions of space, time, and being. Latour defines such “redistribution” of modern humanity succinctly: “[t]he 10 human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms.”32 Such a “passing through” of the human category necessarily critiques the privilege of any static, representational mode (mimesis)—whether as written artifact, inscribing technology, or archive—as best suited to describe human experience. Its story by definition unwritten, the built environment inhabits the surrounding spaces where narratives of death and life at once converge and dissipate. Samuel Cross affirms that Forster’s “foot-noting” in Alexandria: A History and a Guide endorses Michel de Certeau’s critique of the scriptural economy by means of its own spatial story. Forster’s narrative practice correlates text to walking through the surrounding space and across time: “[b]y hyperlinking narrative to description, past to present, and story to itinerary, Forster imagines [. . .] a nonlinear journey [. . .] that will dialectically inform and be informed by a concurrent walk through the city, a walk in which the past will offer itself dynamically in explanation of otherwise-incomprehensible scenery, and in which that scenery will allow the walker to chart the past from the book’s pages onto the living city.”33 Such queer “incomprehensibility” of the built environment signifies the work undertaken by spatial emplacement which Forster's Guide cannot write directly but which, in Cross’s fine phrase, “becomes itself the world it proposes to describe.”34 This returns us, then, to the emplaced ruins of Alexandria. They served as Forster’s chosen sites as he sought to clear newer (modernist) ground for sexual experience distinct from the civilization that, as C. P. Cavafy’s poem famously put it, the gods have abandoned. Much as Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages” do, ruins reinvest the “modern” as always-already ancient. As assemblages, ruins conventionally juxtapose agencement (“putting” or “arrangement”)—here, of ancient as well as British-colonial pretexts—with their subsequent application or reordering as assemblage (a “reintegrated” or refashioned assembly) in a living context.35 Texts, too, constitute 11 prior instances of agencement which very likely can neither exhaust nor predict the assemblages subsequently (re)built from them by means of imaginary reinterpretation. As such, the ruins of the built environment of today are historically different, but substantively the same, as all ruins have always been. (Our “present,” too, occupies merely one transitory site in the ongoing assemblage linking past ruins to a ruined future.) To rotate Latour’s maxim only slightly: “we have never been modern,” yes; but when presently recrafting the ruins of the built environment to different purposes in design and intention, we, like the ancients, have always been modern when seeking to reconstruct the material fulfillments of any prior era. Inevitably, all such present fulfillments fade, and the structures bearing them crumble. Even so, the present ruins of past fulfillments populate our sense of the “incomplete” future. Completed for another time, ruins remain incomplete for ours. Such is how we encounter them, as remaining serviceable to our understanding of what any future can afford, at once ruined and re-made in the same vision. Similarly, Forster and el’Adl among the catacombs offered the perception of ruination, even as it constituted the present fulfillment of an ongoing process as yet uncompleted (Fig. 2.2). This incompletion is not by definition elegiac—the banishing of alienated fragments or conserved texts to the archive; but, rather, the disentombing of desire which attends the fulfillment, on the part of participating subjects, emplaced in the surrounding space. Linking the domain of the living with the dead, the depicted ruins of Kom es Chogafa were rebuilt anew in the unfolding “assemblage” of Forster and el-Adl’s emplaced love. {Fig 2.2 here} Figure 2.2 Kom es Chogafa. By E. M. Forster. Repr. in Michael Haag. It is only by gazing upon the ruins of materiality that the constructive potential—the search for enchantment among the fragmentary “ruins” of the textual—becomes possible. In 12 Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s late modernist Alexandrian Quartet, Durrell refers to Alexandria as “the unburied city”; and Michael Haag, the great preserver of Forster’s Guide after it fell out of print in the 1960s, is still referring to the city, in 1977, as “embalmed” by historicity.36 In such terms, Latour’s “redistribution” of human meaning throughout the built environment occurs as the disentombment of textual fragments, and as the reintegration of diverse realms, formerly fragmented, back “into” the material world rebuilt. Forster understood this relation between a baser materiality and its ennobling conatus intuitively, as a function of affect, and imposing salutary limits upon potentially aggressive materialism: “[o]f course we must be materialists, but it must be and is a materialism in which love is far more precious than when it moved the stars.”37 Forster’s first encounters with Alexandria were conditioned almost exclusively by racist texts that the imperialist system and its institutions had provided to him ready-made, minted in the exercise of absolute power. His eventual separation from the enunciations such texts impose would have to be total and decisive. From his arrival in November 1915 until the earliest beginnings of his courtship with el’Adl in the late spring and early summer of 1917, Forster consistently contrasted Egypt unfavorably with India—a move designed to establish his greater degree of intimacy with that place and to send up the continuing love, for Syed Ross Masood, he had cultivated there. In a letter to Masood (29 December 1915), Forster wrote, “[i]t is only at sunset that Egypt surpasses India—at all other hours it is flat, unromantic, unmysterious, and godless— the soil is mud, the inhabitants are of mud moving, and exasperating in the extreme: I feel as instinctively not at home among them as I feel instinctively at home among Indians.”38 Notably, and as Lago and Furbank point out, the vivid image of “mud moving” was subsequently applied by Forster not to Egypt, but to India in the opening pages of his great masterpiece, A Passage to India 13 (1924). Initially, such was Alexandria to him, a place reduced to baser matter—mud—which lies inanimate, without god or soul, in the absence of indigenous vibrancy. As we have seen, Forster’s conatus eventually provided an ennobling spark to the surrounding Alexandrian mud, giving it substance, if not knowledge as such. Imperialist pretexts could never have served Alexandria differently, except to prefer the Indian alternative an otherwise unenlightened Forster had found initially sufficient. As the weeks and months of Forster’s posting went by, he accordingly sought to distance himself from colonialist clichés: [M]y idealization, we won’t say regrettable but ahemmable, of India mounts and mounts and mounts. Egypt feeds it my contrast. I hate the place, or rather its inhabitants. This is interesting, isn’t it, because I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudices, but in 10 months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pump-shitting or eating or laughing or anythinging [sic]—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian. I better understand [his] irritation though I’m glad to say I’m as far as ever from respecting it! It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.39 Forster’s truly shocking lines—lines farther from humanist cosmopolitanism could hardly be imagined—have often been cited against him.40 Fewer scholars own the provisional, yet still palpable, self-critique the passage contains when taken in its broader context; that is, of his admittedly bogus “idealization” of India (“ahemmable”) and his rightful admission of racism as a deep-seated problem which, even as he utters it, he knows is disrespectable and revolting (“It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me”). Interestingly, Forster’s notorious (and strangely clinical) listing of active gerunds catalogued for his old classmate Malcolm Darling—looking, walking, pump-shitting, eating, 14 laughing, anythinging—also constitutes an emerging critique of the ruined abjection of the colonial built environment as it then stood, notionally active in gerund form and yet clearly still based upon passive and impoverished percepts of the colonizer. The British colonial ruling classes clearly did not mix with the local population enough; they mistook everyday activities of the Egyptians as conveying an existential nature. Such paucity of the colonial “affective ecology,” and its racist scripts, denied colonizers and the colonized shared access, in dignity and mutual respect, to more affirming spaces, interactions, and potentials. It is hardly surprising, then, that Forster’s lamentable catalog performs rhetorical violence via colonialist idiom, such being the only idiom at hand. As yet unlived, Forster’s perspective on the “Arab” subject in his or her surround had little actual basis in any experience other than evacuating metaphor (“mud moving”). The effect is disgusting; it is also the depiction, or resincription, of a textual aesthetic in the utter absence of any countervailing lived experience to rebut—or at least to contend with—it. And yet, the mud moves nonetheless. It rises, animated by the power of the perceiver and, remarkably, itself; it assumes form and agency, it breathes. As Ashis Nandy has made axiomatic, colonial intimacy debases not only the colonized but the colonizer as well.41 The leveling effect of intimacy is also a function of the built environment, which bounds spaces excluding colonial power and so preserves lacunae of local knowledge and authority made pertinent by a spatial necessity. The ruined texts of imperial racism must, and in Forster’s case did, give way to the recovery of appreciative differences susceptible to the dynamism of the built environment. I have suggested that Forster’s miraculous and affirming love for el’Adl was built out of the ruined texts of his colonial inheritances. When undertaking the anatomy of colonial racism, then, the dehumanizing texts and scripts coding lived experience, as damaging pretexts, 15 are the first that must be overturned. In their place, the emplacement of a living desires in the experiential surround may actually achieve the redesign of an outmoded pretext as an emergent and vibrant assemblage—say, an emerging structure for love, refuge, and dignity—no text can ever truly approximate or capture. It follows that Forster’s earliest renderings of those men he was commissioned to help as a Searcher for the Red Cross are also highly aestheticized in the absence of any lived context Forster could recognize as his own. These working-class men, convalescing in Alexandria prior to being shipped home or for redeployment, step forth boldly in the language of a letter written to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (28 July 1916). The ANZAC wounded and traumatized appear as beautiful figures populating an idealized, Titian-like frieze devoted to the masculine form: I wished you were with me at Montazah [‫ ]المنتزه‬this morning. [. . .] Amongst its tamarisk groves and avenues of flowering oleander, on its reefs and fantastic promontories of rock and sand, hundreds of young men are at play, fishing, riding donkeys, lying in hammocks, boating, dozing, swimming, listening to bands. [. . . A]nd down by the sea many of them spend half their days naked and unrebuked. It is so beautiful that I cannot believe it has not been planned, but can’t think by whom nor for whom except me.42 The above passage is well-crafted. Forster’s reaction to the men, in the palace or on the beach, is one of joyful disbelief. Yet the impact of the scene, as he represents it in language here, superimposes aesthetic distance upon lived experience through the act of writing. This use of disinterested aestheticization corresponds precisely in its use of figural outline and gerunds, for example, to that found in Forster’s depiction of the reviled “Arab.” Written only nine days apart, the correlation between the two letters asserts itself immediately, if contrastively—in both may be found a long chain of gerunds signifying differing verges of 16 colonialist fascination. In each, a class of subaltern—one eroticized, the other the object of fascinated disgust—is fashioned. Neither, in fact, says anything substantive about the built environment surrounding these particular objects populating it. Forster’s depiction of the scene eventually moves us, however, because we do feel its pathos once history inevitably intrudes. Many of these men will reassume their duties, only to return to the theatre of war and never to return. The affective history banishes the disinterested aesthetic. It is all the more remarkable, then, that at the end of this passage Forster abandons the pose of the disinterested observer and declares his support for the emplacement of the merely aesthetic as lived experience: The lines of a straining nude have always seemed academic to me up to now but hereafter I shall remember red light on them, and ripples like grey ostrich-feathers breaking on the sand. [. . .] I come away from that place each time thinking “Why not more of this? Why not? What would it injure? Why not a world like like this. . . ”. It’s evidently not to be in our day, nor while nationality lives, but I can’t believe it Utopian [for I have seen it], for each human being has in him the germs of such a world.43 The phrase, the “germ of such a world,” is most striking, because it constitutes Forster’s halting, if nevertheless sincere, materialization of the aesthetic in the direction of the built environment as world-forming. He does not end, after all, with the aesthetic; he would bring its subjective and organizing perception (the beauty of this moment at Montazah) to the material world. Indeed, Forster’s epiphany—and ours—lies in that there is an individual duty, both material and ethical, to bring the imagination in mind forward and to make it accessible for all. And yet: the “Arab” remnant (cloistered by its attending texts, its apperceptions constrained by ignorance of experience and insight) is omitted from the scene. It is still nowhere present. Forster’s chance meeting with el’Adl, a tram conductor on the Ramleh-Monzourah line, would radically alter this 17 foreshortened, aestheticized, and text-dependent perspective forever. Only one short year later, Forster’s love for el’Adl, blossoming during the late spring of 1917, resulted in the reenchantment of everyday spaces along the streets, precincts, and outlying areas of Alexandria. Their love made these prior texts, like the outmoded (colonial) pretexts upon which they were built, irrelevant. Through the previous autumn, of 1916, Forster had set himself the task of reading the Ethics of Spinoza. His selection of this particular thinker is interesting, and not only as the contemplative sidebar to his daily bureaucratic routine interviewing wounded soldiers: “[I] am pleased to find I can understand a little of Spinoza and that he is every bit as fine as I had suspected. He holds my intellect at its utmost strain, and sets me wondering at what must lie beyond its reach. [. . .] He is a corrective for the Platonism into which, when trying to think big, most of us, whether Christian or not, tend to slip.”44 Here Forster appreciates the philosopher’s attempts to impose a contemplative framework upon merely abstract and conceptual domains of rational experience. However limited it may have been, Forster’s brush with Spinoza matters because of its restraining influence (“corrective”) upon the earlier neo-Platonic tendencies he had inherited from Victorian standard-bearers such as Matthew Arnold.45 This discovery of a contemplative Spinozistic rationality in Alexandria was crucial for Forster for two related reasons. First, it allowed him to ground in actual spaces and places—in the built environment—the inheritance (from Arnold) of his neohellenism, which had all too readily conflated personal experiences, in all their variety and diversity, with idealized concepts as absolutes. Offering the emplacement of sexuality instead of an airy neohellenism, the Alexandrian ruins were repurposed by Forster imaginatively in the interests of reinventing a far more fulfilling spatial practice than the pastoral “escape” of the greenwood had allowed in his 18 earlier fiction.46 Everyday life and love in Alexandria had achieved Forster's passage beyond pastoral: he understood that the conceptualization and writing of sexual difference were far inferior to actually experiencing them. He conceded the point openly: “[t]he whole ending of Maurice and its handling of the social question now seems such timorous half-hearted stuff.” Forster and el’Adl's loving itinerary around Alexandria, following from Forster’s contemplative turn away from colonialist texts, had “outstripped” all of his prior theories.47 However transitory, Forster's encounter with Spinoza allowed for his (Forster's) reframing of place and position at a scale distinct from a colonial discourse, as well as when considering anew how the enchanting of the built environment could rupture its barer and sparer conceptualizations in language. Such a shift was emblematized, for example, in the encounter described in Forster’s famous passage about the great Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy, which introduced the latter to the English-speaking world. At each turn of phrase below, Forster’s descriptive syntax collides with the surrounding space. The resulting dialectic subtends flat, textual properties by means of responsive and dynamic feedback from the built environment, placing stress upon its subject at an oblique “angle to the universe”: Yes, it is Mr Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behavior of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities 19 and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. [. . .] [I]t is the sentence of the poet.48 The attenuated, emplaced “sentence” of the poet (we recall Simone’s aesthetic of incompletion) does not necessary need to be punctuated by Forster’s own language. The “sentence”, crafted by Forster and attributed to Cavafy,is not in fact linear but world-forming. It might well carry on forever: the on-going apposition of clauses achieves form in interaction with the spaces the subject and narrator traverse. Such language does not serve the content of the ensuing form; rather, its content is attenuated, stretched or lengthened in service to Forster’s construction of the built environment from which Cavafy emerges and to which he returns. The words on the page are not simply descriptors: they also signify the plasticity of written language in interaction with the surround. The language itself “lasts” through the street, ambling hither and yon, and finally, enunciates the perspectives of three civilizations by means of a momentary irruption attributed to “Cavafy.” Here, then, is a concrete example of how Forster’s writing is not only responsive to the premise of a vibrant built environment but subordinates itself to it. We also note that the narrator’s discovery of Cavafy (among the diversity of objects and actors in the surround) is also Cavafy’s discovery, in a shared spatial contiguity, of the narrator. Of the search for modernist community, Jessica Berman has written: “it is a question of shared perspective [but] in the twentieth century [. . .] social experience becomes fragmentary; the only community available seems to be” speech.49 By contrast, Forster’s turn toward the built environment (as in the example above) offers compensation for the foreshortening of speech and text; inhabitants lacking Berman’s “shared perspective” of community may nevertheless revert to the vibrancy of material existence found elsewhere, commencing at the margins and off-page, in 20 the text’s material surround. Forster’s spatial turn, then, is inherently materialist and yet also communally prospective. His search for conative community among the ruins of the Alexandrian built environment distinguishes him readily from “high” modernist projects otherwise indebted to aesthetics of fragmentation, linguistic isolation, and the compensatory searches—as in T. S. Eliot or Walter Benjamin—for sacred or rabbinical truths exempted from time and history. By contrast, the built environment Forster encountered in Alexandria actively surrounds and dispels, for a time, his despairing wish for the deferred “happier [English] year” to which he eventually dedicated Maurice. The emplaced memories of el’Adl also led to more direct kinds of advocacy: once back in England, after January 1919, Forster wrote on behalf of Egyptian rural workers (fellahin) embittered by the abuses of the occupying Egyptian Expeditionary Force.50 Nor do the object-forms and texts of melancholy and shame, so well-suited to the purpose of disciplining queer experience in the terms Heather Love has provided, serve best as monuments to Forster’s Alexandria or to his recollections of el’Adl who died of tuberculosis in 1922.513 Grief and mourning may not withstand the open air. Memories of el’Adl inspired Forster’s onward sense of better and more fulfilling relationships directly, through which he began to construct his own conative community once back in England: “End of my attempt with Tom . [. . . H]as turned me back to Mohammed el’Adl, and dispelled the doubts time was causing to accumulate.”52 Emplaced anew, memories of el’Adl remained vibrant and alive. Forster’s reimagining of Alexandria differently—as a built environment—constitutes the firm rebuttal of colonialist writing practices as they then stood, including officially racist excisions from the representation of everyday Alexandrian life. Emplacing ruined texts within the surrounding space allows perspective to attend to a whole host of other ills attending human conflict: homophobia, genocide, the debasement of poverty, and the denial of dignity. If, as 21 Michael Haag famously declared, Forster’s most salient contribution to the history of Alexandria was, alongside Durrell’s and Cavafy’s, an “architecture . . . found in words about her” then the built environment which emplaced Forster’s desire, silent and shimmering, must surely have demurred.53 Alexandria’s is not an architecture built exclusively from words, after all, but of spaces and places, the people inhabiting them, and their careening desires. Texts, like ruins, weather in the open air. Striving in the service of desire, Forster’s “ruinophilia” constituted a way of seeing modernity askance the ancient past and athwart the present ruination of a degraded colonial system at war.54 Still, the Alexandrian surround I have presented does not privilege any particular enunciation of Forster’s story—not even that version I have presented here. Contra socially constructivist orthodoxy, the presence of the built environment simply foregrounds the truth that historical bodies do not breathe, live, and die by words alone. Human essences are not exhausted by stories, nor built exclusively from them; lived experience compounds, adumbrates, and dissolves texts. We are not stories.55 Miraculously, for Forster, the present (colonial) degradation of colonial textuality became suddenly redeemable on Alexandrian ground. The emergence of conative community from the ruins, much as Cavafy's had been, validated Forster’s faith in difference. As such, the Alexandrian built environment taught Forster not only that matter must always matter, but that the transiting of material spaces is also the perceiving subject’s addition to them, including an appreciation of the “fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.”56 Forster’s consummated love for el’Adl capably dispensed with the prevailing texts of a shaming imperialism in close proximity; it offered a viable means for any foreigner’s access to an affective ecology in present surroundings—the bed, the tram, the ruins. 22 And it was in Alexandria, finally, where Forster first learned how to rummage productively through the textual ruins of the colonial modern, gaining an increasing awareness of an alternative, more contemplative being in the company of one he loved. Using metaphysics to argue that the built environment constitutes subjective experience may be discomfiting for some, because it de-privileges any exclusive focus upon a gendered textuality (or its constructivist canons) in order to allow for the determinations of the surrounding world.57 Still, E. M. Forster strived to “pass through” the baser matter of modernity—the ruined texts of a shaming and dehumanizing coloniality—in search of friends, enchantment, and room to build. And so he transited the Alexandrian built environment, added to it; and in return, that world returned him, more lovingly, to himself. 23 Notes Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong government for providing project funding (HKBU #12668516) necessary to the completion of this research. I would also like to thank The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the E.M. Forster Estate for permission to reproduce E. M. Forster’s hand-drawn maps. 1 E. M. Forster, Selected Letters: Volume 1: 1879-1920, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983), 287. 2 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90. 3 Elisa Freschi and Philipp André Maas, Adaptive Reuse of Texts, Ideas, and Images in Classical India (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 2. The phrase “orts, scraps and fragments” is borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. 4 Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19. 5 Claire Buck, “Reading the War's Colonialism: E. M. Forster and Mohammed el’Adl,” The Space Between, 10 (2014), accessed 14 July 2017, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-betweenliterature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol10_2014_buck. 6 David Seamon and Adam Lundberg, “Humanistic Geography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Geography, ed. Douglas Richardson et. al. (Chichester, Eng.: Wiley, 2017), 4. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Ibid., 9-10. 9 Ibid., 10, original emphasis. 24 10 AbdouMaliq Simone, “Passing things along: (In)completing infrastructure,” New Diversities 17, no. 2 (2015), 153. 11 Ibid. 12 Our souls, like our bodies, cannot desire apart from the material built environment constructed, by God and ourselves, in the same momentary perception. In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes between two kinds of affect: actions (actio) and passions (passio) with both serving, albeit differently, the exercise of the rational mind perceiving and engaging with the built environment. I quote David Bidney: “Any activity depends upon some affect and may be either an action or a passion. See his The Psychology and Ethics of Spinoza: A Study in the History and Logic of Ideas (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 25. 13 Spinoza, Ethics, 77. 14 Ibid., 155. 15 See Christopher Lane’s foundational critique in The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Lane offers close-readings of Forster's erotica to rebut the psychologically compensatory superstructure of Forster’s liberal humanism, which founders along the “treacherous terrain of interracial desire” (145). For a fine treatment of Forster’s relationship to el’Adl, mapped onto a dynamic rendering (or palimpsest) of competing desires, see also Claire Buck. 16 Bidney, Spinoza, 36, 101. 17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), x. Bennett rightly appreciates the ways in which materiality contributes to the formation of subjectivity and yet remains diffident to subject formation as attending larger, 25 world-forming processes. My debt to Bennett in the present analysis, particularly her use and application of Spinoza’s conative principle, is dutifully acknowledged. 18 To his Indian lover, Syed Ross Masood, Forster had written: “I am what is called a ‘Red Cross Searcher’: that is to say I go round the Hospitals and question the wounded soldiers for news of their missing comrades. It is depressing in a way, for if one does get news about the missing it is generally bad news. But I am able to be of use to the wounded soldiers themselves in various unofficial ways—I lend them books, get their watches mended, write their letters, &ct. They are so pleasant and grateful, and some of them quite charming.” See Forster, Letters, 232. 19 Jonah Corne argues that Forster first became “attuned” to the ruins in Alexandria where, far from the European or Anatolian battle zones, he interacted along a “responsive range [. . .] investing certain zones of ruination with a queer erotic energy, a variously submerged current of same-sex desire [. . . which troubled] the idea that his fragments ceaselessly cry out for wholeness and restitution.” See his “Queer Fragments: Ruination and Sexuality in E. M. Forster,” no. 3, College Literature (2014), 41. Here I invert Corne’s claim, suggesting that it was the built environment that “invested” Forster’s conatus by giving it form and substance. 20 Maurice was written in 1914—although Forster continued to revise the novel for decades afterwards—but not published until after his death in 1971. 21 Stuart Christie, Worlding Forster: The Passage from Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2-3. 22 Forster, Letters, 269. 23 Rosenbaum makes a convincing exegesis of Forster’s eventual “refutation of idealism” as combining, alternately, the rejection of idealism proper (that consciousness alone constitutes reality) and transcendentalism (that we cannot really “know” what our percepts encode). See 26 S. P. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (New York: St. Martins, 1994), vol. 2, Chapter 9. Moving beyond formative influences such as Matthew Arnold and G. E. Moore allowed Forster, once in Alexandria, to reconsider ontological fulfillment as dependent solely upon concepts or ideals. 24 Forster, Letters, 274. 25 Forster, Letters, 270. 26 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), trans. Catherine Porter, 136-37. 27 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 48-50. The liberation from shame required refusing a specifically modernist entombment of desire, or its culmination, as the excision from history. The darkness and despair must be remembered. 28 Love, Feeling, 2-3. 29 Forster, Letters, 293. 30 The German word, Weltanschauung, translates as “world view.” Here I take the term to encompass a body of works and representations constituting the colonial worldview as a ruling ideology. 31 Bailey and McFadyen have demonstrated that “there is no straightforward or sequential story [. . .] of construction and then use” for “built objects” found within traditional archaeology. See Douglass Bailey and Anne McFadyen, “Built Objects,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 565. There is, instead, evidence of on-going “adaptive reuse” of materiel in building community across diverging timelines and epistemological registers. See also Freschi and Maas. 27 32 Latour, Modern, 138. 33 Samuel Cross, “Alexandria: A History and a Guide,”, accessed July 29, 2017, http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Alexandria:_A_History_and_a_Guide. . 34 Ibid. 35 Thomas Nail, “What is an Assemblage?,” SubStance 46.1 (2017), 22. 36 Michael Haag, “Afterword: City of Words”, in Alexandria: A History and a Guide by E. M. Forster (London: Michael Haag, 1986), 241. 37 Forster, Letters, 253. 38 Ibid., 233. 39 Ibid., 238-9. 40 See Hala Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 41 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20. 42 Forster, Letters, 236-7. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 272-3, original emphasis. 45 Christie, Worlding Forster, 11-14. 46 Ibid., 3. 47 Forster, Letters, 287. 48 E. M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and Guide: And Pharos and Pharillon (London: André Deutsch, 2004), 245. 49 Berman, Politics of Community, 2. 28 50 Forster, “Treatment of the Fellahin,” Manchester Guardian (March 29, 1919); and “The Egyptian Labour Corps,” The Times (November 13, 1919), 8. 51 See Jesse Matz, “You Must Join My Dead: E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 2 (2002), 303-317. 52 Philip Gardner, The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster, vol. 2 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 75. Far from melancholic, the decathexis of the living subject from his or her “dead” object(s) in memory was productive for Forster. In an entry from his “Locked Diary” (21 January 1924) Forster proudly declares: “Finished A Passage to India and mark the fact with Mohammed’s pencil” (73). Nor should Forster’s encounter with the enlivening Alexandrian built environment be subordinated to a trajectory privileging the subsequent production of A Passage to India. See Martin Quinn and Sefaa Hejazi, “E. M. Forster and the Egyptian Mail: Wartime Journalism and a Subtext for A Passage to India.” English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920 25, no. 3 (1982). 53 Haag, “Afterword: City of Words,” 243. 54 The term, “ruinophilia,” is Svetlana Boym’s. See her “Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins,” Atlas of Transformations, accessed July 29, 2017, http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophiliaappreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html. 55 Galen Strawson, “I am not a story,” Aeon, accessed July 29, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story. 56 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xi. 29 57 In this, I hold a view averse to Buck, whose meticulously researched and thoughtful essay concludes, to my mind erroneously, that “[Forster] cannot counter the process by which his words incorporate el’Adl into an Orientalist narrative of homosexual self-development.” 30 Bibliography Bailey, Douglass, and Anne McFadyen. “Built Objects”. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Eds. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 562-587. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 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