MILLICENT BELL
105
that she is like women who think they have received a proposal of
marriage when none has been given - Freudianly, hysteric delusion
has resulted from sexual repression. Lean adds substance to this
view by inventing an early scene in which she wanders alone into a
deserted Hindu temple. She sees erotic carvings, the expression of a
culture in which sexuality is sacred rather than shameful, and is
screamed at by a band of wild monkeys - and she flees directly to
Heaslop and becomes engaged to him as though to protect herself
from sexuality rather than to embrace it. A neat closure of the case
with the help of psychoanalysis was not, however, Forster's intent.
An early manuscript of the novel shows that rather than wanting to
suggest Adela's hallucination, he thought of making it evident that
she
had
been molested. In the end, he preferred to leave this am–
biguous. He told a friend:
In the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion.
If
I say, it becomes whatever the answer a different book. And
even if I know! My writing mind therefore is a blur here - i.e. I
will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain, as I am of many
facts in daily life. This isn't a philosophy of aesthetics. It's a par–
ticular trick I felt justified in trying because my theme was India.
I wouldn't have attempted it in other countries which though
they contain mysteries or muddles manage to draw rings round
them. Without the trick I doubt whether I could have got the
spiritual reverberations going.
The uncertainty that Forster placed at the very center of his
novel might have been represented in a
Last Year in Marienbad
or
Blowup
but has no place in Lean's realism. The film maintains a little
vagueness by concealing the moment when Adela flings herself from
the cave, but shows her a moment earlier as she stands listening to
Aziz calling outside, and makes it clear that he fails to find her. The
novel keeps the episode obscure. There it represents, as obscurity
does in the antirealist films just mentioned, a general uncertainty.
Forster thought that India was itself a representation of this in the
sense that it was a "muddle" without unitary meaning, a pullulating
confusion of races and religions. Beyond India was a metaphysical
indeterminacy represented by the doubt, the gap in the narrative.
But a more important "what happened in the cave?" is asked
concerning the experiences of Mrs. Moore. In the film she is over–
come merely by the crowd, the heat, the close air, and by a peculiar
