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PARTISAN REVIEW
echo that reverberates in the dark. The message offered by this echo
in the novel does not readily go onto a soundtrack:
Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and
quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof.
"Bourn" is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it,
or "bou-oum" - utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a
nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "bourn" ... The crush
and the smells she could forget, but the echo began to undermine
her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be
fatigued, it had managed to murmur: "Pathos, piety, courage–
they exist, but are identical, and so is filth . Everything exists,
nothing has value."
If
one had spoken vileness in that place, or
quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same–
"au-bourn."
Mrs. Moore's anti-vision, which tears the veil from appearances
only to reveal a void, is the dark center of Forster's novel.
It
repre–
sents a crisis familiar to the modern mind. As in the writings of
Beckett, nothing relates to anything else or can be distinguished from
it, and language has no referents. But she is of an earlier modernism
than Beckett; she is a nineteenth-century Christian, and her spiri–
tual crisis is the common descent into despair undergone by many
Victorians, an Everlasting Nay to Christian certainties that makes
even the question of Aziz's guilt trivial: "When shall I be free from
your fuss?" she complains to her son. "Was he in the cave and were
you in the cave and on and on ... and unto us a son is born, and
unto us a child is given . . . and am I good and is he bad and are
we saved? And ending everything the echo." Is an Everlasting Yea
still attainable after this? The three-part structure of the novel–
"Mosque," "Caves," "Temple"-may represent the Carlylean stages
of belief, its loss, its recovery. The final section of the novel describes
a Hindu festival celebrating the "release signified by the birth of
Krishna" as the return of some measure of faith in universal connec–
tion and significance.
This "recovery" is not directly Mrs. Moore's, yet she is present
when Fielding and Aziz meet again at 'the festival some years after
her death. "God is not born yet - that will occur at midnight - but he
has also been born centuries ago, nor can He ever be born, because
He is the Lord of the Universe, who transcends human processes.
He is, was not, is not, was." The mystery resembles the Christian in–
carnation, and an inscription beneath Krishna's image, "God si
