Duality of the Divine in A Passage to India

Forster represents the idea of "God" or the "Divine" in very distinct ways in A Passage to India, by the Western and the Oriental. However, Forster also places God as the center of human connection. We are first presented with the idea of God through Mrs. Moore in her conversation with her easily-irritated son, Ronny.

Beyond her initial statement that "'God...is...love," she goes further to discuss what could possibly be the most pleasing thing in God's eyes: "'The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God...The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of fialure. Good will and more good will and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of...'" It is interesting that the narrator comments through Mrs. Moore's perspective how he only "approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem," which is the filter through which many nationalistic people view humanity (52).

So now we are given the first insight to God's character through the eyes of an older Englishwoman. There is this dichotomy that occurs between the more passive view of God being all that Love encompasses, and Ronny's view that God blesses and should be associated with national pride. Both characters view the other as being off base from the truth, either given into disillusionment or just by being stubborn or foolish.

[I would like to note that the Beatitudes found in the book of Matthew emphasize the overall Christian values of being pleasant to one another and existing in a way that will call one to a Higher place of understanding. This, and the more obvious passage that relates to Mrs. Moore's concept of God: "Beloved, let us love one another, for Love is of God and everyone who loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God for God is love" (1 John 4: 7-8). I don't particularly like King James version, but here it is. ]

But by the end of the novel, we are exposed to a different view of the Divine that is lacking throughout the first half. For really the first time in the novel, we experience some element of a carefree behavior. Celebrating the Birth is just that: a celebration. "All sorrow was annihilated, not only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars; all became joy, all laughter; there had never been disease nor doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty, fear" (287-288).

It must be noted that yes, this is not the idea of the Divine all year long; there is a time and place for laughter and sorrow, according to King Solomon. But the novel needs some relief, some reassurance that humans are still capable of connecting, despite racial and social divides.

On a personal note, I expected Aziz to be completely forgiving, to achieve this higher level of spirituality by realizing that human connection required a clean slate of forgiveness. The grudge he holds actually only emphasizes his human nature, and yet the religion associated with his India celebrates a time when everything comes to a renewal, like a start-over button.

What could Forster be saying about the nature of God or the Divine, if he is saying anything at all? Is there something to be said of the fact that Mrs. Moore can boil down what satisfies God to "pleasantness" and the Indians recognize a broader range for their "spiritual orgy"?

Birth of Krishna: http://saranaagathi.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/janmastami.jpg

The Beatitudes: http://www.biblebios.com/master/beatitudes.jpg

Christ and Krishna: http://www.gita-society.com/images/krishna-christ.jpg

Looking at Pearls and Swine through historical and biblical lenses

With the idea of Orientalism which England used to homogenize "the other" to the East, we can only glean that which is expressed through literature, such as Leonard Woolf's Pearls and Swine, to make sense of what this "other" really entails. Woolf gives us varying perspectives through the characters of the Archdeacon, stock-jobber, and the Commissioner of India. Imperialism is an underlying theme, and by the end of this story all sense of imperialistic pride has somewhat been sucked out.

This video depicts the Great Rebellion of 1857, which is obviously a few years before this short story was written. But it gives a lot of insight as to what direction England was headed with this idea that she was "Top Dog."

http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/gallery/photos/21.html#great_rebellion

Wrote one British officer: "We have power of life and death in our hands, and I assure you we spare not."

Karl Marx comments on failure of British press to cover British atrocities:

"The cruelty of the sea [poise] is only the reflex of England's own conduct in India. The European troops have become fiends."

I would also like to briefly touch on the title of this story. Did anyone else catch the Biblical reference? "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you" (Matthew 7:6). How can we relate this to the idea of Imperialism, if we can at all?

As the introduction to our reading states, Leonard Woolf wrote this story based on his own experience in Ceylon as an imperial civil servant from 1904-1911, thus making the tension we see from the Great Rebellion of 1857 older but not yet inapplicable. From what you see of the clip from the PBS site relating to "The Story of India," is it a possible assumption that we can see a definite decline in successful British Imperialism from 1857 to when Pearls and Swine take place? Here is one key passage I'd like to point out from the text, located on p. 33:

"'Well, we rule India and the sea, so the sea belongs to us, and the oysters are in the sea and the pearls are in the oysters. Therefore of course the pearls belong to us. But they lie in five fathoms. How to get 'em up, that's the question. You'd think being progressive we'd dredge for them or send down divers in diving dresses. But we don't, not in India. They've been fishing up the oysters and the pearls there ever since the beginning of time, naked brown men diving feet first out of long wooden boats into the blue sea and sweeping the oysters off the bottom of the sea into baskets slung to their sides. They were doing it centuries and centuries before we came, when--as someone said--our ancestors were herding swine on the plains of Norway.'"

Images courtesy of http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/images/FarEast/India/British_1857Mutiny01_full.jpg

http://img1.tradeget.com/gdovtiwala/5JWUWIRS1pearls.jpg

http://media.photobucket.com/image/bleeding%20Bible/bri-09rules/rose-bleeding-on-the-book.jpg

Why Keynes?

Keynes, described by Clive Bell as having an amount of "cocksureness" that was specifically annoying, contributed nonetheless to the diversity and cultural awareness of the Bloomsbury Group. With artists and cultural connoisseurs on one end and writers on the other, it would appear that Keynes does not have his own place within the group. However, by looking through a third-person and first-person perspective of his character and what values were important to him, we can better judge the rationality behind his involvement with the group. (Left: "John Maynard Keynes, photo by Wittgenstein", with Duncan Grant)

"Maynard was the cleverest man I ever met: also his cleverness was of a kind, gay and whimsical and civilized, which made his conversation a joy to every intelligent person who knew him...I once heard him say...'If everyone at this table, except myself, were to die tonight, I do not think I should care to go on living.' He loved and he was beloved" (388).

This description, although followed by Bell's reminder that Keynes and he had a reciprocal respect rather than platonic love, allows us to see a little bit of Keynes' innate passion among friends.

It is important to note that Keynes genuine love for friendship, above even his own life, revolves around his idea expressed in My Earliest Beliefs of pure simplicity. If religion based upon an "ideal God of Mercy" could be unclouded by doctrine, tradition, and strained relationship, then it could be easier to reckon with the world.(Right: Ballerina Lydia Lopokova (1892-1981) and her husband, economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946))

"If, therefore, I altogether ignore our merits--our charm, our intelligence, our unworldliness, our affection--I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath" (TBG 64).

I'm positive his ideas of how government spending and economics penetrated at least a few Bloomsbury meetings; however, I do not think these political ideas were the backing of why he was able to be so involved. The Bloomsbury group, this bohemian group of new thinkers with creativity and culture strapped fast to their personalities, exuded an almost utopian friendship. His image of the water-spiders gives us an idea that he saw the group conversation as a free-flowing stream of thought, onto which anyone could latch onto the surface without being tossed about by angry opinions and claims of right and wrong. (Above: "Keynes by Duncan Grant")

Do you see Keynes' involvement in the group as most beneficial through his devotion as a friend, seeing as he cared so deeply for those around him (although his cocksureness should not be overlooked)?

Bibliography for my Presentation

Works Cited

Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: an Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005. 28

Jump, Harriet Devine. “One Cry for Justice: Virginia Woolf Reads Mary Wollstonecraft.”

The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century

Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. 41, 44, 47.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own: Annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar.

Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1929. 27, 28, 29, 30.

Woolf, Virginia. Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, edited by David Bradshaw. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2008. 160, 161, 163.*

Pictures:

Virginia Woolf:

http://londonparticulars.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/virginia20woolf1.jpg

Mary Wollstonecraft:

http://www.zgapa.pl/zgapedia/data_pictures/_uploads_wiki/m/Mary_Wollstonecraft_cph.3b11901.jpg

*Text © the Trustees of the Virginia Woolf Estate

Family Matters

Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell's only daughter, shared invaluable information about both her Aunt Virginia and her mother. Although Garnett's recollections and descriptions about these two women differ from others, I think it is important to see how Virginia and Vanessa were portrayed in the domestic sphere. Viewing these prominent women in literature and art is only half the observation; the other half is seen through the eyes who saw them on a daily basis.

One of Bell's prominent recollection about her sister is that of an opinionated, vocal little girl. "When Thoby and I were angry with each other or with [Virginia], we used good straightforward abuse, or perhaps told tales if we felt particularly vindictive. How did she know that to label me 'The Saint' was far more effective, quickly reducing me to the misery of sarcasm from the grown-ups as well as the nursery world?" (332)

Although being labeled as a religious entity, Bell saw this language as such a mean form of sarcasm that it was as if she was struck physically by Woolf's speech, her own "the deadliest weapon."

This recollection of Woolf as a young girl is a little different from that of Garnett's memory of her, with some obvious similarities:

"Virginia, on the contrary, was shy and awkward, often silent or, if in the mood to talk,

would leap into fantasy and folly and terrify the innocent and unprepared. This combination of limpid beauty and demon's tongue proved fatal to those who were too timid to respond and who, ensnared while unconscious, woke like Bottom to find themselves in a fairyland echoing with malicious laughter" (174).

Here, Garnett remembers her aunt as "shy and awkward, often silent," which differs greatly from Bell's remembrance of her giggling during a lecture about Good Friday, it being "too much and Virginia [being] hurriedly banished, shrieking with laughter" (334-5). However, both Bell and her daughter had the opportunity to see Virginia Woolf in her relentless criticisms, using a "demon's tongue," as Garnett called it. Ironic how Woolf calls Bell "The Saint" and Bell's daughter gives Woolf reference to a demonic entity. This also subtly implies the stark differences of personality: meek and strong, serene and (almost) impudent. She does, however, go as far to admitting that, "when [she] knew her best, age and experience had softened her and lit her with a more tender light" (174). This, incidentally, is the Virginia Woolf--"Billy Goat or The Goat"--that Garnett remembers.

As far as Bell goes, Garnett describes her mother as "calm, like a pool on which the coloured leaves slowly change their pattern. She accepted, rather than protested; was passive, rather than avid" (175). Calling her a "primitive Aphrodite," Garnett holds her mother in such a light by which her Aunt Virginia could not stand in comparison. It is interesting to note that both Woolf and Garnett give Bell this goddess-like quality, Woolf refering to her as "The Saint" and Garnett referring to her as a "primitive Aphrodite." Although Woolf praises her sister for being an artist transcendental to most others, she finds it not as necessary to recall what her childhood with her sister was like, as Bell so clearly does. How Woolf describes her is as "tantalising, so original, and so satisfying as a painter. One feels that if a canvas of hers hung on the wall it would never lose its lustre" (172). Clearly Woolf is in clear admiration of her sister's talent, although Bell feels more inclined to touch on her subtle jealousy of Woolf: "I don't remember being jealous of the fact that her appearance and her talk had obviously the greatest success with the grown-ups" (333). Her rhetoric here implies that she realized Woolf's charm to be superior than her own, although she'd like to admit that it was not as bothersome.

Briefly, we can see little pieces of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf through familial bonds. The tension, brief friction and overall love these sisters shared for each other was apparent to Angelica Garnett, who was able to produce an intimate image of these women to us through her own observations.

Allow me to introduce myself...

I am a senior English major, Spanish minor, and am applying to grad school for the Fall '10 semester. I enjoy anything by Kafka, Anne Rice, and most women's literature from the late eighteenth-early twentieth-centuries. Edgar Allan Poe must be one of the sexiest writers I've encountered. I love to cook, so if anyone is ever in the mood for some home-made food, let me know.

My name is Ashley Tambunga, and I am a coffee connoisseur.

I am the benjamina in my family, which means I am the youngest of all my sisters. In addition, my six nieces and nephews are my loves, on whom I shower much love and attention. The oldest niece is 10 and the youngest nephew is a little less than a year old.

Culture and tradition are very prominent in my Hispanic family. I still live at home with my parents (which, until I am married, is the Mexican tradition), but we have a bond that is incredibly strong. I am very proud of my heritage and look forward to incorporating it in my future writings and career. Here is an interesting fact: as of two years ago, the total count for the Tambunga family is a little over 500. Yes, we are all related.

Music is an intricate part of my being. I don't know who I would be without my music.

Laughing is the best medicine. I love to laugh, although I am told that the sound of my laugh is quite obnoxious.

Although I am a people-pleaser, I don't consider myself subject to peer-pressure. My opinions surface slowly at first, and once you get to know me a little better you know exactly what my buttons are and how to push them. Being pensive is how I get by. Thinking is a pastime in which I indulge myself frequently; sometimes, if a thought is especially provoking, I will write it down and it will reoccur in my novel (I have been working on this one for the past 3-4 years).

'Twill be a pleasure, I'm sure. Dios te bendiga y nos vemos.