“Only connect,” EM Forster's inscription in Howard's End, is more problematic than it should be. It is a typically Forsterian injunction: idealist, gently humanist and absolute, but vague and declared contested. First, what does this statement apply to? It is located under the title, encouraging the novice reader to extend it to each situation in the novel, which is quite simple. Perhaps our aim is only to connect people, or England and Germany, or the struggling and affluent classes, or, with other work in mind, the colonizer and the colonized. The quote only reveals itself in the last third of the book, where it refers to something interior and specific: "Connect only and the beast and the monk, deprived of the isolation which is life for the 'both will die' (188). There is of course nothing unexpected about a specific phrase having a broader meaning, but it is slightly unbalancing that the broader meanings come first. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay But Forster, despite his scrupulous avoidance of the horrific, is a surprisingly unhinged author. This is partly an effect of his stability posture. His steady, assured, aunt-like narrative voice promises the truth through sheer force of diction: “He knew it would pass from his hands and his eyes, but he had thought it might live in his mind, without surrendering. realize that the very fact that we loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more we invoke them with passion, the more they move away” (50, Passage to the Indies) to take an almost random example. This trick – intruding on a character's thoughts with a statement from a higher expressive power – is recognized Forsterism. Yet this narrative voice, with its style of confidence and consistency, is proudly inconsistent. He can utter the terrible resounding "ou-boom" of Mrs. Moore's disintegration with the same force as he expresses Aziz's joy at finding her sympathetic. Forster is a moral philosopher with a deep humanist bent, and his official views are therefore easy to detect: they are the most sympathetic. But the triumph of the Forsterian worldview cannot be achieved without the defeat of strong opposition. The idea of ​​this dialectic as a strategy can be supported by an episode of Howard's End which constitutes a sort of microcosm of Forster's novel, the description of Beethoven's Fifth. The composer is curiously alive and active throughout the performance of his piece "Here Beethoven began to decorate his melody...Here Beethoven, after humming and hooting with great sweetness, said "heigh-ho!" (45). Beethoven only ceases to be the subject during his third movement, when "a sprite walking quietly through the universe" and his acolytes fill Helen with "panic and emptiness" (46). took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted." . He appeared in person. He pushed them a little... and then - he blew with his mouth and they scattered! 46).The artist is in charge here, he lets go of the goblins to be able to triumph over them with a vision of harmony and heroism. But this is not the natural order of things. of choice of the artist. Beethoven finally chose to escape... But the elves were there They could come back. He said it with courage, and that's why we can trust Beethoven when he. said other things. (47) This is Forster's method, an art oscillating between optimism and uncertainty – “disorder”. He starts with a certain vision, but causes it to waversubtle and frightening way, then reaffirms it. But the assertion is accompanied by an artistic admission: this articulate and dominant narrative voice chose for things to happen this way. Life in his novels is somewhat like Beethoven's sonnets: "They may triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph" (Room With a View 29). Yet this artistic vision of triumph and unity is presented as seen by the people who experience it in disparate and contradictory ways. Famously, Freddy follows the technicalities using the sheet music, Mrs. Munt taps her foot, and Helen has visions of wrecks and leprechauns, which Margaret finds a little ridiculous. Most of Forster's aesthetic assessments are like this: problematic, confused. What is the right way to listen or watch Della Roba babies and children. Frescoes by Giotto? Understanding art, the unifying and unsettling force, can be as disjointed and controversial as anything else. In Howard's End, the question of disjunction is even more confusing, because the problem beneath the "just connect" imperative is gender. These words, as well as the words "prose and passion", want to extend universally, covering both the non-whole world and the people who make it up. Instead, they contract at the site of disjunction caused by the sexual drive – the beast and the beast. monk. As if strangers in the house weren't enough, now there are strangers inside. The problem is expressed more clearly, although less evocatively, in Maurice. This posthumous novel focuses on what his other works were literally forbidden to touch: the awakening of homosexuality. Sex and desire in Howard's End, A Room with a View and A Passage to India are brief implications of rapture or terror: a struggle in a cave, a fall in a field of violets, where kisses break and where everything else is just talk. about later. There is nothing explicit in Maurice, but we see the beginning and end of the love scenes, the veil drawn from standard courtesy. Maurice can almost be read as an expansion of the famous quote from Howard's End, as a subtext to the various affairs. directed by Margaret, who attempts to combine the disparate elements of her husband's lack of character. The hero is tormented by sexual desires that do not correspond to the character that society allows him. He doesn't even have the dispensation of lust attributed to heterosexual men like his father and Mr. Wilcox. Her first love Clive, who makes an improbable conversion to heterosexuality, enjoys such a Wilcoxian marriage: "They united in a world which had no respect for everyday life, and this secret led after it to a great part of their lives. mentioned” (151). Yet Maurice, by his very deviance, is saved from this state of compartmentalization. As the hesitant and absolute narrator says of Clive's attitude toward sex: "Between men it is inexcusable, between men and women it can be practiced since nature and society approve of it , but never discussed or praised” (151). Between men, this is inexcusable and we must therefore discuss it, or at least think about it. Thus, young Maurice, when his teacher talks to him about sex, is able to recognize that societal scenarios of love are inconclusive and imperfect, his homosexual desires revealing this to him: “'Liar,' he thought. 'Liar, coward, he told me nothing.'" (9). The delicate moral questions and concerns about conventionalism that run through the most famous novels reappear in the form of the difficulties of a man trying to write his sexuality And in this case, at least, the “confusion” so invoked by., 1977.