| Author(s) | Omar Abdullah Bagabas |
| Affiliation | Assistant Professor, Department of European Languages, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia |
| Title | East and West in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Arts. Volume 12, No 1. (2000/1420) |
| Abstract | Abstract. This paper sheds light on a significant statement spoken by Fielding to Adela Quested following the terrifying experience of the caves and after Aziz’s acquittal in Forster’s A Passage to India. The statement is analyzed in the light of its relation to vital issues discussed in the Orientalism debate inaugurated by Said’s Orientalism and picked up by Bhabha, Young, Fanon, Majeed and others. The above debate relies on the existence of a dichotomy or a clearly defined demarcation between a powerful Europe and a defeated Asia. The Orient has always existed in the European imagination as a kind of negative projective fantasy that invites the West to extend its hegemony over it and rob it of its natural resources and hidden treasures. But Forster shows that such a conception is erroneous and in due time it is shattered and dismantled as such a romanticized image of an exotic Orient embedded in the Western mentality is based on fantasy. Equally, Forster directs a severe blow at colonization since the British Empire rests on sand. Colonialism is bound to fall down because it is based on fake and artificial categorizations. It deepens racial discrimination and sets up its own faulty criterion for differences between colonizer and colonized. The inevitable result is that an attempt to bridge gaps between East and West is an impossibility. Thus the pillars that colonial authority uses to strengthen its domination are ironically the same pillars that threaten its eventual collapse. While the colonizer thinks he can domesticate the Indian continent and subject it to his control, he finds himself in a hostile and inimical environment that refuses his intimacy and expels him as he gets too close to its inaccessible treasures and hidden mysteries. What is left for the colonizer at the end is a confession of utter defeat that he cannot extend thorough control over a muddled and equivocal orient. Thus he has to depart and turn his face toward a clear and harmonious West leaving behind his back a mysterious and enigmatic Orient that he can never clear himself from its muddle and confusion, and thus it remains beyond his comprehension. |
