Forster, the Immersive, and A Passage to India

Jeffrey Heath identifies the kinetic (“shifts and turns of thought”) as a key value underlying Forster’s depiction of surrounding experience. Playfully, yet cogently, Heath posits that Forster scholars should avoid “prearranging” the author’s intentions as the “editing” of experience Forster sought to avoid. Rather, fielding trajectories for the immediacy and potentiality of unedited experiences—made authentic by virtue of contingency, of surprised joy or accident, amounting to Forster’s “aesthetics of the accident”—becomes a key interpretand when seeking to understand the after-life of Forster’s oeuvre. Moving beyond Heath’s kinetic premise, I argue that Forster’s depiction of a multi-vectored and dynamic experience, and the surrounding space it constitutes, amounts to an immersive premise, one which requires the unwriting of his fictions. In honor of the centenary, I will focus upon examples taken from A Passage to India in support of the claim. Two questions emerge: first, is Forster’s immersive approach anti-theory insofar as its validation of experience remains skeptical of post priori textualizations? Second, does declaring an “immersive turn” for twenty-first century Forster Studies flirt dangerously with contemporary, technocratic discourses of global neoliberalism; or, on the contrary, create new channels rendering Forster’s works ideal for post-print literary paradigms?