Trilling on Forster on Huysmans: A Case of Misunderstandings and Automatism

Abstract

In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust writes regretfully of how his work has been misunderstood. Even those who were favourable to the Proustian project, he complains, ended up congratulating him for achieving the opposite of what he actually intended. They praised him for discovering certain truths through amicroscope whereas, Proust claims, he had used a telescope. Far from being a ‘fouilleur de détails’, he describes himself as seeking ‘les grandes lois’. Proust remains among themostmisunderstood authors of the last century. Beginning to read Proust, to borrow an analogy from Schopenhauer, is to look at the front-side of a piece of embroidery – it is quite beautiful, but, for the beholder, the dots have not yet quite been connected. Finishing Proust is to consult the back of the embroidery and to see how all the stiches have been worked together to form the images on the other side. But even when one sees the back of the piece of embroidery, numerous questions remain. Yes, Proust’s work undoubtedly lends itself easily to misunderstandings. Changing gears slightly, misunderstanding is a major theme of the work (and life) of E. M. Forster, especially in A Passage to India. He writes that ‘[a] pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry’. What about a written conversation, a text? Forster’s comments evidently hold true there as well, but there is one aspect to be added. In a text, misunderstanding can arise, quite unconsciously, from omissions – not on the part of the writer, but the reader. Without lapsing into cliché, what is not said is often more interesting than what is actually said. But also, what is not heard, or mistakenly heard (an inversion of the infamous Freudian slip), is often more interesting that what is actually heard, or accurately heard. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Forster, a maestro of misunderstanding, would find one of his sentences misunderstood by the eminent critic Lionel Trilling – and that, to curious effect. Towards the end of his book titled E.M. Forster, Trilling cites a passage from an essay by Forster that recounts his time in Cairo during the war. Trilling introduces this passage by saying that it displayshow ‘literatureworks to “help”us’.He cites Forster as havingwritten that: