At the Queen’s Hall with E.M. Forster and Jean Laplanche

In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, we are introduced to the way in which the characters in the story listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In this article, I draw on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to suggest that music constitutes an enigmatic cultural message that returns us to the ‘scene of primal seduction’; a myth of human origins that takes the encounter with an enigmatic other as constitutive of human subjectivity. Reading Howards End through the lens of Laplanche, I discuss how Forster’s characters respond to Beethoven’s message and conclude with a brief discussion about issues of inheritance and alterity.