"Just Connect," E.M. Forster's inscription at Howard Home, is more problematic than it should be. It is a quintessentially Forsterian injunction: idealistic, sweetly humanist and absolute, but vague and stated to be contested. First, what does the statement apply to? It's there under the title, and it prompts the novice reader to extend it through every situation in the novel, which is easy enough. Our aim is only to connect the people, perhaps, or England and Germany, or the leisured and distressed classes, or, with other work in mind, the colonizer and the colonized. The quote does not reveal itself until the last third of the book, where it refers to something internal and specific: "Only come together and the beast and the monk, deprived of the isolation that is life for both, will die" (188) . Of course there is nothing unexpected about a specific phrase having a possible broader meaning, but it is slightly unbalancing that the broader meanings come up first. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay But Forster, despite his scrupulous avoidance of the horrible, is an unexpectedly unbalanced author. This is partly an effect of his stability pose. Her steady, confident, aunt-like narrative voice promises truth through the sheer force of diction: "He knew she would disappear from his hands and eyes, but he had thought she might live in his mind, not realizing that the very fact that we have loved the dead increase their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoke them the more they move away" (50, A Passage to India) to give an almost random example. This trick - intruding into the reflections of a character with a statement of superior expressive power - it is a recognized Forsterism. Yet this narrative voice, with its confident and coherent style, is proudly incoherent. It can utter the terrible and resonant "ou-boum" of Mrs. Moore's disintegration with the same force with which he articulates Aziz's joy in finding his sympathy. He is a moral philosopher with a declared and profound humanist inclination, so his official opinions are easily identifiable: they are the good ones. But a triumph of the Forsterian worldview cannot be achieved without the defeat of a strong opposition. The idea of ​​this dialectic as a strategy can be supported by an episode of Casa Howard 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 declaiming with great sweetness, said "heigh-ho!" (45 ).Beethoven only ceases to be the subject during its third movement, when "a goblin walking calmly over the universe" and his cohorts fill Helen with "panic and emptiness" (46). goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push.... and then - he blew with his mouth and they dispersed! (46). The artist is in control here, he lets the goblins free so he can triumph over them with a vision of harmony and heroism. But this is not the natural order of things. It's a question of the artist's choice. Beethoven ultimately chose to do everything right... But the goblins were there. They might come back. He said it so bravely, and that's why Beethoven can be trusted when he says other things. (47)This is Forster's method, an art that oscillates between optimism and uncertainty, 'confusion'. He begins with a certain vision, only to see it falter in subtle ways andscary, and then reaffirm it. But the statement comes with an artistic admission: that articulate, dominant narrative voice chose for things to happen that way. Life in his novels is a bit like Beethoven's sonnets: "They can triumph or despair depending on how the player decides and Lucy had decided so. They should triumph" (A Room with a View 29) Yet this artistic vision of triumph and unit is presented as seen by people who experience it in disparate and contradictory ways. Famously, Freddy follows the technical details with the help of the score, Mrs. Munt taps the keys with her foot, and Helen has visions of shipwrecks and goblins. Margaret finds it a bit silly. Most aesthetic appreciation in Forster is like this: problematic, confusing What is the right way to listen to, or look at, Della Roba children and Giotto's Frescoes? Understanding art, the a unifying and messy force, it can be as disconnected and contested as anything else. In Casa Howard, the question of disjunction is further confused, because the problem lurking beneath the “just connect” imperative is sex. prose and passion” want to expand universally, covering both the non-whole world and the non-whole people in it, but instead contract to the place of disjunction caused by the sexual drive: the beast and the monk. As if strangers in the house weren't enough, now there are strangers in the house. The problem is expressed more clearly, if 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 Howards End, A Room with a View and A Passage to India are brief implications of ecstasy or terror: a fight in a cave, a fall into a field of violets, where kisses shatter and everything else is only talked about. about later. There is no explicitness in Maurice, but we see the beginning and end of the love scenes, the veil drawn out of normal courtesy. Maurice can almost be read as a development of the famous quote from House Howard, as an undergrowth to the various affairs. made by Margaret, who attempts to combine the disparate elements in her husband's lack of character. The hero is tormented by sexual desires that are not within the character that society allows him. She doesn't even have the dispensation for lust afforded to straight men like her father and Mr. Wilcox. Her first love Clive, who makes an unlikely conversion to heterosexuality, enjoys such a Wilcoxian marriage: "They came together in a world that had no respect for the everyday, and this secrecy took with it much more of their lives. It could never have been mentioned anyway" (151). Yet Maurice, thanks to his deviance, is saved from this state of compartmentalization. As the wavering, absolute narrator says of Clive's attitude to sex: "Between men it is inexcusable, between men and women it may be practiced as nature and society approve of it, but never discussed nor praised" (151). Among men it is unforgivable, and therefore it must be discussed, or at least thought about. Thus, young Maurice, when his teacher talks to him about sex, is able to recognize that social scripts about love are inconclusive and imperfect, his homosexual desires revealing this to him: "'Liar,' he thought. 'Liar, coward , he didn't tell me anything." (9). The delicate moral questions and concerns with conventionality that run through the most famous novels reappear as the difficulties of a man trying to write about sexuality. And in this, at least, Forster's much invoked "confusion" becomes a desirable state. Queer desire is spontaneous, beyond all limits, and therefore requires a reconsideration of marriage, love and society as a whole."., 1977.