Today’s class – on Bloomsbury Group aesthetics – was difficult. And in some respects that is the point of Bloomsbury Group aesthetics, including Forster’s novel. Forster likes to put the characters in his novels into impossibly complex situations which he referred to (in Howards End, as it happens) as “muddle.” The complexity of life, human relations, desires and wants, expectations and failings, are all thrown together in a puzzling and largely untenable set of predicaments. The point, many critics think, is not for readers to resolve or judge these situations one way or another (as we are invited to do with Roxana or Emma) or even to sympathize with them (as we do Maggie I think) but rather for readers to appreciate that good and bad qualities co-exist with each other and in themselves. The “human condition” is revealed to be in its essence not right or wrong but simply complex.
What does this have to do with money? You all might recall the scene early in the novel where the women in Margaret and Helen’s circle debate “What are we to do with our money.” No one can come to any satisfactory solution – and the women’s inability to decide is in part what leads to the central plot thrust of the rest of the novel. Complexity is causal (as Robert Trigo reminds us all plots are) but not in the direction of resolution (like Emma) but more in the direction of appreciation – for the “beauty” (a word that appears many times in the novel) of what is impossible. To see this muddle though is to appreciate the “form” of the novel – mixed up, messed up, confusing, complex, without it being something that “teaches” anything in particular. The novel becomes an opportunity to see the world – and even the economy as we will see with Keynes – with an eye to all of its difficulties and somehow see it all as an “experience” that we can measure and even possibly appreciate.
The novelist Zadie Smith has a wonderful essay on “muddle” in Forster’s novels. It was published in the Guardian in 2003.
At one point in Zadie Smith’s essay she contrasts the protagonists of Austin and Forster. A far cry from the positivist characters Austin depicts, at first glance one might think that the different socio-economic classes the various characters belong to in Howards End would be indicative of their morality. The characters, however, are much more complex than that, their differing levels of wealth adding but another layer of complexity to characters we cannot decide if purely of one disposition, because they are not.
Smith posits that what “Forster’s muddled style has to tell us is that there are some goods in the world that cannot be purely pursued rationally, we must also feel our way through them”. I think that is an important claim about Forster, with respect to our conversations in class about the new quantitative directions economics was taking at the time. Keynes pioneered a staggeringly more rational approach to economics, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the mess of human emotion as an unremovable part of the discipline. While cutting-edge at the time, further down the road critics of Keynesian theory attack the lack of mathematics in his workings.
I think there is a certain level of “muddle” to be associated with economic theory. Throughout history, and especially in the present, the economy and it’s workings have been extremely complex, with the norms of macro economic theory being what leading thinkers at the time use to explain it’s phenomena. These theories and frameworks work great until they don’t, until an economic phenomena occurs that is not explained by them, and something new is thought up.
I think I see this “muddle” most in the character of Mr. Wilcox. Mr. Wilcox is a muddle of good/bad/ugly human characteristics. He loves his children, late wife, and Margaret, yet he does not understand them and does not allow for this true characters to register on his perception of them. Although his view of women is probably a product of his era Mr. Wilcox is rather sexist, and his beliefs regarding rich and poor are eerily reminiscent of the Republican ideology in America now, where the poor are poor because they choose to be, and if they only tried they wouldn’t be. Yet Margaret loves him, despite his failings, and there are moments in the book when Mr. Wilcox is kind, or loving. I was particularly touched at the end when Helen enters with her baby and Mr. Wilcox says “‘Here they are at last!’… disengaging himself with a smile” (293). There’s no doubt that Mr. Wilcox either has a fondness for Helen or the baby; either way, it shows that he’s forgiven Helen’s transgressions — how, or why, I’m not too sure. I think this ambiguity — coming after, I would add, from Helen’s pregnancy indirectly causing Mr. Wilcox’s son to go to jail for three years — is representative of the Fosterian “muddle” in which we are not supposed to judge the characters, or even understand them, but to just sit and appreciate the strange and wonderful complexities of human nature.