'A balm for the incurable wound of the world' : music and the pictorial mode in the writing of E.M. Forster

Benjamin Britten opined in 1969 about twentieth century English literature that there ‘is no doubt that E. M. Forster is our most musical novelist’. Although Britten argues that Forster shows ‘a most sensitive reaction to music’, he notes (and disapproves of) Forster’s ‘curious tendency to mock at any intellectual approach on behalf of the listener’. Forster favours a critical discourse that guards against a sterilising effect of technical musicological language, and his essays on musical aesthetics articulate a stark epistemological divide between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ modes of responding through the medium of words to the vagaries of musical sound; he is ‘more interested by the workings of the unconscious’ of the composer and listener than in the subsidiary technical exposition of the critic. Forster acknowledged that he was ‘no musician’ and outwardly states his general ambivalence towards technical criticism. Historically, however, musico-literary critics have attempted to explain Forster’s writing about music by methodologically borrowing from that same technical approach from which Forster was keen to distance himself. Such approaches have distracted scholars interested in music and the word from Forster’s own questions about music and ontology: What constitutes meaning in music? How can that meaning range so widely between different people? Can such differences be reconciled through intersubjective connection? To justify a claim for Forster as the twentieth century’s ‘most musical novelist’ requires calibration around a literary set of questions: How can one describe the sublime effect music has on the listener? Are there ways of drawing that sensation of unity into personal relationships in daily life? And does the value felt in music reflect on one’s own sense of nationhood? Taking Forster at his word as an amateur player, and lover, of music, this thesis focuses on how Forster figured music to convey more ‘more than the words of daily life can tell us’ about creativity, love, and cosmos.