ABSTRACT
In the recent Radcliffe Harvard Lecture, Zadie Smith (2003: 2) celebrates the work of E. M. Forster as a novelist whose ‘deliberate rejection of controlled style reflects the messy complexities of the human heart’. Smith holds up Forster as an author whose muddled stories and inconsistent characters are not literarily flawed but closer to the bewildering realities of life while opening up an ethical space. Forster’s style has been often criticized and ridiculed, but why, argues Smith, do we value consistency and rationality so much? Clarity and consistency in literary characters and plots are not just unreal — does everyday life ever adhere to such structure? — but can also be morally problematic: ‘The lesson of the comic novel’, Smith writes, ‘is that our moral enthusiasms make us inflexible, one-dimensional, flat … we lose a vital dimension when we embrace the esprit des serieux’ (2003: 3). Indeed, Smith argues, ‘there might be some ethical advantage in not always pursuing a perfect and unyielding rationality’ (ibid.: 4). Smith’s analysis emphasizes the ethical and political dimensions of comedy and ambiguity: instead of moral certainty and consistency, a comic literary muddle opens up an ethical space in which we as readers ‘find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us’ (ibid.: 4).
