A Literary Anthropological Interpretation Of A Passage To India On Its Cross-Cultural Theme And The Revelation

The novel A Passage to India could be regarded as a masterpiece of E. M. Forster. When it was published in1924, it received both positive and negative critical views, which made a great contribution to the interpretation of the novel itself. A Passage to India on the one hand, concerns the confusing political and religious points of the time; on the other hand, it orientates its main theme on searching for connection and universal love between different cultures. The latter point has aroused more and more attentions to study the cross-cultural aspect of the novel. It could be easily found that the whole novel’s plot is centered on the discussion of the realizability of true friendship and communication between the British and the Indian, which is the focus of the present thesis.Different from the former point of view, the present thesis will prove the great cultural gap between the British and the Indian as well as its obstructive influence on the realizability of the true communication and friendship between them in the colonial background by applying an interdisciplinary theory, named as literary anthropology which is first put forward by Fernando Poyatos. According to Poyatos, a specific culture could be divided into sensible and intelligible systems and each system also consists of several subsystems.The sensible system includes some microcosmic aspects, such as body gestures, communication distance, drinks, food, architecture, city layout which are more related to daily life. In the novel, there are many parts related to the above aspects. Characters from Britain and India have quite different features in daily details. They have distinct understandings of one gesture; they express the same meaning through different ways; they have dissimilar customs about eating and drinking; they adapt to distinct living environments. By comparing their various aspects in sensible system, the cultural gap between them could be strongly and clearly proved which arouses the misunderstanding and bias between the two parties and finally impedes cross-cultural communication between them.The intelligible system is more related to macroscopical aspect compared with the sensible system. It could be further divided into religion, society, politics as well as arts etc. Through the study on the distinction between the British and the Indian in aspects of religious belief, marriage thought, art preference and man-animal relationship, the cultural gap and its obstructive function on the cross-cultural communication between the two sides could be unfolded here.Based on the comparison between the British and the Indian in various aspects both in sensible system and intelligible system, the cultural gaps between the colonizer and the colonized are identified vividly and comprehensively which implements an obstructive role in the cross-cultural communication between the two parties. Besides, the colonial background intensifies such a kind of obstructive function. In spite of the failure of cross-cultural communication between the British and the Indian in the novel, the constructive suggestions for current cross-cultural communication could also be summarized from such an experience which is put forward by the present thesis as:the cross-cultural communication can be fully achieved by communicating with each other based on the mutual respect and equal status, the fully comprehension about the partner’s culture and one’s own culture as well as the strong persistence.