The Ghost of Ethics in the English Modernist Short Story

Abstract

This paper begins by differentiating le rien from le néant, and situating it in relation to other terms like la chose, quelque chose, and le tout. It then moves on to show that le rien functions in some of E. M. Forster’s lesser-known short stories as an element with substance, an alternative to what is, that holds the stories open. This openness becomes the space for utopian possibility, the potential for an other-wise, that dovetails with their lack of formal and thematic closure as well. In this, they return repeatedly to the register of spectrality, invoking the language of ghosts and haunting alongside their engagement with le rien to indicate that though they cannot clearly evoke a new ethical reality in the twentieth century, they can imagine its possibility and insist upon its presence—even if felt as an absence. The stories discussed are ‘The Purple Envelope’ and ‘Dr. Woolacott’. In both tales, a ‘nothing’ in the vein of le rien forestalls narrative closure and motions towards the possibility of an ethical alternative to the totalised, closed version of events demanded by traditional narrative. This dynamic is symptomatic of the modernist English short story, and affords a key means of reading their emergent ethics even when a finally realised ethical vision is not present.

Keywords

• E.M. Forster
• ethics
• ghost
• haunting
• modernism
• nothing