The trouble with Rickie Elliot's short stories, and equally with Forster's own, is an overbalance of meaningfulness at the expense of represented life—a preponderance of "unearned" symbolism. That this imperfection is less conspicuous in Forster's novels is largely due, I think, to the operation of a contrary feeling, his sense of the comic. Comedy provides the counterweight to keep the symbolist from slipping too far toward allegory; it continually refreshes his awareness of the world's intractability to private patterns of meaning.
In saying this I do not mean that comedy and symbolism, taken as literary methods, are opposites. Forster's Italian novels [Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View], with their purposeful selectivity of detail and their almost geometrical structure, are also highly comic; the recurrent symbols or rhythms can appear with equal plausibility in scenes of tragedy and of farce. This is made possible, however, by the fact that Forster's sense of irony governs the world of these novels. To a great extent the meaning he wants to create is ironic meaning; the significant moments are usually the ones that confound our surface expectations and those of the comically wrong-headed characters. A fictional world of this kind is patently artificial, for its details are chosen for their usefulness to the author's practical jokes. There is no urgency here to the characters' task of extracting "symbolic moments" from the chaotic world, for the represented world is not chaotic at all; it has already been severely trimmed to suit the purpose of the plot.
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