disconnected

[calimac]

Well, it's happened again: something that's been puzzling me intermittently for decades, whenever it comes up.

Somebody uses the phrase "Only connect," in some context suggesting that they take it as a deeply meaningful personal motto. In this case it occupied an LJ userpic.

And I ask, "What does that actually mean?" By itself it's meaningless (connect what to what? and what else besides connect are you not supposed to do?), and context has never enabled me to make sense of it.

And I get one of two replies. Either I'm referred to the original source of the phrase in E.M. Forster's Howards End, or else to an essay by P.L. Travers that focuses on the phrase.

Here's the Forster paragraph.

"It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Now, I do not consider myself a particularly stupid person. But I cannot make much sense out of that paragraph. If the thrust is, "Put passion in your prose," then "Only connect" seems a very peculiar and unexpressive way of putting it; nor does that seem to be the thrust of Travers' equally uncommunicative essay, whose theme seems to be an inchoate series of ideas weakly summarizable as "find meaning in life." Well, duh.

I'm missing something somewhere. Tell me in your own words, not Forster's or Travers's: what do you mean by it?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm finding I appreciate E.M. Forster's aphorism more, not less, as this discussion progresses. I encountered the phrase at least twenty years before reading Howards End, in Roger Ebert's review of David Lean's 1984 film adaptation of Forster's A Passage to India: Ebert noted that the characters largely fail to follow Forster's axiom, in that they don't connect to one another. And that is how I what I long took the phrase to mean: the most important thing one should do in life, or all one should do in life, or the first (or primary) thing one should to do in life ("Everybody knows something that is true to do--that is, something he ought to lose no time in setting about") is to connect to others. With my late twentieth-century upbringing, I might have phrased it, "Just connect".

If memory serves, the phrase does not appear in the Merchant-Ivory film of Howards End, so that remembering that this was the work to which Forster's dictum attached, I took it again as having a purely exterior meaning: the world would be a better place if the Wilcoxes, Schlegels and Basts, and by extension their classes and cultures, connected to one another. When I finally read the book two years ago, I was careless, remembering the film too much, and busily noting the differences between them, to consider the phrase as it appears in context. What registered most was how the book is more even-handed to the characters than the film is: kinder to the Wilcoxes and harsher to the Basts and Schlegels. Margaret in particular is a more complicated heroine in Forster's telling than in the film, for all that Emma Thompson managed to do with the role. And this I believed to be the prime reason that some critics (John Simon and David Shipman, for instance) had felt the film failed its source.

But now I see that the movie, for all its cinematic compensations, fails the novel in other ways, and though I've yet to read a critic who made this particular point (possibly excepting Stanley Kauffmann, whose review I shall reexamine -- but anyway, he liked the film), nonetheless I believe it informs their opinions: Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala's script has abandoned much of the novel's interior commentary. And while that is all but inevitable in any film adaptation of this sort of book --without resort to a narrator-- nonetheless it means that a lot of the novelist's ideas are lost. (Thus as one critic complained, the famous passage analyzing Beethoven's fifth symphony is practically a cartoon in the film.) This phrase and its full sense are among the casualties.

But I already can hear you asking again: that's all very well (or not), but what is that sense? Why did Forster himself so value this phrase that he used it as an epigraph for the entire work? Well, it is making a connection with different kinds of people. And it is connecting one's passionate and prosaic sides. And it is connecting actions to emotions. But I'm going to let someone else explain it: I found the following essay helpful (despite the error in its very title).

A reading of Howards End (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:-Njf8LvbTbUJ:www.emforster.info/pages/howardsend.html+howards+end+only+connect&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Some final notes: I caught a suggestion elsewhere in this discussion that if the reader can't easily make sense of "Only connect", there is no way that staid Henry will understand it. In fact, Margaret never utters the phrase, though Forster calls it her "sermon": she means to preach through example. And in the very next paragraph Forster says that she will fail: Henry doesn't notice things. Was Forster also fighting the long defeat? (Also, about that watery pish, I agree that sometimes Forster's ideas are better than his prose.)

-MTD / NEB

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I saw the film "A Passage to India" when it came out: I found it rather incoherent. Paging through discussions/explanations of the novel (I had no intention of trying to read the thing) did not help.

Reading Ebert's review now, I can sort of follow what he means by connecting, but absent what I have learned in this discussion, the phrase itself "only connect" still seems baffling, in a grammatical way. I wouldn't be able to parse how it means what it's supposed to mean.

But despite that critique of Forster's prose, my creeb about "watery pish" was a reference not to the prose, but to the ideas. Once I learned what "Only connect" is supposed to mean, the imperative of it seems to me to be casually and unprofoundly true, to be fundamentally trivial.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you (and apparently those you refer to) take "Only connect" as meaning connect to others (as I said in my initial comment that it seems to me many people do), yet it seems clear to me that at least in the quotations from Howards End, the reference is to connecting the parts of oneself, becoming an integrated human being.