of Plato’s cave interior may: perhaps this cave experience has something to do with Adela getting in
touch with the deepest levels of her consciousness and perhaps being frightened by what she finds there.
Now, Forster’s use of the caves. The locals cannot explain or describe the caves. Aziz, a grand
promoter of them, must finally admit he knows nothing of them, having never visited the site, while
Professor Godbole, who has seen them, describes their effect only in terms of what does not cause it. To
each of the characters’ questions—are they picturesque? are they historically significant?—he offers a
cryptic “No.” To his Western audience, and even to Aziz, this set of responses is not helpful. Godbole’s
message might be that the caves must be experip. 101enced before they can be understood or that every
person’s caves are different. Such a position might be borne out by the example of Mrs. Moore’s
unpleasant encounter in a different cave. Throughout the early portions of the novel, she has been
impatient with other people and resentful of having them—their views, their assumptions, their physical
presence—forced on her. One of the ironies of her Indian experience is that in a landscape so vast, the
psychological space is so small; she came all this way and can’t get away from life, England, people,
death closing in on her. When she gets inside the cave, a crush of people threatens her; the jostling and
brushing seem overtly hostile in the dark enclosure. Something unidentified but unpleasant—she can’t tell
if it belongs to a bat or an infant, but it’s organic and not nice—rubs across her mouth. Her heartbeat
becomes oppressive and she can’t breathe, so she flees the cave as quickly as she can and takes a good
while to calm down. In her case, the cave seems to force her into contact with her deepest personal fears
and anxieties: other people, ungovernable sensations, children and fecundity. There is also the suggestion
that India itself threatens her, since all the people aside from Adele and herself in the cave are Indians.
While she has tried to be Indian, to be comfortable and understanding of the “natives” in ways other
members of the ruling British have not been, she can hardly be said to have mastered the Indian
experience. So it may be that what she runs into in the darkness is the fraudulence of her attempt to “be
Indian.”
On the other hand, maybe she doesn’t have an encounter with Something at all. Perhaps what she meets
in the cave is instead Nothingness, albeit some years before Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and the
existentialists of the 1950s and 1960s articulate the dichotomy between, in Sartre’s terms, Being and
Nothingness. Could it be that what she finds in the cave isn’t death necessarily but the experience of the
Void? I think it quite possible, if by no means certain.
p. 102So what does Adela’s cave stand for? She has, or seems to have, all of the responses that Mrs.
Moore does, although hers are different. As a virgin on the edge of spinsterhood who has been shipped
halfway around the world to marry a man she doesn’t love, she has some very understandable anxieties
about matrimony and sex. In fact, her last conversation before entering the cave is with Aziz regarding his
own married life, and her questions are probing and even inappropriate. Perhaps this conversation brings
on her hallucination, if that is what it is, or perhaps it provokes Aziz or some third party (their guide, for
instance) into whatever he does, if anyone does anything.
For Adela, the horror of her cave experience and its booming echo ride roughshod over her soul until
she recants her testimony against Aziz during his trial. Once the mayhem dies down and she is safely
away from the Indians who have hated her and the English who now hate her, she announces that the
echo has stopped. What does this suggest? The cave may bring on or point up a variety of inauthentic
experience (another existential concept)—that is, Adela is confronted by the hypocrisy of her life and her
reasons for coming to India or agreeing to marry Ronnie, her fiancé, by her failure to take responsibility
for her own existence. Or it may represent a breach of the truth (in a more traditional philosophical
tradition) or a confrontation with terrors she has denied and can only exorcise by facing them. Or
something else. For Aziz, too, the caves speak through their aftermath—of the perfidy of the English, of
the falseness of his subservience, of his need to assert responsibility for his own life. It may be that Adela
does panic in the face of Nothingness, only recovering herself when she takes responsibility by recanting