H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 4this local tourist attraction. Instead, it intimates its importance in a
sideways, negative kind of way.
This ambiguity – are the Caves really out of the ordinary or
not? – lies at the heart of A Passage to India. In a shadowy way, the
very core of the book is distilled in its opening words – ironically,
even teasingly so, since the reader cannot possibly be aware of this
yet. Literary works quite often ‘know’ things that the reader does
not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.
Nobody will ever know what was in a letter written by Milly Theale
to Merton Densher at the end of Henry James’s novel The Wings of
the Dove, since another character burns it before we can learn
what it contains. One might say that not even Henry James knows
its contents. When Shakespeare has Macbeth remind Banquo to
attend a feast he is throwing, and Banquo promises to do so, the
play, but not the spectator, knows that Banquo will indeed turn up
for the feast; but he will attend it as a ghost, since Macbeth has had
him murdered in the meantime. Shakespeare is having a little joke
at the expense of his audience.
In one sense, the Marabar Caves turn out to be every bit as
momentous as the opening words of the novel would suggest.
They are the site of its central action. But this action may also be a
non- action. Whether anything happens in the Caves is hard to
decide. There are different views on the matter in the novel itself.
Caves are literally hollow, so that to say that the Marabar Caves lie
at the centre of the novel is to say that there is a kind of blank or
void at its heart. Like many a modernist work of Forster’s time, this
one turns on something shadowy and elusive. It has a kind of
absent centre. If there is indeed a truth at the core of the work, it
seems one that is almost impossible to pin down. So the novel’s
opening sentence serves as a little model of the book as a whole. It