Edward Morgan Forster, The Longest Journey.
The question could again be the same, where the cow is.
So we read this masterpiece, and we can see that the least loved among Forster’s novels not only strikes us by the precision in characters’ depiction and in the description of their developments and of their movements, but it has in itself very much to tell us, and not only about the nature of reality.
First of all, because of its very strength in showing the world like it was before the twentieth century began, before First World War. The world mainly in the sense of relations between people, and for what concerns the differences between the rich and the poor, and for what concerns the vanishing of these differences. I mean, rich people could live a private life, poor people couldn’t. Nowadays, both can’t.
And we can also see that the question of the cow is now, even more than in 1907, of huge momentousness. Because while in 1966 (remember The Beatles) the cow could be here there and everywhere, now after 2008 and the CDO affair, which Stewart Ansell could have definitely called the subjective product of a diseased imagination, now the cow can be everywhere, and nowhere.
And beyond the question of the cow we can find something more.
Reading the story of the clubfooted Rickie Elliot we can’t help thinking of Oedipus and consequently of William Gass’s Introduction to The Recognitions by William Gaddis. As a matter of fact, Rickie is looking for himself from the beginning to the end of the novel, and he marries a woman which is quite different from what he believed, and so, The Longest Journey turns out to be another novel about the everlasting theme of the recognition, and Rickie Elliot is another hero of this search of ourselves which we can never accomplish.
Rickie Elliot is hardly a hero. Oedipus is hardly a hero. And William Gass says, “We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition!”. And so we all are heroes, even though hardly heroes. (quint)
