Sexuality, Allegory and Interpretation

Both Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer and E. M. Forster’s Maurice explore success achieved in the face of society’s hostility to homosexuality. This chapter addresses both novels in terms of allegory and utopian possibility. Whilst Galgut’s adoption of biofiction in Arctic Summer aims to utilize the political and creative possibilities found in early modernist writing, the text’s tight control of narrative form and use of allegory leads to problems – that apparent newness is in fact highly scripted and controlled. Spurred by this consideration of Arctic Summer, a new approach is taken to Maurice that emphasises its openness as a text. The reader is encouraged to engage with issues of interpretation, with Maurice’s own development showing him becoming adept at reading complex, pressured situations. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is seen as an important intertext both for Maurice and the South African Anglophone tradition to which Galgut belongs. Using Walter Benjamin on natural history and allegory the chapter contends that Maurice, whilst maintaining its stress on how long-term same-sex relationships and cross-class love secure meaning in the world, also depicts a world that is always subject to change, loss and ruination.