E. M. Forster’s Ciphers, Puns and Ambiguities
E. M. Forster’s Ciphers, Puns and Ambiguities

Summary/Abstract: This study starts from the premise that a writer, and E. M. Forster makes a case in point, will always be a good reader of signs, be those the signs one discerns in the natural environment or the signs in the shape of letters forming words in a text. Forster wrote his first short story under the impression of the signs his eyes beheld in the Italian landscape of a valley, which suggested a plot of a fantastic nature to the then young man who found himself “in a receptive state” (Forster 1983: 290). Much later, in his most accomplished novel A Passage to India, Forster challenged his readers’ perception of the abstract geography of “fists and fingers” (Forster 2005: 7) in the remote distance to build the whole text in the key of a cipher. In the same key, pun and ambiguity contribute to the reader’s sense of active participation in decoding a prose of many-layered and deferred meanings.

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