La mel es més dol a que la sang: Fiction as Magical Intervention - a reading of E.M. Forster’s The Life to Come.

Drawing on Deborah Bird Rose’s notion that there is a need for a magicalintervention on the part of individuals if humanity is to survive, this paper will considerhow the ethical interventions of fiction writers are acts of imagination that bring about anew idea of the past (history), the human being (memory) and our own Life to Come (themythic).The paper explores a short story by E M Forster. The Life To Come, written in 1922 andpublished fifty years later in 1972, is set in the eye of an historical encounter both postcolonialand queer. Forster’s story gives voice to an alternative historical space often madeinvisible; it represents one of, what Ashis Nandy calls, History’s Forgotten Doubles. TheLife to Come is therefore a marker within a cultural discourse about injustice and the past,that continues to emerge, and write the world: it shifts the contents of our histories andmemories through the invocation of myth. In the second part of the paper, I explore recentexamples of this literary tradition.