Periphrasis, defined most simply as "the use of many words where one or a few would do," has, like all figures, a more devious side. Rooted in the Greek "to speak around," described variously as a figure that simultaneously "underand over-specifies," or "the use of a negative, passive, or inverted construction in place of a positive, active or normal construction," the circumlocution associated with periphrasis begins to suggest a refusal to name its subject that emphasizes the fact of its elision.' If we go further and describe it in Gerard Genette's terms as a figure that both opens up and exists in a gap or space between sign and meaning, a figure that is moreover "motivated" in its usage,2 then we arrive at the association between periphrasis, power, and rape that structures both linguistic and social relations in A Passage to India and provides the space for re-reading E. M. Forster's most enigmatic novel. To introduce this association, we must move immediately to the event at the heart of the novel, Adela Quested's experience in the Marabar caves that leads to the trial of the Indian doctor Aziz for attempted rape. Or so we assume: the charge, like the event, is either elided completely or referred to by the English as an "insult," a clearly motivated circumlocution. Later, in a moment of vision during the trial, Adela returns to the caves and retracts her accusation of Aziz, but the reader never learns what if anything actually happened there. Where we would have the naming of the crime and its perpetrator, exists only a periphrasis, a gap. That Forster deliberately created this gap is clear from the original version of the scene, where an assault definitely occurs: the reader is in the cave with Adela and feels the hands that push her against the wall and grab her breasts; we too smash the assailant with the field glasses before running out of the cave and down the hill.3 In the published version, not just the violent physical attack but the entire scene in the cave is elided. Into the interpretive space opened by this elision, critics have not feared to rush, supported by Forster's statement that "in the cave it is either a man, or the