Comment
`Share'-value of stories today
TABISH KHAIR
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As literature gets commodified, the stuff of contracts and media campaigns, only stories that have mass market appeal and encourage us to not think too much are getting noticed.
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TOO much storytelling, too little of anything else in the global book market: Monica Ali, Yann Martell, post-Satanic Rushdie, Khaled Hosseini etc. It appears that today the highest compliment critics can pay a novelist is to describe her as a great storyteller. Where would that have left Proust, Joyce or Camus?
I am not even convinced that novelists with intricate "stories" between their covers were primarily storytellers. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) are not easy to read stories, or even meant to be read simply as stories. In Dead Souls (1842), Gogol does not turn the very "marketable" idea of selling the "dead" into a thriller or a thigh-slapper. Zola's The Ladies Paradise (1883) is not simply an entertaining "Dallas".
But look at any of the novels being currently placed on the front shelves of the large bookstores, promoted by book clubs, overloaded with advances and awarded prizes like the Booker, and you come across (sometimes excellent) storytelling, and little else. Where are the novels experimenting with narration, style, ideas, conventions, newness?
Not being noticed
Oh, they are probably being written — but they are not being awarded prizes (unless it is the Nobel, which sometimes goes to great literary writers for the wrong political reasons) or put on visible bookshelves.
There was a time when storytelling needed to be championed, perhaps. After all, storytelling is the proletariat of novel-writing, just as basic, as essential, as likely to be dismissed by the cerebral classes. But, being a post-Soviet Marxist, I have never been convinced by the Leftist tendency to mythologise the workers. As far as I can see, Marx believed in the revolutionary potential of "workers" but he never accepted all their standards. His daughters were given piano lessons; he cared for poetry and philosophy. For him, the communist future was one in which workers would be able to engage in high culture too, not one in which we would all have to, so to say, downsize.
But, of course, that is what happened with Stalin and others — with their stress on the stories of workers and tractors. We had Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel was Tempered (1936), a huge "story" of its kind, shared — willingly or not — by all in Stalinist USSR.
Something similar is happening today, though from the other side, from the side of liberal capitalism. With the worker being hastily buried by Thatcher, Reagan and their intellectual echoers, the stress has moved to the "consumer". So now we have readers' literary awards, we have storytelling — the most commonly accessible element of the novel, the obligatory "share".
However, what is the "consumer" but the "worker" in liberalist garb?
There are two main objections to this predominance of storytelling in the art of novel-writing today: the first one relates to the genre, and the second to the world around it.
To take the generic objection first, at least those of us who write in English have no excuse to ignore the name of the genre. It is true that every once in a while a critic or a novelist tries to define the genre, usually by highlighting one of the many elements that go into it: plot, story, language, characterisation, individualism, print, whatever. But the genre defines itself also in terms of novel-ness: by definition, a novel (at least in English, where it is not a "roman") is something new. Hence, one can argue that the premium should be not on storytelling — which is an age-old art — or any other component of the novel, but on experimentation and contestation in the novel as a whole.
Essence of the novel
I am not arguing in favour of newness for the sake of newness. I am aware that the novel grew into strength with the rise of industrial capitalism and that newness remains one of the gods of capitalism. Like all gods, it is capable of much mischief. And yet, to take newness out of the novel — at least as self-aware contestation, re-questioning, experimentation — is to take the novel out of this world.
My other — worldly — objection relates to the ways in which storytelling (unlike the narrative of a novel) operates. Storytelling is a collective art. It depends on large areas of agreement. This is what explains, for instance, all those novels by "coloured" writers that finally tell us about the confusion of Third World immigrants in the West, or about Indian or Muslim women contending against (Eastern) patriarchy in London or New York. It is not that such stories do not exist, but they are told more often because that is how "Western" readers see "Eastern" women and men. What about other stories — for example, that of Indian women with professional degrees and work experience who marry into the U.S. or Europe and are turned into housewives for years or forever, because their visa do not permit them to work? I know more Eastern women turned into housewives by the "West" than Eastern women who are being civilised into modernity by contact with the West, but I am still to read about the former in prize-winning novels.
Consumerist bias
Even promising "bestsellers", like Ali's Brick Lane, Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian display this "consumerist" bias in favour of stories that are already visible, "shared" stories. This explains why the stories of Brick Lane, published at a time when visa, custom and "anti-terror" restrictions had begun to impact even on privileged commuters from the East, culminates in this scene: Two Bangladeshi women, middle-aged immigrants, decide to go skating. But you cannot skate in a sari, says one. Oh yes, you can. You can do anything in England, replies the other.
There is no suggestion of irony in this narrative. And while I will gladly concede that some women can do things in London that they cannot do in, say, Kabul, the fact remains that some women can also do things in Jakarta, Delhi or Karachi that they are not allowed or able to do in London or Copenhagen. Way back in 1987, Ravinder Randhawa, a pioneer of modern South Asian writing in England, had published a hilarious, gendered novel, A Wicked Old Woman, playing with exactly these possibilities and prohibitions: its protagonist was an immigrant woman who pretended to be old in order to wrangle more personal space within England. Of course, the novel never became a bestseller.
If literature, as is often claimed, is meant to challenge and question, then it appears that many eulogised recent novels depend on questioning the "other", not the reading "self" in the West. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a rare work of humour in many ways, nevertheless depends of stereotyped perceptions of Communism and the conflict between "new" and "old" East Europe. It also offers fair dollops of complacency to us in the West, constantly highlighting the rational, democratic, tolerant aspects of England. Similarly, Hosseini's The Kite Runner, another promising first novel, does something remarkable — and unnoticed by critics. Praised as a "masterful story" of Afghanistan, it keeps us in Afghanistan until the first years of Soviet control and invasion, then it skips the Mujahideen phase and returns us to Afghanistan only after the Taliban are in place. Would it be possible for a writer to narrate the Mujahideen — those equivalents of the "founding fathers" of America, according to one U.S. President — and still write a bestseller? Or have we become incapable — at least in the supermarkets of literature — of reading novels that make us question our own roles and assumptions, our own complicity in the horrors of the world?
Off-the-shelf stories
We are increasingly told stories that can be pulled off the shelves of our age's discursive supermarkets and do not have to be retrieved from some remote corner-shop; they are stories that encourage us not to think too much. Perhaps that is why even excellent first novels, like Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Booker-winners like Yann Martel's Life of Pi, tend to be so lenient about nomenclature, mixing up Hindu and Muslim names with no narrative justification, not even that of the "unreliable narrator" claimed by Rushdie when critics accused his Midnight's Children of historical errors. After all, what's in a name, as long as the brand — in these two cases "India" — is apt?
What is "an interesting story"? Something "all of us" find "interesting" or "share"? By these supermarket standards, Proust's stories were not worth telling, and Joyce was not capable of telling his stories well. Come to think of it, even Shakespeare, though not a novelist, hardly ever told an original story or told it "well": consider Hamlet, that moronic ditherer!
Tabish Khair's novel, FILMING A Love Story, will be published by Picador in July 2007.
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