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Literary Review
Essays in criticism
Thus it (the critical power) tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself.
Matthew Arnold
WHEN it comes to promoting contemporary literature, there is nothing like Western scholarship. Even while discussing works of previous eras, there is a free exchange of ideas the purpose of which is to stir the mind, leading to revaluations and reconsiderations. We simply have to take a leaf out of western critical tradition. Notice, for instance, a whole lot of series such as "Case Book Series," "Modern Judgments," and "Twentieth Century Interpretations" which put together in a compact edition some of the best critical studies available in various learned literary journals. The current scene in English studies in India bears witness to a similar situation. And this augurs well. "New Orientation Series" of Pencraft International, Delhi, intends to present recent critical studies on the most widely read writers and those who have been admitted into the curriculum of English graduate studies programme. Two such recent anthologies are on Amitav Ghosh and V.S. Naipaul.
The Introduction to Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives by Brinda Bose is a most comprehensive treatment of the works of one of the most important post-colonial, post-modern writers of our times. It discusses this historical researcher's (Ghosh did considerable field work in Egypt and Cambodia for his In an Antique Land and The Calcutta Chromosome, reported to be the first science-fiction novel in Indian Writing in English) abiding interest in exploring the identity (or lack of it) of the displaced Indian diaspora. This exploration involves straddling between two cultures — a ubiquitous phenomenon these days — retrieval of subaltern texts and creation of political and historical subtexts by way of establishing the context and the sense of place and time so essential for fiction. The problem for Ghosh, to borrow Homi Bhabha's phrase, is one of "historicising the dehistoricised" or narrating the nation using the dispossessed, the subaltern voice. The subaltern can and does speak after all. Ghosh belongs to the Rushdie tradition of writers, the ones who are supposed to represent the "global league". The extended family, the basic unit of the Indian society, the very archetype of our social fabric (as opposed to the Western nuclear one) has always been the epicentre for Indian fiction ever since the days of R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. It has served as the bedrock for representing national identity. In the post-modern context, however, it would be a misnomer to use family in this sense. Ghosh would rather employ it to examine the fractured identities of the displaced Indian diaspora, the inhabitants of what has now been termed the "third space".
This valuable anthology comprising 14 essays has three sections in it. The section on "Critical Readings" discusses six novels, the one on "Pedagogy" deals with four and the concluding piece, a reprint from Kunapipi (1997), is an interview with Ghosh. The choice of the novels taken up for discussion seems deliberate. Preference is given to those works which have elicited a wider response among critics and, for obvious reasons, those which often get prescribed for study. There is a detailed 12-page tabulated analysis in chronological order of fictional events occurring in The Shadow Lines. In the interview Ghosh admits that in contemporary post-modern fiction the distance between the writer and his audience has become somewhat wide. He wishes now to turn away from such hard-edged, self-referential post-modern texts and get into a closer intimacy, a greater communion with his readers, the communion in which lies the main strength of the novel. Happy news! Have we not often discovered during the course of reading that a good work of fiction connects us at a very deep and intimate level? In real life our aspirations may be thwarted; our expectations may not be fully met: but in a good work of fiction they are realised and these give us an immense sense of relief.
Taking the cue from Naipaul's description of himself, "I am the sum of my books," Purabi Panwar, in her Introduction to V.S. Naipaul: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, notices the unevenness in his writings, more especially the paradoxes, the ambivalences and the polemics which have generated such a controversy during the 40 years of his writing career that while there is an enormous approbation from his admirers, there is an equal measure of hostility from his detractors. Amitav Ghosh expresses his indebtedness to Naipaul in the following words. "It is as though Naipaul's work were a whetstone against which to sharpen my own awareness of the world." Most Indian readers would agree with Panwar's observation that what is most offensive is "Naipaul's characteristic tendency to pick out selective details, and wrap them up with over-generalisations and over-statements" (p.17). From among his vast oeuvre, she chooses A House for Biswas (1961) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) for deservedly extended treatment. "Biswas stands out as a metaphor for a large number of colonials who are confronted with the worst of an endemically repressive colonial dispensation, and who despite their vulnerability and weakness, lack of support or guidance, demonstrate a persistent will, and struggle hard to find a vocation with dignity and to live in a house of their own" (p.18). The Enigma of Arrival (1987) "narrativises the enigmatic status of a self-exiled and culturally dislocated protagonist in quest of his self-hood, a colonial/ postcolonial situated in an erstwhile coloniser country (now the globalising England) and sorting things out for himself" (p.21). In the tailpiece, Fukrum Alam shows his whole-hearted agreement with Edward Said for whom the Nobel Committee's decision in awarding the Prize to Naipaul is wrong for Naipaul's antipathy to Islam shows his lack of objectivity. There are 12 essays in this handy volume interpreting the different works of Naipaul besides two responses to his Nobel award, one of which is by Amit Chaudhuri for whom discovery of Naipaul became part of the discovery of himself as a writer.
In the Indian literary pantheon, Ghosh and Naipaul have become canonical. The two books of essays in criticism on them do help us in the evaluation of these two most gifted writers of our time. These exegetical, interpretative studies have a sure place in present context of English studies in India. They are what they are. They are accessories for students, scholars and the reading public. Several otherwise inaccessible critical essays come together in such anthologies. When all is said and done, there is no denial about the need for a period literary history of modern Indian fiction. Realising that India is underestimated in world literature, Rushdie declared in the golden jubilee year of India's Independence, "the prose writing — both fiction and non-fiction — represents the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books." Fiction happens to be the most vital and dominant form of literary art of our time with what Bakhtin calls its dialogic orientation. It is in fiction, more than in any other genre, the individual's awareness of life encounters the fullest expression. Fictional craft, in recent times, has witnessed the most significant developments in the aesthetic and thematic ordering of fictional events, or, in other words, narratology. Contemporary novelists daringly experiment with the language of fiction. The inventive vitality in the use of fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, syntactically dislocated word plays have substantially enriched the form of the Indian novel. What we need now, therefore, is a narrative history of modern Indian fiction in terms of the artistic ends, materials and techniques, i.e. a history that would concern itself with the artistic principles that make a work a united whole, its gestalt. Apart from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar's Indian writing in English and M.K. Naik's A History of Indian English Literature, we do not have full-length literary histories, but only partial studies, and collections of essays by diverse hands united by a single theme. Hence the crying need for a narrative literary history of modern Indian English fiction!
Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives, edited by Brinda Bose, Pencraft International, 2003, p.223, Rs. 440.
V.S. Naipaul: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, edited by Purabi Panwar, Pencraft International, 2003, p.198, Rs. 400.
M.S. NAGARAJAN
The writer is former Head, Department of English, University of Madras.
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