http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/the-novel-has-its-delusions-of-grandeur/1/137464.html
The novel has its delusions of grandeur | |||||||||||||||
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 Post 9/11, the western reader wanted to know more about Islam and Islamic societies.
In a recent piece, Salman Rushdie writes that a younger generation of Pakistani writers are giving Indian writers a 'run for their money'. This coming to the fore of Pakistani writing raises some interesting questions. What underlines this phenomenon? Often it is a matter of coincidence and chance that a particular generation sees many talented practitioners of a craft. Talent often skips a generation or two in families. It's no surprise that it might do so, collectively, in society as well. In the UK, we had the generation of Amis, Hitchens and McEwen. In India, we had the generation of post- Independence poets writing in English: Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Eunice de Souza. These moments happen but rarely in literary history, they make a Golden Age, so to speak. In the case of Pakistan, things are not that straightforward. The rise of the Pakistani novel, and novelist, seem to have little to do with the intrinsic talent that a generation possesses. It has obvious links with external political events, specifically 9/ 11 and the rise of Islamic terrorism. It looks like an entire Pakistani generation discovered it had talent the moment Osama Bin Laden bombed the twin towers. Post 9/11, the western reader wanted to know more about Islam and Islamic societies. She was bewildered and curious about societies that fostered anti- western terrorism. She wanted an answer to the existential question: Why do they hate us so much? Enter the Pakistani novelist. Context I'm not sure this is such a good thing. For one, if my conjecture is correct, this means that the western interest in the novel from Pakistan is really an interest in the novel from Terroristan. The Pakistani novelist in English exists only to feed voyeuristic western hunger for stories about bombs and beheadings in a dysfunctional society. The subject matter of these novels is always the same: the class divide, suicide bombers, dictators, wars. The Pakistani writer who breaks away from this formula simply gets lost. Aamer Hussein wrote a brilliant autobiographical story for Granta's Pakistan special. It had nothing to do with politics and violence in contemporary Pakistan but, instead, was about a young Muslim boy who comes to London from Bombay in 1970 and finds London drab in comparison. Western readers and reviewers largely ignored the story. Ironically, just like Pakistan, as a society, is dependent on America, even the Pakistani writer is dependent on an American readership and its vanities. What happens when things settle down? When the west loses political and militaristic interest in Pakistan, will the western reader also lose interest in the Pakistani novel? Such close intertwining of art and politics can never be a good thing. Will the western reader ever allow the Pakistani writer to evolve on her own terms? This also raises sharp questions of our expectations from the novel form. Since when did the novel become the bearer of information? Is this a function it was always supposed to perform? Is it a fair expectation? I think it's fair that western readers should want to know more about societies which have affected them in fundamental, and destructive, ways. But I think it's unfair to expect storytellers to take on this burden of explaining, of writing the ' nonfiction novel'. The west doesn't expect this of its own novelists, for that job is now being done by nonfiction. And it's doing it rather well. In a recent essay Geoff Dyer makes the same point: " Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al- Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time. These books do not, however, take the shape and form often expected: the novel… If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within historical events… could only be assimilated and comprehended when they had been processed by a novel, that time has passed". When you have embedded journalists and real soldiers bringing you tales straight from the battleground, what new light will the novelist ever be able to shed on ' ground realities'? The characters are there in these nonfiction accounts, fully realised in flesh and blood, in the way we expect fictional characters to be. Dyer concludes: " Reportage, long- form reporting - call it what you will - has left the novel looking superfluous." Art Let us keep aside Pakistani writing for the moment. In India, commentators have criticised our writers for not dealing enough with ' issues', current events. In fact, it's the reverse of what's happening in Pakistan. Hartosh Singh Bal complained: " In the past two decades, liberalisation has changed the country, we have witnessed the rise and perhaps the fall of the BJP and the BSP, but the literature of this generation of writers is mostly about a few people staring at their navels." As we have seen, the trend in the west is to leave ' issues' to nonfiction. Still, Bal would like our novelists to be more like their Pakistani counterparts. The art they produce should deal more with injustice in society. But was art ever supposed to do that? W H Auden, in a Paris Review interview, makes the following point: " I have not lost my interest in politics, but I have come to realise that, in cases of social or political injustice, only two things are effective: political action and straight journalistic reportage of the facts. The arts can do nothing. The social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al., had never lived. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over." I would like to add to this that storytellers were never supposed to be slaves to headlines. The west has passed on this burden to nonfiction; it's only the subcontinent that is still stuck with this quaint notion. Good fiction, in fact, helps you enter quieter spaces of self ( and society), spaces where news cannot go. Good fiction also performs the function of sketching universal and timeless human types. The other day, while rereading Kafka's classic story ' A Hunger Artist', I was struck by the parallels it had with Anna Hazare: "… the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day… even in the nighttime there were visiting hours." Kafka was born in 1883. India Indian writers though ( and this should make Bal happy) have ( unfortunately) started addressing issues. Adiga did it in White Tiger , and a new forthcoming novel by Aman Sethi promises to give us the inner life of an itinerant labourer. Both these novels commit the cardinal sin of imposing upper middle class moral indignation on the hapless subaltern. Too often, what you get in the end, is not the inner life of the driver or the labourer, but the inner life of the writer himself. This self righteous writing coming from the subcontinent should take a reality check from Auden: " By all means, let a poet, if he wants to, write what is now called an " engagé" poem, so long as he realises that it is mainly himself who will benefit from it. It will enhance his literary reputation among those who feel the same as he does." | |||||||||||||||
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