Amitava Kumar on what was new in Indian writing in English
The Hindu, June 5, 2005
"That was once new in Indian writing"
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a new novel written by a young, under-thirty American author with more-than-a-million-dollar advance. The story revolves around the grief of a nine-year-old narrator, a New Yorker, who has lost his father in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The author's name is Jonathan Safran Foer. This novel has been described as "gimmicky" and "an overstuffed fortune cookie" because, apart from several blank pages and dramatic fonts, it also contains such unconventional devices as a flip-book of video-stills arranged in reverse order so that a human being can be seen jumping up toward the top of the smoking twin towers.
The New York Times Book Review described Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as maddening enough to drive the mature reader to the bar for a stiff drink. Such judgments notwithstanding, the book continues to remain on the newspaper's bestseller list.
My own views on that novel are similar, but I am still left with a set of questions: How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha—didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?
To find some answers I want to go back to the beginning. Let us return to the first novels written by writers who inaugurate what we call, inadequately and clumsily, but not wrongly, Indian writing in English. Those literary forebears of ours were trying, in their own way, to do something new. What was it?
I have just finished reading, for the first time, R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends. This was Narayan's first novel. When he had completed it, Narayan would mail it to a publisher in England and then wait for rejection—the whole process usually took about six weeks. In August, 1931 Narayan finally handed the manuscript to his friend Purna, who was leaving for Oxford. Purna had been advised by the aspiring novelist "to weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames."
But fate intervened. One day Narayan received a cable from Oxford. It had been sent by Purna. It read: "Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible."
This drama of rejection—and chance acceptance—is important for several reasons. In the thirties, when publishers and readers in the West were familiar only with fictions of the Raj, Narayan had taken the unusual step of writing about a school-boy in an imaginary South Indian town.
Swami and Friends is an exploration of the intimate but ordinary, even humdrum, world of a middle-class childhood. History does make an appearance in these pages—we read of the nationalist movement, for instance—but it does so more like a paper-boat passing in a gutter filled with rainwater. It would have required a great deal of courage on Narayan's part, or at least a mix of naiveté and confidence, to create a world so unfamiliar to those who were going to appraise his manuscript. That, I think, is newness.
Another Indian writer who debuted the same year was Mulk Raj Anand, but unlike Narayan, Anand was engaged in a more active dialogue with the West. Anand wanted to be accepted by the friends he had courted in Bloomsbury; at the same time, he wanted his independence and strove to find it in his art.
At the heart of his novel Untouchable is the drama of a young man's desire not only to escape the oppressive caste system but to also become a sahib. Anand's protagonist Bakha wants to wear trousers, breeches, coat, puttees and boots. He smokes cigarettes rather than the hookah. Bakha also wants to be educated: "he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke." It is significant that in the very act of telling us that Bhakha wanted to be a sahib, Anand is able to Indianize the Englishman. The language of the sahib no longer remains English—it is recognizable only as "tish-mish, tish-mish."
Back in the eighties, this is exactly the feeling that was aroused by Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Twenty years later, it might be argued, we are looking for more than a mixed language. Newness at this stage will come not only from an irreverent tongue, which is now a cliché, but a more accurate engagement with our complex realities, many of which have global dimensions.
In Untouchable, Anand's prose always bore the burden of explanation, as if he was trying to act as a guide to the English. On the other hand, by the end of the novel the Englishman had lost his allure for Bakha. Ten years before the publication of Anand's novel, E.M. Forster had published his remarkable novel A Passage to India. Anand looked up to Forster because "this particular Englishman had leaned on the side of India." Later, Forster was to provide an admiring foreword to Untouchable. Anand must also have opened himself to the novel. And yet, in his own writing he attempted something entirely different; he undertook the task of critiquing caste-oppression in his own society.
Like U.R. Anantha Murthy in Birmingham three decades later, with Bergman's "Seventh Seal" and his teacher Malcolm Bradbury as his inspirations for his searing indictment of Brahmin hypocrisy, Anand used his conversations with writers like Forster and Virginia Woolf to write against untouchablity.
What was true then is also true now. In the case of current Indian writers working in English, what is new is also the result of the conversations ongoing with writers all over the world, older writers like Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Alice Munro, but also younger ones like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and, why not, even Jonathan Safran Foer.*
*Amitava Kumar's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Published in Bookmark, Times of India, June 26, 2005
As everyone knows, Macaulay's rationale for the introduction of English in India was to produce a body of clerks. Indians were not supposed to use the language imaginatively. Yet, that is exactly what we have done with great exuberance, in our everyday usage but also in our literary production.
We have been less experimental, however, in our approach to literary forms. A majority of our writers write quite conventional novels. Anything that steps over the settled boundaries attracts quick condemnation. For good or bad, this is true not only of India but also those very places where the novel was born.
Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close challenges many conventional expectations not only about what a novel reads like but also what it looks like. In the several weeks that have passed since the book's release, it has been celebrated as well as attacked for what has variously been called its "originality" and its "gimmicky quality."
Oskar Schell, the nine-year old hero of the novel, has lost his father in the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Oskar is extremely smart and incredibly cute. This can be annoying at times, but his intelligence and hurt provide the engine for an engrossing search into the meaning of his father's death.
This novel is Foer's second major work. His debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, won several prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award. In his new work, Foer intersperses Oskar's story with the stories of his grandparents who were the survivors of the Dresden bombing.
Oskar's young father died in the World Trade Center. But the imperishable truth is that Oskar really has several literary progenitors: Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and even the young and excessive David Eggers. This is part of the attraction—and frustration—of Foer's work: its richness and ambition and eclecticism.
The name of his hero comes from Grass and so does some of his interest in fiction that engages living history; Sebald, the master interrogator of memory, also might be Foer's inspiration for the use of disturbing images in his novel; with Eggers, Foer shares an interest in attention-grabbing devices like varying fonts, garbled punctuation, blank pages, even the use of a flip-book of video stills that allows the reader to imagine a man, not falling, but rising to the top of the burning towers.
I'm half in support of gimmicks because it allows readers to creatively participate in the novel. (I'm half opposed to them because often they are mere distractions, like a cell-phone ringing in a restaurant.) For example, I called the driver at the limousine company in Manhattan who drove Oskar to his father's funeral. The man's card was printed on one of the pages in the novel. (I got a busy signal every time I tried.)
I have also written to Oskar at the Hotmail address he had given a woman he had just met and wanted to kiss. I have asked him for an interview. My exercise was a bit like his own: he was in the habit of sending unsolicited mail to people like Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. (So far I have received no response.)**
**Reply received from Oskar Schell by email on July 9, 2005:
Hi Amitava,
I don't really "do" interviews. Or correspondence. Sorry. But thank you for e-mailing, and good luck with whatever you "do."
