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| Good taste becomes him |
Yale has an entire course this semester dedicated to South Asian lit. And we didn’t even have to donate a million bucks for a South Asia chair destined for a non-South Asian 
Not even As-Am torchbearer Berkeley had one of these back in the day:
FALL 2005: ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
William Deresiewicz…Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent… Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Average reading load: 250 pages/week. [Link]
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p>Sure, it’s 250 pages/week — if you leave out A Suitable Boy Why is the prof fascinated with these themes?
William Deresiewicz is the author of Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets… [Link]
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| The redcoats are coming |
Ah yes, soap operas with Victorian morés, a perfect match. It’s that blasted Pride and Prejudice again. After jonesing for Bridget (twice) and Bride of Gurinderstein, the new Keira Knightley version seems superfluous. The horse has not only been beaten, it’s died and been reincarnated as a hack. Ennis has been pitching me the book, but I’m in sucrose overdose.
Deresiewicz talks smack about Jhumpa Lahiri’s work:
Interpreter of Maladies… exhibit[s] a high degree of competence, but it’s the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programsIt’s the kind of competence that makes you want to abolish writing programs… The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted–no, machine-tooled–to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices–the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany–arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class. [Link]
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p>About Zadie Smith’s latest:
… [Smith’s] ascent was part of the late-’90s fad for beautiful young women novelists with Commonwealth roots (itself a subset of the post-cold war globalization frenzy). Smith made a third with Arundhati Roy, whose God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year…The narrative voice is… flatter, less exuberant and inventive. And while On Beauty is as long as White Teeth, it has neither the earlier novel’s scope nor its ambition. [Link]
All of this is so obviously a Rushdie ripoff, it’s excruciatingAnd about Smith’s first novel, White Teeth:
The postcolonial thematics–history, memory, identity, hybridity–which could have seemed fresh only to someone who’d been living in a cave for twenty years, are served up with the baldness of an undergraduate essay. And all of this, along with the novel’s postmodern coin tricks, is so obviously a Rushdie rip-off it’s excruciating. But White Teeth exhibits two great strengths, neither of them the kind one expects from so young a writer: the acuteness of its social satire and the brilliance with which it inhabits perspectives utterly different from its author’s. Smith gives us aging Indian waiters, bookish teenagers, high-handed liberal moms… [Link]
While I don’t entirely agree with W.D.’s 40s, his course does take the school back to its origins as the spawn of Madras governor Elihu Yale and the British East India Company.
(I should have made it clear that I am not assuming that Kush buys into the artist stereotype either, but his comment and others bring up that issue in my mind.)
I think we agree that RK Narayan is a memorable writer. The majority of Indian novels in English have been written about upper-caste life; there are other perspectives and experiences yet to be represented.
Out of curiosity, what are these “universals” you refer to in post after post? And how are they agreed upon?
Deepa,
Everything below is light-hearted
I agree with you with RKN touching an universal nerve. Those points were just for Tolkien comparison.
I am not into some any stereotypes***. I think one should “observe” very carefully and make connections that are not obvious and insightful – be science, art, literature – only then true accomplishment will come. My comment is more fun, as I interact with Saheli outside of sepia mutiny too. What I wanted to also say was for anything exciting, you have to be break the mold.
I do science for living – I can say that with certainty. Kiss of death in big picture is staying within the mold but then very (less than 1 %) have the guts and intuition to break loose. You cannot repeat what others have done and succeeded – example of Tagore – expect a real timeless progress.
someone upthread said “what kind of artist needs a Ph.D?”
Hell, I would be last person to say such a thing. Just google my name. I am being sly again.
Cheers
*** I know you are not accusing me of anything. Am having fun.
maybe i don’t make comments that stand out Deepa, you just wonder sometimes. oh well
It occured to me that you wouldn’t expect Hemingway to use a different style, its just expected how he writes; “direct” would be the word I would use for his style
“Out of curiosity, what are these “universals” you refer to in post after post? And how are they agreed upon?”
My take:
When you read Ernest Hemingway in Spanish Civil War or in Africa, you do not have be a European, a soldier, a person in anguish.
When you read Guleri – you do not have be someone who is dying and going through the flashback of unrequited love – and life not lived.
When you read Gabriel Gracia Marquez, you do not have be a South American and have gone through collective purging of memory by military juntas time after time.
When you read Eric Maria Remarque – you do not have be a soldier that only sees bleakness and remorse – yet sometimes true humanity and love in midst of madness.
When you read John Le Carre, you do not have to be a spy and be betrayed, or be a betrayer. to feel compassion and empathy and that is universal, my friend. Am sorry, Indian American writers are not in that league, sorry.
Here is an exmaple of universal
“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Do you have to be a leopard, an African, a sojourner like Hemingway, or a person dying to understand this.
Kush-ji
We get it, we get it. Your ponderous words aren’t as loaded with significance as you might believe. Lay off the bold-face button, yaar…
Kush, understood and agreed 🙂 And sorry, I didn’t know you knew Saheli outside of SM.
Raju, good observation. You obviously know that Lahiri’s “direct” style becomes controversial partly in the context of what is expected of South-Asian-origin writers prominent in the West.
Eddie, I admit I am too tired/lazy to try to remember specific examples from the RKN novels esp. since my collection is sitting half the continent away from me right now, but here is an attempt to address your very good question –
1) I halfheartedly vow to stop repeating the “human universals” point now that someone has explicitly acknowledged it 🙂
2) Of course we agree RKN is great and that upper-caste slices of life are over-represented in English. Where we perhaps? part ways is that I don’t think that representation of his slice of life is the chief aim or virtue of RKN’s works. If I thought that was all there was to his work, I would agree with your comment that readers should skip him in favor of less-represented slices of Indian life, no matter how vividly he brought Malgudi to life.
3) Human universals in Narayan’s work: First, Kush’s quote of Graham Greene above implies that Greene was able to relate to the people in RKN’s novels, whereas if RKN were just portraying a specialized slice of life, the reaction would probably be more of “look at all the things I am learning about this very different way of life”-
(I know there are other applicable Greene quotes, which I don’t have my hands on right now…)
Similarly, my own experience when reading RKN is also not, “oh those lovable wacky Tam-Brams” but of the complexity of living:
-the impermanence of experience (Swami and Friends, the way one of his friends just rides on a train out of his life into somewhere…)
-the vastness of the world outside a very small sphere around you (Swami again, when he and brother Seenu are trying to write to Binns for cricket bats)
-“life is what happens to you while making other plans” (the way Vasu in Man-Eater of Malgudi produces a snowball effect in the narrator’s life, or Mr. Sampath does in the life of the narrator of Mr. Sampath, or what happens to The Guide, or The Bachelor of Arts, or Rann’s effect on the Talkative Man)
-You can’t have complete control, or not for very long (The Guide again re his liaison with the dancer Rosie/Nalini, or Mr. Sampath, or The Painter of Signs re his liaison with Daisy)
-You can never know what other people’s inner lives are like (The Vendor of Sweets – the Vendor can’t fathom the true relationship of his own son with the Korean-American woman he brought back from America)
-What you want is not always what you think you want, and finding out can be delightful (Bachelor of Arts again, the Vendor of Sweets when he announces he is in a new janma and renounces the burdens of the old one)
So there’s a partial list. I see where one could claim a fatalism in Narayan’s themes, but I don’t think it’s a unilateral helplessness or unhappiness. Once the characters come to a point when they realize “this is who I am/what I want,” they are capable of taking liberating, positive action (Vendor of Sweets announces his rebirth, TM successfully thwarts Rann’s seduction plot, Narrator washes his hands of Mr. Sampath’s circus, The Guide decides to make the ultimate sacrifice, etc.). This moment of recognition is powerful in a positive way. People can change, but for all of us, certain decisions/actions at certain times can be too unnatural, too much of a stretch, whereas at other times, they just fall into place. I would say that RKN is realistic about the interaction of the individual’s needs and desires with the world around him/her.
I can’t think of another writer in English of South Asian origin who deals with themes applicable to all humans rather than solely with what makes the writer’s slice of life unique, unless it’s Naipaul in A House for Mr. Biswas. That’s all I’ve been trying to say.
Narayan’s specific milieu -> humanity Flaubert’s specific milieu in Madame Bovary -> humanity Hawthorne’s specific milieu in The Scarlet Letter -> humanity Even D.H. Lawrence’s specifically twisted viewpoint sometimes reflects on more than just his slice of life.
And there are others…oh shit, there are no female writers in the above (partial) list, let alone female South Asian origin writers…don’t beat me, Cicatrix. May be a deficiency in my reading history, and/or an observation in support of Virginia Woolf’s contention which I referred to in comment 96. Or it could be that I, though a woman, am more predisposed to perceive the universal in men’s works.
What really works for me is when a writer attains the universal through the specific. On the other hand, there have been in my opinion works which are great because they brilliantly illuminate their slice of life (again, only a partial list follows):
Sinclair Lewis’s oeuvre – invaluable for reflecting upon the evolution of American life – upon the great change which he was documenting, and upon the little change which has occurred since the time represented in his works.
Banana Yoshimoto – aha, a woman! – apprehends vividly a particular slice of the modern Japanese experience.
The Icelandic sagas.
Damn, Kush, you said it much more concisely than I did 🙂 Well, at least I have my off-the-cuff examples from RKN….
Aha! Jane Austen also reaches for universals through her bourgeois gentry Regency milieu! 🙂
Whew. That’s a load off. slinks back to her life
Deepa:
Thank you for your very comprehensive and informative response. I am impressed with your recall.
Right on. That agency, which stems from a sort of self-realization, is not farcical or inevitably hapless; in some cases it is, as you say, genuinely liberative.
I also agree that Biswas is the another great and permanent novel from the Indo-Anglian writers.
Kush:
I like Hemingway and Marquez from your list.
Can’t agree on LeCarre-think he’s overesteemed.
Deepa, Eddie, Saheli,
I really enjoyed the discussion. I came out learning something new. Thank you.
Deepa, you are definitely quite well read and have thought these things.
Cheers
Kush,
trying to ask if Lahiri’s story is unverisal in the way you write it, i think i might agree. but there’s elements in Namesake that are universal; the longing of the immigrant, the tie between father and son; the price and rewards of duty
overall, that is a good point
I come to this discussion a little tardy (was out of town for the weekend, at my parents’, where they still use (gasp!) dial-up) but I agree with the comments on Lahiri. I recently wrote a paper specifically addressing her use of consumption metaphors as problematiically defining South Asian American experience.
Amardeep, I don’t think middle class ABCD life is pallid at all. What about the brief moment in The Namesake when Gogol’s family’s home is vandalized? The total disavowal of racism is extremely distressing.
Thanks to you too, Kush, Eddie, Saheli, Cicatrix, and everyone. The discussion here makes me think that maybe many desi authors and readers look at desi-produced literature almost solely for the cultural detail, whether for nostalgic value, or educational value, or to see their own experience validated in print? (Not that that is unimportant, but see Kush’s comments 105 and 106 for example.)
Heck, forget the metaphors, the consumption itself is a problematic defining marker of South Asian American experience 😉
Well, despite my comments here, I hope not!
This has been a really thought-provoking thread. My thanks to everyone as well.
I wonder if the commenters who bring up “universal experience” are questioning whether Lahiri belongs (or will eventually belong) to the Canon (the official or the nominally accepted) of Great Literature.
I’m not reverent when it comes to Literature with a capital ‘L’ so, frankly, I don’t care. But I do see how classic literature lends itself to new interpretations, endlessly varying perspectives, etc. Something new is discovered wtih every reading, and the books withstand the test of time.
So as for Lahiri…I don’t know. I would place her, as a young author with only two books to her name, in that middle-brow literature catagory so often sneered at by Lit-snobs.
Please stay tuned for my defence of the middle-brow 😉
For the middle brow,
James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is quite universal too. Any one has to be married to understand that. That is one universal piece of literature.
Many earlier thanks were not complete – a lot others have contributed positively to this thread, like Amardeep, SMR, Raju, Cicatrix et al.
Yeah, there is a lot of perfectly readable and enjoyable literature which still addresses important things about being a human regardless of culture. For example RK Narayan (ok, ok, I’ll stop!) 🙂 It’s not a matter of “highbrow” or of not describing a particular milieu but of how strongly a piece of literature illuminates more universal experience.
Not me..because not all pieces in the Canon of Great Literature address “universal experience” – so the question of whether Lahiri will touch “universal experience” more strongly is not synonymous with whether she will belong to the Canon.
And of course, no work by humans completely excludes reflection on “cultural universals,” but it’s a matter of emphasis.
the thanks are heartily appreciated Kush
I’m also not one to treat literature with large L’s. if a novel deserves to be read, people should recommend it and discuss it
I think you hit a nail on the head though Cicatrix….does Namesake “deserve” to be part of a canon of literature? the problem may be that the Canon is problematic…do works get put into the Canon on merit? I can’t think that’s true, just from what we’ve all learned about eurocentricity, male-centricity, and other biases
however, the test of universality is a merit-based test. even still….if Lahiri describes a particular life experience, i wonder how it can’t be universal at some level. not everyone may be an immigrant’s child, but if Namesake does create a world that describes an immigrant child’s experience in a way that beings insight into that experience, does that then generate any universal insights? i do think Namasake describes Gogol’s life in a way that provides insight
Raju, Deepa, et al.
I have not spoken about Lahiri in specific at all in this discussion (do please follow all my comments before anyone even…) as I have not read her yet (even though I read quite a bit mostly it is Playboy). I brought “Interpreter of..” two years ago but haven’t had time to read it – other stuff precedes.
My take here has been more on emphasizong some universal points of human connection in literature, urge for South Asian writers to dwell on nostalgia, vernacular ideas presented in flowerly english, etc.
Perhaps, Raju is right about Lahiri (I would not know) if she makes an universal appeal as per our definition. Deepa, Saheli et al. would know better.
Now, indirect words in praise for Lahiri. I was first told about Lahiri years ago by a colleague who is a Professor in Geochemistry (not a Literature Professor) and immigrant from Hong Kong over a lunch. She has been here for more than 40 years, all her kids are US born and raised.
The whole lunch she talked about Lahiri and her stories. She seems moved to talk about her at length, and use experience of her raising kids in USA. Maybe, Lahiri does make universal connection, I need to check myself. No matter, we need do need definition for universality – and there comes our Walter Mitty (we all are Walter Mitty)
UC San Diego is offering a “South Asian Migration Novels” course this year. It also has Literatures of the Indian Subcontinent offered as an undergraduate course (under the umbrealla of Third World Studies) and a similar course offered for upper-division.
Reading list: Cape Town Coolie (Reshard Gool), A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (M.G. Vassanji), Bricklane (Monica Ali), Jasmine (Bharati Mukherjee), In A Far Country (K.S. Maniam), and The Pleasures of Conquest (Yasmine Gooneratne.).
sorry so late to add this…
Funny. Somebody actually used an APOSTROPHE in “yours”, and thereby proved any pretense at having a Harvard-quality education to be completely unfounded. U of Mich. seems to be the first claimant, but there are even the jokes of Utah, BYU, MISSOURI[!], whatever.
What’s the point of saying you are no better than second-class?