My Bookish Woes(3): Of Literature Festivals and Book Launches

My Bookish Woes(1)

My Bookish Woes (2)

It’s the time of the year when there are literature festivals galore. These festivals bring writers face-to-face with their readers or, sometimes, just readers. You have your favourite writer sitting right before you, reading out his/her own work or talking about it. Not only their own work, writers could also be asked to pontificate about a wide range of literary issues (say, the future of novel) and non-literary issues (say, the rise of ISIS). We expect them to have an opinion about all these matters, and all that matters.  How well a book does now does not necessarily depend on how well-written the book is, but on how well-marketed it is. The publishing industry is not any longer untouched by (the much aggressively) rising consumerism. 

Books, too, like movies, are now released and launched with much fanfare. There is a great deal of emphasis on visibility. The writers have to be visible to be able to sell. To sell well, at any rate. The writers are now accessible through Twitter, Facebook, their own websites—which could be run by the writers themselves if they are not well established or by a professional if they can afford to hire one—and the literary events too. They write articles on popular web-platforms, and in return their latest or upcoming work gets a precious mention.   

But there was a time when writers thrived behind the veil of obscurity. Readers rarely had direct access to writers. Historically, we have never really known much about the writers and their world-view. How much do we know about Vyas, Homer, Kalidas, Virgil, Sapho? Very little. And most of it is speculative. Despite the humongous research and scholarship that Shakespeare has invited over the centuries, there are huge gaps in his life story as we know it; and we certainly don’t know what Shakespeare’s views on the subjects he wrote about were or what his politics was. One can venture to make inferences based on the works of these greats, but such an exercise is highly vulnerable to inaccuracies. Not always do the views of the writer and those expressed in a text match. The work produced may not always be an extension of the writer, as we generally tend to believe. T.S. Eliot famously called upon his fellow and future writers to shed the burden of personality in their works and thereby only propagated the cult of impersonal. In the Regency and Victorian era, many women writers took to writing under fictitious names, adding another layer of obscurity.  Even much after trend of using pseudonyms phased out, we had writers who were notorious for being reticent and unapproachable.

Samuel Beckett, for instance, never gave the kind of lengthy interviews that we see/read today. He was always the most evasive about his most evasive character: Godot. He never cared to freely explain away or comment on significance of Godot. Yet the popularity of his work has endured even after half a century. Take another example, the literary sensation, the voice of his age, J. D. Salinger. In his most loved work, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger ascribes the following lines to Holden: ”What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” However, Salinger himself remained quite an inaccessible recluse all his life. He himself would never entertain the kind of phone-call Holden might want to make to his favourite writer.

  I attended the book launch of Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseys Abroad last to last year. After the presenter was done asking her set of questions, the audience were given a chance to shoot questions, as is the custom in such events. When a lady asked Amit what books does he read, she was scandalised to hear the answer. Amit very nonchalantly said that he doesn’t read. After a moment or two of surveying the audience which sat aghast in utter silence, he smiled and said that he meant he doesn’t read fiction anymore, just poetry. Order was restored in the universe. Everybody started breathing normally again.

Whenever I attend such an event I have two major fears in my mind.

First, what if I end up asking the same cliché questions that the writer must be tired of answering? All the other questions that don’t pertain directly to the book being discussed, are attempts to understand the mind of the writer. We want to know how it is done. What books has the writer read? (Could I also read them and write as well?) What do they think of a particular book? (Do their views match mine?) Where did you grow up? (From where does he get his characters?) What was your childhood like? (Did he have a miserable childhood?) Does your spouse read your book? (Is their marital life blissful?) Most of these questions, perhaps unwittingly, aim at undoing the mojo of the writer at one level, and establishing a correspondence between the curious reader and the revered writer, at another level. We believe that the writer is endowed with a kind of insight that we are not, and that they have the remarkable quality of distilling that insight in from of words.

Second, what if there is a huge gap between the person I see on the stage and the image of the writer I have built in my head based on his/her book(s)? Perhaps, the writers too have this fear. J.D Salinger may have known that he could never talk in the same gullible and disarmingly amusing manner as Holden Caulfield.  The phenomenal Chimamanda Adichie confesses that it’s unfair for people to expect that she would fully be able to explain the motives of her much loved character Ifemelu, because her own life hasn’t been half as interesting as Ifemelu’s. In fact, she admits to discovering similarities between herself and Obinze. Perhaps, Beckett did not know any more about Godot than we do. This would mean that writers also can not know. And this thought makes me uneasy.

P S. Around writers, I behave like a gushing fourteen year old—too excited to be around them, and too dumbfounded to ask anything. All I can do is asking for an autograph.

 

Naivete

For an irrational moment
I had thought our fates
have been sealed,
among that multitude
of books, some as old
as civilisation, and some
new as your youth.

A quiver of thrill ran
through me as I introduced
Odyssey to you.
Even Homer would have seen
the affection that glazed
my eyes as they darted
from the book to your face.

“Iliad too must be about!”
I’d said looking away impulsively,
eager to conceal that very affection.
Would I sail the Aegean sea
to reach you? Would I launch a thousand
ships to have you?

No! But I was willing to share
my books with you. And my food.
And, believe you me,
that’s a bigger endeavour on my part
than the ones epics exalt.
All the while we walked
those semi-lit alleys
of Connaught Place,
I’d secretly hoped that you’d
place your hand around my waist,
or plant a kiss on my cheek.
All the while we talked
in the frail chill
of an early December evening
I’d secretly hoped that you’d
tell me one thing that you like
in me.

When I dared to probe your feelings
you said that you’ve been
meeting other people, and that
you treat all of us equally.

Never had egalitarianism
sounded as ridiculous and offensive
to me before.
What was I to put it down to?
Your naiveté or mine?
Yours could still be extenuated by
your age. But mine should only be
damned.

~ aviD

My Bookish Woes (2)

I often tell myself that one day, when I grow up, I will read non-fiction too. But for now I am content with my world of fiction. Such a confession often invites judgemental looks. ‘So you don’t want to broaden the scope of your reading? You don’t want to be informed? Don’t you want to grow (and sound) wiser?’ These are the implied questions that are raised along with the eyebrows. The underlying assumption being: fiction is not brain-nourishing, to put it mildly, or that it is juvenile, to put it bluntly.

In the last post I talked about how while growing up I was never introduced to classics. So I was untouched by the art of the Tolstoys, Austens, Brontes, Prousts or Twains. By the time I came to realise the importance and necessity of reading classics, it had been too late. After a point you just have too much on your plate. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to take time out for such pastimes or to make up for what you had missed out in your childhood. And thus you want to make the most out of whatever little you get of this precious reading time. However, for a reader like me this situation presents a new dilemma. Should one read things that one would like to read or one ought to have read by now? Or should one read stuff that’s supposed to make one wiser and more informed (or at least make one sound wiser and more informed)? Of course, I mean non-fiction. 

Whenever I sit to read fiction something in me feels a bit uneasy. Or perhaps guilty. Guilty of not devoting this time to sharpen my wits by reading non-fiction. Does reading Pride and Prejudice not befit me, for it could be written off as nothing more than glorified chic-let romance from the Victorian era? Does reading Madam Bovary (or Lady Chatterley’s Lover) not become me, for it can be scoffed at as nothing but litany of woes of an ingénue who asked for all the trouble? And, of course, won’t my reading Harry Potter, at this age, make no-one want to take me seriously? (Yes, I haven’t read that either; don’t abandon me now please!)

Although people like me would want to believe that reading fiction makes you smarter, there’s not enough credible and concrete proof to suggest so. Thus we still can’t conclusively say that fiction indeed makes us smarter and nicer. 

One may argue that reading fiction comes with its own benefits. The staple ones being: facility with the language, enriched vocabulary, development of the organ of empathy, escape from grim reality, awareness of and exposure to other cultures than your own etc. But are these enough? 

Firstly, it must be stated that fiction is not entirely untruth. It’s not falsified reality; but it is reality ordered and arranged in a certain fashion so as to make it more lucid and tangible. There are indeed additions and subtractions done by a writer to dramatise and to intensify the reality, but the base is, mostly, the lived experience (of the writer’s or of the people they’ve known). Not even wildest of fantastic fiction is without modicum of reality. 

Good fiction can go beyond the aforesaid perks, I feel. It could help you crystallise sentiments that are otherwise amorphous. It breaks down, in words, what you may be feeling at any given point in time, or that you may have felt at a certain point in time in the past. The joy of stumbling upon sentences that capture ever so precisely what you’re feeling is incredible; it makes you want to thank the writer heartily. It could also make you wonder if the writer was snooping upon you, or if the writer is endowed with uncanny prescience. Emerson had once remarked that, “in work of a writer of genius we rediscover our own neglected thoughts”. That’s the beauty of art: it helps you find yourself by losing yourself in it.

  Good fiction can even induce new epiphanies. It holds your hand and leads your way to the threshold of the sanctum of realisation; and then it withdraws its steps as you enter the sanctum, while it stands at the threshold with its arms crossed, smiling, contented in the knowledge that within you’re revelling in the glow of that realisation. Thus in a way good fiction has the potential of not only informing your outlook (‘inlook’ too), but also rendering it anew. Like any other form of art, good fiction could be both informative and transformative.

Another thing that draws me to fiction is that it gives you an impression, even if false, that you can control time. Of all things that are disobedient, time is most annoyingly so. But when you immerse yourself in a good book, time does slow down. You get to observe and dissect those micro-expressions, micro-thoughts, micro-moments that elude us in our high-paced lives. The consciousness of a (good) writer can push itself betwixt two closely overlapping, infinitesimal moments, and then wring out the very essence of all that is felt by us in those fleeting moments, such that the consciousness of the reader can then soak up that distilled essence.

“We can learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology,” Noam Chomsky had once said.

Even if not brain-nourishing, fiction could very well be soul-nourishing. Then, how could a reader, who has already missed out a lot of these wonderful gems in his growing up years, not feel compelled chose fiction over non-fiction? And even while I choose to read fiction, I am torn between the urge to read those classics and the stunning works of contemporary literature. As I read one book I feel tempted to pick another, echoing the perpetual complain of every reader: so many books; so little time! So apparently, my bookish woes aren’t coming to an end anytime soon.

My Bookish Woes (1)

I am writing this sitting in a train and next to me sits an elderly couple. The gentleman is easily in his mid-sixties and is reading a book. Curious to know what book he’s reading I tilt my head at a certain angle, imagining that I am doing so imperceptibly. But it is not so. His wife notices me and asks her husband to show me the book he’s reading. Embarrassed, I smile and thank him.

‘Oh, it’s just a novel! Tell me son does it suit him to be reading such novels at this age? Now at his age he should be reading Gita, but your uncle keeps reading these novels,’ the lady tells me and then chortles. The gentleman stares at her, then at me and goes back to reading his book.
This made me interrupt my own reading and reflect on this incident a bit.

 I was raised in a conservative vaishnav household, wherein reading any kind of secular literature, unless it was academic, was seen to be a form of dawdling. While reading non-fiction still qualified as quality reading, reading fiction (novels particularly) would attract disdainful looks from the elderly. ‘Human form is too precious to be wasted on these fabrications!’ their looks said. Reading novels was for idlers. My grandmother would tell us the story of some distant aunt of ours who’d earned a bad name for herself because she read too many novels; or maybe because all she did was to read novels. We were told that it was difficult finding a match for her. ‘Which saas would want a bahu that just drinks tea and read novels all day?’ my grandmother would say shrugging.

 As a result of this wariness that my folks had vis-a-vis novels, as children we were never exposed to classics; I had not heard of Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters until after I finished college. There was hardly anyone around us who read fiction, which obviously meant there were no works of fiction in the house on which we could lay our hands. This is not to say that there was aversion to books or to reading. In fact while my SoBo peers were reading Austen, Dickens, Twain et al., I was reading Meera, Jaydev, Soordas et al.

Now in retrospect when I analyse the situation, I find it very amusing. In one sense this practice could be seen to be very restrictive and orthodox, depriving a child of the pleasure and treasure of world of fiction. Yet in another sense it could be seen as an exercise in decolonisation, even if inadvertently so. We were not disallowed per se to read these classics, but we were never encouraged either. And even when we did read them (thanks to the school library), we were completely oblivious to the canonical status that these books enjoyed. For us it was just another novel, and for my folks, perhaps just a waste of time (and of the precious human form). We would have never gotten around to appreciating the indigenous literatures, if we were distracted, or even possibly consumed, by the glamour of the English classics or novels in general.

However, this ostensibly decolonising practice could have also taken a perilous turn: it could have made us myopic and parochial, and worse still, chauvinistic. We too could have turned into narrow-minded nincompoops, who are so blinded by the almost mythical glory of the past that they fail to realise its goriness. But we were salvaged. And like it is almost every other time, this time too it was mummy dearest to our rescue.

My mother had been a reader in her childhood. And I can safely assume that she must have been a secret reader. I don’t know how and when she lost touch with this side of hers; but during our late-night conversations with her, I distinctly remember, she would often tell us how as a child she was fascinated by the world that Enid Blyton would create in her popular series. She would get us Chandamama (in English) to read and would also often read it to us also. So she was the one who had introduced to the world of fiction.  More importantly, she had also passed on to us her love for languages and reading.

But perhaps it was a little too late. A considerable span of my childhood had already passed without reading fiction, and whatever little I read would not qualify to be called refined literature. Still, the seeds that mother had sown did not go waste.

Much later in my life I decided to study literature formally. And my introduction to literature, and by extension humanities, as an academic discipline prevented my falling prey to chauvinism. (Though I must confess I was almost there. Almost!) It taught me that genius does not belong exclusively to one country, one race, or one community. And, interestingly, my being rooted in the indigenous culture in my growing up years also prevented me from blindly holding the western canon in reverentially high esteem. It taught me that imperfection also doesn’t belong exclusively to one country, one race or one community. So, in a way, it did solve its purpose of decolonisation. To put it simply, I realised: to err is human, and to think that we (the Orient) have never erred or that they(the Occident) cannot err, is bovine!


What I still could not fully shake off was this deeply ingrained guilt I feel while reading novels. Even today, I feel some sense of scruple if I sit to read a novel first thing in the day (no matter however desperately I want to). A couple of years ago an relative of mine had come to visit us. I was in the first year of my master’s and was trying to penetrate Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. He walked in to my room and upon finding me reading, he asked me hesitantly: ‘beta, is this your course book or just a novel?’ For him a book that was not a course book (prescribed in the curriculum) and was fiction, was still just a novel. Just a(nother) novel. What a waste of the precious human form!

But my bookish woes aren’t confined to just this culturally conditioned guilt. Books now present me with a new and a different set of dilemma. I should try to write about those the next time though. For now I have a book to return to. 

PS. The elderly gent sitting next to me is reading Half Girlfriend