The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  4 Doubling the Point, p.63.

  5 And the writer’s next move, into the strange textures of Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, confirms that the ‘realism’ of Disgrace was not in any sense a lapse back upon a representational default position, only a significant moment in a writing career driven by restless doubt in its search for truthful ways to tell the contemporary story.

  6 The same tension, although expressing itself so differently, is there in every sentence in the late James.

  4 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

  AMIT CHAUDHURI

  Reading is not about love at first sight; it has to do, more often, with evolution and chance. The fact that we evolve and change as readers – that a book which seems incomprehensible and dull at one point in our lives might, should we encounter it again, be deeply pleasurable (the process I’ve described is equally true the other way around) – implicitly informs the critical act. Not only is there no such thing as an instantly recognisable ‘good book’; we possess no reliable faculty for instant recognition. Whatever instinct we have in this regard can’t be coerced or even trained into existence; it’s dependent upon a curious form of openness whose operations we can’t predict or control. This is where chance comes into play. Chance makes the whole matter of literary history mysterious. The poet Arun Kolatkar addressed this mysteriousness in words he scribbled on a piece of paper, and which remained unpublished until after his death:

  I may register/ receive/ read some of Mandelstam’s poems in translation

  40 years after he died

  or 60 years after he wrote them/ went nova

  It may take Mandelstam’s light 40 years

  to reach me

  and then I may add his name to my star chart/ map/ catalogue

  and a dot may appear on my mental picture

  and a dot may appear where there was only

  darkness on the photographic plate of my consciousness

  It may take 300 years for a Tukaram or a Villon or a Kabir

  to be part of my consciousness

  simply because I was born that much later

  1300 years for Tu Fu to find a good translator a publisher

  before he registers on my mind.

  If I were to construct a life-history of my own reading, I’d have to do so, in retrospect, in the terms of two distinct movements. The first dates back to my early twenties, and involves my discovery, as a young writer, of the importance to me of the mundane; the supremacy of space, light, and objects rather than what are called ‘story’ and ‘character’; and the difficulty of bringing this submerged preoccupation to the surface of my mind. Around this time, I began to become aware of writers, or works, or even passages or lines in those works, which had approached the ordinary or the particular from different perspectives. I can’t now say whether I first discovered the ordinary in those passages or in the world; in what order the discovery occurred – of the allure of phenomena, as well as the importance of a literary and artistic tradition – has never been clear. But to gradually piece together the latter – the tradition in question – was not only to experience pleasure, but to realise slowly that there was a moral weight ascribed to this discovery; that the particular had a lineage and a role in literature – beyond story, beyond psychology. This, I remember, was a great relief to me. Many of the lines and passages I refer to in general terms, and which, in my early twenties, went into the construction of this almost personal lineage, came to me by chance: I found poets and writers quoted in other people’s work, often in critics’ writings, which I might be consulting to read up on figures who were well known and whom I may or may not be entirely interested in. Thus, I encountered Elizabeth Bishop first in Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell; Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas in a handbook on ‘Commonwealth’ writing, in the form of a paragraph on painting a shop sign; a dissonant argument in The Man Who Loved Children (a book I’ve never got round to reading) in an essay by Randall Jarrell, a piece of such sustained, well-judged, and inspired advocacy that those sentences by Christina Stead have stayed with me and have almost seemed all I need to know of her work.

  After years of promiscuous reading around (the years of curiosity and fantasy about reading) and serving an apprenticeship as a writer (the curiosity to do with using words), my first, most intense discoveries of what my temperament was about as a reader and writer came to me through the quotation, and it brought with it its own lessons: that the fragment was enough, and the overarching narrative and story were, in a sense, dispensable; that immersion in, sampling, and re-reading the quotation offered so much pleasure that the book itself became a tertiary entity; that compression and the shape of the unsaid were indispensable to the shape of the quotation; that craft determined the compression as well as the outline of the unsaid; that craft, in that it sought the essentials (making the paragraph or sentence quotable, free-standing, and re-readable), was at once moral and instinctual; that the quotation represented an inversion of orthodox notions of what was essential and what was superfluous.

  With the experience of fundamental modes of delight comes a clearer sense of oppositionality. Now I had a more defined idea than ever before of the sort of writing, or artwork, I wanted to avoid, or keep clear of. No amount of emotion in the work could compensate for the moral and pleasure-giving value of the sentence: the pedestrian adjective or adverb was not only a minor violation on the level of language; it represented a failure of the imagination. One had to imagine the world one wrote about in every word, every sentence one used. And, no sooner had I arrived at this aesthetic, which would govern my artistic decisions from now on, than I began to resist it. This led to the second ‘movement’ in my reading that I mentioned earlier, the second phase of discoveries; and it’s into this phase that, for me, Arundhati Roy and her novel The God of Small Things fit in.

  *

  I spent some time in bookshops, turning, as I usually do before I experience any kind of genuine interest in a work, the pages of The God of Small Things, hoping to light upon a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph. There’s something at once banal and epiphanic about this ritual; the narrator of Natsumo Soseki’s Kusamakura describes it thus: ‘I find it interesting just to open the book at random … like pulling one of those paper oracles out of the box at a shrine … and read whatever meets my eye.’ The random act, however, presupposes a history and evolution of reading on the browser’s part, a spiritual ideal; it involves a training and honing of a certain kind that directs the reader’s eye and its sightings. But each form of viewing is also, from another vantage-point, a kind of blindness. My spot checks of Roy’s novel never yielded results. Instead, the one-word sentences, the rebarbative capital letters, the apparent lack of self-awareness in the first sentence, ‘May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month’ – all this led to a reinforcement of prejudice and scepticism, and back to the uncomfortable problem of what literariness was. For this had been called a literary novel. And nothing in the first paragraph – a catalogue of details: ‘black crows gorge on bright mangoes’; [j]ackfruits burst’; ‘[d]issolute bluebottles … stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun’ – nothing in these sentences bore the mark of what, for me, was literature: by which I mean not style, not vision, but a special, minority gift for the particular that is not to be found in any other form of discourse.

  Yet, from time to time, I persisted. This is because I knew, by then, that the instant of illumination and knowledge that occurred in my early twenties in connection with art, with my own temperament, contained within it its own narrative of unravelment. I will give one example. At the time I discovered in myself a sympathy for the early work of Satyajit Ray, for its treatment of the improvised commonplace, I also developed a more clearly formulated animosity towards Ray’s contemporary and alter-self, Ritwik Ghatak: to Ghatak’s epic and operatic predilections, his love of the over-the-top, the final, the melodramatic. It was only later, when, by chance, I saw Ghatak�
��s work again, that I found the grand luminosity, the exaggerated, expressionist, living detail in his cinema that I would grow to admire. After that, not only did my resistance to Ghatak’s oeuvre break down, but also the dichotomy on which the resistance had been created. The artist, arriving at what he thinks is self-knowledge, begins busily to make affiliations, largely on the principle of family resemblances; and then, over the years, gradually finds the principle subverted – pleasure and sustenance begin to come to him from sources outside of the family he’s elected to belong to. One more example, this time of a single author: D. H. Lawrence. There was Sons and Lovers, with its quest for perfectability, its transformative version of the mundane; and there was the work that followed, where the border between good and bad writing was blurred, where there was a new, almost predetermined lack of exactness, and which still contained recurrent glimpses of the true and radiant – radically shifting, thus, the inner alignment of the work. Sons and Lovers had been crucial to me: I had read it and uncovered my own aesthetic through it; it was a moment of sudden but complete recognition. The later work, initially somewhat repellent, slowly revealed its compelling features. Here (with the later work), it was a matter of getting habituated to, and then inhabiting, the alien; learning to view the aesthetic from a radically different point of view, a point of view essentially antagonistic to the position one had arrived at, after much self-examination, as a writer; and to read, understand, and derive pleasure within that alien space wasn’t possible unless, as Lawrence might have said, one ‘killed’ a part of one’s identity and self-definition. Roy’s novel itself is a constant enactment of this struggle for radical, agonistic extinction and departure.

  The problem with The God of Small Things was that it was given a reception where it was either exalted or condemned on the grounds of the ‘literary’. No one clarified what the ‘literary’ was; it was a given. Publishers and agents used the novel as a model and justification for a covertly Thatcherite world-view of the arts: that the ‘literary’ could (really should) also be ‘popular’. It was praised (and condemned) as a modernist work might have been in the early twenties: for its ‘new’ language – though no one repeated what Pound had declared in his own capital letters to Harriet Monroe in connection with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘PRAY THAT IT NOT BE AN IMMEDIATE AND UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS’. It was compared, among other canonical moderns, to Faulkner. These references and positions were problematic. When, on an impulse, I finally borrowed the novel from someone, I found the text did not bear them out. My lender had ‘loved’ the book; distractingly, she, in her involvement, had underlined phrases, metaphors, and similes. So, in a novel in which words and sentences were anyway emphasised by a variety of devices (and underlined in a manner of speaking), I had to contend with steady pencil markings reappearing on the pages. Consulting that copy again (re-borrowing it for the purposes of this piece), I find the first four pages full of those marks. On the first page, in the first paragraph (which I mentioned earlier), ‘still, dustgreen trees’ and ‘fruity air’ have been singled out. Then there is a sentence I quite like: ‘Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom.’ Two other sentences in the same paragraph, descriptive of the chaos of Ayemenem in early June, and as obviously, almost cheaply, alliterative as the underlined one, are ignored: ‘Pepper vines snake up electric poles’; ‘Boats ply in the bazaars’. Both appeal to me on a second reading for their mixture of almost-fake local colour and deeply accurate small-town tawdriness. On page 2, my large-hearted hostess has dragged her pencil beneath ‘when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever’; on page 3, ‘a viable die-able age’; on page 4, the simile (which teeters slightly): ‘Her face was pale and wrinkled as a dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long’ – the author means the dhobi’s thumb spends a lot of time in the water, not the face in question. Underlining these sentences and images isolates them from the story – to which they belong in a curious but unquestionable way – and offers them up as fragments; but they don’t bear being read in this fragmented, or fragmentary, incarnation, as, say, the opening sentence of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls can: ‘I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly.’ Roy’s phrases are part of a tone, a polemic, and a polemic cannot be broken up and read in parts as, say, a work of poetry can. Encountered singly, they are too demonstrative, they exhibit signs of what that great New Critic Holden Caulfield would have called ‘phoneyness’.

  *

  I persisted; it wasn’t easy. But much depends on chance. The novel itself, whose narrator instructs us that ‘things can change in a day’, enshrines the fact almost too often. ‘Things can change in a day’ is at the core of the modernist aesthetic: the simultaneously constricted and inexhaustible frame of twelve or twenty-four hours; the transfiguration of the quotidian, of ‘little events, ordinary things’. And yet it pushes, this prophecy, towards realms the modernists, with their adoration of the phenomenal world, averted their gaze from, and which the surrealists embraced: of destiny and of coincidence; of the equal significance and momentousness of the spontaneous and the manufactured. It’s towards these realms, I think, that Roy’s peculiar sensibility veers.

  On page 92, I finally found the passage that unlocked this book to me. Rahel and Estha, twins, are back in Ayemenem, where much happened once that made their lives both extraordinary and miserable. Grown into a sort of adult orphanhood, they are back desultorily together, and it is Rahel who probably first registers and acknowledges the desire that silently characterises their relationship. She chances, and spies, upon her brother in the bathroom, naked, washing his own clothes with what appears to be a bar of cheap detergent soap:

  Rahel searched her brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of his knees. The arch of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at which the rest of his arm met his elbow. The way his toenails tipped upwards at the ends. The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums never grow up. Like school satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of childhood. Two vaccination marks on his arms gleamed like coins. Hers were on the thigh.

  The reference to men’s bums might have been cheesy; but there’s a genuine melancholy in the observation that they never grow up. The comparison of bums with satchels – funny and apt – was, for me, the first simile in the novel that provided me with access to its world. It’s a curiously boyish comparison, tapping into the latent androgyny of Rahel’s name, with its seemingly deliberate phonetic proximity to the masculine ‘Rahul’. It’s difficult to write tenderly and suggestively of the male body, as Roy does here, except, probably, in homoerotic terms, as in Allen Ginsberg’s Whitmanesque homage to his infrequently bisexual (and, sadly, largely heterosexual) friend Neil Cassady in the poem ‘Many Loves’: ‘I put my hand down to feel his great back for the first time, jaws and pectorals of steel at my fingers, / Closer and stiller, down the silken iron back to his waist … / I first touched the smooth mount of his rock buttocks, silken in power, rounded in animal fucking and bodily nights over nurses and schoolgirls, / O arse of long solitudes in stolen cars …’ In contrast to the frank voyeurism, supplicating admiration, and dominance of the male gaze in relationship to the female nude, the homoerotic gaze is partly narcissistic, self-discovering, and implicated in what it sees; and this sense of self-absorption, primeval self-recognition, and tremulous implicatedness finds its counterpart, in the novel, in the way the twins relate to, reassess, and remake each other.

  Rahel and her twin brother Estha have made their way back to her birthplace, the Keralan small town Ayemenem, on a visit. Their present-day lives are marked by a deceptive lack of distinction, and seem to be ignored by destiny – Rahel has worked in a disorganised way in America, Estha doesn’t seem to do very much; drifters, they gravitate towards each other. Within this lightly sketched, wavering frame is contained the story of a family, of a day of childhood tragedy (‘things can change in a day’),
and another narrative of taboo love. Rahel and Estha, in this other tale, are seven years old; they live with their mother, Ammu, an impulsive, progressive, and (as mothers are) unique woman, who once made the mistake of marrying a seemingly sophisticated Bengali tea-estate official who turned out to be a completely immoral alcoholic. Ammu, having left this man, has brought up their children more or less alone. There are other people in the house: the twin’s grand aunt, the vicious and oddly human spinster Baby Kochamma, the grandmother, Mammachi, and the Oxford-returned Chacko, who is divorced from the Englishwoman Margaret and is the doting father of Sophie Mol, and is the owner, in Ayemenem, of Paradise Pickles. At once comprador and Marxist, Chacko, with the rest of the family, is expectant – of a visit to Ayemenem by Sophie Mol and her mother (who seems to have parted ways with Chacko on relatively friendly terms) from England. Two unusual and entirely unpredictable events unfold during this banal small-town visit, and translate what’s a deeply intelligent study of class, caste, politics, and development into the domain of the mythopoeic and the folklorish: Sophie and the twins decide to run away from home, to steal away on a boat ride, using a boat made by Velutha, the strong, much-beloved (of the children) Paravan untouchable, a worker in Chacko’s factory. The boat capsizes in the current; the twins survive, but their cousin drowns. The other story that emerges at this point concerns Ammu’s and Velutha’s bizarre attraction for each other, a physical and emotional magnetism that has been unrecognised and then unarticulated, and is finally acted upon by Ammu with the moral conviction that only one such as she could possess. These liaisons are noticed with horror by Velutha’s father Vellya Papen, and reported by him in the end to Mammachi, the grandmother, and Baby Kochamma; Ammu is locked away in a room, separated from her children; Velutha, ‘the god of small things’ (for his deftness with his hands, his skills in carpentry), is accused of rape, tortured and beaten up by the local police, and killed.