Readers Write In #697: My two more cents on Serious Literature – Part Three

By G Waugh

‘One of literature’s purposes is to give hope to the hopeless.’

I have seen some of the finest critics trying to define the purpose of art and literature as given above. I have seen some of them reject even the most truly original works of art as undeserving of their adulation and recognition for only one reason – the depressing effect they leave on their ‘consumers’. Even someone as eminent as the Sahitya Akademi winner, Su Venkatesan told in one of his speeches about his novel Velpari that he chose to end his story on a positive note, despite historical evidence that points to the contrary. According to historical sources, Paari, the chieftain of Parambu is defeated by the combined forces of the three great kings of Tamizhagam – the Cheras, the Cholas and the Pandyas and his land of Parambu finally comes under their rule. But Su Ve finishes his novel the way his readers including me would have wanted it to – Paari with the help of his soundest knowledge on the nature of the landscape where the battle is fought outmaneuvers the three kings and chases them away back to their homeland. Why? Su Ve says he wanted his novel to give his readers hope and optimism so that the lessons they take from the story empower them to face the struggles of their real lives with resilience and inspiration.

It is Su Ve’s literary license to end his novel the way he would have wanted it to and I am nobody to question that. But the bone of contention here is something different – if the quality of a work of art is to be determined based on whether it offers hope and solace to the reader, aren’t we in the process ending up ‘reducing’ the very purpose of its existence? Does an art work have an obligation to the reader to serve as a supplementary dose to his daily diet of caffeine, failing which it should be ‘sequestered’ from its canon and allowed to rot in a ghetto of oblivion and infamy?

In my very limited experience of reading literature, art serves multiple purposes, one of which is to reflect with as much sincerity and conviction, the psyche of the writer in question. This definition too in my opinion I admit, is very reductive but this is not the place to scale the significance of art, its purposes and importance in all its many dimensions. My point however is only this – if someone asks me what art has given me, I can say one thing very emphatically,

‘Art has comforted me sometimes when I have felt depressed and depressed me when I have felt comforted’.

Frankly, when I had joined the IT industry a decade or so back, when I was wallowing in the early opulence it was offering me in terms of decadent parties, expensive wardrobe, multiplex cinema, branded shoes and exotic cuisine, I had the opportunity to read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in my leisure time. As many might have known, the novel is a re-telling of how tens of thousands of farmers and daily wage laborers in the United States found themselves pauperized and how they migrated from one state to another in search of jobs for survival during the Great Depression of 1929. The intensity of the suffering they had endured shook me out of the comforts of my living, depressed me for so long and finally put me in the path of learning more and more about poverty, unemployment, inflation, their causes and ways to tackle them.

The same thing happened when I was worried about the fragility of democracy in our own India, how our citizens had no consciousness about their rights and privileges and how easily the government could turn ‘autocratic’ whenever it had felt that its authority was waning. When I was trying to learn how other countries were dealing with issues such as these, I had the opportunity to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It was in some ways an indirect assault on the authoritarian state that existed in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the last century before the collapse of the USSR. And some more novels and films (Hotel Rwanda, 2004) about other countries helped me learn how a lot of countries in the world that were liberated alongside India have deteriorated into anarchy, riots and genocide over the last few decades and how most of these societies are even now as we speak, grappling with the question of how to solve these problems. In some ways, even if these stories were depressing, they ended up serving me as a great source of comfort at the same time, helping me realize how much more peaceful, stable and democratic in comparison, our own India has been and how lucky I was to be born in such an environment.  

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On the personal front too, novels and films have had the same effect. I remember a line from a song in K Viswanath’s Salangai Oli,

“Vaazhkai mudiumbodhu thodangum, thodangumbodhu mudium!”

I remember reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens more than a decade back. Throughout the whole story, young David would have remained smitten by a beautiful girl, Dora Spenlow if my memory serves me right. A very long portion of the story would have been dedicated by Dickens towards this – the blooming of this romance, the development and its ripening at their marriage. When the reader is expecting a longer tale about how the young couple lived and grew old, Dora dies all of a sudden due to a miscarriage if I remember correctly. All along David in parallel, would have had a close friend named Agnes who remains his conscience-keeper throughout. David spirals into a depression and after many years of writing to Agnes, he suddenly finds love in her. They marry each other and a new life begins of course, out of the blue. 

The story may seem very ordinary to many in some ways, just going by how I have narrated it in just a few lines given above. But if you read the novel, Agnes would have been shown as someone who is like a Shobana to Dhanush’s Thiruchitrambalam- a close friend, nothing more, nothing less. She could have been a Partha to Udhayanidhi Stalin’s Saravanan and the relationship would not feel very dissimilar, the only difference being her gender. She remains with him when he is in pursuit of Dora, weeps with him when he fails and cheers when he succeeds. And Dickens would have woven this relationship in such a way that you would find absolutely no hint of romance between these two. And when Dora dies after her marriage with David, the reader I am sure would have felt so depressed like how we felt while seeing a Mahalakshmi dying in the 2004 blockbuster, M Kumaran Son of Mahalakshmi. Dora till then, as a character would have remained the giant propeller behind the whole story’s movement and when she gets killed off by Dickens abruptly, the reader would have felt like a bewildered 23rd Pulikesi suddenly finding himself against a wall while strutting in his palace about discussing keenly with his advisors. 

But Dickens continues the story and after some painful years of mere correspondence with Agnes, David overcomes his depression and tries to start a new life. The moment where he finds love in his life-long companion Agnes is a beautiful episode and personally, the moment felt glorious and epiphanic for me, for reasons that shall soon follow.

If I think deeply about why I was hit so deeply at such a moment, I realize a lot of things. The reason why the story of all our lives is so interesting and depressing at the same time is only one – its utter unpredictability. I remember my father telling me that having completed his schooling without his parents’ support in the early 70s, he was forced to pursue a Diploma in Commerce for pecuniary reasons in a local Polytechnic. He had to study this highly unpopular course despite his complete hate towards the subject only because his brothers could not afford paying for other ‘lucrative’ ones. But as months went on, he tried to develop a liking towards the subject. He soon grew up to pursue a Masters in Commerce and came out unexpectedly, in flying colors. He had till then assumed that Commerce was going to be his life and had started applying for positions that needed his skill. Within a few months, he found out that the process of getting a job was not going to be quick and easy and to escape the wrath of his brothers for remaining idle till then, he enrolled himself for a part-time course in shorthand and type-writing, with of course dislike and equal disinterest. 

As months passed, he understood that a job in his field of interest and proficiency was not going to be easy to get and that he had to put himself in the service of anyone who was willing to take him in, at least for the time being, irrespective of the nature of work. He worked for a few months as a stenographer in a few private companies and with this experience, he was delighted to be invited one fine day, for an interview for a job in the Central Government. He succeeded in passing the relevant tests and found himself soon proudly leaning against a wooden chair in one of the musty rooms of a Central government office, ready to type out a letter for his superior, on his proud, new possession – a mechanical Remington typewriter.

Shorthand and typewriting, that he had initially found himself indifferent to and pursued only as an accessory skill, became the first stepping stone in his three decade-long, illustrious career in the service of the government. Within years, he was able to clear a few departmental exams in the same office and by his middle age, he found his name embossed in a government seal, ready to attest documents for my friends enrolling themselves in engineering colleges. 

These parts of his life, which he used to emphasize often remind me about nothing but the intriguing unpredictability of the very story called life. Right from childhood, we believe in certain things and throw our weight behind certain choices that we assume to be good and beneficial for us in the long term. At some unforeseen moment, things take a turn, the results turn out otherwise and our hopes are permanently dashed. We suddenly find ourselves in a blind alley without a clue on which direction to turn towards. But as great art sometimes shows, life can restart in completely unpredictable ways and take us in a new path. 

This is one of the reasons why I found the marriage of David and Agnes very touching and epiphanic. These portions of the novel suddenly felt so life-like and relatable to me that I keep telling my friends about them whenever I find them depressed and hopeless.

Again, I would like to remind my reader that only because the novel David Copperfield did not have a sad ending like having David vomit blood at the corners of the open sewers of 19th century London and die with the memories of Dora, I liked the novel and I still savor many portions of it. Absolutely not. When Agnes married David, I was happy at David’s redemption no doubt. But when Dora died before, I was not only sad but also extremely appalled at the perils of life’s unpredictability as well.

Not only David Copperfield, V.S.Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Thi Janakiraman’s masterpiece Mohamul and my recent favourite, Devibharathi’s Neervazhipaduoom – all of them have a singular quality. They offer me through their wide canvas, a slice of the wholesomeness of the story of life. When I use the word ‘wholesomeness’ I refer specifically to the multiple possibilities that exist for a character within a story. A character in a novel just very much like us, might have many acquaintances and have multiple networks of relationships with them, some central and some peripheral. Most stories that we see in films or novels do not touch upon a majority of these networks and take the easier path of going from point A to point B making use of only the networks that directly make sense to the main thread for pushing the story forward. For example, Jayakanthan’s Oru Nadigai Nadagam Parkiral is very much a love story and the main thread alone is given the highest importance – the relationship of Kalyani and Rangaswamy and how they move from being strangers to becoming partners for life, overcoming multiple hurdles. By confining themselves only to the main thread, these stories, despite having compelling arcs at the same time, do not attempt to emulate life or touch upon its immense possibilities. 

Only by being ‘wholesome’, by replicating real-life networks of relationships onto the canvas of a story and exploring teeming possibilities inherent in them, a writer in my humble opinion raises his work from the level of its ability to ‘dispense hope and succor’ to the reader to one of ‘imparting the sense of having lived the life of someone else’ to the reader. Only when I feel I have entered into the mind of a fictional character and lived his life through all his ups and downs, does a work of art feel complete for me. After exiting out of the character and returning to the realities of my own life, I must feel like I have gained at least something in terms of experience. During happy times in my life, I must be wary from that experience that these are only fleeting and when I am sad, I must cheer myself for the very same reason.

In other words, to paraphrase Sundara Ramasamy, it is absolutely not the job of the writer whose book I read to massage my ankles at the end of one of life’s longest treks. Hence, I would rather not expect it from him. 

To end with a quote, I will go with one of my best pickup-lines:

‘She is like art. She is not beautiful. Art is not meant to be beautiful (or inspiring). It just has to make you feel something’.

Posted in: Books, Personal, Readers Write In