Understanding the Kafkaesque

Understanding the Kafkaesque

Understanding Kafka is no easy task. A reader of Kafka’s work in many ways becomes like one of Kafka’s own protagonists – an isolated, confused being, struggling to understand a world that in some way constantly defies understanding. This is probably why so much of criticism on this early 20th century German-speaking author from Prague clings so desperately to the raft of Kafka’s life, through his letters and diaries. Considering the number of these he left behind, a biographical reading of Kafka is a popular approach: easy, straightforward, and really quite inevitable, given the circumstances through which much of his writing is available to us today. Kafka felt a deep personal connection with his work, and asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished writings upon his death: last wishes that Brod disobeyed after Kafka died in 1924, changing the face of 20th century literature. It is impossible to deny the strong presence of Franz Kafka in his writings. His protagonists’ names, for example: K. from The Castle, Josef K. from The Trial, Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis, are all encapsulations of Kafka’s own name. The domineering, authoritarian father figure – most notably in The Judgement, seems to be a reflection of Kafka’s own father, underlined by Kafka’s own Letter to His Father.

However, reading Kafka’s works through his life is a bit like flipping ahead to the solutions pages in a puzzle book. Not only is it a bit like cheating, it leaves the reader cheated as well, whether or not they are aware of it. For one thing is sure about Kafka’s works: they defy any sort of essentialist reading. Turning to the solutions pages in this case helps us only to place the body of Kafka’s writing in context; more than anything, along with Kafka’s fiction, it helps us understand the author Kafka better, but his fiction itself remains as puzzling as ever. Like Kafka’s unfortunate protagonists, we are not meant to fully understand the absurd reality of Kafka’s fiction, or find any solution for it. Like Josef K. and Gregor Samsa, we struggle against this breakdown of sense and meaning, only to fail at the end. It is this inexplicability that lies at the core of Kafka’s fiction.

Nowhere is this made as clear to us as it is in Kafka’s metafictional short story, The Cares of a Family Man. The narrative begins in a manner suggestive of an analytical reading: “Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.”

We go on to learn that Odradek is “a flat star-shaped spool for thread” that “looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished”. Odradek can be seen as a metaphor for Kafka’s own works: senseless, but in its own way perfectly finished. The narrator of this story, the family man, struggles to grapple with the meaning of this object, but by the end of this 500-word story we realise, along with the narrator, that Odradek is what it is: meaningless, but permanent. In the final line of the story, the narrator admits: “He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful”. These words are prophetic in the way Kafka’s own “meaningless” work would survive him. What is more important to consider, however, is the way Kafka plays with meaning and meaninglessness in the story. The narrator knows Odradek to be meaningless, but we also observe, along with the narrator, the slow implicit dawning of the realisation that in his impermanence, he too is rendered meaningless. Odradek is the family man’s shadow, his guilt, a manifestation of his own meaninglessness. The narrator is only defined for us as the “family man” – a label apparently filled with meaning, but in a way no more meaningful than Odradek’s description of being a flat, star-shaped spool for thread. The narrator will only be survived by his legacy as a family man – his children and his children’s children – and Odradek.

The story is a wonderful comment of the worldview of Kafka’s fiction, which we may call the Kafkaesque. It embodies a certain nervous laughter that is so characteristic of the Kafkaesque. Consider the opening passage of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and Samsa’s first thoughts are about how he will get to work that morning. It is this nervous laughter, this humour of disbelief, that is the only form of escape in the Kafkaesque world, that is otherwise menacing and claustrophobic. Jean Collignon explains the source of this humour in Kafka’s fiction:

When confronted with an absurd situation, we burst out laughing, but we do so only because we believe that, due to this very characteristic, it cannot last. Pretty soon, we argue, the absurdity will be exploded and reason reestablished. If not, we go on laughing because we feel superior to the absurd, unaffected by it, while those responsible for it are discarded as fools. But if the absurdity affects us deeply, we either sink into despair or revolt. Now Kafka's heroes, without growing despondent or rebellious, seem to wallow in absurdity with a surprising amount of delight. (Collignon 59)

The Kafkaesque perspective is the perspective of the bug, the pest, the Ungeziefer. Although we see the bug only in The Metamorphosis, a similar perspective is retained in Kafka’s other stories.

(click to see larger)

(Watterson, 22)

Kafka’s protagonists all have that dim perception of being the victim of some cruel prank or joke. When Josef K. is arrested at the very beginning of The Trial, he harbours for a long time the suspicion that it is merely a practical joke that his colleagues are playing on him. As a result of this perspective, Kafka’s protagonists seem to go about their increasingly absurd lives with a sense of flippancy. The Kafkaesque has often been described as being nightmarish, with perhaps too much emphasis on the nightmare as being horrific. It is nightmarish in the sense that there is a constantly present hope that the protagonist will wake up.

In Adam Thirlwell’s description of the Kafkaesque, he describes and refutes the common perceptions of the Kafkaesque: of expressing the alienation of the modern man, of prophesying the totalitarian police state and the Nazi Holocaust, of expressing a Jewish mysticism, of an anguish of man without God, of being very serious, of his stories all being autobiographical. He says of these notions of the Kafkaesque: “All of these truths, all of them are wrong. It is not a very accurate word, this ‘Kafkaesque’” (Thirlwell xi).

Thirlwell does not go on to define the Kafkaesque. He defines it only negatively, by stating the things it is not, which are, ironically, the very things it is popularly perceived to be. The Kafkaesque can never be an accurate word. Defining it would be to essentialise it, which would go against its very essence. Which is not to say the Kafkaesque is not characterized by a very distinct, constant style. No one-line definition of the Kafkaesque could capture its complexity, except if it is defined as being reminiscent of the works of Kafka. Such a definition begs the question and leaves us no wiser.

Perhaps it is true that the “Kafkaesque” can no longer be seen only in light of Kafka’s own work. The adjective has transcended its original relation to Kafka’s fiction, and attempting to redefine the Kafkaesque so it better represents the work of Kafka might not be a worthwhile exercise. It would be interesting to understand, however, why the Kafkaesque describes a certain kind of literature that cannot be described by any other word. The Kafkaesque of Kafka’s fiction, at the very least, fails to attach itself to or group itself under any other labels of genre.

The difficulty of pinning down Kafka and the Kafkaesque is reflected in Kafka’s uncertain position in the literary canon. Kafka cannot comfortably be grouped under any literary movement, for while his style shares elements with several of them, it also lies outside the boundaries of every one of them. “Kafka turns out to be as much an Expressionist as a Zionist as a mystic as a pre- and post-Communist Czech as an Existentialist as a post-modernist as a post-colonialist as a (whatever he will be next month). Kafka's work and his life seem to lend themselves to infinite readings and finite exploitations” (Gilman 9). Kafka is often categorised as an expressionist: his surreal narrative seems to occupy a more mental and emotional realm than a purely physical one.

One important aspect of the Kafkaesque is claustrophobia. It is not the surroundings that are claustrophobic (although occasionally they are), but a claustrophobia of the mind, the frustrating confines of the character’s thoughts and their inability to comprehend baffling surroundings. When Josef K. of The Trial is arrested, it is primarily his own mind that shackles him. The Kafkaesque claustrophobia is perhaps illustrated best by his story The Burrow. The narrative is the frenetic thoughts of a burrowing creature, constantly worried about its burrow. One could say the claustrophobia of the narrative is reflective of the physical confines of the burrow, but interestingly the narrative squeezes the reader into an even tighter box within the creature’s thoughts when the creature leaves the burrow. The mind seems to be the primary dimension in which this aspect of the Kafkaesque operates. Yet to call the Kafkaesque only expressionistic would be to completely miss the point: the Kafkaesque explores the entanglement between the dimensions of the mental and emotional with those of the physical and real. The uneasy relationship between the two is what creates the nightmarish quality of the Kafkaesque. It is an unreality imposed upon a very familiar reality. Ritchie Robertson, in his introduction to Kafka, explains this with the example of The Judgement. “In The Judgement, Kafka defies the expectations of readers that a text will have a stable relation to reality - that it will stay in the same literary mode throughout. Instead, Kafka begins in the realist mode and moves to the Expressionist mode, with hints of a further reality that neither can accommodate” (31). He goes on to explain that while The Judgement employs a shift from the realist to the expressionist mode, The Metamorphosis employs both modes simultaneously.

Expressionism was a turn-of-the-century movement, relating more to developments in painting than in literature. It is a movement clubbed under the larger cultural epoch of modernism. Kafka’s work, containing elements of the expressionistic, undoubtedly contained elements of modernism. His stories did reflect a certain mundanity of modern urban life: Gregor Samsa’s constant worrying about his job as a travelling salesman is evidence of this. Kafka’s heroes’ struggle to make meaning for themselves in a chaotic world is a modernist quest, and a strongly existentialist one.

Yet at the same time the Kafkaesque mocks and parodies the familiar (although perhaps not quite so familiar in Kafka’s time) modernist narrative. Samsa is an insect when he worries about his job as a travelling salesman. The modernist quest for meaning always fails, and Kafka distorts the very concept of meaning, as we saw in The Cares of a Family Man. The existentialist aim to define oneself is always thwarted.

The inevitability of the hero's reduction to powerlessness culminates in his death and dramatizes the superiority of the victorious forces which render all attempts at self-determination futile. Rather than providing the reader with that privileged moment of insight into the reasons which bring about the protagonist's downfall, Kafka's obsessional quest for completeness and absolute truthfulness is frustrated by the maze of minute detail. This deconstruction of totality ultimately leads to the fragmentation of truth. The failure to establish a totalizing view restrains Kafka from restoring to the narrative any familiar sense of omniscience. He renders the world unintelligible and truth inaccessible. (Beicken 401)

In its parody of modernist narratives, the Kafkaesque is also postmodernist, despite its arrival prior to postmodernism. Kafka’s use of metafiction is an indicator of his postmodernist tendencies. The refusal of the Kafkaesque to maintain a stable relationship with reality could be read as a sort of pastiche of genres, a favourite tool of the postmodernists. The Kafkaesque belongs to no single genre, but borrows from several, mixing them together in what continues even today to be a confusing narrative, despite the arrival and growth of postmodernism. James Whitlark says of Kafka’s prose that it is “reminiscent of literary realism, except in its dreamlike minimalism […] If Kafka had merely presented a ‘figure… or system’ and its deconstruction, he would still be working within a fairly traditional logic. Instead, he jostles one system and its deconstruction against another, creating an ungovernable world where any struggle for control becomes nightmarish – the Kafkaesque” (13).

Kafka’s fiction also manages to fall into the magical realist mode, even though the very term magic realism was coined one year after Kafka’s death. Yet the dynamism of the Kafkaesque’s relationship between the real and the unreal, in retrospect, finds itself a place in the magical realist tradition. Milan Kundera cites Kafka’s surrealist humour as being the predecessor of magical realist artists like Federico Fellini, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie. Like magical realists, Kafka distorts the dimensions of space and time – Kafka’s characters are often running for their lives to stay in the same place – they are unable to move. Time, too is hugely problematised, and turned into a mental dimension rather than a physical one, as we see in Kafka’s A Common Confusion. In the story, A accomplishes a journey to H in ten minutes on the first day, but the same journey takes him ten hours to complete on the next day. Magical realist narratives are seen as postmodernist narratives, being concerned with questions of being rather than questions of knowledge (McHale 83). But if we are to consider this definition as accurate we know that Kafka once again steps out of the magical realist framework by concerning himself with questions of knowledge as well as those of being. The Kafkaesque is plagued with these questions – in Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, we are told of the Chinese emperor who is known only through bits of knowledge, fragmented, like the Great Wall itself, and wholly unreliable because they have passed through the distorted filters of Kafkaesque space and time.

The Kafkaesque, Kafka’s Kafkaesque at the very least, therefore, creates a category of its own, a new genre that manipulates other genres, with the effect of bewildering the reader, who, like K. or Samsa, becomes a victim, a bug, with a dim perception that it is at the butt of some cruel trick, but lacks the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it.

Understanding the Kafkaesque then becomes oxymoronic – we cannot understand that which is not meant to be understood. The only understanding this essay, or any elucidation of the Kafkaesque can offer, is that the Kafkaesque will puzzle us, there is no way around it. All we can do is laugh disbelievingly until the very end.

WORKS CITED

Beicken, Peter U. “Kafka’s Narrative Rhetoric.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 6 No. 3 (Sep 1997): 398-409. Web.

Collignon, Jean. “Kafka’s Humor.” Yale French Studies. No. 16 (1955): 53-62. Web.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen (1987)

Gilman, Sander L. Franz Kafka. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Web.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Great Britain: Penguin, 1977. Print.

--- “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 3-54. Print.

---“The Burrow.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 113-149. Print.

---“Cares of a Family Man.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.

---“The Judgement.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.

---“The Great Wall of China.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 55-69. Print.

---“Letter to his Father.” Web.

Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Web.

Thirlwell, Adam, ed. Metamorphosis. London: Vintage, 1999. Print.

---“The Last Flippant Writer.” Thirlwell ix-xxviii. Print.

Watterson, Bill. Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat.

Whitlark, James. Behind the Great Wall: a Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1991. Web.

Comiclore

Coming soon, saar. That, was what the chap at the Sathyam box office (do ticket counters at multiplexes count as box offices?) told me, when I asked him when the damn Watchmen movie was coming out.

So I asked him again, does ‘coming soon’ mean March or, sayitisntso, April?

Idontnosaar, he replied. Coming Soon.

Ah well, so it goes.

Some of you gentiles, who haven’t read the book yet, might just what the big deal in yet another big budget Hollywood adaptation of yet another comic book is. So before you say that, or something similarly uninformed, let me take you through a rough guide of sorts, into that strange realm of pop culture which, when you think about it, isn’t as pop as it should be, since its only nerds and critics who seem to form its primary constituency, the graphic novel.

As someone very excellently put it, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upmanship is forever. And we here at The Pseudputs Review, are all about the one-upmanship. Also, as everyone knows, or should know, Dickens, Eliot, the Russians, and books without pictures in general, are like, so passé.

So here’s my list of graphic novels/comics that everyone should have heard of/read:

1. The Watchmen by Alan Moore

I remember the day I finished reading The Watchmen; I thought it was Western Civilization’s greatest artistic achievement.

I’ll admit, that was, maybe a tad over the top. But I still think The Watchmen is right up there with Anglo-American popular culture’s greatest achievements- The White Album (I like it better than Sgt. Pepper’s), Pulp Fiction, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Arrested Development and Pepsi (I like it better than Coke).

The story of The Watchmen unfolds in 1985, in a universe that’s similar, yet not quite the same as our own. Nixon’s in his fifth term as President, and America is at the height of a Cold War with a Soviet Union that is anything but dying. The threat of nuclear war and subsequent annihilation (that quintessentially 80’s concern: like Bon Jovi), is a ominous theme throughout the story. Also, masked vigilantes, or ‘super-heroes’ if you will, are a part of everyday life; that is, until they were outlawed in 1977 (a bit like the Incredibles that bit, only these guys didn’t have any powers at all. They were just grown {wo}men in costumes.). The book starts with the mysterious death of one such retired super-hero, The Comedian. This death briefly brings together many of his former caped crusading colleagues who are now fat, balding and/or impotent; all of whom, except one for one Rorschach (he wears a napkin with an inkblot as a mask), have ambivalent feelings about all the ‘crime-fighting’ they did in the past. In this universe, some of them even fight in Vietnam.

The idea of a super-hero is a funny, uniquely American, one: a masked vigilante who upholds the moral order of the time and vanquishes anyone who dares go against it. But what if say, the dominant moral order isn’t quite that peachy itself. It’s sexist, patriarchal, racist, dominated and manipulated by the interests of the rich and powerful (Manufacturing Consent, anyone?). Where does that leave our superhero? It makes him, or her, knowingly or unknowingly, a bit of a crypto-fascist. Someone who has clear ideas of what society should look like and what would constitute, an undesirable element within it. Suddenly, the Joker isn’t half as bad, is he (he was just plain ol’ anarchist)?

This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Alan Moore explores in his remarkable book, which starts off, and ends, as a whodunit. Throw in some Neitzche, Dylan, and super villains famously spouting post-modern art theory on the eve of veritable diabolism, and you have the comic book equivalent of Paradise Lost.

2. Fables by Bill Willingham

Snow White is Deputy Mayor of a secret township of exiled fairy tale characters living in the heart of New York City. The Big Bad Wolf (or Bigby more affectionately) is the Chief of Police. Prince Charming is a manslut, who has been married and divorced three times (not to mention cheated innumerably more- he can’t help it, his charm’s his curse), to Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella respectively (all whom meet regularly over cocktails, a la Sex and the City, and bitch about him). Goldilocks is a flaming Marx spouting revolutionary, out to incite armed rebellion. Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) is a con artist. Beauty and the Beast are desperately seeking a better apartment and higher social status. Mowgli is an international super-spy. So is Cinderella.

Welcome to the world of the Fables, imaginary to us, but real nevertheless. The Fables have been driven out of their Homelands by the Adversary (you’ll never guess who that is). And for the past few hundred years or so, they’ve been living in the world of the Mundanes (that’s us, Mundys more affectionately: don’t worry any similarities with Harry Potter end there).

Winner of 7 Eisner Awards (it’s like the Oscars for comics) so far, the Fables has been called the best ongoing comic book series. And you bet it is. Thankfully devoid of any Nietzsche, these are funny, absorbing tales of adventure, romance and absurdity; Bill Willingham’s created something of a masterpiece here.

And the best part? Unlike every other title on this list, it’s an ongoing series; meaning you can have the unique pleasure of waiting to know how the story progresses with each issue.

3. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

I’ll confess I haven’t finished the series entirely (the .cbr versions of this comic I find particularly unbearable). But this is another one of my favourites, nevertheless. Actually, pretty much anything Neil Gaiman puts down on paper is hallowed literature to me. The man’s a genius.

In a nutshell, it deals with the travails and adventures of the Sandman, the Lord of the Dream Realm etc. etc. He is one of the seven Endless (his siblings, of whom, Death, his sister, is one). It’s difficult to say what the Sandman series is about, it has seriously epic proportions. Dreams, Life, Death, Art, the Meaning/Absurdity of it all, the crazy King of San Francisco, Baghdad in its Caliphate glory days, Aborigine folklore, and where Shakespeare really got his inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream from. If I could take one thing to a desert island, I’d pick the collected Sandman series.

Now for my favourite part, Neil Gaimanisms:

“Walk any path in Destiny's garden and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you, or look ahead, and see only darkness.”

“Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams; and the dreamers will wake and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.”

The series also contains, what I believe, is the greatest drinking toast ever written:

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”

4. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Published in the same year as The Watchmen, 1986, and almost as canonical a work, The Dark Knight Returns, finds Bruce Wayne graying and old. It’s been ten years since Bruce last put on the Batsuit, and Gotham is a city racked by crime and unemployment. To top it off, we find Bruce in the middle of a profound existential crisis. He too wonders whether any of it was worth it (yes, what was it with the late 80’s and superheroes getting existential all over the place?).

Consider this, in one the first chapter Bruce is returning from a meeting with his old friend Commissioner Gordon. As he walks along what he realizes was the same street his parents were killed over 40 years ago, he is accosted by two teenage thugs with knives. And suddenly, having something of an epiphany, realizes the man who killed his parents was just like the two boys in front of him, “all he wanted was money. I was naive to think of him the lowest sort of man.”

While the not quite as multi-faceted as the Watchmen, this work is considered by many to be the best Batman comic ever written (apart from of course Year One, also by Miller). It’s a trenchant (and, I must admit, brazenly liberal-Democratic) look at Reagan-era America and its contradictions: where the government cut social security spending in the name of fiscal prudence, crime and inequality went through the roof and, at the same time, billions were spent on keeping the ‘Evil Empire’ away from the ‘Free World’.

Also, did I mention Batman fights Superman in this book? He does. And it’s epic.

5. Maus by Art Spiegelman

Maus is about the Holocaust. The Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. Simple, yet scathing. It’s also a true life story. Maus derives from a series of interviews Art Spiegelman conducted with his estranged, difficult father who went through Auschwitz and somehow, came out to tell his tale.

And Art Spiegelman is not one for crude, simplistic portrayals; he is brutally honest. He even brings out the rather disturbing fact that his father, the survivor of the worst genocide in human history, is also, a racist. Spiegelman Sr., like many of that era, didn’t quite fancy black people.

Maus is a psychologically complex work that ought to be standard reading in schools, if you ask me.

Note to insti junta: All of the titles here can be downloaded off LAN. I'm sharing.

Non-insti: This should get you started.

Honourable Mentions/ I’m too lazy to write anymore

The Preacher by Garth Ennis

The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

A Contract with God by William Eisner

Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean

Kari by Amruta Patil (Honestly, it wasn't that great. But whatever, I actually bought it- so I’m keeping it on the list.)

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller

Signal to Noise and Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Transmetropolitan and Bad World by Warren Ellis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

MAD Magazine (The only comic I've been buying since I was kid)

Principles of Uncertainity by Maira Kalman (Sadly, this old column of hers is no longer available online. Check out the link anyway, she's got something new going on.)

And of course, Charlie Schulz and Bill Watterson; no list is complete without them.

The Indianness of Indian English Literature

The Indianness of Indian English Literature

Kaushik Viswanath

Almost any essay attempting a broad overview of Indian English Literature[1] seems to find it necessary to comment on, or at least make mention of, the “Indian English Debate”. It is a debate that centres on questions such as “can Indians write in English?’, and more importantly, “should Indians write in English?”. The main critics of the movement of Indian Writing in English are those whom it leaves behind, or sidelines, in its wake: Indian regional language writers. They dismiss most of Indian English Literature as being second-rate, and Indian writers in English as well as their readers as “intellectual pygmies” (Reddy, par. 9). A certain excessive ill-feeling against the IEL is evident in their statements, perhaps since they have come in response to Salman Rushdie notoriously commenting that the best literature in India was being written in English, calling “Indo-Anglian” literature the most valuable contribution India has made to the world of books. Makarand Paranjape is of the opinion that Rushdie’s statement was a reinforcement of what is only a myth and a misconception, but misconception or not, until the statement is withdrawn, the protest will not be silenced.

One would suppose that in over eighteen years of such debate, the issue would have finally been brought to a standstill, an uneasy resolution, or at least have fallen out of relevance. The problem is that it hasn’t – critics and writers continue to fume over the issue of the validity of Indian Writing in English. Usually the attacks against this burgeoning tradition come first, after which supporters of the tradition jump to its defense. The debate is not a baseless one, although the major question is no longer about whether Indians can write in English. Jeet Thayil quotes from a letter Yeats wrote to his friend:

Damn Tagore. We got out three good books, Sturge, Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.

Thayil strikes down Yeats’s argument by pointing out that Yeats never wrote in Gaelic, the language he learnt in childhood (Thayil, xii). But even when one looks at early literary criticism (even by Indians themselves) about Indian Writing in English, the outlook has been fairly sceptical:

“Indian English can hardly acquire the native strength of Amerian or Australian English, for in Indian soil, it has always remained an exotic plant, and Indian Writing in English is a tree that has sprung upon a hospitable soil from a seed that a random breeze brought from afar” (Joshi & Rao, 2).

Indian English Literature has come a long way since then, and has established itself with more confidence than literary critics before the eighties might have expected. The first Booker prize to go to an author of Indian descent was in 1971, to V.S. Naipul for his In a Free State. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala then won the Booker for her Heat and Dust in 1975. However, true optimism and a revolutionary change in the perception of Indian English Literature came only with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker prize in 1981. As Paranjape comments, “It was written with rare verbal verve and employed an astonishing variety of linguistic and narrative traditions. Rushdie himself called it the chutnification of the English language. This novel broke taboos and inhibitions, encouraging Indians to experiment anew with both the form and content of fiction… another thing that Midnight’s Children did was to renew the dying market for IE fiction in Britain and America” (Paranjape, “Post-Independence”, 1053).

Since then, IEL has grown in leaps and bounds, garnering both critical as well as popular acclaim – it has won three more bookers since Midnight’s Children: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in 1997, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in 2006, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger in 2008. Penguin has also stated that India is the fastest growing market for English publishing.

Questions of whether Indians can write in English have therefore been silenced. The questions that still rage unanswered are those regarding the authenticity and validity, or rather the Indianness, of IEL. M. Prabhe, in her book The Waffle of the Toffs, asks not whether IEL is ‘authentic’, but whether Indian English authors are “silencing authentic voices by usurping the cultural space of the nation themselves” (170).

Regional language authors feel that IEL is incapable of successfully capturing the culture and life of India, whereas regional language literature is able to achieve this. Ashokamitran says,

Being rooted eludes writers like Naipaul and Rushdie. Rushdie is extremely clever and he does try to be Indian but not successfully. The land and the community give a lot of support, subtly, to a writer. This distance from the community the IWE have, their sense of not belonging anywhere, their lack of emotive content, makes them prime candidates for a spiritual life, not writers. (Reddy, par. 10)

Paranjape also admits this shortcoming:

Because of a disjuncture between the language and social experience, because the text is written about people and events in a language which is not the language of those people, the natural tendency of an Indian English writer is to move away from society instead of toward it. There is an exception to this alienating clash between the medium and the culture when and if you write only about the people who speak in English in India. But if you did that you would be confined to writing about a very small section of people … the Indian English novel has by and large been a novel of retreat from social engagement, either into personal psychological reality as in Anita Desai or Arun Joshi, or it is formalistic, with verbal experimentation, virtuosity and display of skill in the manner of presentation as in Rushdie and Roy. (Paranjape, “Kiran Nagarkar”, 14)

Indeed, many writers of the IEL tradition have taken this into account and attempted to vernacularise and Indianise their English. What Rushdie calls “chutnification” is an example of this, using code-switching and code-mixing. Nissim Ezekiel took this further in his poems that examined the peculiarities of English usage that was and still remains typically Indian:

(From “The Patriot”)

I am standing for peace and non-violence.

Why world is fighting fighting

Why all people of the world

Are not following Mahatma Gandhi

I am simply not understanding.

Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,

I should say even 200%

I should say even 200% correct,

But modern generation is neglecting –

Too much going for fashion and foreign thing. (Ezekiel 5)

Aravind Adiga, in his Booker-winning debut novel The White Tiger, accounts for, or explains away this “alienating clash between the medium and the culture” in the manner in which his book his presented. The book is essentially a series of letters written by Balram, the protagonist of the book, to the Prime Minister of China. Balram is originally from a rural background and has never completed his schooling – English is certainly not his first language. Still, the necessity of having to write across international boundaries demands that Balram adopt the medium of English, for writing in a regional language would fail to achieve his purpose of communicating with the Chinese Prime Minister.

Others have approached this very differently. Kiran Nagarkar, in Cuckold, tells a story set in 16th century Mewar through the eyes of the Maharaj Kumar, the heir apparent to the throne of Mewar. The tale is narrated entirely in English, and makes an almost anachronistic usage of English idioms. This is, in a way, complimentary to the protagonist himself, who is an anachronism – he is a voice of modernity and progressive thinking in a medieval society entrenched in conservative ideals. Paranjape stresses upon this fact and highlights the anti-realist or almost fantastical element that Nagarkar is able to draw out by his conscious use of a medium that contradicts the culture. (“Kiran Nagarkar”, 15-16)

It is now evident that the debate over IEL is not simply over whether or not Indians can and should write in English, but is entirely a much more complex issue. On one level the entire debate boils down to an issue of labels – asking what constitutes “Indian English Literature” entails asking what constitutes “Indian English”, “Indian Literature”, and most importantly, “Indian”. Meenakshi Mukherjee makes an insightful point in this regard:

If I were to write a novel in Bengali I would not be called an Indian writer in Bengali, but simply a Bengali novelist, the epithet Bengali referring only to the language and not carrying any larger burden of culture, tradition or ethos. No one will write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness of the Bengali novel. But the issue of Indianness comes up with monotonous frequency in any discussion of novels written by Indians in English ... Seeing India as a symbol both in physical and metaphysical terms comes more naturally to the novelist in English than to the other novelists who take their India somewhat for granted and often deal with it piecemeal rather than in its totality. What it means to be an Indian is not a question that troubles the Marathi or the Bengali writer over much. (46-49)

Mukherjee’s statement is almost the final word on the matter. It is an undeniable truth – the very label “regional language writer” robs its bearer of a national identity. What language can claim to be pan-Indian? Indeed, what can be said to be pan-Indian, without question? If there is any language that seeks to represent “India”, it must be English. The issue is no longer about Indian English Literature’s place in India, but about English’s place in India – and enough has been said about this. On this matter, Kiran Nagarkar hits the nail on the head: “I was born on the cusp of independence, there was no point denying my colonial legacy as well as the new India. The only thing to do was to accept it and to make the most or the worst of it” (Chakladar, par. 3)

Like the implicit justification of the usage of English Adiga gives us in its communication across borders, English’s place in India is also implicitly justified in a nation that is essentially riven with boundaries – boundaries of community, caste, class, and most importantly in the context of this debate, boundaries of language. IEL’s use of English to travel outside the boundaries of the nation is well-known. What it needs to be allowed to achieve is to travel across the boundaries within the nation. In the absence of Indian English Literature – Indian literature in a language that is equally foreign to all Indians – there is no Indian literature. As Mukherjee points out, there will be Hindi literature, Bengali literature, Tamil literature, and so on, but an Indian who knows no Tamil will have to rely on translations into a language he knows to be able read his countryman’s and his country’s literature – and translations are not always available, nor are they always good. (Besides, if we are to abandon English altogether, then every regional language literature must be translated into every other regional language – a herculean task.) Within the framework of a nation like India, that is as much concept as it is nation, the existence of Indian English Literature is both necessary and inevitable.

A majority of the time, the problem is that IEL is too self-conscious. Indian English Literature is, in my opinion, too often about India – it is either the focus of the work, or the Indianness of the work is flailing its arms around, trying to make itself as conspicuous as possible. IEL is not without its hang-ups and neither are its readers. A lot of IEL, even the best of it, tends to betray some self-consciousness and a little insecurity about its own Indianness. But this is changing – I believe the total absence of such an insecurity was part of the phenomenal success behind Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone. Indian Literature in English will be propelled forward by Booker winners, but what it also needs is literature that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that is interested more in national readership than international acclaim.

Works Cited

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008.

Chakladar, Arnab. “A Conversation with Kiran Nagarkar.” Another Subcontinent. 21 Aug. 2005. 26 Nov. 2008 < http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/>.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “In Search of Critical Strategies” The Eye of the Beholder, Indian Writing in English. Ed. Maggie Butcher. London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Common Myths and Misconceptions about Indian English Literature”, New Quest 129 (May-June 1998): 134-144.

---. “Kiran Nagarkar and the Tradition of the Indian English Novel.” The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Yasmeen Lukmani. New Delhi: Indialog, 2004. 1-24.

---. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History”. Economic and Political Weekly, 2 May 1998. 1049-1056.

Reddy, Sheela. “Midnight’s Orphans.” The Week, 25 Feb 2002.

Rushdie, Salman. “DAMME, THIS IS THE ORIENTAL SCENE FOR YOU!” The New Yorker, 23 June 1997.

Thayil, Jeet. “One Language, Separated by the Sea.” 60 Indian Poets. Ed. Jeet Thayil. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008. xi - xviii.

Joshi, Krishnanand, and Syamala B. Rao. Studies in Indo-Anglian Literature. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1970.

Prabha, M. The Waffle of the Toffs: A Sociocultural Critique of Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 2000.

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[1] Henceforth referred to as IEL. May be variously referred to through this paper as Indian Writing in English, Indian Literature in English, etc.