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Why does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?The editorial speculates about the sociological causes for the boom in English fiction writing in India today.
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How Indian TV Channels Pitched the 2009 elections to their audiences
During the parliamentary elections in 2004, there were roughly 43 news channels in India.
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Books: |
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Vishal Bhardwaj 's Kaminey
by M.K. Ragavendra
Review 1: Kaminey
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Inglourious Basterds
by Quentin Tarantino Review 2: tarantino Read |
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Home > Letters |
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Letters: Response to the review of The Inheritance of Loss |
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Gayatri Devi
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Mr.Raghavendra's review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss provoked
many questions in me. I am curious to know more about the evident
interest in the review to "read" Desai's novel as some sort of a
testament to what Raghavendra calls "theory," evidently an
epistemological and textual reading practice he holds in barely
concealed disdain. Why would a review of the novel include a digression
on the alleged shortcomings of "theory"? For instance, it is rather lazy
to say that Desai's novel "If it is sensitive, it is not so much to
experience as to the hazards of falling foul of theory and theorists."
How does Raghavendra know that the novel is not sensitive to
"experience"? Whose experience might that be? Moreover, why pit
"experience" against "theory" and "theorists"? Raghavendra does not
clarify the theory, theorists and theoretical school that Desai
allegedly panders to with this novel, though his reference to Gayatri
Spivak leads me to believe that most of the disdain is directed at
deconstruction, a form of reading practice and epistemological critique,
as we understand it in literary studies. It is also curious that
Raghavendra would use criteria such as the following to read a literary
text: "To use an analogy from science, the first criterion that a theory
must fulfill is that it must be 'vulnerable'. A theory that cannot be
falsified is evidently worthless and 'falsification' implies measuring
it against experience." What is the worthless "theory" that Desai is
propounding in this novel? Raghavendra does not specifically say what it
is. The sort of empirical positivist approach that Raghavendra appears
to favor-"falsification implies measuring it against experience"- might
work in science, but it is never the most fruitful way to read
literature. You bring your empirical stack and I will bring mine; that
does not really tell us anything about any work of literature being
discussed. In fact, in Raghavendra's empiricist reading of the novel,
most of Desai's description has no "use." Desai's description of Cho Oyu
as situated "'at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga' is a gratuitous
cinematic image, Raghavendra asserts. It is not; the five peaks of the
Kanchenjunga frame the eventual reunion of Biju and Cook in a sublime,
emblematic moment; the mountain peaks contain the emotion of that
reunion. Ultimately Raghavendra's review of the book speaks more about
himself than about Desai's novel. The relationship of people to money is
Raghavendra's interest in this novel; thus his insistence on finding the
"function" and "usefulness" of this novel. It is interesting that
Raghavendra wants every subtle effect spelt out flatly: he complains
"Biju works in an eatery in Manhattan but we don't learn much about the
social lives of immigrant laborers or the precise economic relations
they are governed by. Since Biju eventually loses everything, it would
only be by letting the reader see the trouble taken to earn the money
that Biju's story might have been made tragic." That is precisely the
point of the novel; Biju's loss of money is not tragic to Desai; he
comes back to Kalimpong because the American Dream is a fantasy and he
figures it out. Thus Desai's tendentious use of Borges's great poem "The
Boast of Quietness" as the epigraph to the novel: "My humanity is in
feeling we are all voices of the same poverty." Every inheritance is
tinted, tainted with loss. This is a mature insight from such a young
author. It would have been useful if the review considered the
narrative, political or epistemological levels of the novel. Where does
it stand on issues? How do the different levels of the
text-narratological, political, epistemological-- interact with each
other to produce meaning? It would be useful to hear criticisms of
Desai's novel along those lines. And there are valid criticisms to be
made on each of these aspects. Raghavendra does not offer any such
readerly insights in his review. He merely makes some hackneyed
complaints against "theory" and "theorists." Also it is not clear at all
what Raghavendra means when he says that "When Desai gives Gyan and Biju
voices, for instance, it is not because she has any understanding of
people like Gyan and Biju and their actual situations." Gyan and Biju
are fictional characters created by Desai; what does Raghavendra mean by
their "actual situations"? Stranger still is Raghavendra's professed
intent in his review: "A new work of fiction is perhaps like an unknown
object and needs to be described and classified accurately, its intended
function determined before its usefulness can be evaluated." It is very
curious that Raghavendra would use such blatantly anthropological
language to speak about a work of fiction, as if he is an "expert" who
obviously has the interpretive tools and authority necessary to
"describe" and "classify" an "object" to "determine" its "function" and
to "evaluate" its usefulness." When did book reviews become
anthropological discourses at the expense of reading and responding to
texts as singular works of literature?
Gayatri Devi teaches world literature and linguistics at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania
Reply from reviewer
I have difficulties with this response and can only get its general thrust. Phalanx is printing it without changes so that the intrepid reader can make more of its arguments. Take the following words for instance: "Desai's tendentious use of Borges' great poem The Boast of Quietness.." The Oxford Dictionary indicates that the word 'tendentious' is normally used in a derogatory way. If this is so, how can a writer (apparently deserving our admiration) be lauded for making 'tendentious' use of a great poem? This provides evidence that Gayatri Devi employs language in a rather unfamiliar way and I will therefore excuse myself from replying to her criticism point by point, only making a few observations of my own about constructing meaning in literary fiction and how 'Theory' is related to it.
A novel (like any text) yields different kinds of meaning depending on who is interpreting it and to what purpose. The 'evaluation' of the text (the task of the 'reviewer critic' but not the 'interpreter critic') depends on how he/she has read it. Still, all readings cannot become the basis of 'reviews' (i.e. the basis of evaluations) and I will duly expand upon this here.
To my understanding, the four broad ways of making meaning of a text are:
1. |
The reader constructs a concrete world out of the text and simply looks at the story, its construction and the use of language. In the case of Kafka's Metamorphosis, for instance, this would be to understand what happens to Gregor Samsa, the relationship between the different people, how they respond to him and why. |
2. |
The reader moves up a level of abstraction and assigns a conceptual meaning to the text. Metamorphosis could now become a treatise on the way people react to human suffering. |
3. |
3. The reader may construct a symbolic or implicit meaning. Metamorphosis could, for instance, be probed for its religious symbols and it could be about Original Sin. Why does Gregor Samsa suffer thus and are there pertinent references to his kind of fate in the Old Testament? |
4. |
If 1, 2 and 3 assume that the text knows what it is doing, the perceiver/ reader may also construct a 'repressed' or 'symptomatic' meaning, assuming that the text does not know what it is doing. The symptomatic meaning of Metamorphosis could include Kafka's castration complex or an incestuous longing for his mother or sister. The repressed meaning is not necessarily psychoanalytical and could also be political/ ideological. It might imply racial prejudice, for instance, or it might contain an implicit discourse privileging certain power structures. As opposed to 1, 2, and 3 above, 4 is a 'deep' interpretation though this 'depth' has nothing to do with profundity. |
These meanings are, generally speaking, different territories apportioned between different kinds of readers. I will suggest that the lay reader confines himself/herself to (1) and (2) above. Number (3) is usually the territory of the literary essayist who appropriates for himself/herself the freedom to deal with the material in any way he/she chooses. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, concerns himself exclusively with the kind of insect Gregor Samsa becomes - whether cockroach or dung beetle - and the bearing this has on the world of the novel. Territory (4) is the chosen space of the academic critic and it is where 'Theory' is usually employed.
Evaluation of a novel (through a 'review') is required in the novel's early history and one does not therefore 'review' Kafka today. Since evaluation through a review is usually done for the benefit of the lay reader, the reviewer examines the same aspects that the lay reader might be attentive to, i.e. plot construction, language, characterization, its view of life etc. The reviewer also uses everyday language in which words carry their understood meanings. The word 'experience' used in my review, therefore, has no more than its usual connotations, the same connotations that Gayatri Devi might admit when away from her university.
The symptomatic meaning is not relevant to a 'review' - and not only because Kafka's incestuous longings might not do him credit. The author writing the novel addresses the general reader (and the reviewer) because he/ she seek immediate responses and approval rather than an exposé of his/her latent phobias or prejudices which might not be of much benefit to him/her, which is not to say that the uncovering of a prejudice or a phobia in a piece of writing cannot do the image of a writer any harm. Still, generally speaking, academic criticism and Theory may be useful in the study of literature but they are as pertinent to literary practitioners (and the production of literature) as ornithology is to birds.
A problem with some writers of literary fiction today is their addressing the academic rather than the lay reader; the outcome they hope for is not the satisfied book lover as much as the scholar working on his/her PhD thesis. Perhaps they labor under the misapprehension that their own worth is directly proportional to the number of pages written about their phobias. In my review of The Inheritance of Loss I detected this tendency in Kiran Desai that I (being a reviewer) found appalling, but which is welcomed by Ms Gayatri Devi because she is an academic and looks for 'symptoms' rather than readable fiction.
M.K. Raghavendra
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