The Narrative Arcade: On Vikram Chandra's "Artha"

Vikram Chandra's collection of interconnected stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, is a book I had thought of writing about in some detail, but I'm afraid time is not on my side with that, and a number of other writing projects need attention. One story I managed to make some notes on is "Artha", and here are those notes, in case some thoughts on the story are useful to someone else...

In thinking about Love and Longing in Bombay, I’m going to start by grasping some tiny pieces within the wholes, and see what I can do with them.

First, a single story, and a single page of that story, and not the words but the blank space.

The story: “Artha”. The page: 165 of the 1998 Back Bay Books paperback edition.

The two blank spaces between narrators and their narratives.

Storytellers: Escaping the Nightmare of Myth in Chaudhuri and Rushdie

Continuing on from yesterday's post about Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (a novella included in the collection Freedom Song), here's a bit more academic writing about the book. This time, my goal is to undermine, or at least question, the common opposition of Chaudhuri's "realism" to Salman Rushdie's "magical realism". The two writers have frequently been set against each other as polar opposites, but my argument here is that they have far more in common than might be obvious at first...

In his 2009 essay “Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face”, Amit Chaudhuri tells of a conversation he had with the Bengali poet Utpal Kumar Basu:

We were discussing, in passing, the nature of the achievement of Subimal Misra, one of the short-story writing avant-garde in 1960s Bengal. ‘He set aside the conventional Western short story with its idea of time; he was more true to our Indian sensibilities; he set aside narrative’, said Basu. ‘That’s interesting’, I observed. ‘You know, of course, that, in the last twenty years or so, it is we Indians and postcolonials who are supposed to be the storytellers, emerging as we do from our oral traditions and our millennial fairy tales’. ‘Our fairy tales are very different from theirs’, said Basu, unmoved. ‘We don’t start with, “Once upon a time”.’ (91-92)

Chaudhury goes on to explore the implications of this statement, and of the desire to solidify an idea of pure cultural identity (“Our fairy tales … We don’t start with…”) against ideas of modernism and cosmopolitanism, but here I would like to take the statements in the above paragraph more on their surface and to explore the effect of the stated and implied Once upon a time…
   
Salman Rushdie’s Shame does not begin with exactly those words, but the sense of a fairy tale beginning is strong: “In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.” The narrator quickly assumes the role of storyteller: “…the three sisters, I should state without further delay, bore the family name of Shakil…” (3), the narrative voice here asserting, for the first of many times in Shame, the kind of presence that most European novels of the 19th century sought to vanquish in the name of realism.

The idea of realism led to third-person narratives unburdened by the presence of a narrator, and the success of that style has created a sense that storytelling was a more primitive tradition, a tradition that the 19th Century European novel first refined and then progressed beyond. The realist European novel is inextricable from a particular idea of European progress, and the aesthetic is strongly located within a specific, and quite narrow, time and place. Storytelling may be universal, written narrative may have a long and multicultural history, but the realistic novel is a particular technology.

Notes on A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri

Here are some thoughts after reading Amit Chaudhuri's first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which I read in the collection Freedom Song (which is what the page numbers below reference). I struggled with Chaudhuri — his goals for fiction are not mine. Nonetheless, I found it to be a productive struggle, and enjoyed writing about the book for a seminar on postcolonial fiction from Southeast Asia.

Over the next few days, I'll be posting here some of the material I came up with during that seminar that I doubt I'm going to develop into something more polished, at least immediately, but which seems worth preserving, even if my ideas are based on false premises, misreadings, or other potential pitfalls of quick apprehension...

ASSEMBLING THE INSTANT OF THE CITY 

He did not know what to do with his unexpected knowledge. But he felt a slight, almost negligible, twinge of pleasure, as meaning took birth in his mind, and died the next instant. (117)

             

Here we have the protagonist, Sandeep, discovering the pleasure of meaning in a word and name (“Alpana”), but the moment could be extended to the novel as a whole and, in particular, its perspective on the city of Calcutta. If we accept Majumdar’s proposal that this novel presents a flaneur’s-eye-view of life and the city, then the cityscape of the novel is less a stable conglomeration of stone and steel than it is an ever-flowing multiplicity of sensations. It is a place full of objects, but the objects live in constant moments of being, and those moments of being are created within the perceptions of the people who come in contact with them. Thus, there is no one object, no one city; rather, there is a practically infinite field of encounters, and those encounters erupt and fall into memory within the space of an instant.

"Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall

Whenever I encounter a piece of writing that blows the top of my head off, I try to settle down and figure out how it works and what I so forcefully responded to within it. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes I can't. Sometimes the top of my head just won't go back on.

So it is with "Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall, published in the latest issue of Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. You might not have heard of Porcupine, but it's worth your attention; this issue in particular is rich with good poetry, prose, and pictures. But "Akhil and Judy" is the standout for me, and a standout among all the stories I have read this year, or, for that matter, any year.

I have a few hypotheses for why I find this story so affecting, so impressive, but I don't have much in the way of solid reasoning, though I'm going to try here to make my hypotheses hold some water. I know the story's effect on me: during one of my three readings, it brought me to the verge of tears; during another, I was struck by how charming and even funny it sometimes is. Each time I read it, the story took hold of my attention and imagination in a way few stories ever do -- I heard nothing other than the words, imagined nothing other than the images those words expressed.

It's a difficult story to summarize, and that's often a good sign. Summary cannot really convey how (and how well) this story works, because its subject matter is so vividly and inextricably connected to the narrative structure.

Nonetheless, there are things I can say. I can say it is the story of Akhil, who was born in India and then was brought by his father to Rwanda, where the family settled in Kibeho, where an orphaned girl named Isobelle saw apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and then, a few years later, everyone was in hell. Akhil and Isobelle met in a refugee camp and fled, eventually ending up in California. That's where the story begins:

Akhil and Isobelle first set eyes on each other while they were fleeing for their lives-- Akhil, amongst a throng of screaming people, from the east end of the camp, Isobelle, in a frenzied crowd, from the west. They stared, slowed down, crossed paths, turned to keep their eyes connected then continued their flight from the men with machetes and machine guns. Akhil hid in a toilet hole along with a mother suffocating her child. Isobelle buried herself beneath a pile of recently inaugurated corpses. When Isobelle later appeared, looking into the toilet hole, yelling for Akhil to get out, Akhil was convinced he finally had a real vision. Now the vision ends, or walks out the door, slamming it vengefully behind her.

Akhil decides to leave, and so he gets on a train to Portland, and there he meets a family from India with a little boy, and the little boy thinks Akhil is his lost brother, Mohammed. The family is from Ahmedabad, and left in 2002, a year after a terrible earthquake, and the year of a month of riots that began with a train on fire.

There's even more to the story, both foreground and background, but that's enough to let you know there's a lot. Yet "Akhil and Judy" isn't even twenty pages long. That's where some of its wonder lies: it compresses three continents and three decades of history into remarkably few words, and it does so without reducing the continents or the history to simple lessons or easy emotions. The affect of the sentences is flat, yet they gain power from Lall's careful control of tone and diction, with surprising (and effective) choices of words popping up every few sentences to keep the story from falling into an inappropriate deadpan. It stays, instead, tensely matter-of-fact, jutting now and again into lyrical images that would be much less effective were the whole striving for the same effect.

I would quote some passages to prove my point about the prose, but (in this case) to rip the words out of the story hobbles them. The sentences and paragraphs need each other for their rhythms and patterns, and what looks in an excerpt like too much or not enough proves itself to be, in the story itself, exactly right. The familiar doesn't lose its familiarity, doesn't become completely strange and new -- rather, it becomes both familiar and exact, satisfying in its inevitability, amazing in its ability to contain so much in a form that would, anywhere else, be mundane.

The title points to one part of the story I haven't yet mentioned. Early in the story (though not in their lives), Isobelle tells Akhil, "We have to become different people." Later, we discover what this means:

Their date was at a pier in Newport Beach. Akhil was supposed to come upon Isobelle and approach her as if for the first time, using an alias and a past made of fiction.

It doesn't work the first time -- Isobelle scoffs at Akhil as he pretends to be other than himself, and she walks away. But they try again, and this time they talk, with Akhil calling himself Jack, and Isobelle ("in a Jamaican accent that faded in and out") calling herself Judy. As the characters talk, fiction leads to something that sounds too convincing to be anything other than a horrible truth.

One of the reasons I find the story so effective, aside from how much it crams into its sentences and how well crafted those sentences are, is that it is not linear, and yet it is patterned. We move back and forth from the present-tense travels on the train to past-tense reminiscences and meditations. We gain glimmers of the past until, by the end, the accumulated bits of collage gain a shape in our minds, and all the previous sections grow richer and revelatory.

And so we have a story about time and memory and vision and loss and faith; about exile, truth, and family; about religion and politics, Akhil and Isobelle, Jack and Judy, Kibeho and Ahmedabad, us and them. It's a story so achingly sad at its heart that it is nearly unreadable, and yet the sadness is leavened with a hope in the possibility that comes from new beginnings, though that hope is tempered with the knowledge that survival is a blessing tempered by the ineradicable taste of ash on the tongue.