(Shashi Deshpande is a well known name in the field of Indian literature. She was born in Dharwad in Karnataka as the daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist as well as a great Sanskrit scholar Sriranga. She pursued her education in Economics in Bombay and graduated in Law from Bangalore. She later received an MA in English Literature. Shashi Deshpande, was awarded the Padmashri in 2009 & is well known for her novels, short stories and children's fiction stories. Her book titled “Writing from the margin and other essays,” was published in 2003 stop other notable works of Shashi Deshpande: The Binding Vine; Matter of Time; That Long Silence; Dark Holds No Terrors).
A strange paradox about literature (as also about culture, of which literature is a part) is that in the abstract it is considered to be of great importance. (Note how the words culture and literature are often spelt with a capital C and a capital L.) But in real life, literature is a low priority, (which is made clear by the fact that literature and culture are many times regarded as a woman's domain) to be given a place in our lives only in times of ease and plenty. For, the point is, of what use is literature?
When we speak of fiction, there are even more decided views. I have often heard people say, with a self-congratulatory air, “I don’t read fiction.” After all, fiction is only a story; it is good as a time pass, some hours of entertainment and amusement. People would rather read, or be seen reading, books like Amartya Sen's, for example, which are enlightening, giving you both information and knowledge. So, once again the question is: Of what use is fiction?
But I will rephrase the question and ask instead: What does a novel do to us? And then quote an opinion which comes in the introduction to Prof. M. N. Srinivas's famous book “The Remembered Village.” Sol Tax, who has written the introduction, says, “It is the poet or novelist who brilliantly catches the truth of a nation, a civilization or an era.” I know how true this is when I think of how Dickens’ novels gave me a living picture of London, of the England of his times. How to read Mrs. Gaskell is to understand what the Industrial Revolution did to individuals, to workers and their lives. And to read Jane Austen is to get an idea of women's lives at the time. If her novels spell out the importance of marriage to women, it is because women at the time could neither inherit nor own property; without marriage they became dependent upon male relatives. Therefore, the conflict between marrying without love and remaining unmarried was not merely a romantic question for women, but one that hid a harsh economic reality.
If the novelist does catch the truth, it is because he/she does not give the reader a mirror image of society. The novelist creates a picture that goes behind the façade, beneath the surface. A questioning picture, exploring not only what is, but the silences, the gaps, the ambiguities and the contradictions. In the process, perhaps, unearthing hidden truths that mere facts can never get at.
This is the larger picture. I will move on to the smaller one, to the question of what the novel does to people, specifically to the author and the reader. Before that, one needs to know why the novelist writes stories of make-believe people living in a pretend world. To escape from reality? To give readers some hours of escape? “Why do you write?” This is a question that writers are almost always unable to answer. Answers, when attempted, range from “I don’t know” to “I can’t not write” to novelist Margaret Atwood's splendid statement, “There is the blank page and there is your resistance to it.”
The truth is that the novelist is impelled into writing by something deep within her, something she can’t explain, because she does not understand it herself. Often, reading what she has herself written, the writer is puzzled. “Did I write this?” she asks herself in amazement. It is as if the writing self is another self altogether. This is on the deeper level. On a more conscious level, the novel comes out of questions, confusion, turmoil. I can explain this much better by speaking of my own experience. Before I began writing, I was restless, troubled by something that had nothing to do with the circumstances of my life then. I could not identify what it was that was disturbing me. And then I began to write. Writing brings about a clarity of thought, but I realized what it was that had been troubling me only much after I wrote my third novel “That Long Silence.” I knew then that my anger and confusion had come out a conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea the world had of me as a woman. Out of a conflict between the “womanly” roles that were supposed to be my lot and a self that could not wholly accept these roles. However, when I had completed “That Long Silence,” all that I knew was that I felt unburdened. Whatever the conflicts were within me, they were not resolved, they could never be resolved; but to get an idea of what they were made it possible to move on.
A well-known example in literature is Dickens’ “David Copperfield.” In this novel, he wrote of some of his childhood experiences – experiences which continued to haunt him in later life and which he could not bear to talk about. By converting his experiences into David's, he was – I think – able to come to terms with them, to put them away behind him. In this novel, he also recreated his irresponsible father, who was the origin of the difficulties of his childhood, as Mr. Micawber. Whatever his feelings about his father were, Mr. Micawber comes to us as a sympathetic character – the one whom you laugh at, but with affection. Perhaps, writing about him helped Dickens to come to terms with his feelings about his father as well. Tolstoy, too, who had a very tormented relationship with his wife recreated her in one of his plays. In the play, she comes off as a more sympathetic character than the man who was himself. Again, it had to be that writing gave him a clearer picture.
As a well-known American poet Anne Sexton, who was induced to write poetry by the doctor treating her for depression (she bluntly calls it madness) said, “I understand something in a poem that I haven’t been able to integrate into my life.” Even with my little knowledge of mental illness, I am sure that such integration is important to the person's mental well-being. Working with experiences, plumbing into memories, the writer is confronted by things she/he had refused to look at, things she/he had refused to accept, to face. It has been said that writers are the only sane people in the world because they are able to get rid of much of their emotional burdens in their writing. I am not sure if this is true (I am sure it is a writer who said this), but undoubtedly writing provides a kind of catharsis which helps the person to move on.
Recently, I came across something which is a striking example of this. A novel, at the heart of which was a conflict between a mother and daughter, showed the daughter as having behavioral problems, exhibiting a great hostility to the mother and nurturing fantasies which threatened the entire family. The novel was written from the mother's point of view and it was generally known that much of it came out of real life. Years later, after the novelist's death, her daughter admitted that she was the daughter of the novel. But she said her mother got her completely wrong. The novel had left her angry and disturbed; she felt she had been betrayed by her mother. How could she write about me, how could she write about me in such a way! She wrote a kind of angry response to this novel. Years later, she retrieved this manuscript and rewrote it as a piece of fiction. After the novel was published, there was a dramatic change in her. She was able to complete two novels she had abandoned, left incomplete. And she admitted that as a writer herself, she was now able to understand her mother's novel better. Converting her experiences into fiction helped her to distance herself from the girl and to unblock her, both as writer and woman.
However, a novel is never about oneself. There is a huge difference between writing fiction and writing diaries, memoirs or autobiographies. As Virginia Woolf says, “Writing must be formal. The art must be respected. If one lets the mind run, it becomes egotistic, personal.”
To write about yourself can become an act of self-indulgence. The novel requires intellectual rigor as well as emotional content. When you write about yourself, you can choose the things you want to reveal. Not so in a novel. There is a grain of stubborn truth at the heart of a novel you can never deviate from. You have to adhere to it - never mind if it makes you cruel. This discipline, as well as the discipline of crafting the novel, does not allow the novelist to be subjective. When writing, the writer has to distance herself/himself and become a spectator. From this point of view, she/he gets a different perspective and is able to see, objectively, the human predicament – she/he becomes like Sanjaya, whose vision gave Dhritirashtra a picture of the battlefield. This ability to stand away and see life at a distance is a rare privilege, but of course it only happens in the course of writing. In life, the writer soon slips back into her old human narrow tunnel-vision self.
Personally, I always see writing a novel as a voyage of discovery, of serendipitous discoveries, because you don’t start with the idea of discovering anything. However, certain things have to be known. If I am to tell a story about people, I need to know everything about them. Where they live, what they do, about their families, their friends, their pasts and so on. Most of all, I need to know their minds, their secret dreams and hopes, their fears and nightmares, their worst thoughts as well as their better ones. Because I have to understand the kind of people they are, to know why they do what they do. Ultimately, I know them better than I know my nearest and dearest. And so, as I write, I learn more and more about people, about human nature, I understand people the way I never did before. There is also the discovery you make, that in uncovering people's minds, you often come face to face with yourself. You see yourself as you had never done before. In telling other people's stories, you sometimes find your own self. I know that in the process of writing and discovering the voices of women, I found my own. In fact, at the end of a novel you are no longer the person you were when you began writing it. You have lived many lives; you have gone through the various experiences your characters have gone through, something which cannot leave you untouched.
These are intensely individual and personal transformations, but what is enormously significant to the self is the sense of power that writing gives. I think of it as drinking the magic potion Asterisk, the character from the comics, drinks before each adventure, each battle. Humankind has always recognized the power that comes through writing, which is why so many people – women, lower classes, castes considered inferior – were barred from writing. Anyone who writes can vouch for the sense of self-worth that it gives a person. And anyone who understands human nature will know what this does to an individual.
What about the reader then? I see the reader as a partner in this enterprise of telling a story. Without the reader, the story does not become real. The reader travels with the writer through the terrain of the novel and, it is a journey of discovery for the reader as well as the author. One of the most interesting statements I have heard being made about the novel is by an academic and critic Harold Bloom. He says, “… only reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self,” and adds, “Imaginative rather than argumentative literature is the most efficient way to achieve autonomy.”
He explains autonomy of the self as being that which liberates us from our previous ways of thinking about the lives and fortunes of individual human beings.
To put it in my own words, and according to my understanding of what he is saying: to read a novel is to go through a whole gamut of human experiences, it is to see the randomness of life, the unexpectedness of events, the multiplicities and complexities of human ways of thinking and acting, the finer nuances of human behavior.
This leads to our becoming more open, more sensitive to other people, to different ways of living, different ideas, different predicaments. It means we will no longer be able to recognize only one way of seeing things, one way of thinking, no longer consider that our way is the only one and the right one. In effect, as an Iranian writer has said, “The novel develops the democratic imagination because it offers various paths various destinies.”
Undoubtedly, to share so many human experiences expands the reader's experiential and emotional worlds, it increases the reader's understanding of and tolerance for all kinds of people. As with King Lear for example: an arrogant, vain, despotic man, full of bombast, he is driven by these qualities into an act of monumental folly. The consequences of this act drive him to anger, to bewilderment, to madness, to pathos and finally to a great tragedy. The reader travels all the way with him, the reader knows that he is entirely responsible for these consequences. Nevertheless, Shakespeare has so brilliantly captured his mind that we sympathize with him and at the end we see in him the tragedy of humanity itself. In fact, we sympathize more with this erring foolish man than with the faultless Cordelia because we can identify with him. People who make mistakes and agonize over them, people who suffer anguish over their tortured relationships – this we learn is human frailty and this is what we can identify with. (Shakespeare was unsurpassed, unequalled in his knowledge of the human mind).
Dostovesky is equally amazing in his “Crime and Punishment.” He takes us into the minds and hearts of the seemingly most unloveable people – a murderer, an alcoholic, and his loud, nagging shrew of a wife. But we learn to understand them, even to sympathize. And when, finally, they redeem themselves in different ways, we learn that redemption is never impossible for anyone. No wonder, Susan Sontag, an American writer, calls reading an education of the heart, which enlarges your sense of human possibilities.
We can never really see ourselves, we will never know, however much we long to, how we look to others. But a reader often has the sense of seeing herself in the novel. This is my story, a reader wrote to me, you have written my story. Sometimes it is a character one identifies with, sometimes it is a character's thoughts, actions – this is exactly the way I think, exactly the way I feel – the reader exclaims in surprise. And, since the novel gives you, with total honesty, the insides of people's minds, the reader sees a person's worst thought, secret fears. Poet Emily Dickinson says, “ourself behind ourself concealed should startle most.” Yes, we are startled by our own concealed selves, but there is also relief. I am not alone is thinking this way, I am not alone in what I am going through. There are others like me. I am not abnormal. There is something healing, strengthening and transforming in this process. Nothing dramatic as the blurbs of novels tell you, but a reader will, in the course of the years, have had some glimpse of people, and of life, which would not have been possible only through living.
“A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
These are Kafka's words which make a very powerful statement. I can think of no more appropriate way of describing what fiction can do to both the writer and the reader. I think that this, breaking the sea within people, is what those who set out to heal minds have to do.
[Based on a presentation made at “Roots and Arts,” the Annual Conference of the Indian Psychiatric Society, South Zone (IPSOCON 2010) at Bangalore in October 2010]
Footnotes
Source of Support: Nil
Conflict of Interest: None declared.