James Wood remarks in one of his articles that 'the unpractised novelist cleaves to the static'. I loved the verbal and rhythmic interplay of this sentence for the longest time before coming to terms (in the past few months) with its actual meaning. What is the novelist's first responsibility?, asks Wood in the article. Is it in the enumeration of the particulars of a scene, say, or in the features of a character, or maybe even in the chronicling of a day's events? Wood's example of stasis in prose is exemplary in itself -- ""My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood."". Of course Wood himself has the proper writerly affliction of being unable to produce as an example a truly bad piece of writing (note the 'for some reason', which props up the first sentence and prevents it from being read through too quickly; the clever insertion of the `that' between 'head' and 'grey' instead of a more staid 'a', for example, and the character-related description that follows), but even so it succeeds in illustrating Wood's point, namely, that no one here is moving. Wood goes on to make other points about 'animating a static character', including the delightful remark -- "A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness". Wood's article is insightful, piercing, and never insincere, and of course I recommend that everyone read it; the following few paragraphs meanwhile represent my own feelings on the subject.
The past few months have seen my own sporadic attempts at animating my own characters, a task that has proven harder as I realize that most `conventional' ways of setting about to do such a thing are gently subversive of `the truth'. The most fundamental thing about a character (in real life or fiction) is that he possesses a purpose (or perhaps many such). This purpose lends a propulsive aspect to the fictive environment (fortunately absent in an everyday setting), because we, the readers, know of the character's motivation(s) and in some sense feel the same as he does. Why did he sleep with his neighbor's wife? Why, his wife seemed aloof these past many years; not only did she seem more interested in her job, she also refused to satisfy him in the many ways that a marriage promises. The trick of (some varieties of) prose is to transform this rather quotidian situation into something that is more `beautiful', by taking advantage of the facilities of the written word. Wood's article has a few examples of such a transformation, including one that I loved for its sheer economy -- "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."; note the `always', an easy generalization that holds up an otherwise ordinary sentence and lends an almost comforting quality to it.The first question, though, that comes to my mind when I read sentences like this is the inevitable "Did he?" Can I, the writer make such a rash claim of one my characters, a claim that results in the sort of stereotyping that a reader can comfortably (and unconsciously) engage in in the pages to come, a stereotyping that would itself require the writer to sacrifice other, possibly more microscopic aspects of the said gentleman's character? Whether or not the character `always' walked through doors is not so much the question as whether you, the reader (or worse) the writer perceive him as such. There's something disturbing about art coarsening itself so as to accommodate the social lens through which it will no doubt eventually be seen.
There is, fortunately, a better way to illuminate a character: by allowing him to feel. Feeling occupies a primary position in the lives of the author's characters (and, by reflex, the author himself, although that's a subject for another post). If I, the writer feel an ineffable accountability to `the truth' -- ostensibly the motivation for a great deal of literature -- then feeling is an ideal place to begin. One can never go wrong with feeling: it is at least universal (although this is a dangerous term to use); and it is through feeling that we're convinced that our characters are finally human. Wood himself is a huge proponent of feeling as a source of literary inspiration, a sensibility perhaps no better illustrated than in
this article, where he bemoans the recent glut of `social' novels from previously acclaimed writers, and exhorts new writers to abandon the social for the individual and his feelings. Wood drives home his point by quoting from recent Rushdie (who in one of his novels introduces a character that plays air guitar in his crib), Pynchon (whose prose is apparently littered with references to giant octagonal pieces of cheese), Zadie Smith (who in her first novel has a terrorist group named KEVIN), etc. These writers seem to care not about any single perception of humanity or feeling, preferring instead to distract their readers with gaudy but pithless examples of apparent creativity; Wood grieves that this is not a healthy literary trend (though I would argue that Rushdie and and deLillo and early Zadie Smith are not literary at all), and that writers must take a leaf from the books (literally) of eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists by framing characters in the shadow of their own feeling.
This is all quite reasonable, and ties in well with the at-first-blush view of literature that it can be about anyone human. If the writer understands a human being well enough, then he can certainly write a novel about him. But what does this really mean? How can a writer write `about' a person? Before the consolidation of each character (however major/minor), you (the writer) might ask the following questions (arranged roughly by importance):
0) What do you mean?
1) What aspect of the character's character (so to speak) are you calling attention to? Why is he in the novel? Should he be in the novel?
2) Is he writing or are you writing for him?
2a i) If the character is writing, is he aware that he is writing or are you presenting his thoughts in first person?
2a ii) If he is aware that he is writing, is he conscious? If he is conscious is he also unreliable?
2a iii) What aspect of him is unreliable? What does that tell you about him? Does that tell you anything about him, or are you just being a stuntman? ( :-) )
2a iv) If he is conscious is he also vainly/awkwardly conscious? Or can he write about himself (I think this is the most important question if you choose to write in first person)?
2a v) What tense does he adopt?
2b i) If you're writing for him, are you also writing for others?
b ii) If you're writing only for him, then do you use your own style of writing or weave in and out of his style, his words, his inflection, his slang? (So called free indirect style, which when employed correctly can be beautiful.)
b iii) If you're writing for others as well, then how do you present everyone's thoughts/feelings and still maintain a coherent narrative?
b iv) What tense will you adopt?
3) Is the character's past being presented (the answer to this question is usually yes, unless of course one wants to preserve a certain sense of 'mystery' about the entire thing)? If the character is writing for himself, then how will he write about his past? (This question is also related to 2a iv. The problem is that the unconscious narrator usually does not write about his past in an overt manner, unless he is talking about it; the conscious narrator on the other hand can possibly do anything.)
4) If yes to 3, then how is it being presented?
5) What happened fifteen years ago, and how is it relevant to 1? Is it relevant at all? Should you begin at the present instead, without a preamble, so to speak?
To me, these questions, and a few others that emerge during a character's construction are `generic' ones; at first glance, they don't appear to relate to what is happening, or what has happened. They ask the `how' questions, but not the `what', and as such can be applied to each character without referring to the situations that the characters find themselves in. The problems begin when these generics interact with the specifics in ways that smudge the narrative and threaten its demise. For example, if I decide at the outset that one of my characters is unreliable, then it would seem that I have a choice of presenting what happened (which is clear in my head) and what he perceived happened (which I don't know a whole lot about because I don't know him that well yet). This is exactly the sort of vagueness that has retarded my writing these past many months, because far from enabling my characters, the above questions cripple them, resulting in self-conscious prose that does not bear subsequent examination. Of course, the reverse situation -- where I write in deliberate ignorance of these questions -- is impossible; such questions once asked cannot be unasked. Besides, the common counter to such an approach to writing -- namely, that it's too `intellectual' -- is not only wrong, it's also lazy. It's better not to write than it is not to know what you're writing about.
Returning to feeling in novels: perpetually at odds with the writerly yearning to present humans and their feeling is the authorial ambition to be of one's time. How can an author be a chronicler, a sort of contemporary historian, enabling the reader to see the author's (implicitly superior) perspective on the many common events that bind them? This is what Wood really means when he refers to the social novel: the novelist's cognizance of the social present and his ability to present it in a manner that is both aesthetically pleasing as well as socially enlightening. This `genre' of course seems to form the majority of modern `literature', to the extent that even subversion in the literary novel nowadays has the stamp of social approval (I can think of no better example than any recent Rushdie novel; also see for example Aravind Adiga). I don't know if such a trend is inherently `bad' (any such moral judgment is flawed because morals are finally social, and any form of social approval cannot be morally wrong); indeed, I can think of no argument against it save the rather empty one that it must be bad because I don't like it. I do feel, though, that given what we as a society seem to be going through nowadays, seeking social approval through the medium of a novel is essentially misguided.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the past few weeks, I've met and gotten to know many people; so many, in fact, that I can almost see myself as I was seven or so years ago (which was the last time, I think, I participated unconsciously in the social), being the crowd-pleasing attention-grabbing garrulous fiend that I no doubt was. I used to feel then that I could only become more popular if I told the truth about myself to everybody; my disheveled appearance (I used to wear, for example, a pair of `bermudas' that were faded and torn in a few places. I would also insist on not combing my hair) and ability to joke about myself seemed like indices of such an apparently `honest' outlook. What I understood later, of course, was that the only reason I was popular was because I was the clown, because I could always be depended upon to be the clown. I remember once being called a string of offensive names by Sudhanshu (this chain-smoking binge-drinking English teacher who used to hang out with us seventeen-year olds; he was himself not over 24); names that were directed at me simply because he expected me to do no more than grin and bear it. To him, and many other people, I represented the social equivalent of a mattress, one that can be relied upon to provide comfort but one that will stay beneath you no matter what.
Things improved to an extent in college. I stayed mostly away from people, preferring instead to meditate upon how I would salvage a mostly meaningless existence. Engineering to me was a hobby, the sort of thing that occasionally excited my fancy but was for the most part quite unremarkable; several alternative career choices looked equally wonderful, if only I had the energy to pursue them. I tried to liken the
Friends jokes I knew so well to my life in college, hoping they'd somehow acquire a renewed meaning. I played basketball with people I didn't know and then wrote a play about it. It was also during this period I became conscious of an enveloping disappointment with humanity -- people seemed unreliable indicators of their `true' selves, a fact that indisputably indexed their flaws. Of course I myself had the somewhat arrogant air of the cynical teenager, nursing certainties about entire groups of people, theorizing, cataloging. A person to me existed to be rendered prosaic through ceaseless annotation.
In 2004, amidst this miasma of social suspicion and moral rejection, I began to write my first novel (called
Twenty-Six Roses, it tells the story of a fifteen-year-old in the throes of his first love). I knew then that I needed to defy everything. My central character (Vinod) was the rebel I had always yearned to be; a person who tamed monkeys and spoke in double entendres and delivered manipulative speeches on breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease. The novel itself was written in deliberate opposition to convention, alternating for no apparent reason between third and first person. Narrative scenes would break off abruptly to pursue other, completely unrelated threads. A suicidal character named Vaidehi made a late entrance in the story only to decide against suicide at the very end. There was an odd interlude which interspersed a game of basketball with one of chess. People called each other colorful but ultimately literal names. All this, of course, in the self-conscious desire to stand out: if it hadn't been done before, I would do it. I felt a heady appreciation for my writerly abilities; surely there was nothing I could not write about. I went about delighting in myself, delivering literary monologues to the unsuspecting in deliberate sotto voce, writing emails that conveyed to the recipient a subdued weariness, displeasedly surveying thriller-novelistic paragraphs. It was not enough that I had won: others had to lose.
I finished writing
Twenty-Six-Roses in March 2006, but my excitement at its conclusion was short-lived. Of the ten people I emailed it to, only four finished reading it; of these one even said that he would be "[...] very surprised if such a book was published. I'd love to be proved wrong, of course, but [...]". I was also disappointed to see that I could not in fact take criticism very well; tiny `suggestions' for improvement inflated themselves in my mind until they became signs of my own creative degeneracy. I interpreted readers' silence on aspects of my novel as final proof that these aspects were flawed. I remember reading Stephen King's Dark Tower around this time and thinking his forays into authorial self-deprecation in the final novels of the series quite appropriate (for reasons I don't understand, my undergraduate years were filled with a nearly comprehensive exploration of King's oeuvre; surely, I think now, he could not have been that good). The well-wishing would attempt to bring me out of my huffs, but they were the worst of all, with their unspecific praise, their watered-down critiques. In any case, there were so many things outside me that were changing that I didn't have too much time to think of how I'd repair the novel. In August 2006 I left Bangalore to begin a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering (at the University of Texas at Austin; the best thing about the degree is the number of capital letters in it :) ), leaving behind me everything I cared about. At the time I didn't really understand what I was doing. Someone had asked me to "follow my passions", but I suspected then that I didn't have any passions to speak of. A job had been out of the question, as had been the suggestion that I embrace my authorial leanings to produce a publishable piece of work (implicit to that statement was the assumption that
Roses was unpublishable, and of course I must have bristled at such an easy dismissal). I ended up as many others, in a strange place and in pursuit of a graduate engineering degree.
My first month in Austin was full of chance meetings with kindly strangers (Austin is full of them, buskers, hawkers, hippies, fashion-stylists, anti-water-pollution lobbyists, lesbians, goth `chicks', sex-toy-store employees, non-Thai Thai-restaurant waitresses, divorce lawyers, rock-aficionados, vegans). These strangers -- I was amazed to see -- would tell me everything about themselves, from what denomination of Christianity they belonged to how much they hated their boyfriends' lounging about in underwear in their apartments. My first week I was driven by a bespectacled man in his early 40s to a Christian get-together where we sang hymns (someone gave me a lyrics-sheet and I remember trying to string the syllables together before they all began singing in a startlingly beautiful harmony) and people clapped as I announced I was from India while their husbands and wives scooped hunks of chicken from large identical misshapen tubs. The weeks before my first semester were full of such strange meetings. There was Linda, who (at 50) was studying to be a pastor; in her dimly lit studio there were figurines of Jesus Christ next to posters of The Counting Crows. There was Dr. Friedman, a professor of French who seemed to me as American as everyone else. I remember Genevieve, whose parents (she told me this apropos nothing, but rather excitedly; maybe she meant something else) had also met at UT. These, and the several others I met -- most of whose names I never knew -- I did not see again.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bringing us, then, to the present, and the glut of social interaction that I've recently seen. There's something to me that's intensely comforting about moving about in large groups. There is a smaller stress on the interrogative as a means to bridge the gap between individuals. Social questions can be posed in social ways: I can say "So, how's everything?" without fear that the unspecific nature of the question will lead to an awkward pause. Silences are never long, and frequently broken by interjections of laughter. Someone or the other has something interesting to say, here I may remark that I find a certain girl everyone knows of quite hot, everyone agrees but this other guy says that he thinks someone else is hotter, a third guy trips on a stone and a we all say `How clumsy' and laugh until another group passes us under a streetlight opposite and someone says hush, it's 3am. Everyone is great, everyone is mediocre, everyone sucks, we lose ourselves in the collateral of the generic. Social interactions like this seem to me like the very recipe for happiness: however low I may sink, I know my friends can always cheer me.
Except that happiness itself seems to be a rather odd emotion to grapple with. Is it an emotion at all? I find it hard to understand sometimes exactly why it is that I feel happy. Happiness suggests an participatory emotion, a verb, almost, with immediate consequences on my well-being. "I am happy", meaning that I am responsible for my own happiness, that I am its architect... but then what does it mean? Is there a difference between social happiness -- that seems to be founded on a pervasive numbness and the specious certainties of the universal -- and individual happiness, which cannot be separated from feeling, from the grotesque and the specific? When strangers speak to me they seem to be at their most individual when there is no one else around us, when they --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I began this article in disgust several weeks ago. I wanted to argue that the novel is -- and has always been -- in the realm of the individual, is in fact the least imperfect of the many imperfect representations of a human being. I wanted to argue that the pigeonholes that we're placed in as a natural result of being in any social context -- "He is quiet", "She's shy", "He's brilliant", "I don't like him" -- can only be defied by a proper positioning of the individual aspects of our being in relationship with society, a positioning such as (only can be) afforded by the novel. I wanted to argue that there are several sides to each of us, and it is only through a sincerely-written non-literal framing of these several sides that we can come closer to achieving 'true' meaning. I wanted to argue that social endeavors do not -- indeed, cannot -- provide us with a true respect for our feelings, for even as they encourage putatively "positive" feelings (you see my disdain shining through the apostrophes by now, I'm sure!) -- feelings like "happiness" (which I began unsuccessfully to argue against before confusedly breaking off) -- they adroitly undermine those feelings that are no doubt part of our individuality, feelings that can be described not by a single adjective or several but require an entire novel; not only the novel itself but the fears that accompany its writing, the dismay that will accompany its (probable) social failure.
There were several reasons for my disgust. I had written three fairly long emails to three very good friends, emails in which I tried to tell them how I felt about something that connected us, something that was deeply personal. The only response to these emails was a one-word reply from one of them, an unutterable but also innocuous adjective that seemed more than anything else to signify the recipient's cynicism at what I had written. The week-long silence that followed only increased the inscrutability of the email, and accompanied as it was with no further explanation I was forced to choose between one of three alternatives: a) the recipient thought that the email was indeed "too smart", and could not suppress his disdain, or, b) he didn't want to reply because he felt nothing, or c) It was as affecting to him as it was to me but he could not change what he felt into words. Each of these alternatives troubled me equally.
I wanted to rant for several other reasons as well, reasons to do with the social interactions I spoke of earlier. But as I write this I realize I have nothing to say. So what if some writers regarded as "brilliant" are really bad? So what if Mr Adiga might win the Booker Prize next week? So what if I don't like some aspects of being in large groups? I am no stranger to any of these emotions; in fact, a version of me that bears no resemblance to my present self could have perhaps written most of this article several years ago. I can call attention to patterns I see today, but tomorrow those patterns may well be replaced by new ones that require an opposite interpretation, an interpretation that I will be able to provide because I can, because I need to. It will be then that these words will seem as literal to me as they must to a casual unaffected reader, then that I will mentally disown having ever held the opinions I write of here. Meanwhile I can only nod at the several statements I have made here, and feel a dangerous sense of harmony with the ideas they represent. I see what I want to see.
