What Ails Today’s Literature?-(Bhaskar Jyoti Nath)

Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician, novelist and marvel of our time started writing novel when he was 50. He said that he did not write merely out of any expectation of the reading public to write a novel. He began to write because he ‘wanted to write a novel’. His closest friend, Roland Barthes passed away with the remorse of not becoming a novelist, though he had some epoch-making and hair-splitting essays to his credit. Prior to that, Eco accumulated the knowledge that one can draw as much as possible from different sources in his life time. He kept his novels ‘pending for as long as seven or eight years’ and that was his pleasure of creating, recreating, living and breathing with his plot and characters. That’s why he says, “Novelist does not write a novel, a novel writes itself”. When his suggestion was sought for new young writers, he, in his idiosyncratic humour and candour, said that one should not think of himself ‘seriously as artist’. Youth’s trying to write a novel in a year or writing for temporary fame ‘irritated’ him. As he had said in an interview, “before becoming a general, become a corporal, sergeant then lieutenant. Go step by step”. Eco’s words are relevant to the writers of all ages and countries, more especially to regional literatures of India. In our spree of becoming a writer overnight with our limited knowledge and studies, many of us write a fiction or poetry collection every year and gleefully choose to overlook the rich traditions of different nationalities, viz. African, Italian, Latin Amrican, English etc. It results in dry and dull narrative, often verbose without the fun of perusing an open work or writerly text. We, the new generation of writers need to keep this thing in our mind! Given the fascination to hog the limelight and craze of youths for cheap and popular stuff, potboilers or chic literatures are mushrooming. Electronic media too have blown it out of proportion for their gluttonous TRP craze. On a serious note, athough India is the cradle of oriental civilisation, our country lags far behind European countries like Italy or France in producing great modern writers, barring a handful. One would cite that the best single reason for Italy was that it was the birthplace of the Renaissance. But that does not suffice. We have been colonized, ravaged and plundered by different invaders. But how many postcolonial writings have flowed from our pen like Achebe, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o? It seems as if elite Indians were happy with the colonization. Barring Indian diaspora writers and a few good names in Indian Writing in English, the list is not very long. Classics of regional writing are also not adequately represented in translation for global outreach. Regional literatures too are the fruition of literary luminaries’ exposure to the literature of the West. Polymath like Eco was heavily influenced by predecessors like James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges. T S Eliot was arguably the best writer to have realised the importance of the past. He is right in saying that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artist. He can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period”. As a discerning reader, before buying a book, I often ponder on finding out reason to buy the book. Should I buy it because it’s a book written in regional language by an author of my state or because of its quality? These are the questions that strike my mind while buying a book. Equally, every writer should ponder in similar reflection before sending his/her manuscript to press -“why a reader would buy his/her book”.Last year as a discerning and critical reader I went through a good number of books of young and old alike in Guwahati book fair. Barring a handful, writers seemed to be writing oblivious of serious literary merit! Not to talk of the poetry collection of young newbie poets with glitzy covers and names portraying abstruse and wild metaphors (Assam alone accounts for more than thirty thousand poets as per the estimate of many critics and writers). Adding to the menace is mushrooming of self publishing imprints and lack of peer review. Agreed, in a market driven economy books too have been relegated to a product. As there is a strict demarcating line between mainstream literary writing and commercial rom-com, potboiler or chic literature. Media too blurred the distinction between the two while its role is to heighten and shape the literary sensibility. This has been a new ominous trend which was never before seen in media. The Spectator and The Tatler under the abled hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele taught the 18th century England “which book it should love and how it should love, how to treat its wives, mistress and sisters“. It is undeniably true that we write and speak more but read very less. Our experiences are limited. our writerly braggadocio gets easily exacerbated by parochial study and claps of sycophants! However, it is true that the pace of globalisation and corporatisation of immaterial world have shrunken and threatened the realms of reading and writing. Consumerist culture coupled with the rising materialism and the use of Internet have been a stumbling block in imbibing love for books among the teenagers. Digital books, audio books, kindle etc. have emerged keeping pace with the changing time. Still, I am incorrigibly optimistic that printed books won’t go away so soon! Parallelly with the decline of literary merit of books, the taste of the reading ‘public’ too is deteriorating. In proportion to the publishing of books, literary merit is somewhere compromised! Good writers create and construct their readers rather than writing to the taste of the readers en masse.There is another herculean challenge to regional literatures. As pointed out by acclaimed intellectual and critic Dr Hiren Gohain that the gargantuan threat to regional literatures like Assamese is that a vast chunk of majority reads only English and no Assamese. Similarly, a large number reads only Assamese and no English at all. Both these groups of readers are inimical to the growth and prosperity of regional literatures like Assamese etc. This applies to many other regional literatures as well.Crusading voice of the dissent in our political literature is too on the wane imitating the dying voices in British political literature. In 2007, Terry Eagleton wrote in a disparaging manner taking a dig at Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard and Salman Rushdie etc. that the razor sharp edge of their political satire has gone down. Literary works are also cultural products that are embedded in the circumstances and discourses of a time and place. It’s ultimate goal is not to entertain people and to divert the minds of people from the sordid realities. Social commitment of a writer is also crucial. In absence of staunch non conformist voice of dissension against tyranny of state etc., political literature and art in general too have been compromised. Wit-laden satirical writings are the dire need of the present time.Equally astounding is our brouhaha over the literary trends of the West, especially the act of blindly adhering to the intimidating and dismaying theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism. However, a proper understanding and a balanced perspective is appreciable. From romanticism and modernism to recent obsession with Derridian deconstruction and postmodernism, misunderstanding rules the roost often leading to chaos and haphazard imitation. While heralding modernism and espousing the tenets for new criticism, Eliot et al. relied on their “tradition”, many of our luminaries fraught with the idea of inheriting from their tradition, rather than from the tradition of the orient. Grasping the literary crosscurrents of ‘isms’ in proper perspective is crucial to take a balanced stand and to align our “position”. Misunderstanding and utilization of endless theories in literature will take us nowhere given the oriental intellectual climate and glorious heritage.