The Author in Literature Part 1

Deconstructing the Novel

One of the greatest ‘agents of change’, the foremost of avante garde writers of the early 20th century was James Joyce. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest literary minds ever born. Dubliners, one of his early works, is one of the most beautiful odes to a place. It is the story of a place, more than its people. It is something authors wanting to write about a place dream to achieve.

But it was James Joyce who, because of his talent and not despite of it, deconstructed the genre of the novel. Ulysses, his first such experimental work, tells the story in one day in the life of Stephen Dedalus. The story is allegorical. The plot is confusing and it takes many readings and much supplementary reading to make sense of it.

Soon the plot completely disappeared from the novel. Other writers started emulating Joyce as he was a literary giant of his age. With magical realism, all the sacred principles of good old storytelling were abandoned.

Magical realism was an understandable medium for the South Americans who built upon their experience of shamans and magical stories of the tribes. But the magical realism which seeped out to the rest of the world just destroyed the discipline.

Led by Joyce, a new technique called Stream of Consciousness was becoming very famous in the West. This style meant that the writer has to put on paper whatever came to his mind without editing, in the rawest form. He was not even allowed to organize his thoughts or even his language. For any ‘editing’ or ‘organizing’ will create a narrative which the authors dreaded like the plague.

Jacques Derrida along with Roland Barthes meanwhile was peddling that ‘writing has no meaning’, and ‘there is no inherent meaning in language’ and that ‘meaning is constructed by the reader as he goes along’.

This intellectualization of the art of storytelling resulted in the destruction of the very tools of writing, of creating literature. The degradation was quick. In Finnegans Wake, a later work of Joyce, we see that the language itself is destroyed.

Finnegans Wake is classed as a novel but it can be read forwards and backwards, from the beginning, from the middle, and starting from the last; which means that it is essentially meaningless nonsense. And I mean it literally.

Many of its pages don’t have paragraphs or proper sentences and sometimes not even words. Sometimes entire pages are filled with “..rattttttttttttttttshhhhhhhhhh…” and so. The author did not have to edit it, they said! It had to be raw they said!

The postmodernists and deconstructionists argued that not only the story, the plot, the narrative, but even language had to be deconstructed for staying true to reality, as even language is a human construct.

This is factually untrue. Language has deeper evolutionary and biological roots as proved by cognitive scientists and neurobiologists in the 21st century. But science is seldom the strong point of ideologues. As a result: not just the product, that is literature, but even the medium, that is language was also destroyed.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

In drama parallel strains were evolving. The Theatre of the Absurd had been deconstructing some of the fundamentals of the art of drama. Since they said that language is a human construct and it is impossible to convey your feelings to one another, the plays of this genre were filled with nonsequiturs where two actors would talk incoherently about inconsequential and unrelated things without making any sense.

The entire point of the play would be to convey the claimed irrationality of life, the illogic of language, and the meaninglessness of drama.

Bertolt Brecht

Some great artists like Samuel Beckett managed to wring one or two good pieces like Waiting for the Godot, but the genre in general was thoroughly deconstructed from within with the destruction of dialogue, action and plot.

Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Jean Genet were some of the hacks in this new industry of Theatre of the Absurd.

Bertolt Brecht the Marxist dramatist and ideologue from Germany deconstructed drama from the other end. The Fourth Wall is a convention in the drama. In any theatre, the stage has generally three walls behind and on the two sides of the artist.

The front is obviously open for the audience to see what is happening on the stage. However, the artists behave as if the audience is not present and as if there is an invisible fourth wall. They don’t notice the audience and this is called ‘maintaining the fourth wall’.

Brecht argued that the drama is unreal and the audience shouldn’t be misled to believe that it is real and hence the fundamental stage ethic of the artist – to maintain the fourth wall – has to be broken deliberately many times throughout the drama.

He said that it was necessary to make the audience realize that the drama was not real. In his plays, the actors would deliberately converse with the audience in between and remark upon what was happening in the audience. It was one step further in the deconstruction of the traditional play.

The poetry saw the same degeneration. The paucity of space here does not give full freedom to remark upon this genre here, but suffice to say that what started as individual innovation in late medieval times when Shakespeare started using blank verse profusely got degenerated in modern times into free verse. In blank verse, rhyming was abandoned in favor of rhythm, but by modern times even rhythm was abandoned.

Any notion that poetry is meant to be recited was also abandoned and just about anything started to be passed off as poetry. Any tinkering would qualify as artistic innovation. All of this started off with the belief that the individual can create art without any divine inspiration; that authors can create new stories.

The humility that goes with this traditional worldview that the artist is just a conduit for expressing the glimpses of the Ultimate Truth; and that higher truths just flow through him with divine grace was the first casualty upon the introduction of the author.

At first, it resulted in an explosion of creativity. But soon the usual avenues were exhausted and the personality of the author with all its eccentricities and idiosyncrasies started imposing too much upon his art.

The author was becoming too imposing upon literature. As a result, the postmodernist era saw revolts ‘against the author’, but ironically they made the idiosyncratic imprint of the author even more significant upon his.

Most of the modern literature has no plot, no story, no hero, no concept of good and bad, no chronology, and no coherent dialogue. They are at best, confused, and confusing parallel narratives delivered in the inebriated state of the narrator, not necessarily making sense in either time or place. The reader truly can make of them whatever he wants to.

The Wisdom of India

In India under the aegis of Sanatana Dharma, the agency of the author as a vessel and as a conduit was always recognized and thus we always hear the names of the dramatists, poets and authors but not much attention is given to their personalities. Their stories and their message are considered more important than their personality.

It was also commonly agreed upon that a piece of great art is created only with divine inspiration and not through the individual innovation of the author or the poet. This is evident in almost all epics and poems where the agency and authority of Shri Ganesha or some other deity is always invoked.

The story is also said to be only ‘heard’ by the poet from some divine sage or a primary deity. No claim of originality is made. The idea of ‘genius’ in the modern sense was missing in ancient India. What was valued was the effort to approximate most to the ideals of the Sanatana civilization. Coomaraswamy once again explains:

“For what is a masterpiece? Not as commonly supposed an individual flight of the imagination, beyond the common reach in its own time and place and rather for posterity than for ourselves; but by definition, a piece of work done by an apprentice at the close of his apprenticeship and by which he proves his right to be admitted into the full membership of a guild, or as we should now say trade union, as a master workman. The masterpiece is simply the proof of competence expected and demanded from every graduate artist…” (Coomaraswamy 98-99)

The sanctity of the language is also maintained. The Sanatana tradition has always maintained that reality is far beyond the powers of the description of any language, even Sanskrit. Even Sanskrit is said to be only the Vaikhari form of language, which has three other, deeper planes of existence.

The first arises from the primal source, from the Universal Consciousness and in this form it is inexpressible. This stage is called Para. It is then visualized as an image or a picture which is the stage of Pashyanti. It then goes to another stage called Madhyama where it is verbalized but unspoken. When it is uttered in human language it is called Vaikhari and even in this last stage it is changed and is not expressed as is thought in Madhyama.

Having maintained this, the Rishis of India recognized that even in Vaikhari it was necessary to convey the divine message in whatever form possible. And thus the Vaikhari form of language was completely mastered. Sanskrit was refined as much as a human language can be refined and the spiritual and eternal message is more easily conveyed in Sanskrit than in other languages.

The point is that that the tools of expression, that is language, were never deconstructed in India. Along with recognizing that the Ultimate Truth is inexpressible in human language, ways of reaching that Truth was indicated as much as possible in human language.

In the West, starting with Christianity, it was claimed that Ultimate Truth is expressible in human language and was expressed once and for all in the Bible. When the Bible was proved false the West went in the opposite direction. Now they started claiming that no fact can be expressed in any language, however banal or mundane the fact is.

Ever going to one extreme of the pendulum Sanatana Dharma never went to another in reaction. But the West sadly did. This in a way was a result of the Christian insistence that the Ultimate Truth can be expressed completely in human words. By doing that they took divine inspiration out of any artist’s work.

Once that had happened, revolts started coming and in the post-Renaissance world, the author started overpowering literature and gradually degenerated to the current state. At the core of this are the introduction of the author, the introduction of the individual agency, and the claim that something new can be created by sheer intellectual innovation.

REFERENCES

1. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Blooomsbury Academic, 2018.

2. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art. Munshiram Manoharlal, 2008.

3. Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Penguin UK, 2003.

4. Gupt, Bharat. Dramatic Concepts Greek and Indian: Study in Poetics and the Natyasastra. D K Printworld, 1995.

5. Naipaul, V. S. Reading, and Writing: A Personal Account. New York Review Books, 2000.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. Published by IndicaToday.