Exquisite intermingling of the novelistic and the poetic

by Liyanage Amarakeerthi

A debut novel rarely achieves the same excellence as Baththalangunduwa by Manjula Wediwardena. In any language, such first-novels are rare. Still there are many writers who have mesmerised readers with their first novels. This is certainly one among them. In writing this novel, the author does not hide the fact that he arrives at the art of novel, bringing with him the technical devices of poetry and short play, two genres he had excelled in earlier. He uses those elements to create a style that makes his novel a sensation in the contemporary Sinhala novel. The book has been translated into English. This essay, though based on Baththalangunduwa, is about the significance of style in a novel.

One of the challenges that new writers face is to create a ‘new language’ for the Sinhala novel. Not to argue that a single style fits all, but style is one area in which a writer can establish the novelty of his work. Our writers seldom experiment with language to create a style that is both simple and attractive at the same time. When it comes to experimentation with narrative techniques, even young writers do not show the youthfulness found in the work of senior writers such as Ajith Thilakasena, Siri Gunasinghe, Simon Nawagatthegama or Tennyson Perera, to name a few. Naturalist realism becomes rather stale, if it is not presented in an innovative style or using other experimental narrative devices. The realist mode is, however, extremely malleable, and an inventive writer can still make it look surprisingly fresh if he or she is imaginative enough with regard to the technical devices of fiction writing. Stories can be crafted in numerous ways. Possibilities of fiction can never be exhausted. Every once in a while, a writer or two appears to remind us about those possibilities. In recent times, Manjula Wediwardena was one such writer. Of late, there are others but we are yet to see if they would continue to develop literary careers.

Tissa Abeysekera, one of our greatest writers, points out this problem of style and language in his excellent collection of essays, Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences. In it, Abeysekera argues that even though Martin Wickramasinghe was able to produce a language for the realist novel in Sinhala no writer was able to surpass him. Abeysekera goes on to argue that Viragaya (The Way of the Lotus) is the pinnacle of the Sinhala novel. It can be said that this is an accurate observation. One can agree that Viragaya is an immortal novel. Yet, the weakness of Abesekara’s argument is that it does not mention any writer who has apparently attempted to surpass Wickramasinghe. The novels of Simon Nawagattegama, for example, are excellent examples of creating a fresh style of language for each novel. The characters or the environment of Dadayakkarayage Kathawa (The story of the Hunter), or Ksheera Sagaraya Kelambina (The Milky Ocean is Churned) cannot be properly portrayed in the language of Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya (Uprooted). Furthermore, those novels have levels of reality whose existence is predicated upon the existence of a unique language, and Nawagattegama creates that language. Let’s look at a paragraph of The story of the Hunter, even though it is hard to make my point in a translated segment:

“Those who belonged to the lineage of the hunter had no satisfaction by merely being hunters. To be a shooter, one only has to train himself in shooting a target. It is not such a big deal to brag about either. Is it? Even though one can aim at an animal and shoot it down, even though one can shoot every day all the animals one sees and carry them to the village, it only shows that one has already committed so much sin and one still has Karmic disposition to acquire sins that can bring Karmic fruits for five hundred lives to come. Does it not?”

The language of this novel is formed in such a way that it focalizes the story through the life and point of view of the hunter. This style takes the reader into the hunter’s consciousness and sustains the reader within the level of reality, where the hunter dwells.

Misconception

There is a misconception that there exists language or style suitable for all novels. It is an opinion constantly repeated by popular literary journalists. Poetic talents can be extremely useful for a novelist. More often than not, it gives immense pleasure to read novels written by poets. All novels by Michael Ondaatje are like long poems. Yet, each of his novels has its own language. If anyone expects a single language or style from all his novels, he simply does not know the meaning of novelized language. A British critic once claimed to have found Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost a bit too poetic, and might have reasons for that argument.

Possession by A.S. Byatt is very much a poetic novel, and there is a narrative reason for it: It is a story of love between a poet and a poetess. One might not be able to write a novel of that kind without a great deal of poetic skill within oneself. Byatt writes in a beautifully poetic language. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald is also a captivating novel about the life of the German poet Novalis. In it, the author’s controlled-use of poetry within the novel contributes considerably to the book’s immense attraction. That Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is poetic should not surprise anyone, for it is an epic of the life of a poet. But there poetry does not intermingle with prose. It is true that there are so much poetic description nearly everywhere in the book. But what is obviously poetic is included as a collection of Zhivago’s poems, at the end of the book. So negligible was the connection of poems to the structure of the novel, that the poems were later published as a separate book. Separation of that kind is not possible in Possession, where after every few pages poetic sections appear, helping to advance the plot. The immense appeal of Rainer Maria Rilke’s stunning novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, is predicated upon the author’s undisputed skills in poetry. In some ways, it is a Campu written in German translated into English!

Prose or Campu

Vilasiniyakage Premaya (The Love of a Courtesan) by Ediriweera Sarachchandra is a Campu poem, as the author prefers to name it. In a Campu, verses are a part of the structure because it is a genre that uses a mixture of prose and verse. In it, verses are used to express the inner feelings of characters, to express interior monologues or to send some coded message. Another novel that deals with poets, poetry and poetic talents is Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere. It is clear from Baththalangunduwa itself, that Wediwardena has been heavily influenced by Kundera’s novel. Intertextual significations the Sinhala novel develops by constantly referring to Life is Elsewhere, and in reading it, an experienced reader is regularly reminded of many other novels in which the novelist and the poetry merge in an exquisite union. In the manner the author uses language in the novel, it is very much comparable with numerous other novels mentioned above.

A good novel, among other things, creates a style that refreshes the language of contemporary fiction. Baththalangunduwa does refresh the language of the Sinhala novel or novelistic Sinhala. Though there have been many recent newcomers to the genre, the promise made by those novels to renew novelistic Sinhala has not always been kept. Hundreds of novels are routinely published, written in a style which fails to attract and surprise us with its beauty and artistic fineness. Only a few novelists, Sunethra Rajakarunanayake for example, delivered on the promise, by writing several innovative novels. Perhaps, it has a lot to do with the fact that a style alone cannot give a novel lasting substance.

Insights into human life

Why have we failed to sustain the genre of novel as a text that generates unique insights into human life and society? Some Sinhala writers use attractive styles, but their thinking is a bit too plain to make them great novelists. Conservatism of thought has been plaguing the Sinhala novel in recent years. Cultural nationalism, as the most dominant ideology in the country, gets in the way of achieving literary greatness. In fact, the same nationalism, which is extremely conservative about the language, is one of the greatest obstacles for inventive writers. More often than not, writers who break away from conservative grammatical traditions, have to face considerable hostility from conservative thinkers. Wediwardena seems to be aware of these challenges. This book has a new style and a new content, and they supplement each other beautifully. Moreover, the book’s thematic content cannot be separated from its style.

This novel is quite minimal in its content. In time and space too, the novel’s scope is limited. For that very reason, its style is the central feature that breathes life into the text. Usually, a novel, which focuses on a relatively small life-world situated within a small space and short time period, places greater emphasis on its style. Such a novel aims to achieve its completeness through an innovative and captivating style. Baththalangunduwa is such a novel. There are such novels in world literature as well. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August, for example, have achieved excellence primarily through their styles. Novels like, Karamazov Brothers, War and Peace, or Anna Karenina are so grand in their theme and scope that they achieve greatness even without any particular inventiveness in style. That is not to say that Tolstoy was not a great stylist. He certainly was, and there are memorable sentences and paragraphs everywhere in his novels.

Wediwardena’s novel tells a story set in an Island of the North-Western coast of Sri Lanka, and the novel becomes unique simply because of the sub-culture of the fishing community of the island. But he still faces the challenge of inventing a style suitable to create the world of that community in his text. He does invent that style wonderfully.

The challenge he had to face was a complex one. The community he is writing about is different from Sinhala Buddhists, which make up the largest chunk of the cultural world of Sri Lanka, and the community in this small island is different from the mainstream Christian community living on the main island. This small island is an island in the cultural sense as well. It is a tiny island that belongs to a larger island. The writer, writing in Sinhala, has to portray this small fishing community in a manner accessible to the readers living in the main island, who have little or no knowledge of this sub-cultural group.

In addition, there is another challenge, perhaps much more demanding: Sinhala language is mainly a product of Buddhist culture and many Sinhala words have Buddhist connotations. The majority of novel readers in Sinhala are also Buddhist. They know very little about Christian communities and much less about fishing communities in these small islands. In this sense, writing about Baththalangunduwa, the island, is as difficult as writing about a foreign land.

Son searching for father, father in search of son

The other side of Wediwardena’s challenge is even more complex: When the narrator-son goes to this remote island to look for his father, he is a young man exposed to the postmodernist conditions in Colombo. He takes with him a Sinhala translation of Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere. It is through this character that the fishing island and its people are presented to us. Thus, the challenge of style gets even more complicated. The writer has to come up with a style that can hold together two worlds, which are strikingly different from each other: The postmodern urban world of the son and the unsophisticated life of the fishing community, where the father makes his home. It does not end there. Since the narrator is a poet, the style of the novel needs to be one that can facilitate poetic sensibilities. As I see it, the author successfully meets all these challenges. At times, the novel’s style is too poetic to be novelistic but, in the main, it is able to breathe life into ‘postmodern Antony’, (the son) and the men and women in the fishing community. The style wonderfully absorbs fishermen’s wisdom of the ocean without destroying their epistemological foundations. In other words, those folkloric views of the fishing community enter the author’s prose without being subjected to any rationalist comments of an urban observer. Thus, one is able to listen to the most beautiful descriptions of the ocean through the dialogues of those fishermen.

Though characters of a novel exist in language, characterisation largely belongs to the plot. The complications of characters appear in the way they react to different incidents of the story. But in this novel, the style is instrumental in characterisation as well. Wediwardena allows the language of these Island-dwelling fishermen to merge with the author’s narration in a way that provides important glimpses into the lives of those men and women.

This novel does not have large dramatic events. Thus, the plot is not all that crucial in characterisation. Instead, the author skillfully uses his style to present his unique characters.

Organic connections with characters

The author deeply loves the characters he portrays and he is honest to life there on the island. Consequently, very much like the main character, Antony, the writer himself has no hesitation in mingling with life on the island. He is not a detached observer of that life. Antony does not detach himself from the community in the island as an elitist visitor from Colombo. But rather he eats, drinks and have sexual relationships with those people. The ethical rationality that undergirds those activities is not something brought from metropolitan Colombo; it is a form of ethics unique to the island. Both Antony and his father share everything that the island offers: food, drink, lodging, and even sex. For the conservative moralists, the island might look like an abode of sin. But the ideal reader of the novel, the reader this novel seeks to ‘create’ might see this island as a place where primordial innocence still exists. That innocence is something we have lost with the advent of modern life. It would not be surprising for the reader to feel like eating fish curry, drinking locally made illegal alcohol with those fisher folk and making love freely as they normally do. This aesthetic effect is achieved primarily through style.

New facet of Sinhalaness

This novel shows us another beautiful facet of Sinhala culture. The culture of this island made with Catholic faith, the trade of fishing and folkloric beliefs about the ocean should also belong in the Sinhala culture at large. Some of the Sinhala people on this island only speak Tamil. But the island is open to Milan Kundera. It is clear from the way the culture of this island intermingles with other cultures that no culture is pure or impure. This novel reminds us of Sri Lanka’s cultural diversity and the intricate connections among different cultural elements. This is, perhaps, one thematic dimension that could have been developed further.

In this novel the impressionist portrayal of life on the island is prioritised over elucidating a strong thematic line. The novel revolves around the trip Antony makes to see his father, the meeting of the father and the eventual separation. What are the themes of this journey; of the search for his father; or of seducing the father’s girlfriend? Is it a case of a son seducing his symbolic mother? Our author does not allow us to make any thematic summaries of the plot. In Faulkner’s As I lay dying, a family takes a dead woman’s body across the Southern US to bury her. That journey itself makes much of the novel. But the mythical allure of the journey lends itself to multiple meanings. Antony’s trip to this exotic island has that mythical quality, whose realization perhaps needed better care. Still Baththalangunduwa is one of the most original works of fiction to be published in recent times.

(Amarakeerthi is a professor of Sinhala, University of Peradeniya)