"The old stones were quiet here..."

The old stones were quiet here, polished by the footfalls of the years. Gandhi and Jinnah must have walked up this stretch, founding fathers of two nations; the same basalt flagstones offered a place to rest to beggars and itinerant vendors of fresh lemonade, second-hand textbooks, and handled-looking postcards that showed ten famous views of the city. Walking here, he felt that he walked among the great and insignificant of the past; all, alike, hurried as he did, for in this city even idlers liked to look as though they had somewhere to go smartly. All the clerks and petty officers; in their stream, he imagined his father, hurrying along with a set of proofs in a large envelope; he'd been proud, at one time, to do some printing for the university. It hadn't been a lucrative job, but had seemed to confer a diffuse glow of learning over all his work. A hundred and fifty years earlier this had been the beach, before the land reclamations; perhaps it was the murmur of waves one heard on the busiest days, through the endless talking of peons and passers-by, and the tumble of the red busses, the taxi-horns, the metallic steps of each person hurrying through the Fort.

Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park 

A long quote, from a novel I read some time early last year. One of many I wanted to write something about, but never got around to. It's far to late now.

If I remember correctly, what I wanted to write about this quote specifically, was how it seems to work as an allusion not to any specific novel or writer, but to that tendency in much Indian fiction in English to focus on the history and politics of post-colonial India in big, maximalist novels. Rushdie, Seth, Mistry, etc. Writing a novel of modern middle-class Mumbai, this is the only time Joseph alludes to India's history, and she is as concerned with noting the presence of 'insignificant' ordinary folk of Mumbai, going about their everyday business, which is explicitly contrasted with the great men of history, who appear only against the mass of present day reality. Where politics enters the narrative elsewhere, it's only as the irritating right wing opinions of an older relative, or else the idealistic environmentalism of a young neighbour. It appears early on in the novel, almost seeming to stand as a sign of what she's not going to do. Instead, her work is concerned with the interpersonal relationships of several characters connected by family and friendship, and with their individual experiences of living in modern Mumbai.

*

Now, admittedly, my earlier post on Satyajit Ray was already long enough. Still, it's interesting to me to see that, in arguing against David Thomson's condescension to Ray, and having noted that an artist should not be expected to focus on the history and politics of their country, I then go on to argue for some of the ways in which Ray's films do actually open up to history, both colonial and post-colonial. I don't think that anything I wrote is wrong exactly - all art has a political dimension of course (the consequences of which is something which I was recently trying to grapple with in my most recent post) - but there is surely much which is easily left out of what the experience of an art work can actually mean when one is producing an explicitly political reading of a work. But if I'd wanted to try and address that there, it would have made an already very long piece even longer!

Now, I have no particular issue with reading art works for their latent political meaning - it can be a very productive way of examining a work and can produce valuable insights, and I find thinking about the social and historical contexts of a novel can be very invigorating, and certainly does;t have to exclude pleasure or enthusiasm - but I'm questioning here my own ingrained leap here to such a way of reading an art work. Is that really the reason why I fell in love with literature in the first place? Is it anyone's?

(In another context, it's also one of the ways in which, in Britain and America, and presumably elsewhere too, writers and filmmakers who come from elsewhere - specifically Asia or Africa - or else emerge from immigrant communities, can be condescended to. The unspoken expectation is that they must comment in some way on the historical and political experience of the countries or communities from which they come - they're expected to explore this for an audience which is implicitly white and British. Certainly I've seen writers expressing dismay at this 'othering' and pursuit of bogus authenticity. Aminatta Forma, in The Guardian, just last year, complaining about the labelling that both fuels and results from this unspoken assumption. Inevitably, the only book of hers I've read is her first book, her memoir of her father and Sierra Leone.)

Anjali Joseph doesn't venture far outside of her own experience in Saraswati Park, writing about the middle class Bombay in which she grew up and presumably knows as an adult from trips back. But her main characters are both men. Actually, the stories of both are hardly particularly novel - a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality, an older man coming to the realisation that he's been taking his wife for granted for years - but it's beautifully written. And as I've tried to articulate above, what's most refreshing is her refusal to overtly tie her story to explicitly political or national concerns. Nothing wrong with that, surely. Equally, it can be just as enthralling to observe the lives and intimate characters of several middle class individuals and their movement through both public and private spaces and the city. It's a novel which contains a lot of travel, of people getting about by foot or by train. Inevitable in a modern city like Mumbai, perhaps, but it's lovely to see it depicted so lovingly here.

Currently reading...

...and here's a wonderful connection between things I'm interested in: her son, Waris Hussein, was director for the first four episodes of Doctor Who, as well as a later serial 'Marco Polo'. He seems to be an interesting person in his own right, but of course, it's being the very first director of Doctor Who for which he'll always be most remembered. I love his own memories of it:

"[I was] a graduate from Cambridge with honours, and you're directing this piece about cavemen in skins...I thought, 'Where have I landed up in my life?'"

*

On the face of it, it seems such a delightfully odd juxtaposition. Stories of pre-partition feudal North India, and the first story of what now seems to be an almost quintessentially English science fiction show for the BBC. The Sceenonline profile argues for a consistent interest in 'female psychology' throughout Waris Hussain's work. Certainly what I've read of his mother's work suggests a concern with the roles available to women within a feudal patriarchal society.

In her introduction to my edition, Anita Desai tries to make a connection with the Mughal school of miniature painting and the influence of Urdu. This feels rather a stretch to me - a touch of exoticism for a Western audience that is being reintroduced to an Indian author - but even allowing for that, there's surely equally a modernist influence. A concern with the confrontation between an older feudal India and modernity. These are also works of memory, describing a world which by that point no longer existed - written after Attia Hosain decided to remain in England following Partition in 1947. So the bridge between tradition and modernity, which I'm rather artificially setting up here with my somewhat comical juxtaposition, was present in her life.

*

Other family connections: her niece is the Pakistani author and journalist Muneeza Shamsie, and her great niece the novelist Kamila Shamsie. Quite a family!

I'm reminded of something I once read in an interview with Martin Amis, when he was promoting his autobiography. Part of the the inspiration for writing Experience was that he wanted to record his relationship with his father. This fact, two successful writers in the family, one the parent to the other, was a 'special case'. Even at the time, I thought this was off. Just of the top of my head I could think of Dumas pere et fils. Now I can see how his claim is part of the romanticising of the writing life. As though plenty of people don't follow their parents into similar or related careers.

And what about siblings? The Brontes? A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Vidia and Shiva Naipaul? Or is it only parents and children that count. The literal act of generation paralleling the metaphorical one of literary production.

It's also about opportunity. How many writers had parents who nursed ambitions, but never made it into print? Or who might have done once or twice? Or worked in journalism? How many mothers or grandmothers had gifts for storytelling, but never even dreamed of making it into print? So yes, I think it's a rather gendered claim which sees only certain kinds of writing, of literary art, as worthy of importance.

As so often with Amis, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd been a bit less impressed with himself, he'd have been a better writer.

'Narrative plenitude'?

For a second there, I had wondered, naively no doubt, if I hadn't inadvertently stumbled over a new critical term. One that might even have some use. Alas, it seems not.

Oh, well.

'Narrative plenitude'?

A simple google search will find plenty uses of the term, going at least as far back as Laura Mulvey's seminal 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975) and Frederick Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), both works that I know only by reputation. From the brief scan which is all I have time to give them at present, it would seem that I meant something different by the term. It appears that a sense of narrative plenitude is used in a Freudian context, set against a narrative 'lack'. Plenitude here appears to be in line with the first definition of the word as it is defined by the OED:

"Fullness, completeness, or perfection; the condition of being absolutely full in quantity, measure, or degree."

'Narrative plenitude' is referring to a narrative which conveys a sense of satisfaction, of completeness. It's a narrative which satisfies all the conflicts and issues which have been brought up throughout it's duration. It's a sense of narrative 'rightness' which can of course be construed as a form of mystification if one is so minded.

I apologise if I'm repeating myself a bit there, but I'm trying to get a hold of this. 'Plenitude' of course has another sense, of abundance and excess, and that also seems to a be a way in which it can be used. It can be used in terms of analysing melodrama, where part of the satisfaction of the narrative is  surely precisely in that excess of emotion or style which the form provides. In other contexts, 'plenitude' refers to the excess of multiple narratives that postmodern or consumerist culture confronts us with.

It's this last which is closest to what I was trying to get at, and it might be argued that there isn't really any need for a new term. But then, what am I trying to get at?

It's a form of intertextuality. Professor Challenger isn't just referred to in All-Consuming Fire. Although he doesn't actually appear in the narrative, what is clearly being posited is a fictional world in which he and his published adventures are all as much a part of the fictional reality as are the adventures of Holmes or the Doctor. It's part of the 'reality effect' of the novel, even though what's being referred to is fictional. This effect becomes clearer in works like Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics or much of Kim Newman's fiction (Anno Dracula obviously, but also the Diogenes Club stories), where characters from multiple fictions are actually interacting with each other. I've not read any of Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton' work, but that might be earliest example of what I'm talking about (there's also a little known short story by Maurice Richardson, 'Unquiet Wedding' from 1948, and other examples too no doubt, but that's more of a burlesque, which is not quite what I'm trying to describe here). It's a sense of multiple narratives interacting, that behind the scenes of the novel which we're currently reading, there is a wealth of narratives currently invisible to us. But there they are, happening out in the same fictional landscape.

It could be argued that we already have the perfectly serviceable term 'crossover'. I wouldn't wholly disagree, but that feels rather too mechanistic to me, a simple description of what it is. In a more academic context, Umberto Eco has proposed the term 'transworld migration' which can be taken as the technique of borrowing a literary character from another work. Again, this feels to me like a structural term to label a technique. Whereas what I'm trying to describe here is something that is more affective (assuming I've got the right term there), a sense of how it works, of what it actually achieves. Which will inevitably be somewhat subjective. It's a quality rather than a description.

Consequently, whilst I think that these narratives which bring fictional characters together from multiple disparate works are at the heart of what I'm thinking about here, I would also broaden it to include other works. Michael Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories, especially the 'Second Ether' trilogy, also seem to have something of this quality. Then there's the storied landscapes of the superhero universes owned by Marvel and DC. The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who and all their many spin offs. The many spin-offs of Sherlock Holmes. Again, no doubt there are plenty of other things I'm currently unaware of at present.

What all of these fictional narratives have in common is that they have multiple authors. This is most obviously the case with Marvel/DC and commercial spin-offs, but it's also the case in a work which combines characters from the work of other authors.* It's also, unless one is a complete obsessive, practically impossible to read or see or hear everything that makes up most of these narrative worlds. I'm never going to read every DC comic, or every Doctor Who spin-off, or the original appearance of every character that Kim Newman includes in Anno Dracula. Life's too short.

So the sense of narrative plenitude or excess which I'm trying to define here also encompasses narratives that I'm never going to experience. I'm sure this is the case for most readers. So that sense of narrative excess actually entails a lack, which might in turn account for the obsession with continuity which so many fans of this kind of fiction exhibit. It's the hope that somehow this excess of narrative can be contained and made to make sense. Since the very reality of multiple authorship also means that there will inevitably be contradictions in these texts, there is obviously something rather quixotic about such a desire, but it's a desire which is clearly a response to that initial sense of narrative excess and plenitude.

Once you get away from that anxiety though, what we have is a sense of seemingly boundless possibilities, of narratives bumping up against each other, braiding together: a plenitude, an excess. A joy.

*

So that's an initial rough sketch of what I think I'm trying to get at here. Now I just have to decide on what to call it.


* It might be argued therefore that Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories don't fit here, since there there is only one author. And most of the characters Kim Newman crosses over in his Diogenes Club stories are of course his own creations. It does seem that where an author's work falls into discrete series there is then the opportunity for combining characters so as to produce an effect which is otherwise more commonly found in works which have multiple authors, or which borrow characters originally created by others.