SLIDE 1 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction e20fic14.blogs.rutgers.edu
- Prof. Andrew Goldstone (andrew.goldstone@rutgers.edu)
(Murray 019, Mondays 2:30–4:30) CA: Evan Dresman (evan.dresman@rutgers.edu) (36 Union St. 217, Wednesdays 12:00–2:00) December 8, 2014. Narayan; course conclusion.
SLIDE 2 final logistics
▶ distributed Monday 9 a.m. on Sakai Resources ▶ due Tuesday, December 16, at 3 p.m. (no slack) ▶ email immediately if you cannot access the file
▶ Sakai submission (notify me by Wednesday)
▶ submit under Sakai Assignments 2 ▶ and Sakai Drop Box to be sure ▶ no e-mail submission
▶ otherwise, exam due in person in Scott 216
SLIDE 3 final format
▶ 3 essay questions, one hour each
▶ 2 cover whole course
(multiple titles each, some choice)
▶ 1 focuses on Hurston, Barnes, Narayan ▶ open books, slides, notes; nothing else ▶ discuss at least 7 seven texts in total
▶ honor code
▶ open book, no collaboration ▶ maximum work time is 4 hours ▶ record your starting and stopping times
SLIDE 4
plenary
questions concerns random thoughts?
SLIDE 5
review: unlikeness
▶ Barnes’s style lets her make her mark ▶ language dominated by forms for assimilation to type
simile, satiric generalization, absurd episode
▶ every simile is a catachresis ▶ character-system consists of unassimilables
SLIDE 6 review: disunity
▶ community and relationship are dominant themes
▶ utopian: Bohemian, transnational, sexually open ▶ gender, like status, nationality, becomes performative ▶ but no solidarities persist
SLIDE 7
final question
After modernism, what then?
SLIDE 8
Narayan in a historical line
‘Swaminathan, where is your homework?’ ‘I have not done any homework, sir,’ he said blandly. There was a pause. ‘Why—headache?’ asked Samuel. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘All right, sit down.’ (“Father’s Help,” 70)
SLIDE 9
SLIDE 10 Swaminathan left his seat joyfully and hopped on the platform. The teacher took out his cane from the drawer and shouted angrily, ‘Open your hand, you little devil.’ He whacked three wholesome cuts on each
- palm. Swami received them without blenching….
Swami jumped down from the platform with a light heart, though his hands were smarting. (71)
Discussion
Remind you of anything? Compare this to the pandying scene in Portrait. How do Narayan’s repre- sentational technique and his distribution of attention resemble or differ from the earlier book?
SLIDE 11 Swaminathan left his seat joyfully and hopped on the platform. The teacher took out his cane from the drawer and shouted angrily, ‘Open your hand, you little devil.’ He whacked three wholesome cuts on each
- palm. Swami received them without blenching….
Swami jumped down from the platform with a light heart, though his hands were smarting. (71)
Discussion
Remind you of anything? Compare this to the pandying scene in Portrait. How do Narayan’s repre- sentational technique and his distribution of attention resemble or differ from the earlier book?
SLIDE 12 succession?
Parallels
▶ scene of colonial schooling
▶ “Sir, was Vasco da Gama the very first person to come to
India?”…“That’s what they say.” (70)
▶ disempowered child who nonetheless exerts agency ▶ third-person narrator with ambiguous irony
Divergences
▶ interior life represented but highly reduced ▶ authority, instead of being a menace, is absurd ▶ novelistic trajectory is foreshortened by short form
▶ (Even in novel Swami and Friends, limited or no Bildung)
SLIDE 13
1906 b. Madras (Chennai); father a school headmaster educated in English (and Tamil); fails English exam 1930 B.A., journalism, brief career as English teacher 1935 after many rejections, Swami and Friends published in London by Hamish Hamilton through intervention of Graham Greene Greene: “His novels increase our knowledge of the Indian character cer- tainly, but I prefer to think of them as contributions to English literature” (1937)
SLIDE 14
1906 b. Madras (Chennai); father a school headmaster educated in English (and Tamil); fails English exam 1930 B.A., journalism, brief career as English teacher 1935 after many rejections, Swami and Friends published in London by Hamish Hamilton through intervention of Graham Greene 1939–50s stories in The Hindu (Madras) 1942 starts Indian Thought Publications 1956 leaves India for first time (to USA, later visits yearly) continuing production of novels and stories increasing acclaim prose versions of Mahabharata and Ramayana 2001 d.
SLIDE 15 Indian English once more
His mother said, ‘Why don’t you go to school in a jutka?’ ‘So that I may be completely dead at the other end? Have you any idea what it means to be jolted in a jutka?’ (66)
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SLIDE 16 Indian/English: many paths
A week later one of the sons of his old master came and told Velan, ‘You will have to go back to your village, old fellow. The house is sold to a
- company. They are not going to have a garden.’…
He let out a scream: ‘Stop that!’ He took his staff and rushed at those who were hacking. They easily avoided the blow he aimed. (“The Axe,” 106–7)
SLIDE 17
many paths (2)
“Sharing a joke with Mulk Raj Anand in Chennai, 1995,” photo by N. Ram, in Ram, “Reluctant Centenarian,” The Hindu, October 8, 2006
SLIDE 18
many paths (3)
The anglophone Indian novel is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape…‘the idea of India’. (Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel [2009])
SLIDE 19
many paths (3)
The anglophone Indian novel is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape…‘the idea of India’. (Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel [2009])
SLIDE 20
many paths (4)
Those who write in the languages of India, whether that happens to be English or one of the modern ‘vernaculars’, do not necessarily write about ‘India’…but about cultures and localities that are both situated in, and disperse the idea of, the nation. (Amit Chaudhuri, “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English” [1999])
SLIDE 21
many paths (5)
[The Indian writer] hopes to express through his novels and stories the way of life of the group of people with whose psychology and background he is most familiar, and he hopes that these pictures will not only appeal to his own circle but also to a larger audience outside. (R.K. Narayan in 1953)
SLIDE 22 small/restricted
Venkat Rao mumbled, ‘Yes, sir,’ and slunk back to his seat. The clock showed 5:30. Now it mean two hours of excruciating search among
- vouchers. All the rest of the office ha gone. Only he and another clerk in
his section were working, and of course, the manager was there. (“Forty- five a Month,” 89) It was twilight. Everyone going about looked gigantic, walls of houses appeared very high and cycles and carriages look as though they would bear down on her. She walked on the very edge of the road. Soon the lamps were twinkling, and the passers-by looked like shadows. (87)
SLIDE 23
Rama Rao went out of work when a gramophone company, of which he was the Malgudi agent, went out of existence….A series of circumstances in the world of trade, commerce, banking and politics was responsible for
- it. (“Out of Business,” 91)
“This flower garden….H’m, it is…old-fashioned and crude, and apart from that the front portion of the site is too valuable to be wasted…” (“The Axe,” 106; ellipses original)
SLIDE 24
Rama Rao went out of work when a gramophone company, of which he was the Malgudi agent, went out of existence….A series of circumstances in the world of trade, commerce, banking and politics was responsible for
- it. (“Out of Business,” 91)
“This flower garden….H’m, it is…old-fashioned and crude, and apart from that the front portion of the site is too valuable to be wasted…” (“The Axe,” 106; ellipses original)
SLIDE 25
It was a fine sight: the temple elephant yoked to the engine by means of stout ropes, with fifty determined men pushing it from behind, and my friend Joseph sitting in the driving seat. A huge crowd stood around and watched in great glee. The engine began to move. It seemed to me the greatest moment in my life. (“Engine Trouble,” 81)
SLIDE 26
life in modernity: secular magic
Presently he grew tired of lying down there. He rose and walked back to the station. There was a good crowd on the platform. He asked someone, ‘What has happened to the train?’ (“Out of Business,” 95) “Have you heard of a thing called jujitsu? Well, this is a simple trick in jujitsu perhaps known to half a dozen persons in the whole of South India.” (“Fellow-Feeling,” 45)
SLIDE 27
life in modernity: secular magic
Presently he grew tired of lying down there. He rose and walked back to the station. There was a good crowd on the platform. He asked someone, ‘What has happened to the train?’ (“Out of Business,” 95) “Have you heard of a thing called jujitsu? Well, this is a simple trick in jujitsu perhaps known to half a dozen persons in the whole of South India.” (“Fellow-Feeling,” 45)
SLIDE 28
realism
He sat there in the front part of his home, bent over his clay, and brought into existence a miniature universe; all the colours of life were there, all the forms and creatures, but of the size of his middle finger…he had the eye of a cartoonist for human faces. Everything went down into clay. It was a wonderful miniature reflection of the world; and he mounted them neatly on thin wooden slices, which enhanced their attractiveness. (“Gateman’s Gift,” 28)
SLIDE 29
“after” modernism
▶ Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner claim to put paid to realist novel ▶ close coupling of social modernity and artistic modernism
revealed as metropolitan, high-cultural position
▶ Narayan exemplifies the vitality of realist narrative ▶ He and Anand together exemplify the many paths of Indian English
SLIDE 30
what happened?
James, “Art of Fiction” (1884) Conrad, Heart (1899) James, “Jolly Corner” (1908) Stein, “Melanctha” (1909) Joyce, Portrait (1916) Sayers, Whose Body? (1923) Hemingway, In Our Time (1925) Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930) Anand, Untouchable (1935) Hurston, Their Eyes (1937) Barnes, Nightwood (1937) Narayan, Malgudi Days (1942–56)
SLIDE 31 what happened? (2)
▶ stream of consciousness, narrative fragmentation ▶ pursuit of aesthetic autonomy ▶ disenchantment of the world and alienated selves ▶ traumas of the Great War
▶ political commitments, realistic representation ▶ vernacular Englishes; who does English belong to? ▶ shifting global system of English-language writing/reading
SLIDE 32 see with both eyes
▶ the major lines of struggle
▶ recognition, artistic prestige ▶ power to represent and re-imagine people/situations
▶ a chronological line ▶ and a space of proliferation
SLIDE 33
next Read on.
