The current of affairs
The Jaipur Literature Festival would be even livelier without Sociology 101
After the circus,at the safe distance of a week,we may reflect on the hopes and anxieties we’ve chosen to bring back with us. Foremost is the expansion of self-definition the Jaipur Literature Festival is attempting. Perhaps in trying to cloister the term “literature” — which we all do for reasons our own,in accordance with our affinities — everybody fails,and the bottom falls out.
Times and life around us are changing faster than we can key in words. Martin Amis worries about how the human brain is physically morphing with its current preoccupations — the way we read on a computer is changing our brain which is changing the way we read on a computer. Reality,which we never can quite capture in words our own,or our chosen literary masters’,is our topmost concern (indeed,when was it not?).
Our present obsession with non-fictional,mostly journalistic,writing can be explained,and explained away,on the grounds of 9/11 and the resultant emphasis on “current affairs”. However,it didn’t begin there; and it’s not quite untrue of the non-Western world either. The zippy journalist can get there and can be out with a book in a month,or a year,technically. The novelist won’t get there for a full half-decade — Don deLillo’s Falling Man took six years. The literary writer must endure the foment in her head,a typically long novelistic gestation period. But despite that delayed birth,we don’t quite get to the novel’s universal death.
In the 1960s,Philip Roth complained about how American reality was outpacing American fiction. Tongue-in-cheek but true as it was then,the 1960s seem a rickety stage carriage now. And yet,the novel didn’t die in the last three centuries; it isn’t dying now. It may not be possible to write a Humboldt’s Gift any more,if you agree with Amis. Or it may be,some time in future,when things have slowed down again,if you would rather go with Richard Ford. Talk about the novel’s impending death is less climate change (irreversible) and more inter-glacial (we take some melting,then carry on).
Nevertheless,we were entertained and enlightened by the likes of Rory Stewart,David Finkle,Jon Lee Anderson debating their reporting from war zones. What would you hold against a young,rock star-type (Stewart) who’s been on both sides of the governance divide — governing in Iraq,preceded by his long wintry walk across an Afghanistan without a government,who’s now a Westminster MP? Or Finkle,with his sincere humanitarian concern and human empathy for a crushed,over-theorised,little-understood people? Or Scotsman Ben MacIntyre,divulging the researching and writing of Operation Mincemeat,knocking audiences off their seats in the Durbar Hall with his slideshow and quips,discussing something that another speaker would have kept the humour out of? A vanishing British wit much like the people in his book,a species which vanished after World War II.
We are warned never to twist facts to suit our theories if non-fiction is what we make a living by. That too for purposes of archiving the documentation of reality; not for sales figures. Well,we at least know right from wrong. Not to make our living by,but our karmayoga.
But is it time to worry about the grip the social sciences are expanding around the literary fest’s neck? A gala like Jaipur must perforce be thoroughly democratic,allowing every man,woman and maybe even child to walk in,without dispersing it into an über civic chaos like the Calcutta Book Fair. Yet,must vaulting ambition,exploding crowds,an extending range of speakers,invite with open arms JNU Sociology 101? That’s not Christopher Bayly,or Gulzar. That’s classroom Calmpose and EPW.
The rumour goes,next year,artists and art historians are promised. Bring them in. And maybe music — not the evening jive with the wine,but a couple of sessions on the purest,the mother of all art forms? In the beginning was music; behind everything is music.
A.C. Grayling,the god humanists everywhere pray to,doesn’t come down every day. Just as another god,J.M. Coetzee,doesn’t read his work on your front lawns for post-lunch lazying. Throttle not our quietening imagination; leave us our little aesthetic feast. Let this be the only fundamental query debated every year: do you write for yourself,giving not a damn about the audience (Amis & Co)? Or do you burn to tell a story (Henning Mankell)?
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
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