Book Review - Theime, J. 2007 : R. K. Narayan. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-5927-8‘…what does one do with a novelist apparently so easy, whose plots are simple and views nondescript? Is it possible to say anything at all about him without sounding platitudinous?’ asks P.S. Sundaram (135) referring to R.K. Narayan. Critics, at times patronizingly, describe Narayan’s writing as ‘gentle’, ‘quiet’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘limpid’, ‘calm’ and then make almost apologetic comparisons to some Western writer to validate the attention he has received as a pioneer in Indian English writing. Narayan has been compared to writers as different as Chekhov, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Maupassant, O. Henry and others. Even Shashi Tharoor, who finds Narayan’s concerns ‘banal’, his prose ‘predictable’ and his vocabulary and experience ‘shallow’, calls him ‘India’s answer to Jane Austen’ (see Comedies of Suffering). Nonetheless, ever since Graham Greene announced his admiration for Narayan’s work saying, ‘Without him I could never have known what it is like to be an Indian’, his writings, especially his fictional town Malgudi, have become the touchstones of Indianness. Not only are Malgudi and its inhabitants authentic, they also represent what is truly and eternally Indian. And in this ‘Anytown’, as Geeta Hariharan calls it (The Man Who Invented Malgudi), the conflicts are seen to be simple and straightforward, like the one between old and new, between tradition and modernity, between good and evil.
John Thieme makes his way around the familiar pitfalls to bring us to a territory that is not virgin but is certainly less traveled. He begins by deconstructing the monochromic aura of authenticity surrounding Malgudi. He believes the projection of Malgudi as authentic India can only be ‘an expression of a dated Hindu-centered version of Indianness’ (p.2). Using Foucault’s idea of ‘heterotopias’ (those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others) Thieme argues that far from standing for a stable, unified India, ‘the town is the product of a particular coming together of social, religious and above all psychic forces…’ and is ‘messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’. It only offers ‘the ‘compensation’ of apparent meticulousness and perfection’ to the Western readers who are looking to achieve ‘self-definition through contradistinction’. Thieme aims ‘to identify the range of discursive intertexts, as well as some of the social and personal contexts that inform Narayan’s novels… to pinpoint what constitutes their uniqueness’(p. 4-21).
What Thieme considers important for a study of Narayan’s novels is the writer’s cultural background as a Tamil Brahmin. It not only informs the writer’s worldview but also determines the structure of his novels. He concurs with Lakshmi Holmstrom’s suggestion (while admitting it could be reductive) that the development of Narayan’s protagonists usually follows the four asramas (or stages) of the ideal Hindu life and adds that the conflicts in the novels usually result from a quest for the appropriate dharma. And it is Narayan’s cultural background that helps him place the secular and spiritual, political and social all together, without any apparent contradiction, as an ‘aspect of maya, the illusion of existence’. For the purposes of discussion Thieme divides Narayan’s novels conventionally into Early Novels, Middle-period Novels and Late Novels. Perhaps these sections too relate to the varnasramadharma. The early novels are shown to deal with the first stage when the protagonists receive their education and towards the end of it make an attempt to enter the second stage – that of a householder. The middle period novels deal with Grihasthya and Vanprastha while the late novels deal with, among other things, ‘passage into the fourth stage’.
Although he doesn’t put it in so many words, Thieme seems to believe that Narayan wrote with an eye on Western readership. He discusses Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room and The English Teacher as early novels and calls these ‘Narayan’s most ‘English’ work’ suggesting that the Tamil elements of his background ‘are not accorded a central role…to suit the perceived tastes of the British readers’ (p. 24). Although Thieme sees more Hindu or Tamil elements in the middle-period novels, he assigns it to Narayan’s ‘American ‘discovery’ (that) unleashed the possibility for according them centrality, thanks to the Orientalist vogue for eastern spirituality…’ (p. 102). Earlier in the book he had felt that in changing his name from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan Swami to a very readable (to us Indians too) R. K. Narayan, the author ‘was willing, at least in part, to allow his identity to be trimmed to fit the perceptions about the reading public in England…’ (p. 24). At least in the latter case Thieme’s suggestion seems far fetched, for shortened first and middle names are quite common in India. And Swami (literally, a saint) in the writer’s name would have invited unwanted biographical associations.
The question of politics (or the lack of it) in Narayan’s novels has had varied remarks from critics. On the one hand Greene refers to Malgudi as ‘never ruffled by politics’ and Naipaul says with sympathetic amazement that Narayan ‘was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems’ (deduced from Narayan’s comment that ‘India will go on’). On the other hand Wyatt Mason refutes Naipaul with passages from the novels to point out that ‘Narayan’s sly political sensibility is always just beneath the surface…’ (see The Master of Malgudi). Thieme himself traces political consciousness and an awareness of the colonial situation all through the early and middle-period novels. He reads ‘an implicit indictment of colonial education’ (p. 61) in The English Teacher, points to the ‘ambivalent response to Empire…hints of alternative ideological positions’ (p. 27) in Swami and Friends, and sees Waiting for the Mahatma ‘arguing for what Edward Said has termed ‘affiliative identifications’ as a replacement for ‘filial’ relationships’ (p. 96-97).
Thieme disagrees with ‘Naipaul’s privileging of the fabulist over the social’ because for him ‘Western social comedy and Hindu fable…are not exclusive in Narayan’. But he also clarifies that most of the social conflicts (between traditional Hindu values and modern alien forces) are primarily psychodrama. ‘The action lies inside the protagonist’s head’ as he tries to find a way to resolve the crisis. The crisis of course is seldom ‘resolved’ and the comic ambivalence adds to multiple perspectives. Thieme makes another very interesting observation about Narayan’s ‘concern with the dialectics of space’, pointing out how the author endows space and specific locations with ‘physical and psychic properties’. Whether it is the layout of the house in The Dark Room, the outhouse in The English Teacher or the difference between Lawley Extension and Kabeer Street, specific houses and locations not only become ‘the sites for both a Brahmin-based view of cleanliness…and for an exploration of an individual’s quest’ but are also an important part of the ‘cultural geography of the novel’ (p. 56).
There is a ‘falling-off’ in Narayan’s talents in his seventies and eighties, believes Thieme, but he does appreciate Talkative Man, one of the late novels of R.K. Narayan. The novel not only questions fictional authority and originary conceptions of self but also suggests that identities are ‘a product of narrativization’.
A discussion on R. K. Narayan would be incomplete without a discussion on language. The unassuming writer himself explained that he wrote in English for no other reason than that he felt comfortable in it. Critics, of course have had differing opinions on how well he used the colonizer’s language. Nandan Dutta believes that the best thing about Narayan’s writing is his language, which is flexible and adaptable. ‘He uses the language of Bible, Shakespeare and American Constitution to an amazing effect’, says Dutta. (see The life of R.K. Narayan) Naipaul expresses his admiration for the originality in Narayan’s language. ‘All languages have their own heritage…Narayan cleansed his English of all these associations, cleansed it of everything but irony’, says Naipaul. Shashi Tharoor takes a completely different stand and comments in his now infamous ‘obituary’ that Narayan’s prose was inadequate, flat, monotonous, clichéd and flippant. ‘At its worst Narayan’s prose was like the bullock-cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear…’ he says. It is thus surprising that the issue of language does not elicit any significant response from Thieme. Also, one wishes he had included a discussion on Narayan’s short stories since they are set in Malgudi too. To limit the arguments only to Narayan’s novels seems unfair, especially for a book titled ‘R. K. Narayan’ (suggesting an overview of his entire oeuvre).
Nonetheless, these misses do not take away the book’s strengths. Thieme’s purpose is clear, his arguments convincing, and his analyses coherent. Above all Thieme does succeed in presenting Malgudi ‘as a trope for uncertainty, openness and ongoing secular struggle’ (p. 194). This book, especially after the umpteen critical works on Narayan, is fresh and extremely readable.
Padmaja Thakore
References –
Dutta, N. The Life of R. K. Narayan. California Literary Review (March 26 2007), online edition.
Hariharan, G. The Man Who Invented Malgudi. The Times of India (14 May 2001), online edition.
Mason, W. The Master of Malgudi. The New Yorker (18 Dec 2006), online edition.
Naipaul, V. S. The Master of Small Things. Time Magazine (28 May 2001), online edition.
Sundaram, P. S. R. K. Narayan as a Novelist. Delhi:B.R. Pub. 1988.
Tharoor, S. Comedies of Suffering. The Hindu (08 July 2001), online Edition.
This review first appeared in the jounral Confluence (UK) -http://www.confluence.org.uk/2009/06/07/theime-j-2007-r-k-narayan/
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