Matters of Style
What is literature? What sets apart the great novels from the rest? Why does a Stoner — on the surface a book where nothing remarkable happens — leave so many people shaken up? When does writing transcend from being a mere story to something ineffably more, to what we call art, what Schopenhauer described as the closest glimpse we will get of ultimate Reality? Let me not pose this question objectively, since the answer is tied up with our own subjective experience in every way. Instead I ask myself something more particular — what style of writing do I find myself drawn to?
There is the flamboyant, multicolored grandeur of writers like Rushdie, whose sentences are like torrents that sweep us along on their path. There is great skill on display — felicity over the language plus a vibrant imagination plus a healthy ear for music, dialect, cant, and general chaos. When done well, the masters turn this cacophony into something beautiful, and it can be exhilarating. Think of Marquez, for example. There is no holding back with writing such as this — it is bold, carefree, inventive, and extremely stylized. These books are very conscious of their style, their form. I think that the point I am trying to get at is that for me as a reader form and style are more important than plot or ‘content’. I love watching writers deploy all the tools at their disposal to create — or try to create and fail — moments of transcendence. What is a moment of transcendence, you ask? Well, you just know it when you experience it. And as long as a book has some such moments, I think it has succeeded; such books will last the test of time.
This piece was triggered by two things. Firstly, the recent Harper’s essay, by Martin Scorsese, about the Italian auteur Fellini. He describes the magic of Fellini’s movies and the transformative experience they had on him as an Italian-American movie-loving kid. But primarily the piece is an ode to ‘cinema’ as an art form, contrasting that with many of the Hollywood movies being made today, with algorithms recommending movies to us based on the content we have watched. The algorithms, of course, well written as they might be, are not going to have a clue about what aspects of a movie set off that internal churn in you, or that rush of blood that makes time stop for a while (how can time stop for ‘a while’, I ask myself, but let that be); the algorithms are not set up to identify moments of transcendence — they work on ‘content’ similarities. Scorsese’s piece was a lament, then, on the commoditization of the director’s voice — the director’s signature; the auteristic elements — the eccentricities, the quirks, the magic — sacrificed at the altar of algorithms telling us what ‘people’ want to watch. Twenty years from now, will it be irrelevant who directed the fifteenth installment of some superhero movie franchise, created more by data analysts and programmers than by artists?
I found myself nodding along in agreement to this piece (I haven’t watched any Fellini, but this essay made me add it to my must-watch list), and even more so to Baradwaj Rangan’s essay that developed this ‘cinema as art’ vs ‘content’ narrative further. It brought to mind a line from his review of Mani Ratnam’s Kaatru Veliyidai. ‘As a movie,’ Rangan wrote, ‘Kaatru Veliyidai leaves you wanting, but as cinema, very little can come close to it’. I naturally thought back to the intense relationship I have with Mani Ratnam’s films, that have gripped me and moved me and been a steady part of my growth from boy to teen to adult. What is it about his movies that connects with me at such a deep level? It is not the plot of course (none of his films have complex plots, none have mysterious endings that people can debate over, none have twists and exposes that are a key element of the narrative engine of many mainstream movies). I am not a cinephile and I lack the vocabulary (or knowledge) to dissect the process of a filmmaker, but I think it is the ungraspable coming together of writing, staging, lighting (and shadows), music (and silence), acting (and just being) to create a singular, signature piece of art (’mainstream’ art, you might say, but art nonetheless), to animate characters with passions and tensions and joys and dilemmas that we can feel.
There is a stretch in Kaatru Veliyidai. The heroine is a doctor who has been posted to Kashmir. On her very first night on duty, a man comes in completely bashed up after a road accident, his life hanging in the balance. She jumps into action, stabilizes him, monitors him night and day until he recovers. The man, our hero, is an air force officer — a fighter pilot — from the air base nearby. Something starts to shift into place in her heart as she nurses him back to life. They cross path a few times after that — including at the officers’ ball — each time that ‘something’ in her heart growing larger. Now we come to the stretch itself. She is at home making tea for her grandfather, humming a melody softly to herself, when she hears the rumble of fighter planes in the far distance. She gets up as she is stirring, and begins slowly walking to the door — almost as though in a trance — while still humming. Her grandfather calls out to her, but it hardly registers on her. As she nears the door she quickens her step — the jets are closer now. She runs out of the door now and into the glass-roofed greenhouse. The jets are now very close. As she arches her neck up to look at the sky, one of the jets flies down low, thundering in, rattling the greenhouse’s frame, almost within touching distance — or so it seems to us (and to her), before swinging back up again. As she watches the jets fly away into the distance, she sees her grandfather from the corner of her eye, a mild scowl on his face. She continues the humming where she left off, as though the last twenty seconds never happened, and casually walks back home past her grandfather, with a hint of a smile on her face. The stretch takes place in a single shot, with the camera floating along with the heroine. In twenty or so seconds it achieves more than what an hour of expository dialogue might do. It transports us into a moment of heightened experience, and lets us fill in the blanks. I found it to be a stretch of sheer beauty. The movie itself failed miserably at the box office, and so many perfectly sculpted scenes like this wait patiently on the Amazon Prime digital shelves for future cinema watchers to discover them. The point, though, is about style, about form — cinema — over content.
The other thing that got me thinking about this has to do with Drishyam 2. For Indians living under a rock, this is the sequel to the hugely popular Malayalam movie that had a jaw dropping ending twist. This is one of those rare sequels that was as good as the original, with perhaps an even more (wonderfully) ridiculous twist. While chatting about the movie with my friend though, he mentioned that it reminded him of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X. Now this was a book — with a fabulously unexpected denouement — that I loved and had gone around recommending to people. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember details of the ending, or even much about the rest of the story. But I remember the exact way I felt when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis — say — for the first time; I remember the disorienting — but vaguely familiar, like I’ve been through it in many dreams — feeling when I got to the portion where his parents and sisters move on with their lives, sharing a laugh, with Samsa desperately still stuck in his room (and stuck in his alien body). Now that is literature. Or take the final chapters of one of the best books I’ve read, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, when the estranged family finally gets together at home for that one last Christmas. I get misty eyed thinking about it, and it was done with hardly any sentimentality. Perhaps I shouldn’t generalize for everyone, but in the long run, singular moments like these are what stay with us, not plot or story.
Coming back to writing styles, the flowery prose of a Rushdie becomes too much to handle for me after a while. It’s like I’ve eaten one too many pieces of cheesecake. It gets tiring. It starts to seem too self-conscious. And what’s worse is when some writers try to adopt this style and fail — it can be quite painful. Then there is the dense, gritty, reportage-like style of someone like Mario Vargas Llosa, the dream-logic Kafkaesque stretches of, well, Kafka (and no one else), the featherlike lightness and and musicality of Vikram Seth, the unmatched madness of Wodehouse… My earliest memories of coming across Wodehouse are of my grandfather pausing midway on a page, placing the book down on his lap, chuckle heartily for a while, and then pick up the book again. What did you find so funny, we would ask. ‘Nothing,’ he would say, still cackling, taking off his spectacles and wiping away a tear, ‘it can’t be explained.’ Call it art or whatever else, but that is one good way of summarizing it — it can’t be explained.
Over the years, though, I have found myself gravitating more toward one particular style of writing. I first came across it when I picked up my first J.M. Coetzee novel (Disgrace). It is a way of looking at the world more than just a literary style — sharp, unsparing, unsentimental, bare. As a reader you can’t hide behind the joys of literary flourishes, you are face to face with these troubled characters, and you have to find a way to deal with it. He places you in situations that are morally ambiguous, and does not provide any guide rails to find your way out. He does not overtly take sides — in my opinion a mark of a good writer; he describes the circumstance, the dilemma, with microscopic detail. The rest is up to us as readers.
For me the exemplar of this style is the Tamil writer Ashokamitran. His sentences seem to be pared down to the bare minimum. The writing seems to come from a place of complete dispassion — clinical, unflinching reproduction of events. It can seem like the writer’s personality has receded so much to the background as to melt away into nothingness. His novels are barely larger than novellas. His short stories are indeed short (unlike some of the potbellied novellas masquerading as short stories). It can seem like the words are cropped down so much that there is no authorial signature, no style. In fact I have read quite a few critics say things along the same lines — that his writing is simple, basic, and by implication saying that translating him to English or other languages is easy. How completely wrong a reading this would be. For Ashokamitran’s bare-bones, surgical approach is indeed a deliberate writing style, and one that he deployed to the most devastating effect. It is extremely hard to pull off by anyone with lesser talent (I tried writing a short story myself in this style and it was stone dead). When done by these masters it creates a heightened, constricted field around you. It is hypnotic. At times is can be intense and hard; at times, drily funny (I think Ashokamitran is Coetzee with a sense of humor). At times, transcendental.
What writers like Ashokamitran know is that literature is most effective when we (the readers) meet the writers half-way — when we are given just enough to create the worlds — in particular the interior worlds of the characters — by ourselves; that the rush of blood which great literature produces does not emerge from the pages of the book we hold in our hands, but from somewhere deep inside our own selves. The best writers lay the ground for this self-discovery (which is a hard, hard thing to do) and then step back.
For those who understand Tamil, there is a speech on YouTube about Ashokamitran, by contemporary Tamil writer Charu Nivedita. To those who dismiss him as a writer of minor lower-middle class concerns (‘uppu-puli-milagai ezhuthaalar’ in the original conveys it much better), he responds by saying that Ashokamitran is in fact in the pantheon of the best modern writers in the world. He places Ashokamitran in the Kafka-Borges league. And he explains how Ashokamitran can be seen as one of the existential novelists, whose writings go much beyond uppu-puli-milagai to drop us into moments of pure existential angst. And he does this by walking through one of Ashokamitran’s celebrated short stories, Puli Kalaignan (available in English translation by N. Kalyan Raman as The Tiger Artist).
But I would like to take two lines, just two very plain lines, from my favourite Ashokamitran book, Pathinettaavadhu Atchakodu, (‘The 18th Parallel’, translated by Gomathi Narayanan) to illustrate his sorcery. The novel is a bildungsroman set in Secunderabad in the charged years on either side of India’s independence. Hyderabad-Secunderabad itself was peculiarly placed of course, as a Muslim Nizam-ruled princely state located quite solidly inside the Indian mainland (and with a Hindu majority population). Which way would they swing — India’s or Pakistan’s? How would the sheer logistics of it work out if the Nizam chose to sign up with Pakistan? While all the negotiations happened behind closed doors between the three parties, with mere trickles of trustworthy information on the radio waves, while they waited for the Nizam to finally speak up, what should the people of Hyderabad-Secunderabad do? While the wait continued, the private volunteer-based Razakar militia force was increasing in size and volume and starting to flex its muscle against the Hindus. Should the Hindus then flee Hyderabad before it was too late? Not everyone had other places in India they could call home — where would they flee to? This is the larger context that the novel is set in, and these tremors from the world outside will find ways of impinging on his daily life, but the book is primarily about the smaller joys, confusions, tensions of the teenage protagonist Chandrasekharan.
Chandru is a Tamil Brahmin boy living in the railway quarters in Secunderabad (his father works in the Nizam’s railway service), his neighbors being Telugu-speakers, Urdu-speakers, and some other Tamil-speakers like him. The book spans 5 or so years, starting with Chandrasekharan as a middle or high school boy in the early-mid 1940s, and ending with him as a young adult amid accession riots post Independence. The novel has a gently drifting quality to it, and has no significant story to talk about. It sucks you into Chandru’s world, where the biggest concerns are around cricket — worrying about his own patchy form, fighting with the hockey players for use of the common playground, figuring out ways to defeat arch enemy (and deadly bowler) Krishnaswamy and his brothers Goku and Balu, dealing with questionable umpires and even more dubious scorers (‘The other side was all out for 81 in the match. We played next. Our score was 77 according to their score book, but 102 according to ours.’). When taking a breather from cricket, Chandru was occupied with finding where his family’s wayward cow had ran off to next, or puzzling over the stirrings in his heart whenever he was with Pyari Begum from the neighboring household.
The beginning of the ninth grade brought in some new faces to their class. One of them, from a new-to-Secunderabad army family, was Ranga Ramanujam. He was strikingly different from everyone else in Chandru’s class. He carried himself differently — with confidence, unlike the rest of them; he spoke differently. And when it came to sartorial matters:
My shorts were always made two inches wider and longer than necessary as I was a ‘growing boy’. Even after tightening the buckles to the last possible millimetre, the shorts would be loose at the waist and slip down. To prevent this, I used to roll up the shorts all round the waist, much in the same way that a petticoat or sari is tucked up. This would not show, however, since I wore my shirts falling over my shorts. My tuck up at the waist also had the incidental advantage of reducing the unwanted length of the shorts. It was on this scene that there now descended two boys whose sole mission in life, for all intents and purposes, was to effect a change in the sartorial habits of the boys of Secunderabad, Raj Kumar and Ranga Ramanujam…. Ranga’s shirt was open in front and had buttons running up the whole length. While the rest of us had to push our heads through the necks of our shirts, he could put his shirt on like a coat, from the back. This meant that when the process was over, not a hair on his head would be out of place, while we could never get into our shirts without mussing up our hair.
Chandru and Ranga first hit it off in the English classroom…
One day during Ranga’s stint in our class, our English teacher decided to test our grammar. He wrote a long sentence on the blackboard for analysis. Pointing to a part of the sentence he asked, ‘What clause is that?’ The boys stood up one after the other without answering. Then someone said ‘Noun clause.’
‘No, next.’
‘Adjectival clause,’ ventured another.
‘No, next.’
‘Adverbial clause,’ said the next boy.
These were the only three clauses we’d been taught. The whole class, not just I was never quite sure which was which. To answer questions on grammar we always depended on our gambling instincts. Now that all these options had been exhausted, we wondered what clause it would be.
The teacher continued to call out ‘Next’, ‘Next’, till he came to me.
The teacher now looked like a veritable Shakuni of the Mahabharata, and the class took on the features of the Kaurava assembly. Then I cast the dice.
‘Parenthetical clause,’ I said.
There was a moment’s silence in the class, a deadly silence.
‘Next,’ called out the teacher. The next boy happened to be Ranga who sat first on the bench behind me. He stood up and said ‘Parenthetical clause.’
At the end of the class the two of us exchanged smiles as befitted two geniuses at English. He wanted to know my name. And I felt the texture of his shirt.
Thus started a deep friendship between the two. They spent most of their time together — after school, Ranga would walk home with Chandru — hitting it off with Chandru’s family and charming the Railway colony girls — and then they would head out to the cricket maidans, where Ranga played with elegance and flair. Very soon some of Ranga’s influences started to show on Chandru — he got some nice pajamas and a full-open shirt stitched for himself, and started walking around feeling like ‘Janaab Jinnah.’
The friendship grew stronger every day. They shared laughs and worries, went to films together (like Henry V starring Laurence Olivier — Ranga’s recommendation), got into fisticuffs with other groups of boys (with Ranga always standing up for Chandru). Ranga was quickly anointed captain of their cricket team, and they now took on the bully Krishnaswamy’s team with confidence. There were fights and heated exchanges between them from time to time, but — like often the case with boyhood friendships — these were almost instantly forgotten
…After this incident, I didn’t expect Ranga to speak to me. But he did come home. (Here the gravitational pull of the Pyari Begum-Nagaratnam combine should not be underestimated.)
Being best friends with Ranga also brought advantages in social standing:
During my first days in this group it was invariably Goku who bowled to me. Most often his very first ball would come straight for my wicket. Within the few seconds it took for the flying ball to reach me, I was fairly certain that it wouldn’t fail to hit its target. Yet I would make an effort with my untrained limbs and body to stop it, conscious of a crippling sense of inadequacy, anger, sorrow, despair and anxiety. And then I would wait for the crash which was sure to follow in the next split second when the leather-covered sphere of five and a half ounces struck the metal-capped pieces of wood, and I was seldom disappointed. The loud cheers that followed the fall of other players were not heard when I was bowled, only remarks like ‘Bad luck’ or ‘Better luck next time’. All because I was close to Ranga, and Ranga was the equal of and in certain respects better than Krishnaswamy.
Ranga soon became the central figure in Chandu’s life. And then, towards the end of an action-packed chapter and with no prior warning, comes this:
One day Ranga announced that he was leaving Secunderabad, and then his family left the place.
Ranga never came back.
The first time I read this, it was like the air was sucked out of me. Reading about Chandru-Ranga reminded me of many of my own escapades as a kid in the 90s. I was looking forward to seeing how their friendship will mature, what other fights they will get into, whether they will patch up with the Krishnaswamy brothers, whether Ranga will lead them to cricketing triumphs… And suddenly, in two monotonic sentences, Ashokamitran brings it all to a halt. I felt light, a bit giddy.
I flipped through the rest of the pages to see if Ranga returns. Couldn’t find him anywhere. He doesn’t return. Ranga left Chandru’s life, and that was that. Ranga never came back.
I had to stop reading at that point for two days. Couldn’t bring myself to continue. Why did it hurt so much, I wondered. I think it was because it made me realize the number of people from my childhood I have completely lost touch with. The Ranga Ramanujams of my own childhood flashed before me. Classmates, neighbors, cricketing buddies who I spent all my days with, with whom I plotted our futures, are now gone from my consciousness without a trace. Where are all of them now? How can I so completely lose contact? I missed them. Is there a way I could reconnect with them? With some of them — I was ashamed to admit to myself — I recalled their faces, the many things we did together, but I did not even remember their names. It made me realize that, every day, we might meeting someone for the very last time. Who is that person going to be today? Maybe I should find a way to reconnect with those childhood friends, I told myself. But I knew I wouldn’t. They were gone from my life. Ranga never came back.
I think the impact it had on me was also — in large part — because of the way in which it was delivered. It was just slipped in there, with no flourish, no warning, no fuss. There was no delving into the emotions Chandru went through when Ranga left, no overwrought prose about the momentariness of relationships or the unpredictability of life. Ashokamitran just places these bare-bones sentences in front of us, and leaves each of us to deal with the churn caused in our minds. This is a master playing with form to create moments of deep meaning, where time stands still. If this is not style, what is?
I read The 18th Parallel first in English translation about ten years back. I revisited it about two years back, this time in the original Tamil. As I neared the end of this particular chapter, I started to feel a constriction in my throat. Surely it won’t have the same impact on me the second time round, I thought. I was wrong. I again had to stop reading for some time to deal with the inner turmoil. And what was even more cruel — and so typically Ashokamitran — was the very last line of the chapter:
One day Ranga announced that he was leaving Secunderabad, and then his family left the place. Ranga never came back.
And I became captain of our cricket team.
Life goes on.
