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BOOKS
Master and the Mundane
Why R.K. Narayan's non-fiction is a few words away
from greatness.
By R. Raj Rao
When R. K. Narayan's
father advised him to read the essays of Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay,
he thought his old man had gone bonkers. This is because he found their
essays heavy and terrifying and preferred the lighter stuff of Charles
Lamb and E. V. Lucas.
Taking time off from his novels, Narayan wrote
his own essays as a sort of answer to daddy. He describes them in two
words: short and discursive. He wrote them all his life, some as a weekly
column for The Hindu, which he had "rashly undertaken to earn a regular
income", others as travelogues of his jaunts abroad; still others
as a means of self-expression. The essays have been put together in a
commemorative volume to mark the passing away of Narayan at the age of
96.
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R.K. NARAYAN: THE WRITERLY LIFE (SELECTED
NON-FICTION)
Ed by S. Krishnan
Viking
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 517
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Narayan's essays
reveal that like his cartoonist brother R.K. Laxman, he had a satirical
eye for the follies and foibles of middle-class India. Whether it is innocuous
words on how the average Indian spends his Sundays, loses umbrellas and
conducts himself on a train or a serious comment on university education
and the farcical nature of the Nobel Prize, he views it all with ironic
distance. This, as his admirers will recall, was how he dealt with his
novels as well. (The paradox, of course, is that for all the caricaturing,
Narayan never himself rejected the middle class; he was very much a part
of it.)
Narayan's essays are important because they
give us an insight into the man. His novels don't, or perhaps do so only
partially, because unlike Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, who padded their
fictions with ideology, Narayan was the most writerly of the Big Three,
for whom appearance and reality did not go hand-in-hand. After all, his
novels are set in the imaginary town of Malgudi and deal with individuals
rather than issues. As he found himself struggling to express to students
of a mid-western American university (where he'd gone as distinguished
visiting professor), "my novel The Guide was not about the saints
or pseudo-saints of India, but about a particular person".
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SATIRICAL EYE: For Narayan, appearance
and reality did not go hand-in-hand
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EXCERPT
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... As soon as the lights
are on, there comes along the first member-a pale little body poised
on flimsy transparent wings. It circles round the light. One would
think that it had a purpose or limit, but its circumambulations grow
beyond count. Before you say, "Here is another!" there are
five more, and very soon, imperceptibly, as many as thousands have
gathered round the light-quite a cloud of them, like the photograph
of bombers poised over a doomed city ...They gyrate till their wings
drop off and then trail along the edge of the floor behind one another
helplessly, "eyeless in Gaza". ... As any householder knows,
a basin of water placed under the light draws away most of the circumambulating
crowd to a watery grave ...
-From "The Winged Ants" |
Larger questions, paradigms, categories and grids
then eluded his novels; but these are not without value, for only when
we know where a man is coming from can we understand him fully. This question
is answered in the essays. Narayan proves that his constituency is the
artist's, to whom, as Joyce said, silence, exile and cunning are virtues.
They ensure that he is a spectator and not a participant in life's Olympics.
But did Narayan succeed in mastering the personal
essay? The essays in this book vary in quality. Whereas the ones in My
Dateless Diary (about his stint in America) are substantial, my response
to the shorter pieces is lukewarm. They are exercises in minimalism, no
doubt, but they end before Narayan has managed to capture us in their
flow. How we wish he would explore more! His conclusions, frequently,
are no more than truisms, even if we make allowances for the fact that
they were penned half a century ago. He isn't able to end his essays the
way he masterfully ended, say, The Guide.
Again, Narayan's prose gives us the feeling
that spontaneity was more worthwhile to him than elegance and economy
which are achieved only when an author fastidiously revises. Indeed, the
excess words in many of his sentences could be squeezed out by none other
than a skilful copy editor. But then, who is a copy editor to tamper with
Narayan's manuscript? When one is R. K. Narayan, one is sacrosanct.
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