This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels - Softcover

Misra, Subimal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948830159 ISBN 13: 9781948830157

Publisher: Open Letter Books, 2020

Synopsis

Subimal Misra―anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer―is one of India's greatest living writers. This collection of two "anti-novels" is the first of his works to appear in the U.S. "This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale" is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant. "When Color Is a Warning Sign" goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretense of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc. Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order.

About this title

About the Authors

Subimal Misra is a Bengali novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He's considered by many to be one of most important, and experimental, Bengali writers of all time. Heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and William S. Burroughs, Subimal Misra uses various cinematic techniques, like montage, jump-cut etc., in his literary works. And Godard mentioned him as the "Godard of literature." The author of more than a dozen books, this is the first collection of his to appear in the United States.

V. Ramaswamy is a nonfiction writer and translator based in Kolkata, India. As an activist working for the rights of the labouring poor, Ramaswamy has written about workers, squatters, slums, poverty, housing and resettlement, and has been at the forefront of efforts to envision and initiate the rebuilding of his city from the grassroots. Since 2005, he has been translating the short fiction of the Bengali anti-establishment experimental writer, Subimal Misra, whose critical eye examines the society, politics and culture of his time.

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The Anti-Novel

Subimal versus Subimal, continuously, just continuously

He considers his creation to be more powerful than himself, separate from his own existence, confronting him, like another rival. Work is agony for him, he identifies strength with mercilessness and creative work seems to be a fatal yet definitely futile exercise. It’s his own work that stands in opposition to him, against him―something over which he has no control.
―Karl Marx’s words, in my own way.

It’s a harsh and yet an ultimate truth that however great various efforts have been, the possibility of failure exists just as much within them. And it’s also an ultimate truth―that there’s no ultimate truth, there cannot be. Everything is only apparent, dialectical. In a society in which only things possesses value, man too has become another one among countless things, and apparently he is the one that is, relatively speaking, most easily procurable and the most despicable. It’s the so-called bourgeois humanism, which overwhelms all our thinking and which we brag about―and has been strongly criticized in my anti-novels (and stories too), from various viewpoints, in different contexts―but it has only failed terribly. Yet I must say once again, it excludes man himself in the name of humanity, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

This is the ultimate elucidation of the anti-establishment mentality, which is not really backed by any isms currently on offer, it also hurls questions at whatever has been recognized to date as great art and literature and at all the other aesthetics surrounding us. Yes questions are raised in every regard, difficult, harsh, a harshness pervaded by questions, nothing is settled unless place and time are bound, nothing is true, everything is relative―that’s the direction truth heads towards. We are dependent beings living in an era when even the most fundamental expression of beauty has come to be true, and if taken properly, this statement too is relative. What is the subject? We see that writing comes to occupy a kind of place where sometimes, by some method, the act of writing itself becomes the real subject, shabda is then not merely brahma but brahmanda, not merely creation but the universe. It resides in a kind of unfettered narration. And through that it becomes the supreme literature of protest. Protest is opposed to any kind of stagnancy, protest is opposed to every kind of inhumanity donning the mask of humanity. Finally, it does not remain a novel, there’s no smooth story-form with a beginning and an end, no so-called character construction. It is neither history nor a diary, not an essay either, nor research―and yet everything―cuttings, newspapers, campaigns, news, pamphlets, proclamations, a glowing true story―an admixture in collage, montage and new form―and in the traditional viewpoint, an un-corrected form of writing―extremely fragmented, obviously in an apparent way―which does not reach any conclusion, in the sense in which the term ‘conclusion’ is understood.

Here the reader is not ignored either, the reader too is a comrade-in-arms with the writer in the creative act, sometimes the writer and reader merge into one. There is no longer any difference between "him" and "me," possibly it is not even necessary. The hiatus between place and time is gradually wiped away. Real incidents and imagination do not go hand-in-hand, rather they are completely intertwined, they cannot be separated. Sexuality is transgressed in a kind of opaque torpor, somewhat like another Hiroshima Mon Amour. And so naturally, complexity becomes a feature in its construction, all the commas on the verge of exclusion . . . Hadn’t Apollinaire done that so long ago, various passages entering into the same sentence, incomplete subjects from before suddenly returning without prior preparation, the insertion, while dwelling on one thing, of a long digression on something else, consciously sometimes, bearing in mind the helplessness of the reader as well. Yes, the reader too has to participate in the creative act. It is definitely not a story, and neither really an incident either. Again, where necessary, inwardly, everything, everything is raw material then―the way raw material is, the way it is used. The original grassroots form emerges in the language, raw, which this techno-progress-professing civilized society does not permit at all times, sometimes new word constructions too take place. Thinking is apprehended from its source. Not an explanation of emotion and feeling, rather, their union emerges in fragments. In short, in the midst of resorting to the material, seeking questions going beyond the material, searching, keeping oneself and one’s act of writing occupied in this search. In this context, the established forms of realism also arise. Even if reality―which for me is a situation of conflict between past and future―is not merely a fixed moment of unchanging present, there is an endeavour to try to capture that in my anti-novels, in some places. Just that.

In this way, gradually, everyone from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky is left behind, Joyce-Proust-Borges and Kafka-Camus most definitely, for that matter Beckett of Malone Dies, Michel Butor of La Modification, Robbe-Grillet of La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Burroughs of Naked Lunch and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. of Slaughterhouse-Five. Also discarded are Bengal’s Manik, Satinath, Jagadish Gupta, Dhurjotiprasad, Kamalkumar, Waliullah and Amiyabhushan―whom, at least, even if partially, at one time, he used to acknowledge, could acknowledge, used to be content acknowledging. So who remains then? Other than the arrogant Subimal? Subimal then stands in opposition to Subimal, against all his writings to date. He gradually keeps discarding himself. He himself raises questions regarding his own position. All his work stands in opposition to him, all this is not for himself, for he is not in control of all this.


Addendum Most of the writers in our country, for that matter abroad as well, lay emphasis on so-called reality. Some on "normalcy" as well. The basic foundation of popular literature is more or less built upon the stilts of all such reality. In the early phase of writing of some of these writers from the traditional stream, a stamp of intellectual maturity could be observed. But subsequently it did not develop further. They portray characters, they write stories of personal relationships, some of them leave out events too, it is explanation of character that is their prime concern. The same old blah-blah, which had already reached a dead-end several decades ago. For some, portraying the background is the real task, with the characters appearing to have been pasted with gum onto that, sometimes it is extremely lengthy―which was the ideal of novelists of the nineteenth century. We have already received War and Peace, Buddenbrooks, Pather Panchali or Todai Charitmanas. What is to be gained by preparing another copy of all these? None of them seemed to realize that the very highest stage of description of events, portrayal of character or explanation of mind had been crossed long ago in Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, or in The Puppet’s Tale in recent times. Again, in the view of some camps, the perspective on society does the main job and based on that thinking they construct characters, with talk of "socialist reality" on their lips. Notwithstanding an abundance of pedantic writing, the experts were unable to look at this thing called "socialist reality" in isolation from so-called reality, they could not accurately explain this sorry state. [Possibly Maxim Gorky, while speaking about "critical realism," was responsible for putting into currency its polar opposite, the term "socialist realism." Even if that is attached to the socialist world and the writer’s commitment to workers―if I assume so―nonetheless, its use in the practical sphere is, at least now, not as clear as necessary.] In this regard, in another context, Arnold Hauser’s or Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist explanations and analyses could not satisfy us adequately either. And there is another band whose tendency is to create psychological novels. They don’t care about reality and suchlike, there are some young writers like that too. In their writing, they want to lay emphasis on form, in their view the subject does not change, only the form changes over time. I consider my writing, whatever little there is, a few stories and novels, to be different from all these forebears, and I say this without any arrogance whatsoever. When any stationary or moving thing is presented directly, in many cases its actual visage cannot be captured, but if bits and pieces of myriad incidents, characters, diaries, reportage, comments―if all these, everything in accordance with the time, from different viewpoints, can be projected, are sought to be shown, then it could well be the initiation of a different kind of endeavor. Actually the real objective is to be able to reach truth, an immutable route-circumambulation, most difficult, which literature has been trying to do for two-and-a-half thousand years (or is it three thousand), but has been successful only in very few instances. Obviously one cannot but admit that all such thinking has arisen as an outcome of decadence, and together with that it is also true that much new thinking―as well as the possibility of the opening up of avenues for ways of expression―is also manifested in this very fashion, it manifests class struggle, and going further, even the possibility of revolution. In this way, our demolitions are able to transcend meaninglessness, they attain a larger dimension. Revolutionary presentation too becomes inevitable for what is revolutionary. Personally speaking, I try my best to come face-to-face with truth, practically applying all my anti-convention forms, which are dialectical, present a different point of view―a density―which have the gall to stand in the opposite corner, face-to-face with oneself. Yes, face-to-face with oneself, in no uncertain terms. When will you ever show the gall to be able to efface yourself, will you be able to do that, Subimal? When will you go beyond this long journey―ridden with contradictions? There is no end to man going on creating himself, there has never been, Subimal. Because―when a medium as powerful as literature begins to speak in a single mould and tune, what then can cause more despair than that, what can there be?


Further Addendum

All this talk of mine will appear, or may appear, to some people to be merely advocacy in favour of form-centricity. In our so-called progressive criticism, on the one side are placed all those literary creations, which are clearly straightforward, real incidents or established on proximate visualization, and on the other side are placed all those creative works that did not follow the ordinary rules of reality. After qualitative examination, the first, which speak in one’s favor, are considered progressive, and the other side is labelled as reactionary, practicing the literary art of decadence. The oversimplification of such a formula is a big fissure in the stream of Marxist criticism, its gaping maw widens. In the literary arts, the evolutionary viewpoint does not always remain in our sight. We forget that the different schools of thought in currency at different times, despite their dialectical limitations, attain the mantle of the historical and artistic truth of the time. Sometimes, those parts of all these ‘decadent creations’ are granted recognition when they are related only to realism and are located at a comfortable distance from all the acts of anti-realism. Actually the non-dialectical viewpoint is apparent within the use of reality as a measure of qualitative ascent. In reality, however, as an example one can say that the witches drawn by Goya are more real than many of the so-called realist works of art, El Greco’s realization is more visible to our eyes than Constable’s. Shakespeare common folk are more alive than the masses portrayed in the post-revolutionary social reality formulae, Don Quixote and his companions are much more real. Tolstoy’s characters are also just as alive. Notwithstanding all the clamor regarding social reality, never could those reach anywhere close to these portrayals. Moving away from so-called traditional arrangement, Mayakovsky demolished poetry mercilessly, but his form was potent enough to realize revolutionary realism, something that had never been seen in the flowing stream of poetry. Brecht presented another imaginary world, in a different form, which unmasked the bourgeois social system, with an imagination that was much sharper than the dull reality of the popular stream. Mayakovsky or Brecht used all their demolitions and experiments as one of the weapons of class struggle, and if we forget this fact and cry hoarse about their form-consciousness then we will simply jumble up everything―which is the case in our popular Marxist criticism. Because all these are not the cause of decadence, not at all, rather they are its outcome, a movement through historical progression.

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1948830159
• ISBN 13: 9781948830157
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296