Readers Write In #658: My two more cents on Serious Literature

By G Waugh

The first book that had completely left me baffled was The Nausea by Sartre. I didn’t know why I had chosen that book. In those years, the first few months when I was trying to make baby steps into the world of literature, whatever I had done was solely with an intent to ‘show off’. I wanted to show my friends who were fast turning themselves into carbon copies of each other in the mind-numbing assembly line of the world of Information Technology, that I was somebody who could be simply ‘different’. In the first three years, almost every single college-mate-turned colleague of mine in that ‘IT bellwether’ organization was trying to outshine each other in the race towards becoming ‘the most industrious and the most adaptable techie’ ever- someone who could transform into anything that the industry badly wanted- a tree that could bend on all four directions the wind blew. All of them took a lot of pride in that and when you tried to examine their tastes and preferences when it came to anything other than ‘work’ – Christopher Nolan, iPhones, Chetan Bhagat, Sidney Sheldon, Ravinder Singh, Fifty Shades of Grey, the grand Marvel movies, Ponniyin Selvan, Narendra Modi, Amish Tripathi, APJ Abdul Kalam, Game of Thrones and Korean series – you could easily confine their range and draw it on the backside of a one-rupee stamp.

It was not that I did not like any of the aforementioned list of personalities and their work. It was just that I badly wanted to show that I could do more. I not only wanted to fit in but also show my friends that I could transcend them- or their range. If they liked comedy films and wanted to book for the First Day First Show of The Hangover, I had no problems accompanying them. But during my conversation with them during popcorn-filled intervals, I wanted to show that I knew someone who does better at the same genre of movies – Woody Allen. In fact, he was active and making the fabulous Midnight in Paris then. If they wanted to watch beautifully animated Pixar films, I wanted to tell them during our return journey from the theatre that I knew someone called Hayao Miyazaki who made even better animated films than his Pixar counterparts. I was almost the only one who loved Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 2011 when all my friends were going gaga over the latest X-men and Transformers movies the same year.

But there was always a problem- whenever I was recommending these films to my friends and assuming that I was doing the nobler task of elevating their tastes to a newer high, I didn’t understand and appreciate the fact that I was just making a joke out of myself by becoming one of the gang’s most despicable creatures – the super-proud, perennially hubristic, the high-browed Snob. Yes, when I look at those days in retrospect, I was doing exactly what I would have hated today if someone were doing the same to me.

But wait, was that all my fault?

I would probably beg to differ.

The films I had recommended, the books that I had the distinction of accompanying in public during my daily train journeys to Paranur, all of them had a singular quality to it. The more I was trying to explain their significance to my friends, the more I wasas I did not know then, only ending up belittling them. When I introduced Miyazaki’s Spirited Away to my friend who was a big Pixar fan, he came back to me completely disappointed for having wasted his time. When I tried to explain to him for some fifteen minutes or so how wonderful the film was and how deeply personal it was to me, I couldn’t understand then that my friend was all the while trying hard to stifle his yawn in order not to offend me.

All these films and books some of which can be classified into what is often called ‘serious’ works have one thing in common – the way they convey themselves to those who consume them. Not every line or phrase or character in these works is meant to be read, understood, distinguished and then assimilated into your consciousness. In fact, the conventional means of acquiring knowledge by studiously going through textbooks should be completely subverted here. You are not going on an Indiana Jones- like expedition to acquire the Holy Grail where every corner of the thicket bears some significance to your mission and every step across the apparently gently gurgling stream has the potential to seal your fate during the dangerous journey. In fact, the books and movies that are titled ‘serious’ ones demand something rare and completely different from the reader – to put it simply, the callousness of a free-spirited wanderer.

When I was watching The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, I couldn’t understand even one frame of the film. As I grew along the years, by experience and inferences mostly self-drawn, the same didn’t happen when I stumbled upon Bergman’s most celebrated classic, Persona. When someone asks me, why I like that film, the most honest response must be ‘I simply don’t know’. I just went along the dreamily composed frames of Sven Nykvist as it took me and permitted my senses to wander across. The experience was, to be honest, enthralling.

One of the most precious assets that came in handy during those free-spirited journeys was my willingness to not only suspend my disbelief but also my large and unwieldy ‘moral compass’. In Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum, the lead character badly wants to screw his step-mother. In Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the hero Saleem has a big crush on his sister Jameela (she is not actually his sister which I think he learns only later). Things such as your assiduously constructed moral compasses and your keenly developed political consciousness and judgment- every single one of them could turn out to be huge baggage and dead weights during your journeys into these works. If you think you are someone who cannot tolerate child sexual abuse, you cannot stand even one paragraph of Nabokov’s Lolita. I will leave it to you to find out whose loss is that.

You should first be willing to take orders from the creators of these works blindly with of course, implicit obedience. When you are leafing through the vivid descriptions of the underage Lolita’s sexuality by the protagonist Humbert, remember that you are just peeking into the mind of a pervert and that is all. I admit I had a few boners while reading the book but it is not something that I must be guilty about. In fact, I have during my late teens, conceived and secretly nurtured midnight fantasies about my 40-year-old tuition teacher and the only thing that distinguished me from a juvenile offender was that all of them finally ended up staying safely inside my head, having absolutely no life outside.

Another most important thing that you need during these journeys must be what is often today in quite short supply- patience. The willingness to surrender yourself to the vision of the creator must be accompanied with oodles and oodles of patience. The long winding descriptions of the writer of a certain landscape such as what is often seen in the works of Thomas Hardy may not add anything substantial to the story he is trying to tell. But the impressions you exposed yourself to when you were wading through those apparently useless verbiage have the quality of sticking to the surfaces of your consciousness with considerable longevity. And as you trudge across the pages in another one hour or so, a sudden incident of no immediate consequence to the story might leave a completely different and lasting effect upon you, central to which were the impressions that were sown inside you when you were grappling with author’s assumed penchant for flowery indulgence in those previously descriptive paragraphs.

All of this is a way of conveying only one thing- the aims and ambitions of a serious work is not to inform or enlighten or educate or even to sensationalize the reader. The creator of such a work would have only wanted to convey the gravity and effect of a particular experience he had supposedly undergone or conceived in his head. All that he wants to accomplish through his work is to pass that to you. If you could experience even a small inkling of that and see what he had undergone just like how when John Coffey touches Paul’s hands in Frank Darabont’s Green Mile and Paul sees Coffey’s visions mysteriously, the work of the creator can be said to have achieved its purpose.

There is no way a reader like me can explain the greatness of such a work through logical explanations, practical analogies or sound examples to anyone. The intensity of serious literature probably lies in the impossibility of expounding and logically deconstructing its greatness. In critic Baradwaj Rangan’s words, a serious work should probably engage more with the heart than with the head. I get reminded about a line in one of Anurag Kashyap’s shorts in Lust Stories when Radhika Apte tells her boyfriend when he tries to explain how great the previous night’s sex was.

‘No, don’t explain and spoil it’.

Anyway I no longer want to remain a snob and would like to conclude this essay with a line from a Thalaivar movie. The female lead in Aarilirunthu Arubadhu Varai would ask Rajni on why he is so bent on reading serious works of literature. Thalaivar would explain in his own inimitable way,

‘To those who cannot understand, the greatness of these works cannot be explained at all. And well, for those who can understand, there is absolutely no need to explain at all.’