Review: Against Storytelling edited by Amit Chaudhuri
A collection of essays by a range international writers belongs neither to academia nor to the commercial publishing industry but is rich in both theory and insight
Against Storytelling, edited by author and academic Amit Chaudhuri, is an eclectic collection of essays and criticism by an international group of writers, including himself, on the theme of storytelling.
The provocatively titled book, not surprisingly, belongs fully neither to academia nor to the commercial publishing industry but is rich in both theory and insight. This slim volume comprises papers presented at the fourth Literary Activism symposium jointly hosted by Ashoka University and the University of East Anglia in February 2018 in New Delhi. Chaudhuri, who is a professor of creative writing at Ashoka University, says the idea was conceived about a decade ago, when he interrupted a talk he was giving to international writers to say, “Fuck Storytelling.”
There were two reasons for his outburst. “The first had to do with the fact that – given we live in an ethos in which the event is of primary significance, and whatever is significant has to be construed as an event of some sort – it follows that part of the reason stories are important is because they contain a happening, or happenings, in a character’s or a place’s life. It also follows that the eventless can’t be the proper subject of a story.”
The second reason has to do with the fact that he was uneasy with the idea that ‘storytelling’ is a feature of non-Western culture, and a “valuable resource, as a result, of a postcolonial politics that sets itself up against Enlightenment.”
He admits that non-Western modes of artistic expression reveal “a deep commitment to forms outside of what we now think of as ‘narrative’ (synecdoche, for instance, and other means of poetic elision.)”
To illustrate his point, he writes about the opening sections of VS Naipaul’s books such as A House of Mr. Biswas, Guerillas, In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival and An Area of Darkness as well as Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
“What kind of text is produced by an artist who doesn’t want the moment of possibility to be closed down by the compulsion or the need to tell? Once you commit to telling, the moment in the opening paragraph is over,” he writes.
“Naipaul himself is a fundamental example of a writer who sometimes begins with astonishing pages of lifelikeness, but then not so much loses the plot, or loses himself to a plot, but takes on upon himself fetters that are clearly unwanted.”
Alongside Chaudhuri, the book contains essays by Tiffany Atkinson, Jeremy Harding, Charles Bernstein, Anjum Hasan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geoffrey O’Brien, Jean-Frederic Chevallier, and Gurvinder Singh.
Poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra ponders on the significance of the works of Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla. His piece has a charming old-fashioned simplicity just like the life and works of his subject. Commenting on one of Shukla’s early poems from 1960, Mehrotra writes that the author brings a lightness of touch to his works and simplicity that is the hallmark of his writings.
“Making do with very little, or rather making with very little he uses materials that are of the simplest: a man, a bicycle, the falling leaf of a neem tree, dry and yellow and brittle, yet substantial enough to bear the weight of the narrative.”
He further adds: “I say weight, though what I want to suggest is lightness.”
Since he writes in Hindi, Shukla has evaded the accolades that have been showered upon English language writers of India and abroad. A striking anecdote has Shukla being shocked at seeing people lining up holding books at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2011. He was puzzled when he was told that they were all waiting to get their books signed by JM Coetzee, a winner of the Nobel Prize. “Moreover, the name Coetzee meant nothing to him, nor did the names of the other world writers present on the occasion,” Mehrotra writes.
It’s hard to make out if Shukla is against storytelling. Judging by the story titled The Burden (1963), quoted by Mehrotra in the essay, he may be both against and for it.
Novelist Anjum Hasan’s essay discusses the works of Kiran Nagarkar such as Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three, Ravan and Eddie, and Cuckold. “Nagarkar’s experiments with different forms and styles in these three novels – and his ability to incorporate so many accents – is evidence of writerly virtuosity but it also suggests a restless search for the perfect vehicle to express this artistic authenticity in the cause of his humanism.” She writes that Nagarkar is at once a storyteller and against storytelling as his novels are “both scrupulously particular and widely resonant.”
Amit Chaudhuri must be congratulated for bringing out this book as part of the Literary Activism series. It is precisely through such platforms that the works of those writing in English like Naipaul, Hindi writers like Shukla, and those working in both Marathi and English like Nagarkar can be discussed in a single volume.
Tsering Namgyal Khortsa is a writer and journalist living in Dehra Dun.