| ashu |
Posted
on 25-Jun-01 01:08 AM
Shankar Lamichane: A Fall from Grace?
By Ajit Baral
Shankar Lamichane was long dead. And his books had gone out of circulation. Even the vestige of remembrance of him had faded out of people’s memory. But that was that until Prakash Sayami exhumed him and exalted him to a writer of a large stature-- the stature so large that we only saw the contour minus the blemishes.
So a discussion on Shankar Lamichane and his works was warranted. And Martin Chautari slated a discussion on Abstract Chintan: Pyaz under its Sahitya Chalphal Sringkhala. Consequently, Abstract Chintan: Pyaz came upon the scrutiny of both sadharan and gahan sahitya pathaks.
Abstract Chintan: Pyaz is a collection of essays. It is a Madan Puruskar winning book; by that token one would assume it to be a good book. Surprisingly, most of the participants of the discussion said it isn’t despite the overwhelming acknowledgement of the beauty of Shankar’s writing. In fact, most of the participants were very critical about the book.
Being the Pundit (the one who leads the discussion in Martin Chautari parlance) for that particular discussion, Ashutosh Tiwari was the first to direct barbs against the book when he said the essays lacked coherency—beginning here, then traversing far and wide, but ending no where. It is, he said, like tasting array of delicacies, but returning home empty stomach.
He was right, in a sense. For, the diversity of issues and the depth of knowledge each of Shankar’s essays ride on give one a relishing feeling. But when you come at the end of the essays, you will feel as if you have traveled to a beautiful, bucolic country without capturing the texture, diversity and richness of the country.
Madan Mani Dixit, former head of the Royal Nepal Academy, also echoed Ashutosh’s concern when he said that Shankar’s ideas are very disorderly and unstructured. And it’s the fact that seemed not only to bother most of the readers but also to contribute to the intangibility of the essays. But it is implausible to imply that Shankar’s essays aren’t that good on the basis of seemingly disjointed structure of his essays. For, essays don’t necessarily have to flow in a prescribed framework (convention)—of beginning, middle and end.
Moreover, one can purportedly make his essays incoherent, his ideas unstructured. And it’s precisely because of the play/experiment with the forms and ideas that great works of literature and great writers are born. Would Kafka have been the Kafka we know and Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Marquez we know if they had been happy to work within the space provided by the conventional style of writing?
There have been attempts “to write in a form which appears to be formlessness.” For example, in an interview published in Edward Said’s The Politics of Dispossession, Salman Rushdie quizzes Said thus: “You talked of your namesake novel, The Pessoptimist, as a first manifestation of the attempt to write in a form which appears to be formlessness, and which in fact mirrors the instability of the situation...”
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| ashu |
Posted
on 25-Jun-01 01:13 AM
In reply, Said says, perhaps this is an eccentric view. And gives an example of Kanafani’s The return of Hiafa where, he says, “ …there is temporal motion, in which past, present and future intertwine without any fixed center.” Like Said and Kanafani, Shankar Lamichane’s essays, though a different genre of literature, are a conscious attempt to reflect the instability of the situation.
But why would he write the way he writes? The answer to this question can be sought, I think, in the philosophy (existentialism) and the men (Albert Camus, Henry Miller, etc.) he was influenced by. Seeped as he was with existentialist’s concern, his writings are impregnated with anguish and pessimism, and steeped with paradoxes. They are also reflective of life that is/was full of contradiction, and the absurdity and ambiguity of situation he was in.
And steeped in existential quests, his life was epitome of instability. Also there is no coherency in our ideas, and our life is marked by the contradiction—of ideas, thoughts, behavior, etc. So I find it only fitting that he chose an unusually loose structure for his essays.
Shankar quotes Henry Miller, in one of his essay and also in the mantabbya that he gave after winning the Madan Puruskar, that the coming literature will be more and more about oneself and farther from fiction. He seems to be influenced by Miller’s saying, even though he was working more in the realm of facts then fiction. So his essays, written in a confessional mode, are of an aatmaparak type that engage in the revelation of his self. But despite the indulgence with the self, his ability to mishmash many aspects into Khichadi make his essays a delight to read.
He wrote in a sokh. And became a writer. As is the case with the sokhin writer, his writing is primarily a catharsis of feelings. So we find his writing spontaneous, but meandering. In the meandering we find his emotions and discontent. His discontent with the society was so immense that his is reminiscent of Foucault’s discontent with the French society, a society where, he said somewhat incredulously, not enough dialogue happened.
And that was the time when people like himself, Roland Barthes, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Bourdieu, Mauriac and many more were engaged in intellectual fermentation and in discussing and dissecting thinkers and writers like Nietzsche, Kant, Emile Zola, Heidegger, etc.,. And his hubris, so implicit in his writing, is also reminiscent of Foucault’s whose hubris even the presence of Sartre couldn’t tame. Amidst the discontent and hubris welling up in his writings, we either see an image (false, maybe) of a nonpareil writer or a perfectionist waging a loosing battle.
Whether you like the structure of his essays or not, Shankar is a good essayist. Even his stories are better: better than many. But why would anyone like him should resort to plagiarism? This is beyond imagination. Maybe, his need to plagiarize could be linked with his overt concern with money (the plagiarized pieces would have earned him some money) or the desire to vaunt off the diversity of knowledge (it is highly unlikely that any Nepali could have written that plagiarized pieces given the relatively arcane subject it deals with).
The above two reasons may or may not be the causes that induced him to plagiarize, but there is no doubt that he did plagiarize as he himself acknowledged the plagiarism in no unambiguous terms. He could have however brushed off the accusation and gone to write on. But he hadn’t the brazenness to do so. And happily let himself to fade away into literary anonymity.
(Ajit Baral, an art critic, is affiliated with Martin Chautari
in Kathmandu.)
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