QUEENIE by ALICE MUNRO

This time, the review is written by my 13 year old daughter,CHINMAYI.B.S.

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     Life is a drama. It is about how we choose to live, about the arising problems in relationships, domestic tragicomedy, ups and downs, why we act, about making decisions-whether right or wrong and is certainly about moving on. A similar thought is given out through one of the most marvellous pieces of fiction- a story- ‘Queenie’. ‘Queenie’ is an English story written by the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Alice Munro.

     'Queenie' is an honest, intuitive and a beautiful piece of fiction. The book consists of 62 pages of plot, which takes very less time for us to finish reading it, and gives us a panoramic view of what is going on.

    Named after the main character, the book is about a woman named ‘Queenie’ (her real name is Lena) who elopes with her neighbour Mr.Vorguilla (Stan as she calls him) only after a week of his wife's funeral. After two years of their marriage Chrissy (our narrator) and Queenie’s step sister accidently meets Queenie while she is searching for a new summer job in Toronto before she starts her career as a schoolteacher. During her stay with Queenie, Chrissy learns that Queenie works in a theatre and Mr.Vorguilla plays music at a restaurant. Chrissy comes to know more about life and fancies about being a part of Queenie’s life.

    The first section talks about the present whereas the next takes us to the past. That is quite interesting. At a Christmas party, Queenie forgets where she had kept the cake, it triggers a quarrel between Queenie, and Mr. Vorguilla.But Queenie apologizes to Mr. Vorguilla even though Mr.Vorguilla is wrong. I think it shows the male chauvinism in the society and women’s subjugation to it. The point at which Mr.Vorguilla chokes Queenie for telling lies to him and his question ‘Now, are you going to teach me logic?’ make it clear.

     Chrissy gets a job at a drugstore temporarily but she is fired on the very first day. Although the book is about Queenie, the feelings and the thoughts are of Chrissy. It is through her point of view that we understand the story. It tells us about her concepts, her attitude and her interests.

    Later Chrissy works at a Teacher’s college where she gets a letter from her father stating that Queenie has eloped again. Even years after Chrissy’s marriage, she gets a Christmas card from Mr.Vorguilla. Her children were grown up and her husband had retired. Chrissy and her husband travel a lot now but she always has an idea that she will meet Queenie some day.

    At their last meeting in a supermarket, ‘the woman’(Queenie) smiles at Chrissy with merriment of recognition but Chrissy only stretches her mouth as if to a loony stranger and then keeps going towards the check-out. She repents of it later but it is too late.

    The book leaves us many questions unresolved. Queenie’s latest husband, her abode, her thoughts, point of view, her feelings...everything still remains a mystery. ’Queenie’ is, however, a book which is synonymous to the word perfection. The style, the form in which it was written is remarkable. In a few words, this book conveys more. It casts a spell on anyone who reads it. It is a true masterpiece.

Mo Yan's World in RED SORGHUM

Sorghum, though not red

Guan Moye is the real name of Mo Yan.He was born in the same province that provides the setting of his novel ‘Red Sorghum’.

Mo Yan’s narrative technique involves even the minute details of every incident and location in the novel.

Mo Yan

An example from the first chapter of ‘Red Sorghum’:

 

‘The surrounding mist grew more sluggish once they were in the sorghum field. The stalks screeched in secret resentment when the men and equipment bumped against them, sending large, mournful beads of water splashing to the ground. The water was ice-cold, clear and sparkling, and deliciously refreshing. Father looked up, and a large drop fell into his mouth.’

Even those who have not walked through such a field in their life may feel the splash of water beads on their face when they read it.

This is the field where the main heroine, Dai Fanglian- the novelist’s grandma, is ‘raped’ or  ‘consummated’ at the age of fifteen by his granddad. When you read the novel, you understand why both these terms are correct to refer to the sex they had among the sorghum stalks. The way she is betrothed to Shan Bianlang, the richest man in the Northeast Gaomi Township and carried away in a sedan chair later will clarify your doubt.

Shan Tingxiu, the groom’s father one day spots her among other ‘local flowers’ and three months later a bridal sedan chair is sent to carry her away. Like every girl of her age, she too longed for a handsome and well-educated husband.

In the days after the betrothal, girls hear pleasant sexual innuendoes usually from their friends but here what she hears is about the leprosy of her groom. Her dreams evaporate. She still believes her parents. She hopes that they will never plan anything bad for her. However, to her dismay, she understands the truth from the sedan bearers later.

                Even today, many girls have no say in choosing their life partners in many parts of this world. The part in which I live is no exception to it. Some are even deprived of their right to show their face to their fellow-beings. They are hidden in dark clothes through out their life. Nevertheless, a highly fanatic or patriarchal set up, without any scruple, claims that their women are freer under their ‘protection’. Any attempt to challenge this conviction by a non-member of such groups will be interpreted as blasphemous or against their faith.

Social myths are often interwoven with religious faith and different peoples who follow the same religion construe these myths as the inevitable part of their religion.

Although China is a nation whose foundations are thought to be cemented with the tenets of dialectical materialism, people still cherish some mythical notions.

If you are cruel to your pets or domestic animals, you should be ready to ‘reap what you have sown’.

Does Mo Yan tell this to us indirectly in this novel?

Uncle Arhat kills his mules brutally in a rage and a few hours later he is killed by the Japanese army in the same manner. On a few other occasions also, you find similar incidents.

Old Geng otherwise called Eighteen Stabs Geng, a pensioner over seventy, shoots a fox and a few seconds later the Japanese soldiers bayonet him. Whether foxes, dogs, or roosters as the victims, the sinner is, however, ‘paid for his sin’.

         Even in the case of human beings, it is the same. Japanese soldiers rape many women to death during their siege .Especially, the way the novelist’s second grandma and her ten-year-old daughter were treated by the army depicts the horror of war. Such soldiers- ‘Japanese dogs’- in the words of the hero and his men in the novel – are killed in a similar way by  Granddad later.

                The number of people killed during the Sino- Japanese war  varies in accordance with different sources.Athough the number varies from one another, the word ‘million’ is used by everyone to refer to it.

                 The war in the 1930 –s is called the Second Sino- Japanese war. Many people, particularly in China, are still said to harbour grudges over the war.

 

                In 1972, however, the People’s Republic of China established a diplomatic relationship with Japan. When the then Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, during their meeting, personally apologised to Mao Zedong for the incident, Mao said:

                “(You) don't have to say sorry; your country had made a great contribution to China. Why? Because if Imperial Japan did not start the war, how could we communists become mighty and powerful? How could we overthrow KMT? How could we defeat Chiang Kai-shek? No, we are grateful and do not want your war reparations!”

                (If that is the point, Indians must be thankful to the British in many ways.)

                The war started in the early thirties and the meeting between Mao and Tanaka was in the early seventies. Mo Yan was born in 1956. When his Granddad (Commander Yu in the novel) fought the Japanese army, his father (Douguan in the novel) was a young boy. Douguan witnessed the ambush directly and he led his life in the post-war period. He fought the dogs feeding on the corpses of war victims. The dogs themselves were an army. When his Granddad’s generation fought the Japanese army, they called the enemies ‘Japanese dogs.’ His father’s generation in Red Sorghum could not have considered the dogs ‘Japanese’ because they ate human flesh – whether of the Japanese or of the Chinese. As the novelist writes, ‘months of vagabond lives and feasting on rotting meat had awakened primal memories anaesthetised over aeons and domestication’. We learn that, in a war zone, the ‘two-legged creatures that walk erect’ are not different from such dogs.

Sedan bearers including Granddad - A still from the movie Red Sorghum

                The novelist indirectly tells us that domestication is a social and historical condition. When history leads us to the situations that awaken primal memories, man ceases to be humane and becomes simply a two-legged creature that walks erect. As public memory is short, after the revival of humane qualities, the new generation keeps on their journey to future with a ‘let bygones be bygones’-attitude.In a sense, it is as important as the need to keep up the memories of the past. Raking up the past with minute details is a herculean task. That is what Mo Yan does here. The structure of the novel itself makes it clear. A summary of the first chapter itself will elucidate it.

                Mo Yan begins the first chapter of ‘Red Sorghum’ giving us the idea that it is autobiographical. The heroine and the hero mentioned in the novel are his grandma and granddad. Although his father Douguan witnessed most of the incidents in the novel, he did not have the literary acumen or necessary insight to pen them.

                Take the following words of the narrator about Douguan:

 

He never knew how many sexual comedies my grandma had performed on this dirt path, but I knew.

 

The novel comprises frequent flashbacks that span three generations.

             From the first part of the first chapter itself, we learn the narrator’s relationship with the main characters.

 In the second part of the same chapter, you find his granddad and his father wading their way through the corpses driving a pack of dogs that are feeding on the rotten corpses.

                In the third part, read about Commander Yu and his troop comprising a few of the villagers.

                The next paragraph is the continuation of it in which Douguan is pulled along with Commander Yu.

                The fifth piece tells us what his father, Grandma and Uncle Arhat ate.

                Next paragraph: the shocking, brutal murder of Uncle Arhat by the Japanese army. They skin him alive.(Sun Five, the man who does it as no other option was left before him, goes mad.)

                Again, memory shifts to Commander Yu and his valour.

                Thus the seven ‘chunks’ make your reading memorable through the ‘events of staggering horror’ as the blurb claims. By the end of this first chapter itself, you get the feeling that you are not going to have the reading experience of a family drama with a simple love affair or domestic squabbles.

Any novel spanning more than two generations reminds us first of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Hundred years of Solitude’, especially when we find magical elements in it. On the cover page of the novel ‘ Red sorghum’,  Amy Tan , a well-known American novelist, says that Mo Yan deserves a space with Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the heart of the readers.

            Mo Yan’s characters in ‘Red Sorghum’ belong to Shandong Province, a northeast part of China, the place where the central theme spins around with the saga of the first generation in the novel.

            All the troops who fought against the Japanese army were not the personnel of the Chinese army. Yu Zhan’ao was the son of a bandit. He was, in a sense, a bandit king who commanded a troop of bandits against the invaders from Japan.

            The wounds that the war inflicted in the heart of the people of ‘Red Sorghum’ were inexplicable. Mo Yan’s narration has photographic fidelity to all the events. He depicts the war front-turned village very vividly. Even the slightest movement of a leaf nearby and the colour of the rectum of the flying crows after feeding on the corpses are described better than an eyewitness could do it. The director of the film ‘Red Sorghum’ has tried to include maximum details as such in his movie based on the novel but when we watch it, we miss the details unless we watch it repeatedly. (I watched the movie and as it was before I completed reading the novel, it had profound influence on my mental images of the characters. Granddad in the movie best fits my imagination of the character in the novel.) When we read the novel, we never feel like skipping his descriptions of its location or characters. In fact, these descriptions make the novel a treat to our reading.

            The narrator, his father and granddad are the three characters which link the three periods in the history. The scenes, that show us how inhuman can human beings be in a warfront, make us dumbfounded. Two of the horrific scenes in the post-war (or ‘after the ambush’ period) are when the dogs chew up the thighs of the dead women and they attack Douguan (narrator’s father) resulting in the loss of one of his testicles.Such scenes make us think of the gruesome consequence of a war. The wounds left by war in the minds of the survivors take long time to heal.

            Granddad first kills a monk who would sleep with his mother and then Dai fenglian’s husband the leper and his son. The next one is the murder of Spotted Neck. By the time he became commander Yu, he was on a ‘killing spree’.

            During his fight with the Japanese, a Japanese soldier attacked by him pleads for his life. The soldier shows the photos of his wife and a child and ‘whimpers’. Commander’s son (i.e. the narrator’s father) requests him to let the Japanese go. However, Yu does not spare his life. We may think how cruel he is  but when we read about  the brutalities of the Japanese soldiers to his family, later i.e. the way his pregnant wife (Second grandma) and their ten year old daughter, were treated, the lack of mercy that granddad showed to the soldier who pleaded mercy is vindicated. (A Japanese soldier who survived the war can of course write another novel from his point of view.) But whatever may be the reasons, it is a fact that wars kill not only the living things, but also obliterate the qualities that human beings have acquired through their social life.

            You must have already noted the peculiar names of some characters mentioned already. The heroine Dai Fenglian is also called ‘Little Nine’ just because she was born on the ninth day of the sixth month. The novel begins with the phrase ‘The ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939’                 

            The magistrate Nine Dreams Cao, Five Monkeys Shan, Five Troubles, Fang Six, Fang Seven, Big Tooth Yu, Black Eye, and Spotted Neck, Eighteen stabs Geng...

            You find the names quite funny but they are not funny characters. The incidents with which they are associated  cannot be considered funny. However, there are humorous incidents in the novel. The secret of the taste of Sorghum Wine is one of them.

            The heroine Dai Fenglian (Little Nine) is never touched by her leper husband but the propaganda that she has been touched saves her from some sexual assaults.

Little Nine from the movie Red Sorgum

            In fact, her legal husband and his son were killed by Commander Yu before they could touch the lady. She becomes the legal heir of the rich distillery and later, when she is kidnapped by Spotted Neck, he does not dare to do anything  other than to ‘feel her breast’. It is this bit of information that leads the narrator’s Granddad to the incidents that prove his determination and valour as a fighter. He kills spotted Neck.

            Anyway, the reading of the novel ‘Red Sorghum’ will lead you through many breathtaking incidents. But those who expect only the details of the communist upsurge or anti- communist connotations may not derive much satisfaction in their reading. Whatever may be your reason for reading it, ‘Red Sorghum’ will arrest your attention until the last word in it.

            I tried to associate it with a few other books based on the life of the people of China. Jack Belden’s ‘China Shakes the World’ gives us almost a clear picture of China especially during the much-feted Cultural Revolution.  ‘An African Student in China’ by Emmanuel John Hevi caters to the needs of anti- communist readers. ‘To Live’, a novel by Yu Hua presents the life of the people in China from a different point of view. The Sino - Japanese war, nationalists and communists play significant roles in the lives of the characters in his novel too.

 But Mo Yan’s style of narration is unique and, most probably, that is why he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The world that the novel ‘Red Sorghum’ opens before us is a grim reminder to warmongers. 

 

           

 

THE GHOST RIDER by ISMAIL KADARE

The first poesy taught to children in creches had to be the one that follows:

O dear friends, I have three mothers;one at home,one at school and the other is my mother,the party.

It would be hard to find any Albanian at least 25 years old who was not taught this poesy in the first days of creche

-FALMA FSHAZI on Albania under Enver Hoxha

         Without referring to Falma Fshazi,I do not think I can begin this review of  The Ghost Rider ,a novel by Ismail Kadare.It is her doctoral thesis that helped me understand Albania better.

        We have indeed other sources to read about Albania.A brief history of Albania as we read in Wikipedia can teach us only a few basic facts about the country.I also referred to a few other encyclopedias.I re-read my own review (published in a periodical a couple of years ago) of Ismail Kadare's novel 'The File on H'`But nothing can excel the direct experience of a native of  Albania. Especially when a writer like Ismail Kadare tries to debunk the myth that the Balkans may have about themselves,a study like the aforesaid thesis can help us a lot.

        To read The Ghost Rider,it is necessary to have an idea of the history of Albania.  A poem about Albania written by Lord Byron in the 19th century is as follows:

Land of Albania! Where Iskander rose,

Theme of the young,and beacon of the wise,

And he his name-sake,whose oft-baffled foes

Shrunk from his deeds of chivalrous emprize:

Land of Albania!let me bend mine eyes

On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!

The cross descends, thy minaret arise,

And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,

Through many a cypress-grove within each city's ken

(XXXVII,CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE)

        Note the last four lines and you get what he meant.After nearly 200 years,Falma Fshazi writes about the Hoxha regime:

The ban of religion,the intervention in the family until deciding who would marry whom,the hard ideological indoctrination of education and the pressure was made to the citizens to accept a priori and apply the requirements of being 'the new individual as the individual of the party' profoundly damaged the spiritual,social and cultural individual integrity of every Albanian

Falma Fshazi

        I think this is where I can give you the brief summary of The Ghost Rider. The promotional description on the back cover itself is enough to give an idea of it.

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door.The woman opens it to find her daughter,Doruntine,standing there alone in the darkness.She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin.But unbeknownst to her,Konstandin has been dead for years.What follows is a chain of events that plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust.

        Although the blurb tells the reader clearly that the novel is set in medieval Albania,a peruser cannot refrain from linking it to the impetus behind the work.What made Kadare choose such an ancient tale for his novel?

       It is not just because 'The Ballad of  Constantine and Doruntine' is known wherever Albanian is spoken.As in his early novels,he does not want to be the representative of his 'small nation'.The narrator is not eager to use 'we','our people' ,'our land' etc in this novel either.

          Who is the ghost rider?

         The novel answers this question.It was written in the late seventies.It was first published in 1980.In 1975,Kadare was rusticated to the provincial city of Berat following the controversy over his poem 'Red Pashas'.Those who learn the history of Albania know who Pasha (Ali Pasha)was.In a country where 'red' connotes communism the title infuriated the Pashas of the society.

        Ms Fshazi writes that every single piece of individual life was made collective by the party.In her words,it robbed the citizen of all personal properties.

       The belief that was widely propagated in Albania could be written as follows:

The enemy within :Clergy

The enemy outside:capitalism

'Others are plotting against Albania.'

    At the same time,like the communists elsewhere,Indians also believed that Albania was heading towards the dream of communism.

        K.Venu,the leader of one of the Naxalite parties in India then analysed the Albanian communism in his book titled 'Philosophical Problems of Revolution'(I am probably one of the few who still have a copy of the book in English).He had,however,opined that Albanian communism was being mechanical.At least a few naxalites like him had started thinking that the great China itself  was on its way to capitalist restoration.It was not a premonition or sense of foreboding.

        In his introduction to The Ghost Rider,Prof.David Bellos says that it relates the legend of Doruntine to the emergence of the famous(or infamous?)Albanian besa,the foundation stone of Kanun.In his view,the novel broaches the question of surviving oppression or a kind of cultural hegemony.A brief and relevant history of Albania is given in the introduction to equip the reader for its proper perusal.

       Stres,the precursor of today's police detective is the person who tries to unravel the mystery.

     The rumour of Konstandin’s resurrection worries the church authorities. Resurrection is  the monopoly of only one name.Attributing it to a common man is blasphemous. It cannot be allowed. The archbishop himself summons Stres to know about the progress of his investigation.Stres tells him that all except a minority believe in Konstandin’s resurrection.

                                “Then you must see to it that this minority becomes the majority.”The Archbishop says. He orders Stres to find the young man who brought the young woman back. He continues:

        “And if you do not find him, you will have to create him.”

Before long ,an itinerant seller of icons is arrested.

       “I am an honest man. I was arrested while lying on the roadside in agony. It’s inhuman!”wails the man.

        “Put him to torture” Stres orders relentlessly and exits quickly so as not to hear the prisoner’s cries. Yet he hears some indistinct whs and ehs sounds.

       “God be praised, he has confessed!”The messenger says,

       “Scarcely had he seen the instruments of torture when he broke down.”

    Contented archbishop,later,in his speech suggests what unimaginable catastrophes could result if such heresies were permitted to spread freely. He also notes the efforts by the Church of Rome to exploit the heresy, using it against the Holy Byzantine Church, as well as the measures taken by the latter to unmask the imposture. Schisms within the medieval churches are beautifully brought to our notice here.

       Stres also gets opportunity to give his own account of the events. During his speech, he asks the gathering:

            “In these new conditions of the worsening of the general atmosphere in the world, in this time of crime and hateful treachery that could be called unbelief, who should the Albanian be? Shall he espouse the evil or change his features to suit the masks of the age?”

ENVER HOXHA

         These are the questions of  Kadare himself and our mind suddenly leaps from the generic Middle Ages to the contemporary Albania. Albanians’ besa,Kanun,family feuds, bloodshed violence, sudden shifts in climatic conditions that reflect the Kanun-bound tradition ( I remember some descriptions and situations in Kadare’s The File on H .) etc indeed regurgitate.

This is what Kadare said about his childhood:

My father was against the Communist regime; my mother and her family were for it. They did not quarrel about it, but they teased each other with irony and sarcasm. At school I belonged neither with the children from poor backgrounds who were pro-Communist, nor with those of rich families who were terrified of the regime. But I knew both sides. That made me independent, free from childhood complexes.  

       Only certain aspects of communism are good,in his view.'The practice of it in Albania was terrible' 

      In an interview Kadare makes his idea of 'Negative creation' clear.To him,Negative creation for a writer is what he doesn’t write. One needs a great talent to know what one shouldn’t write, and in a writer’s consciousness nonwritten works are more numerous than the ones he/she has written.

       The world that Kadare's words create, however, makes reading a unique experience.It successfully debunks the Albanian myth and mirrors the Balkan dilemma to a great extent as well.The Ghost Rider,therefore, travels beyond the Balkan peninsula and reaches the mind of all those who are aware of our world society.

SECRET SON by LAILA LALAMI

   I am writing this review of this novel, Secret Son by Laila Lalami(published by Viking, a Penguin Group,2010),from Kerala, a southern state in India. This is June, rainy season in this part of India. Drought  is something which we have heard of. Seasons do their role almost very punctually and we,therefore,get rain, hot weather,spring,winter etc in time. Although there have been exceptions, nature ‘s schedule seems to be fixed here every year. We therefore find it interesting when we read the beginning of ‘Secret Son’ with the sentence ‘Rain came unexpectedly, after nearly three years of drought. ‘But  Youssef’s and his mother’s living conditions are not unfamiliar to us. Especially ,a single room with grimy walls, doors and roof is what you can find even in our cities which can boast of skyscrapers.

   When it rains unexpectedly, the first priority of both the lady and her son is made clear. She grabs the soup pot by its ears and takes it to the one room home.Meanwhile,Youssef takes the framed black and white photo of his father who gazes back at him with the looks of a gentle man in his twenties.

   This beginning itself tells us about their meagre belongings and the novelist,Laila Lalami makes the setting clear. The narration is such that you never feel the pressure  to quit reading out of boredom. You read about Hay-An-Najat,a poverty stricken rural hilly area where the mother and her nineteen year old son live in one of the tin-roofed houses.

    In a moment of self realization,the teenager understands who he is: He is none other than a slum dweller, the son of a hospital clerk, a man with no illusions about his place in his society.

   The title ‘Secret Son’ denotes the secrecy behind his birth. Although his mother is known as a widow in Hay-An-Najat,the son is the fruit of her fornication, in a sense or in other words, a Mr Nabil Amrani,a well-known business tycoon of  Morocco is equally or more responsible for his birth. The unglittering realities surrounding the secret son leads him to the situations in which even running errands for his mother seems insurmountable for him. At a point, home becomes his only place to hide from the inquisitive eyes around.

   Youssef’s friend Amin tells him once:

   “I should have known better to befriend a son of a whore.”

   The words sting his heart leaving a stark burning sensation. The very thought of his existence tortures him.

   The novel  is introduced as a tale of contemporary Morocco. Where exactly is Morocco in the world map?

   I looked up the map to find it in Africa. It is only a few kilometres away from Spain too. We can guess the answer to the question why the country has not been a member of African union yet. As we know why  Indians are still proud of speaking English(at least the rank and file),we can understand why the ‘widow’-as Youssef’s mother is scornfully considered by the villagers-is said to put on airs, simply  because she can speak French flawlessly. Although it is a positive element in the society, it exacerbates the resentment of the people towards her.Similarly,Youssef’s half sister Amal is suspected  to be an Arab by a middle aged school registrar in the U S first.Later,when it is found out that she is from Morocco, the man says that she ‘does not look Arab’ in a tone that suggested it was a compliment. When she sells her car too, the American car dealer asks her if there are hidden explosives in it.

   The teenager Youssef goes in search of the secrecy behind his birth and finds Nabil Amrani,his rich father. He enjoys the affluence of his father’s set up for some time only to be  thrown to utter disappointment later. As his mother has often told him, ‘appearances are deceiving’ and he realizes it.

   The novel has four parts but it does not make any change in the serial number of its chapters. The part three ends with chapter 14.Then as we can see before the beginning of each part, words of a well-known writer are given. You  read the following words of Joseph Conrad before you enter chapter 15:

The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.

   It hints at the catastrophe and tells us what can happen to secret sons or sons of poverty in a society into which Islamic fundamentalism digs its claws.

   We can find the novelist,Laila Lalami in both Rachida(Youssef’s mother),an embodiment of the morality of the rural poor  in a country like Morocco and Amal(Nabil Amrani’s daughter),a girl who prefers the American life style with her partner Fernando, a U S citizen, to the traditional life of a woman in one of the richest families in Morocco.

   I would say, here is a fantastic novel which takes you to many live issues of the contemporary world without letting you feel that it invites you to those issues deliberately.
http://youtu.be/3wD8lT-4EWg

THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE by NOAM CHOMSKY

                               

Where shall I begin the review  of this book?

        It begins with the editors’ preface. The editors-Nirmalangshu Mukharji,Bibudhendra Narayan Patnaik and Rama Kant Agnihotri-  are Indians. They themselves are of the opinion that popular, prolonged and intellectual debates are seldom seen in Indian academic scene.But,in their view, Noam Chomsky’s lectures in India in 1996 generated unprecedented enthusiasm in the academic community here.

        The editors’ preface to the book indicates certain serious issues to be touched before we read Chomsky. One of them is the mere marginal realization of the general conceptual goals of a research programme generally.

        After the preface you have only two parts to read. The first one is Chomsky’s Delhi lecture in 1996 and the second, its discussion that ensued. The 30 pages of the lecture and the 38 pages of its discussion make the reading of this book a simple task. The remaining pages contain the preface and clarificatory notes.

      Although Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was published in 1957,I did not get opportunity to read it even in early nineties.Meanwhile,the books which I read then on psychology published by Progress Publishers, Moscow could, in fact, present nothing much better than the behaviourist theories of learning. The two names which caught my attention in the books were  V I Lenin and Ivan Pavlov.

        ‘According to Lenin, mind is a highly organized matter.’

        The authors’ attempt seemed only to substantiate this point with the help of the history of psychology. The books  created an impression that Pavlov’s was probably the greatest contribution to psychology till then. Psychologists like Sigmund Freud were  thought to be in the idealists’ block.They,therefore,hardly give any significance to such well-known psychologists

         "A child’s brain is not a blank slate after birth but it is pre-equipped with a biologically determined ability to learn languages."


(-Chomsky in his Rules and Representations,I think)

         This was the statement that linked me to Chomsky’s world.Cognitivism was widely discussed in India and popularly prescribed grammar books such as ‘Guide to Structural Patterns’ by A.S.Hornby  became almost a joke later. In second language learning, mechanical drills lost their charm.Chomskian thoughts almost revolutionized the field. English teachers  everywhere experienced it.Besides,communists,especially the communists in Kerala, welcome Chomsky mainly because of his severe criticism of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of the US power. May be ,this has left him uncriticized by the communists to a great extent.

         The question,therefore,remained in my thoughts was this:

        How much do Chomsky’s views correspond to materialism- whether dialectical or not?

        Although it is apparent that language learning is not so simple as behaviorists analysed it, to me, Chomsky seems to mystify things a bit especially when he states in his Delhi lecture that ‘science is a strange activity and it only works for simple problems’.

        He further makes it clear as follows:

      “The idea that deep scientific analysis tells you something about problems of human beings and our lives and our inter-relations with one another and so on is mostly pretence in my opinion-self-serving pretence which is itself a technique of domination and exploitation and should be avoided.”

         An interesting detail in the beginning of his lecture is the following interaction of Chomsky with the audience:

“Can you hear me?”

(Section of the audience):No

If you say ‘no’, then you can.

         In ‘Discussion’, there are a number of serious questions from the audience and Chomsky’s answers to them. Some of the questions are anyway a bit funny(I do not mean they are silly).For example:

QUESTION:

Is it possible to have bilingual or trilingual children out of mixed marriages?

CHOMSKY:

It doesn’t make any difference. These things are all totally independent. It is like asking: Can you have long arms coming out of mixed marriages? Or an interest in Greek philosophy?

I am going to read two other books by Chomsky.See them below. 

Of these books, On Language(Penguin Books,2002) discusses linguistics mainly. Necessary Illusions-Thought Control in Democratic Societies(Viva Books Private Limited 2007) is Chomsky’s social criticism. I think, reading the two books  together will help me understand Chomsky better.An amalgam of his social criticism and linguistic theories in my mind........I am waiting for such an experience.I hope I will get something better to tell you then.

MYTHOLOGIES by ROLAND BARTHES

        " Idle reader,beware:you are about to begin a corrosive,insolent,strange,cold and yet witty book."

           Louis Althusser killed his wife during one of his bouts and ,in my view,that delineates his arguments to a certain extent.Whatever were his theoretical assumptions,what they led him to is sufficient for a critical reader to rethink of them.(Of course,it may be ridiculous to attribute his periodic mental illness to his 'thoughts'.Words from a 'sound' mind need not be better than those from a mind suffering from periodic bouts either.However,if you come to know that a teacher who has moralized a lot is a lesbian,you start reviewing her words.)
         I know these are not the right words to introduce Roland Barthes' Mythologies.Its significance cannot be belittled by any distractive thoughts either.I just want to say that there is a possibility to think of the mold when you see a pot.

         I have just read Mythologies by Roland Barthes.It was my second reading.I first read it about 20 years ago.I had studied neither linguistics nor ELT then.(I do not mean that one has to learn either of them to read Mythologies).I had no better understanding of the terms like ‘sign’ and ‘signified’.What prompted me to read such a book was a kind of enthusiasm-I thought of it as an intellectual curiosity then-that was aroused from the perusal of the essays by writers like Prof.K.Sachidanandan,who introduced  new lefts and a lot of post-colonial writers to the voracious readers in Kerala.But the revolutionary youth had already  realized the whims and fancies of some of their leaders.(For instance,read these words of Charu Majumdar,a leader of Naxal movement in India): 

“By the end of 70-s Hindustan will be full of the Red Army(Indian revolutionary forces) marching forward to sabotage the bourgeois government.” 

        In reality,anti-communist marchers stormed the streets of Moscow and brought about the downfall of the U.S.S.R –though in 1991-shattering the dreams of enthusiastic communists elsewhere.

        Let us come back to ‘Mythologies’.Roland Barthes started authoring those essays in the early fifties.The English version of the book was first published in 1972.Today you get the new copy of it with its introduction to the 2009 Edition.The quoted warning to the 'idle readers' under the title above is from the beginning of the introduction.

         Reading a book like ‘Mythologies’ gives us different meanings each time we read it.

         The prose style this time reminded me of a noted critic in Kerala, Prof.M.N.Vijayan.Probably there are some similarities at least in the way facts are elucidated by the both to substantiate their points.In an article,M.N.Vijayan draws the analogy of an elephant keeping intact the hook slanted on it by its mahout while he is away for his recreations, to connote the way the state apparatus keep us loyal and servile to its power.Similarly Roland Barthes exemplifies the myth of a wrestler whose gestures signify suffering,defeat and justice.

“The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign,which like a seed contains the whole fight.But this seed proliferates,for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation,that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of  a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture.”

Wrestling is ,therefore,like a diacritic writing.

       Referring to the Roman characters in films,he writes:

“The intermediate sign,the fringe of Roman-ness or the sweating of thought,reveals a degraded spectacle,which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice.For although it is a good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit,it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified.And it is the duplicity which is peculiar to bourgeois art.”

In another article,he traces the mythological development of ‘ Holidays’.The essay titled ‘The Writer on Holidays’ analyzes the myth of being a writer in a bourgeois society.Bourgeois society liberally grants a glamorous status to its spiritual representatives so long as they remain ‘harmless’.

In ‘The Poor and the Proletariat’,Barthes analyzes Charlie Chaplin’s misconception of the poor and the proletariat.In his view,it makes Chaplin’s films like ‘Modern Times’ apolitical despite the fact that it has a proletarian theme.

         In ‘Novels and Children’ he begins with a comment on the photograph of 70 women novelists. A woman of letters is a ‘remarkable zoological species’

“Women are on the earth to give children to men;let them write as much as they like provided that they do not depart from their Biblical fate.”

These words of sarcasm bring out the attitude of the male chauvinist society.In his preface to the 1957 edition of ‘Mythologies’,Barthes writes:

“In the account given of our contemporary circumstances,I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn,and I wanted to track down,in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying,the ideological abuse which,in my view, is hidden there.”

Roland Barthes was a structuralist.His autobiographical texts suggest that he was a homosexual too.I would say that these things are associated although that is not the topic to be discussed here right now.

“There are ,in any petit-bourgeois consciousness, small simulacra of the hooligan,the parricide,the homosexual,etc.,which periodically extracts from its brain,puts in the dock,admonishes and condemns:one never tries anybody but analogues who have gone astray:it is a question of direction,not of nature,for that’s how men are.”

He examines the myth on ‘the left’ and ‘the right’.On the right,the oppressor’s language is rich, multiform,supple,with all possible degree of dignity at its disposal.When the language of the oppressed aims at transforming,that of the oppressor aims at eternalizing.

Roland Barthes analyzes tautology too.To define poetry you quote poets like William Wordsworth and P.B.Shelley.But none of those definitions is found apt and finally,you say ‘poetry is poetry’.Barthes says that tautology is a faint at the right moment,a saving aphasia.It is a death or perhaps a comedy,the indignant ‘representation’ of the rights of  reality over and above language.

I remember what one of my friends,a teacher, said about her student who asked her the question ‘Why does one use the word ‘I’ to refer to oneself,when every thing else is called in the name of its own?’In her view,the student who asked such a question was a ‘moron’.

          As Barthes says, “The usual  reply at the end of ones tether is: ‘because that is how it is.’

          It is the reply when one is at the loss for an explanation indeed.

          Whatever may be his idea of myth,as the introduction to the 2009 edition of ‘Mythologies’ indicates,an idle reader may not be able to apprehend the profundity of its content.The book demands critical perusal each time you read it.


(Kindly feel free to comment on this review,which will undoubtedly keep me going.)