Dead writers' society: on Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time

In another few days, every town and street corner will be hosting a Big Literature Festival. It is natural then, around this time of year, to hear murmurings about smug, back-patting, liquor-guzzling intellectuals. Along with some less-than-tasteful suggestions: it may be remarked, for instance, that a giant Godzilla foot squelching down on the Jaipur festival lawns on a weekend evening would wipe out our literary community in one swell foop. But notably, most such comments come from insiders themselves and therefore have a certain amount of wistful self-loathing built into them – the last time I heard the Godzilla one, it was said at Jaipur on a weekend evening, and by someone who is himself sometimes regarded as being part of this putative “community”. (He, of course, denies it vigorously. He also denies being the present writer.)

Creatively executed, such self-commentaries – litterateurs sniffing or whining about litterateurs – can be a form of meta-fiction, and meta-fiction is all the rage these days. Much contemporary literature is explicitly about writers and writing, giving the impression that the Novel is not so much dead as trapped in a giant hall of mirrors. Self-reflexive writing of this sort can become tedious (witness the present column), but heading into December I found it almost comforting to read Howard Jacobson’s new novel Zoo Time, with its comically apocalyptic vision of the publishing world – a vision that almost makes our lit-fest and book-launch season seem stable and sane.

Here are some of the things that happen in Zoo Time’s hysterical universe. A publisher shoots himself in the mouth shortly after a meal with an author (during which they talked about a literary world forever altered by Twitter, blogs and vampire-replete bestsellers). Terrified agents lock themselves in lavatories “rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena”, and one of them is lost on the Hindu Kush with a manuscript in his backpack. (“Had Quinton lost his bearings and gone stumbling through the ice with my manuscript wrapped around him for insulation, or had the novel itself sent him mad? The question, to tell the truth, wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was much too common an occurrence to attract speculation.”) The marriage of the book’s narrator – Guy Ableman, author of a novel titled “Who Gives a Monkey’s?” – is in trouble, partly because the sound of his writing drives his wife to madness. (“But so did the sound of my not writing.”)

In this strangely familiar dystopia, literary parties are like funeral wakes (“except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches”) and a car exhaust backfiring might cause passersby to wonder if another publisher had taken his life within their earshot. The few remaining readers quiver with rage whenever they meet a writer (“was it because reading as a civilised activity was over that the last people doing it were reduced to such fury? Was this the final paroxysm before expiry?”) and are actively hostile in their dissection of his “berk” (no one says “book” anymore, it's too much effort). The best chance a young author has of producing a hit is to write a memoir about losing his sight when his adoptive mother’s silicone breasts exploded in his face.

Beyond all these things, Zoo Time’s threadbare “plot” is about the deep attraction Ableman feels for his wife’s mother Poppy, but he uses a literary analogy to describe even this: is sleeping with your mother-in-law like stealing your own book? Throughout, he is a self-conscious wordsmith in the act of constructing his own story, correcting himself mid-sentence, giving us glimpses – whether reliable or not – of how his real life intersects with his fiction. And in doing this, Jacobson’s novel asks that pertinent question: should a writer exist (for the reader) beyond the page? It is a question that was raised memorably in Jaipur two years ago, when J M Coetzee – among the last of the truly taciturn big-name authors – read a long extract from his work but didn’t otherwise say a word. Jacobson may or may not have had Coetzee in mind when he writes about a Nobel-winning Dutch author who simply sat on the stage in front of his festival audience: “So the hour would have passed, each staring at the other in silence, had someone not thought of showing slides of the bridges of Amsterdam. When it was over they gave him a standing ovation.”

Zoo Time is among the most tongue-in-cheek doomsday books I have read. It is about the long-awaited demise of writing and reading (and therefore about the end of everything, since it is narrated by a man obsessed with these things), but it is also a reminder that good meta-fiction can help keep literature alive in the very process of sounding its death-knell. If writers absolutely have to write solipsistic books about writing (and really, one wishes they wouldn’t), this is a fine way to do it. I do hope though that Jacobson is careful in choosing what passages to read at his (no doubt many) impending appearances in clubby literary festivals.

Perhaps the one that begins thus?

This is when you know you’re in deep shit as a writer – when the heroes of your novels are novelists worrying that the heroes of their novels are novelists who know they’re in deep shit... 

[Did a version of this for Business Standard's Eye Culture column]

On "liberal extremism" (and soft oppositions to freedom)

I’ve had a cordial relationship with Chetan Bhagat for a long time; there are things I like about him, as a person and – yes – as a writer too. I once faced flak in literary circles for saying mildly nice things about his early work, and I still often have arguments with friends who make condescending remarks like “Why has Chetan Bhagat been invited to a literature festival?” But I’m deeply disturbed by the position he has adopted on the Salman Rushdie-Jaipur issue, especially his repeated endorsement of the bizarre idea that the whole mess was jointly caused by “extremists on both sides”.

Two exhibits. First, some samples from Chetan’s Twitter feed:

“When extremists on both sides turn a festival into an activist venue, there's a security risk.”

“In a fight between extreme fundamentalists and extreme liberals, the sufferer is the beautiful jaipur litfest, the gainer an appeasing govt.”

“Extreme fundamentalists. Extreme liberals. Extremely difficult to deal with either.”

“If you are truly religious, you believe in forgiveness. If you are truly liberal, you respect other points of view. Sadly, don't see it much.”

A response to that last Tweet: sure – if you’re truly liberal, you respect other points of view. (Since the meaning of “respect” is often hazy in this context, a clarification: it means that you believe people should have the freedom to peacefully express their views, no matter how strongly you disagree with them.) What you emphatically DO NOT respect – or condone – is the demonstration of those views through threats and violence, which curtails the similar rights of other people. And it’s the religious extremists who have been curtailing rights in the Rushdie case; the “liberal extremists” have been responding to the bullying with non-violent protests. This is an important distinction. Even if you find it convenient (for whatever reason) to think of strong-voiced liberals as extremists, do have the grace to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between these two forms of “extremism”.

Exhibit 2: this CNN-IBN video featuring Chetan, Ruchir Joshi (who was one of the four authors who read from The Satanic Verses in Jaipur) and Asaduddin Owaisi, who called for the arrest of the writers.

On view here is Chetan as the “balanced” diplomat-cum-moderate who is willing to listen to both points of view and who badly wants the two parties to find a middle ground – “because otherwise this whole controversy is kind of useless”. I will not comment on individual actions, he starts by saying. Then, “As an artist you have full freedom to write whatever you want to. However... Should you be exercising the right to hurt people?” And to Owaisi, “I request you to withdraw your case”, followed by this astonishing statement: “We are all Indians here – we will not let someone who is not Indian [meaning Rushdie] affect our unity.”

“This is a great issue to unite the country,” he says – apparently “uniting the country” means ensuring that no one says or does anything that might be perceived as offensive to any community’s God, be it Allah or Krishna or Saraswati. “We Indians are believers. Our value system is not the same as London or Paris or Amsterdam.” (Incidentally, Amsterdam was where Theo van Gogh was murdered by a religious fanatic not so long ago because he made a film – and it should be clear to any thinking person that no corner of the world is safe from the extremisms of the “value system” Chetan is so proud of – but let that pass for now.)

------------

In this piece, Chandrahas Choudhury lists three types of opposition to freedom of speech in India. The third of these, he says, is an “insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas”:

“... what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship [...] that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that ‘religious sentiments should always be respected’ and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred”

I have had dozens of encounters with “soft opposition” of this sort. These typically involve conversations with well-meaning family members or acquaintances who might very loosely be described as “liberals” (or at least as “cool” or open-minded people). When the subject of an artist offending religious sentiments comes up, they usually say: “Yes, but was it necessary to write that article/do that painting/make that cartoon? Couldn’t he have been more sensitive?” Or “I agree that he has the right to do or say this. But should he have done it?”

This type of conversation sometimes reaches a critical point if you reply: “Agreed - it might have been nicer/more sensitive to do things in another way. But what if the artist politely hears you out and then says he has chosen to disregard your advice – that he will go ahead and do this anyway? What will your response be then?” I've found that the mask of unequivocal “liberalism” can slip off very quickly in this situation.

It’s worrying that so many people in India seem not to understand what good art can be all about, and the conditions necessary for its meaningful survival. As Ruchir Joshi writes in this piece in The Hindu (bold-marks mine):

I have memories of writers, artists, film-makers being pushed into narrower and narrower pens by people who had no interest in literature, art or cinema other than to use these as excuses to expand their own illiterate, illiberal, poisonous power under the guise of identity politics...

And Amit Chaudhuri in The Hindustan Times:

In India, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a 'free speech' issue. Indians know how to talk about writers, but not about writing.

Little wonder that artistic liberty is among the first things to be held hostage (or made conditional, which is the same thing) when "sentiments" are deemed to have been hurt. A friend told me not to write a post about Chetan Bhagat because “he’s such a soft, easy target”. Well, maybe, but here it is anyway, because I think his stance tells us something about the level of discourse around us today. It’s a pity that one of India’s most popular writers seems unwilling to acknowledge that one of the oldest functions of art is to disturb people and encourage them to look with new eyes at everything they hold sacred. We already see too much of that apathy and ignorance in people who don't work in the creative field.

In Jaipur with Biharis, Swedes and all the other 'chuts'

“At a festival this chaotic,” a friend remarked during one of our many chai breaks on the Diggi Palace lawns, “you have to keep a look out for the small pockets of pleasure – a clever remark made by a favourite writer at an otherwise middling session, an impromptu conversation with someone you chance to meet over lunch. Seize that moment and use it as oxygen to tide you over the next few hours.”

I spent most of this year’s Jaipur lit-fest in a haze, looking for sitting space and finding none, being shepherded hither and thither by a sea of people, or fretting about the panels I was moderating. More than once, I envied the hundreds of book-lovers who had come with plenty of time on their hands and with absolutely no agenda other than to sit down and hear authors talk. For such people, the JLF must be heaven. Not so much for the reporters hunting for “exclusive” quotes or filing multiple stories on harsh deadlines. Or for someone, like yours truly, who can only take so much of crowds.

So after a while, I decided that the only way to survive the madness was to take my friend’s advice and greedily accumulate as many of the nice little moments as possible. A few personal highlights, randomly listed:

– In the course of a warm discussion with Zac O’Yeah, the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell told a funny story about his experiences in a Mozambique town where a police force had only just been introduced, and the protocol between the confused young men who were inducted as policemen and the small-time thieves they had to apprehend was unclear. Thus, you might see a policeman walking down the street holding a freshly caught thief by the scruff of his shirt, but then casually stopping to have his shoes polished – while ordering his detainee to fetch him some cigarettes from a nearby shop, with the latter dutifully complying.

For Mankell, a writer who trades in methodical police procedurals with clearly drawn lines between detectives and civilians, this must have been quite an eye-opener; no wonder he remarked, “It’s fashionable nowadays to say that the world has become very small, but that isn’t true at all – it’s still just as big as it is, and people in one part of it can’t begin to imagine what daily life is like in the other parts.”

– There was also the pleasure of hearing Martin Amis speak about “the myth of decline” – the tendency to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, going as far back as pre-historic cave writings that lamented “Where are they now, the heroes of old?” Discussing the supposed death of the novel, Amis quipped that when the second edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in the early 17th century, there would have been critics who said, “Well, that’s it, that’s the end of the novel – it has no future.” (Note: if the human mind is hard-wired to think of the past as being forever glorious and the present as being bleak, little wonder I spend so much time reminiscing about the cosier days of the Jaipur lit-fest.)

– Amis being sardonic during his introduction of a talk dramatically titled “The Crisis in American Fiction”: “I’d like to begin by asking these three struggling, panicking American novelists about the ongoing crisis in American fiction.” The writers he was speaking to? Richard Ford. Junot Diaz. Jay McInerney.

– I was unhappy about missing the “Cinema Bhojpuri” session moderated by the incomparable Amitava Kumar, but was gratified when I later heard (from Amitava himself) that he said “Dabangg ek Bhojpuri film hai, behanchod” during the course of the session. (On the other hand, it wasn’t nice to hear about the censoring of Faiza S Khan's reading at the “Pulp” session.)

– Thoroughly enjoyed Jeet Thayil’s reading from his forthcoming novel Narcopolis at a session where I introduced him and CP Surendran. (I think this was shortly before poor CP was attacked by an offence-taking sardar.) Jeet’s reading included a lengthy stream-of-consciousness passage where the word “chut” is used almost as a poetic refrain; the drug-addled narrator employs it to describe all varieties of Indians (except for Maharashtrians). After the session, an audience member asked Jeet the inevitable question “If you hate India and Indians so much, why do you continue living here?” Sigh.

– Had a brief chat with the novelist Marina Lewycka, who joked that when she wrote serious books that intended to probe the human condition, they ended up being nominated for comic prizes, and vice versa. Lewycka, incidentally, leads a fairly quiet life in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and she looked understandably dazed by the largeness of the festival. (While on that, poor Ruskin Bond! He probably saw more people in a single day in Jaipur than he has his entire life in Landour.)

– Following the Popcorn Essayists session, a group of schoolboys came up to me and asked me to sign their lined registers. “Sir, are you involved with Bollywood?” one of them asked as I scrawled my name for the third time. I considered telling them I was Aamir Khan but instead shook my head. Boys and registers vanished in a puff of smoke.

Such was Jaipur.

[If you don’t already have festival reports coming out of your ears, try Google: there’s plenty of media coverage, good and bad. Some really good photos on Mayank Austen Soofi’s blog, for example (the ones above of Kiran Desai and Martin Amis are from him). And the official website is putting up videos of sessions, though some of the links are wrong.]

Popcorn essays at the Jaipur Literature Festival

Update: the schedule for this year's edition of the Jaipur lit-fest is now online - check this link. And here's the line-up of participating writers and speakers.

On January 24, Anjum Hasan, Kamila Shamsie, Namita Gokhale, Jaishree Misra and I will be in a session centred around The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies Do to Writers, the film-essay anthology I've edited for Tranquebar. The ladies will read from the pieces they've written for the book (topics include 1980s Bollywood gossip, the Kaurismaki brothers, the case for censorship, and the relationship between the language of prose and the language of film) and there will be a light discussion as well, hopefully with much audience participation. Do try to drop in for the session - it should be fun (with the side-benefit that you might just run into Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee or Junot Diaz sipping kulhar chai on the lawns outside!).

P.S. Here, for anyone who missed it earlier, is Manil Suri's piece for the anthology, excerpted this month in Caravan magazine. And here's his Helen dance which, sadly, will not be replicated at the Jaipur fest.