Therein lies a sliver of glass
Amongst the moon-coloured grass
Translucent, luminous, deadly.
Why, do you remember
The tales of yesternight?
Of quiet screams and loud silence?
Swathed in their purple robes of moonlight
The silvery wisps of grass remain tranquil
Bearing rust-stained crowns upon their heads
An elegance rivalled only by kings and queens.
And the tiny piece of glass
Grinned as radiantly
As only glass can.
“But I felt that they also pointed to the banality of Narayan's concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew. Like Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects. Narayan wrote of, and from, the mindset of the small-town South Indian Brahmin, and did not seem capable of a greater range. His metronomic style was frequently not equal to the demands of his situations. Intense and potentially charged scenes were rendered pathetic by the inadequacy of the language used to describe them. In much of his writing, stories with extraordinary possibilities unfolded in flat, monotonous sentences that frustrated rather than convinced me, and in a tone that ranged from the cliched to the flippant. At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock- cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.I do not see much of the story to “lose sight” of however, even without focusing on the utterly commonplace language in The English Teacher. The reason for this lies with the main character of the book, Krishna. A first person perspective, though vital in creating the impression of an “autobiography”, draws a thin line between one who is in touch with his emotions and one who is a self-centered emotional wreck. From the very beginning of the book, Krishna was portrayed as someone who indulged in self-criticism and did not bother to do anything constructive, choosing to behave like a whiny child instead. As my Source put it, the writer attempted to be introspective in the very first sentence of the book, but failed big time, as “any decent Literature student ought to have noticed”.
I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian. Worse, his indifference was something of which he was inordinately proud. He told interviewers that he avoided reading: "I do not admit influences." This showed in his writing, but he was defiant: "What is style?" he asked one interviewer. "Please ask these critics to first define it .... Style is a fad." The result was that he used words as if unconscious of their nuances: every other sentence included a wrong inappropriately or wrongly used; the ABC of bad writing - archaisms, banalities and cliches - abounded, as if the author had learned them in a school textbook and was unaware that they have been hollowed by repetition. Narayan's words were just what they seemed; there was no hint of meanings lurking behind the surface syllables, no shadow of worlds beyond the words. Indeed, much of Narayan's prose reads like a translation.
Some of my friends felt I was wrong to focus on language - a writerly concern, as they saw it - and lose sight of the stories, which in many ways had an appeal that transcended language. But my point was that such pedestrian writing diminished Narayan's stories, undermined the characters, trivialised their concerns. Other serious readers of Narayan disagree with me, and so many of them cannot be wrong. I was perhaps particularly unfair in suggesting that Narayan was merely a chronicler of the ordinary who reflected faithfully the world view of a self-obsessed and complacent upper caste (and middle-class). "I write primarily for myself," Narayan had said. "And I write about what interests me, human beings and human relationships .... Only the story matters; that is all." Fair enough: one should not expect Austen to be Orwell. But one does expect an Austen to enrich the possibilities of the language she uses, to illuminate her tools as well as her craft. Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.”
“People could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just, should not, in my very definite and precise opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so.”
“You fit into me,The sheer impact of four lines were able to capture the attention of the readers more effectively than a monotonous fifty-line one probably would, especially as the fifty-lined poem was written by a man as unimaginative as Krishna.
Like a hook into an eye;
A fish hook,
An open eye.”
“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?” – Garth NixDisclaimer (again): Narayan’s intention may have been to write stories for himself, which works very well. I am only criticizing the lack of possibilities (and revulsion!) this story provides me with as a literary text.
