All Flesh is Grass (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited)
Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited All Flesh is Grass Harold Bloom: The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of King James Bible [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011] How does an engaged work transcend skepticism and faith alike? There is only one way—by immersing itself in the eloquence and beauty of the subject. Literary appreciation is foremost this act of immersion, especially if you value discrimination and judgment. The King James Bible (henceforth, KJB) is an adroitly woven revisionist tapestry and Harold Bloom has taken it upon himself to probe into a blessing called literature by digging into its innards, which might also be a way of confronting the fullness of our lives. Originally the culmination of one strand of Renaissance English culture, the KJB is a fundamental source for Whitman and Melville, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Milton, William Blake, Henry James, Joyce and Atwood among others. It is important to state right at the outset that a literary appreciation of the Bible does not seek faith and revelation. For the faithful, a literary appreciation is redundant. But a literary scholar enters the terrain of the Bible as a pilgrim, seeking to unearth sublime fiction. But even as we begin to appreciate the narrative tropes, the rhetorical strategies, the lyrical ardour, the fiery prophecies and the pungent proverbs in the text, the problem of its spiritual codes lurks and abides. Literary criticism cannot be made into religion and yet all of Shakespeare and Dante constitute Bloom’s guiding set of Gnostic scriptures. The belief lies in the resurrectionist powers of the arts. Historically speaking, the KJB (also called the Authorized Version) is an English Protestant disputation against contemporary Catholic and Jew alike.It is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.The KJB includes the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha and the 27 books of the New Testament. King James had expressly instructed the translators that the new version ought to conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the Episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. This instructed piety recedes as we immerse ourselves in the narrative and the poetry within. The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. Bloom has delved into those which have the strongest literary possibilities. Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and KJB are for Bloom rival aesthetic eminences, even as he constantly compares and contrasts the language and individual thrusts of four other versions: the Greek New Testament, the Tyndale, the Geneva and the Myles Coverdale translation. The breathtaking erudition of Bloom apart, much of the charm for the readers is to share with him the realization that KJB was a culmination of two millennia of collective work done by writers, composers, redactors and editors, and yet the result has been surprisingly aesthetic, and its power original. Blessing is an eloquent concept in the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. There are at least four voices in the Torah: the Yahvist who tells us remarkable stories of a wondering people—the Jews, as they try to become Hebrews through their journey towards the Promised Land. The Priestly voice, on the other hand is about wisdom, restraint and genealogy. The other two are the Elohist and the Deuteronomist. The idea of the blessing for the Priestly writer is “be fruitful and multiply.” In the Yahvist writer—blessing is “more life into a time without boundaries.” Your name will not be scattered if you have blessing. To this end Bloom nominates Jacob to be the symbol of Jewish consciousness proper, more than Moses or David, archetype of Freud, Kafka and Einstein. Jacob is a survivor who becomes Israel—both a nation and a people of survivors. In Thomas Mann’s narrative tetralogy, Joseph and his Brothers, written between 1926 and 1942, Bloom discovers the best interpretation, the reincarnated spirit of the Yahvist writer. Terror and comedy mingle in Jacob, who passed on the blessing both to his fourth son, Judah, and in a literary sense to Paul. Mann’s Jacob, increasingly as he ages, ponders his own stories, seeking to gain power over their elucidation. In both Mann and the Yahvist, ironies flourish, usurpations are rampant and cunning rather than sanctity is the pragmatic qualification for election: “If Israel is the alternative name of the nameless angel, then Jacob has usurped the identity of what, following Wallace Stevens and Freud, could be called the angel of reality,” says Bloom. The Blessing means survival—though Jacob shall limp for the rest of his life after a fatal embrace with Yahweh. Does Yahweh play the role of the Angel of Death? Perhaps Jacob has made allies of what Freud regarded as reality-testing. This brings us to the second serious question that the book probes: what might luck be? Oscar Wilde nominated Jesus as the Supreme aesthete and Bloom assigns Yahweh the role of the notorious narcissist playing favourites—the creator-by-catastrophe. Much of Exodus, and all of Numbers after it, is a recurrent juxtaposition between revelation and wilderness. Bloom ponders: “Since my long-ago childhood, I have wondered at a forty years’ wandering back and forth in the Sinai, between the symbolic extremes of Egypt and Canaan. The outrageousness of what Yahweh imposes upon his wretched chosen people somehow has escaped commentary, ancient and modern, rabbinical and scholarly. Who can journey forty years in the waste lands without anguish and discontent? Is that part of the Blessing?” For a book that is supposed to be garnering wisdom and poise, the KJB iterates that we are far from dealing in exemplary characters. But we are witnessing the journey of people who are confronting the fullness of life and its many shades. Deceit and shrewdness, jealousy and back-stabbing, revenge and lust continuously make this a supremely human tale. And circumscribing ritual markers leading to the formation of a commune—painstakingly, is also a way of confronting
RENU’s MUMBAI / रेणूजी की बम्बई
Amrit Gangar The title might sound as unpredictable as Renu Saluja’s ‘cuts’ in the films that she edited in her short but brilliant career in Mumbai. Renu Saluja (1952-2000) sailed across the shores – both parallel and mainstream. And on both sides of the river, we’d invariably discover precious pearls of her creativity. When Praba Mahajan informed me of the titles of the films to be screened as part of the GraFTII’s homage to her, I found that out of eight films, five – Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (A Summons for Mohan Joshi, 1983), Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Who Pays the Piper, 1983), Parinda (1989), Dharavi (1991), Split Wide Open (1999) – had a direct relationship with Mumbai, the city where Renu lived all her working life.[1] It’s all about Renu’s Mumbai, thought I. A strange claim, but in the film production line-up, she was the final artist who had to weave a definite story from the available footage; cutting and splicing shots and sequences, honing the director’s vision, and imperceptibly her own, too. In the process, she had a legitimate claim on the ‘city’. These films so palpably demonstrate how strongly she must have felt about her city, else how could have they evoked its indomitable self and spirit in their peculiar pace and pep?[2] To me Bombay is the city of ‘cuts’ (not in the corrupt sense of ‘cut’ practice, but in its dramatic sense), the astonishing ‘experiential cuts’ that you find while walking on her streets, or driving on her roads, or travelling in her trains, you always encounter the unexpected, on every step, at every moment. And these ‘cuts’ Renu Saluja must have experienced and internalized to give back their spirit to the films that she gave the final shape to as editor. In the crevices of their ‘cuts’, the punctuations chosen by Renu Saluja breathed the city. It matters little whether she was born in Mumbai or not. But cumulatively she was writing a meta-cinematographic ‘editorial’ about Mumbai. I think she was giving us a Baudrillardian high, “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvellous continuous performance of films and scenarios,” said the philosopher.[3] Editing was the final scripting stage of a film, Renu believed. A script is first written on paper – once, twice, ten times; it is then rewritten in the director’s mind and in the minds of the technicians and actors. Then a major rewrite takes place in shooting. Finally in the editing, it is constructed bit by bit with images and sounds. As she once said, one needed as much time to do sound as the actual picture cutting did. She always worked in close liaison with the sound recordist after the final cut.[4] I had the privilege of seeing her very briefly when she was working on Ketan Mehta’s film Sardar.[5] However, in that short time, I could see how terribly frank she was in voicing her opinion, how deeply and frenetically committed towards ensuring that the final work excelled. Within her svabhāva, temperament, she seemed to be in a perpetual quest, fathoming pace and rhythm of a moment, and that was the magic of her art and craft of film editing. Practically she travelled through the linear-non-linear, analog-digital span of the Moviola to the Steenbeck to the Avid. It has often been speculated that editing is a process that draws its momentum from the editor’s subconscious and Renu, through her subconscious, was able to make visual and emotional connections even between seemingly unrelated aspects. For every filmmaker, I suppose, the initial challenge is how to take off, how to set the story ball rolling on the screen. Watch any of the films edited by Renu and mark the ways they take. In those few foundational minutes, she skillfully quintessentializes the macro world of the story into its contextual microcapsule, while the rest, as it were, would be just an elaboration, an unfolding. The way she ‘cut’ the first seven minutes in Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! is remarkable. It is difficult to make out whether she cut it on music and song or was it the other way round. I saw it over a decade and a half ago but still can’t forget the juxtaposed image of the dying fish; perhaps because of the power of Renu’s montage that could enter the Brechtian conscience. The way we are introduced to Mohan Joshi and his wife Rohini and their ensuing struggle to get their chawl tenement repaired – it sustains even today. It is Saeed Mirza who has so consistently evoked Bombayness in his oeuvre – the city’s neighbourhoods, its lifestyle, its street language, its hybridity, its oddities, its aspirations, its agonies and ecstasies.[6] Last year, while participating in the IBM² seminar on the New Wave, Mirza said, he was the most regional filmmaker in India.[7] As editor, Renu very subtly understood the filmmaker’s urban ethos. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, she introduces us to the city through her initial cameo-cuts, as the photographers Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra (screen names for Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani, respectively) wait for clients at their newly opened studio. We get the snatches of its streets and high-rise buildings, passersby and a lonely puppy stopping and peeing on his way forward, as if from a Jaques Tati. Renu’s ‘cuts’ create a characteristic atmosphere within the film’s pupa that would gradually pave way for the film’s developed ecology. I think film editing is an art of ‘ecology’. Only an accomplished editor such as Renu Saluja could explore its intricate sub-texts for the director. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was an epicenter of the youthful creative energy and camaraderie. You have to just look at the credits and the naming of its characters. Besides being editor of the film, Renu also assisted Kundan Shah on direction, along with Sudhir Mishra. Today, it would sound like a fairy tale but this great and meaningful comedy was made
Precarity against Heroic Virility: Ramkumar Chetankranti’s Veerta Par Vichlit
Prasanta Chakravarty “पावर में एक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी” ~ आर. चेतनक्रांति (There was but one lack in power, despondency terrified it) ~ R. Chetankranti “Who will say, and in which language, the distance between two bodies?” ~Fernand Deligny Contemporary forms of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unequal political conditions mean encountering new ways of social-existential vulnerability in daily living. The concept of political precariousness—sometimes called precarity— especially in contemporary settings, involves instability, lack of livelihood protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability or some combination of these factors. The pervasiveness of precarity is coterminous to the rise of the powerful fascist forces which have spawned across the world, forces which are able to sell the claim that they will be able to address and mitigate such economic and political inequality with greater efficacy than the previous regimes. Their violent and masculinist ways are supposed to take whole nations into a new era of civilizational self-realization. Given such heroic and grandiose right-wing claims, what kind of realities are we actually witnessing at the ground level in a country like India, especially in the urban and semi-urban centres, where labour is radically being informalized and all forms of collective bargaining thwarted? Who are the teeming multitudes in our towns and cities now? What kind of conditions are they arriving from and what are their expectations and ideas of success in a virile, developing nation? What new biological life-forms and relations might develop in the midst of such precarious social existence? On the other hand, to be precarious also denotes an ontological condition. It constitutes a primary form of reciprocal vulnerability to and with our closest interlocutors—lovers and comrades, childhood friends and colleagues—relations from which we cannot will away without ceasing to be creatures of feeling and responsibility. Relational forms of precariousness—ineradicable fruits of human dependency— in fact, may well be the precursor to physical and social precarity or at least may be radically intertwined with the latter. Ramkumar Chetankranti’s long awaited second collection of poems—Veerta Par Vichlit, manages to do something quite incredible: collectively the poems are able to connect and combine our intimate dilemmas and existential vulnerability with a radical critique of the political, conspiratorial and grandiloquent configurations of right-wing masculinity. The latter, by means of intensifying new ways of social disquiet (instead of mitigating), hasten and nurture a kind of pallid and suffused social pathos all around us. This social pathos and anguish, in turn, play back into the hesitations of our inmost relations. This is where poetry can address our current social and material existence. In other words, Chetankranti’s poetic sensibility underscores the scars and bruises of our heightened, harried living —a kind of living that runs the risk of being assessed by history as a colossal endeavour in human hubris and futility. The Boys of Seelampur Have Turned Patriotic There is this mould. The boys of Seelampur (virtually a human scrapyard teeming with life) used to be hungry and unemployed in the days of yore. Disgruntled: with home, family, society and country. There was no blueprint for life. So, they would yawn and take to All India Radio, with nary a clue about whom or what the radio was babbling. School text-books seemed alien and distant. Teachers harrying. The studious ones, dazzling like fire-crackers in the mohalla, would be the boys’ target in every game they played. Education was high idealism—at best a means to bag a government job, a feat that the boys would not dream of ordinarily. Education, if any, was a default mechanism. Evenings would be spent watching feature films at the neighbour’s. And a huge door of fantasy would beckon—which they would bolt and unbolt for years. And then: फिर वह अंततः जब खुला और नब्बे का दशक मुहावरा बनने से पहले चार सौ साल पुरानी एक मस्जिद की धूल हवाओं को सौंप कर खिड़कियां खोलने में जुटा वे अपने अंधेरों से ऊब चुके थे फिर रोशनी हुई सब तरफ़ उजाला सब साफ़ दिखने लगा यह भी की जिन स्वार्थों को बल्लियों पर टांगकर दुर्लभ कर दिया गया था सबके लिए प्राप्य थे जिन्हे धर्मग्रन्थ त्याज्य कहा करते थे वे भी And then, when that door finally opened The Nineties Before it turned into an idiom Got engaged in Unbolting its windows After broadcasting The dust particles Of a four hundred years old mosque To the winds The boys got bored With their darkness And then there was light Every direction beamed Everything was limpid Those desires which were Tied and nailed to the rafters And made rare Were available to everyone Even the ones Prohibited in the Scriptures It was the magic carpet moment for the boys of Seelampur. The horizon felt closer. The soul would unchain itself and the spine, once again, appeared upright. Every new day triumphantly announced that money was not such a bad thing after all. Love was not a sin. Nor was masturbation. Truth was beckoning. And truth was not scary. But the boys still felt ungendered and the mobile phone was not sufficient a toy to impart a sense of power. They wanted a sip of the nectar of virile masculinity that runs the world. In anger and retribution they left many a judge and minister, doctor and engineer rotting in the manholes. वीर्य और रक्त की बाल्टियां कन्धों पर टाँगे वे रात रात भर घूमते कामनाओं की तस्वीरें बनाते बसों, रेलों, पेशाबघरों में और पूलों के निचे लिख लिख छोड़ते रहे अपने सन्देश जिनका कोई जवाब उन तक नहीं पंहुचा Dangling buckets of semen and blood over their shoulders Night after night they would patrol Sketching landscapes of desire On buses, trains, pissing stations Scribbling down their message underneath flyovers The reply to which they never ever received The older language of sacrifice made no sense anymore. Power and machismo ruled. Motorcycles: the answer! (“On motorcycles, up the road, they come:/Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys ,/Until the
In a Future April: An Excerpt
Paramita Ghosh Excerpt from: In a Future April (a novel) © Radical Notes radicalnotes@radicalnotes.com Aakar Books, 2017 ISBN 978-93-5002-510-9 *** [In a Future April is a novel about revolutions in this age— but being of this age, it is truly a “monstrous abbreviation” of all times, even of those revolutionary periods which were inaugurated exactly a century ago…If this is a novel about precariats and cognitarians as vanguards, it is also about vanguards as precariats and cognitarians. But was this not true for all revolutions? In a Future April narrates and operates the stories of revolutions to abbreviate them into the pregnant dialectic of hope and dismay.] ~from the Foreword (Pratyush Chandra) *** The Night of the Hound SIXTEEN MEN AND women were picked up all over The City that night and sent to the police station of Hardy Screw. Of the sixteen, not one had any lead to Woegore but as one officer, told Screw, they could not go around picking people up from their beds and then tell them they were innocent. They must have been upto something otherwise why would they have attracted a brother officer’s attention—pigs always smell! The best thing to do was to ask them the officer suggested. People generally think they are to blame for something or the other and if they think you are asking them nicely, they may out of concern for their health, not waste their time. Screw, smarting under the fact, that the idea had not come out of his head, took his time to scratch his chin with the tip of his pen, to give the impression that he had better ideas to mull. He dispatched his junior to get him a file from his room upstairs and threw the man shivering before him in the basement the first question. The other fifteen were not packed off into a cell, they were made to watch the proceedings and draw whatever lessons they could from it. “What do you think you are here for?” “Last week, I wished my wife was dead…But every once in a while I’m sure she wishes me dead too.” “And this week you were going to act on it! And for that you hired a man called Woegore?” “Honest sir, I didn’t.” “What else? What else? Talk you crook, otherwise…” Bendy Lulu, the officer sent out for the file had come in and seeing the investigation in progress, was waiting for permission to whisper in his ears. The expression on his face told Screw he was onto something. Screw nevertheless gave him a withering look to tell him he resented the interruption—let the boy stew, let him realise there were repercussions of speaking out of turn. After a few minutes, he called him over, to ask him what he had learnt. Lulu meticulously took out a sheaf of papers and dropped some in nervousness, and then found the right one to prompt his narration, but Screw did not soften. He gave the impression that he had followed the argument but was not in agreement with it. These boys, he thought, looking at the head now busy in clipping back the documents, think they are so clever, when what they really do is present ideas with an air of discovery, one had to be very careful around them so as not to be caught acting and reacting to their dual needs of being embraced by you, to begin with, and then their impatience to pull you down! Look, how he had humiliated him a few minutes back—thank god for small mercies that there had been few witnesses. But the information Lulu had extracted from the file was solid, he had to admit, and it had changed everything—it seemed he was no longer presiding over a routine enquiry over a robbery but a terror investigation! The man before him may not be Woegore or his relative but he was a Partisan, and he, Hardy Screw who had waited all his life to meet one, was going to catch one, even if they had nothing to do with the case! He looked up from the file at the man cowering before him with the love that butchers reserve for the day’s first goat and decided to tell him as plainly as possible the facts of his life which it would do him good not to deny. He could, of course, deny it if he wished, but it would not sweeten his stay. “The walls of your house are red! The flower pots as well! And the red hibiscus is the only flower you grow—now that we have you rascal, you’re going to tell me everything about the Partisans, otherwise I will tell you what you read, how you live, who you meet and that I’m the only one you are likely to keep meeting for the next 20 years as I’m going to keep you here for a very long time!” With every accusation, the man grew more despondent, and then started to mewl. Screw was surprised—his first encounter with a Partisan and he had made him cry! He did wish the man wouldn’t take it so hard—they hadn’t hit him anywhere yet! “There, there!” he said in his best rallying tone: “We have a very nice garden in the jail and it’s just lost its gardener, but no hibiscuses mind you.” The room erupted in laughter and at least ten men belched out sounds in imitation of low-paid stage villains. That there were so many officers in the room watching him conduct the investigation he had not realised, but Screw knew this was nothing new. Professional envy and camaraderie did exist side by side and he had been at the receiving end of both to know these were temporary knocks—take it