In reviewing ‘My name is Red’ by Orhan Pamuk, probably an ultimate compliment was paid by a reviewer when he wrote that Pamuk, in this book, has achieved almost the unattainable, i.e., a convincing juxtaposition of the cerebral, the emotional and the physical elements of the human life.
This is not the place to discuss ‘my name is Red’ and debate how (and if at all or how far) Pamuk had achieved such a feat. But the suggestion is at least thought provoking.
The ‘realistic’ representation of life around us is what one normally expects from stories and novels (perhaps in a more complex manner from the latter) as a basic requirement. However, more often than not, if the reader is not careful, this demand is sought to be satisfied by merely a ‘naturalistic’ (akin to a photographic) representation. This debate as to what is naturalistic and whether or not that is good enough to be called realistic is quite old, going back to French novelists of the nineteenth century and their critical assessment in the early or mid twentieth century by critiques like Lukacs and other Marxist writers. The best writers, novelists, they reckoned, came to be perceptive chroniclers of the society and the important economic, social and political changes of their times (often unconsciously and holding quite conservative and reactionary views about the changes) and these they ably reflected by creating immortal characters carrying forward these changes through their personal conflicts and destiny.
While this analytical view point was probably very useful in interpreting many significant fictional writings (especially novels) belonging to the nineteenth century, one may have been less comfortable dealing with European (in general western) writings in the same genres from the early and middle twentieth century with similar critical perspective. Of special importance were the great novels due to Kafka, Joyce, Camus and Sartre (to name a few among the most significant writers of the last century), bringing to focus an individual’s human predicament, agony, angst, difficult and conflicting choices and the responsibility for such choices providing the framework for the life represented. How far an individual’s characteristics and his choices are predicated to the social and economic changes is less definitively hinted in these fictions than their nineteenth century counterparts. Considering the momentous changes occurring during the early and middle part of the past century, it is inconceivable that the individual destinies are dissociated from those changes. But the writers, imbued with new philosophical outlooks like existentialism and the many artistic and literary styles it spawned, probably tried to create a new kind of representation of life where individual’s cerebral and emotional responses are sought to be more comprehensively catalogued and dichotomised. It was hoped that enmeshing such ‘peculiar’ individual destinies would create a more realistic representation of the texture of the life in the present complex times and fragmented societies.
Come to think of it individual characters of the earlier times had displayed impulses and went into actions in response to events or as a result of moments of emotional upheaval or goaded by inspiration, which could be traced to some conscious cerebral deliberations. But rarely, if ever, was the individual’s self-awareness so acute as to create almost a distinctly cerebral persona stepped out of a character’s flesh and blood and emotional contour. And it was as if this separate persona watches from outside the character and comments and tries to influence its action. Thus this literary device of variously juxtaposing the cerebral and the emotional had seen significant employment in the best of the twentieth century literature.
The key factor that probably propelled this paradigm shift in the fundamental style of the literary representation was the gradual demise (initially primarily in the western world, developed nations) of the religious-ethical-political moorings of the individuals to a perceived communal or social center, creating first a dissonance with and then almost an eclipse of the societal and the communal, and eventually a void beyond the individual.
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