The digression on the length of a novel may be continued for a few more pages, to support my argument that it is not the length that merits the reading of a novel more than once. J.D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ is a short novel but requires a lot of reader engagement because of the narrative style and how the protagonist Holden Caulfield negotiates his struggle against growing up and preserving his innocence. Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ a novel which created ripples soon after its publication is not a long novel. It hits hard at the colored and exotic notions of Africa that had been cultivated by the imperial powers. The novel looks at the African way of life, the struggle of the African people under the force of the invading powers and the arrogant, ethnocentric attitude of the colonial powers which tended to regard the African culture as savage and primitive.
Nigerian Nobel laureate has described the work as "the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of the African character, rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as the white man would see him." Such novels which define the character of a people and the soul of a continent happen only once in a life time. Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ was another work which unraveled, for my understanding, the frames of reference into which the West had conveniently fitted the Orient. This was the work from which my Professor Madam Susie Tharu started her introductory session on English Studies. Why some stories are not heard, and why some stories are hugely popular? What is history vis-à-vis historiography? Why is it that the Canon does not have these books? These questions were asked repeatedly in the class and it took me quite some time to understand that the adventurous, romantic novels that I read and loved were in truth great works of art but their place in the Canon had been at the expense of the marginal and the sub-altern which could have been because of the espousal of a “liberalist, humanist, European, White, Male” perspective. (More on this point in future posts)
Some of the novels written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have been on the shorter side: ‘ No one writes to the Colonel, Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a death Foretold, Of Love and other Demons’ are all short novels. However they communicate the uniqueness of a Marquez novel; the real, merging with the magical, fact merging with fiction and the mundane taking flight towards the heavenly. Iam reminded of several stories from the novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ which established for me, the class of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A shower of yellow flowers rains on Macando when Ursula breathes her last. Remedios the beauty, the woman whose beauty simply turned people mad and whose nakedness, which was bereft of any immodesty or vanity captivated people in a spell of forlorn silence, ascends to heaven in her material form. The novel ‘reeks’ of magical realism. The Latin American as it has been called lives through the pages of this novel.
The absorbing attention to time or the convolution of it is evident in the novels of Marquez. This particular feature has a presence in most of the Latin American novels that I have read, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera, The Feast of the Goat, The House of Spirits, and The Death of Artemio Cruz’ The attention to time is not to distort the present, nor to portray a nostalgia but to unearth the context of life: the mythic and the trivial which define the nature of time outside of the present. Since I started from the length of a novel, I will end this post on the same note. ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ an by published in the 18th century was a short novel but the impact it had on the society of those days is nothing less than phenomenal. (To be continued)