In Defence of The Serious

Sharmistha Mohanty fiction writer and editor of the newly-launched literature web journal www.almostisland.com defends the need for a serious resistance to populism

I began a literature journal on the web last month, called Almost Island. Part of the need to do this arose from what I see as a very difficult public context for serious literature, for writing which moves the medium forward, explores new territories, a writing that enquires into our present human context.

In the Sunday magazine of the Hindustan Times, September 23rd, the lead article is on the publishing industry. It says what is needed is “….Writers who write the kind of books the majority of us like to read. Books that are not highbrow, that tell a story, without necessarily probing the murky depths of human experience, that entertain and are simply a damn good read.” (italics mine)

It is perfectly valid that there should be a “popular” writing. What is unacceptable is the suggestion that anything with depth is to be carefully avoided. It begs the question, what is the mainstream? This word is always used to denote what dominates the market, what most people seek. But, the real “main stream” is that large river which flows far from the markets perhaps, but without which the “popular” would not exist, because it is that river which makes the soil for any kind of writing into a fertile one. It is time we recognised that the “popular,” as we understand it today, would not have come into being without the serious, because that is from where it has learnt.

I am using the word “popular” slightly differently. So not only the “popular” but the “practical,” the “widely used,” the “better known,” the “more successful,” all owe a debt to a quiet source, be that of invention or daring removed from the dominant scene.

What is depth? What is the history of the novel, for example? What are the conditions under which it came about? What is it that the novel is capable of as an instrument of enquiry, how great is its potential, and how does this potential differ from that of poetry and epic and drama which existed before it? These are questions that one must have thought about if at all one uses plot, narrative, character, and even a semblance of an internal world. The origins of things are profound, and it is time that the “popular” modes recognised their debt to what comes from serious thought and craft.

This is not only true of the arts, but even of the sciences. The great mathematician Gauss’s (1777-1855) number theory makes a web credit card transaction possible. David Hilbert (1862-1943), another mathematician, who created the idea of infinite dimensional space, had his theories used in quantum mechanics, which electrical engineers used to make semi-conductors, which in turn made the transistor possible.

What the champions of the marketplace do not know or care to know, is that neither salability nor collective need nor utility has created some of mankind’s greatest inventions. Jared Diamond in his “Guns, Germs and Steel,” says, “…Many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind…It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and the electric light bulb, to the phonograph and the transistor.” It is thought and creativity that makes for a breakthrough, and not merely understanding the movements and prophecies of an avid, eager marketplace.

The idea that anything serious is to be avoided, comes only from an anti-intellectual stance which arises not because people are not capable of thought, but because they fear it. The problem is not lack of intelligence but lack of courage. The prime goal here is that there should be no disturbances which lead to new thinking about ethics, morality, or ways of living, that everything should be easily consumed, digested, perhaps even forgotten. It is the studied avoidance of all real thought, which must be pursued often in the greatest uncertainty.

Almost Island for me is also an attempt to counter one more thing.

The courage of inventors in every field, even Defoe in writing Robinson Crusoe, is the opposite of unadulterated self-interest. I sense increasingly in what is being published and in the current ambience, the need in people to “be a writer” instead of “to write.” There is a world of a difference between the two. No lasting work can come out of a notion of pure self-interest. It is for most of us, an element, but cannot be the prime mover. A serious journal deflects this by creating a kind of collective, where writers can talk to each other and to readers.

What I wish to do through this journal is also to publish individual voices. This may seem obvious, but it is not. In writing today, whether it be fiction or literary non-fiction, perhaps even poetry, the entry point seen as necessary is something far larger than the individual—a sociological, political, or historical overview. So the proliferation of novels that deal very directly with riots, terrorism, the situation for women in the Middle East. It is as if what is factually real has the highest right to become a novel. But in the end the individual is the bedrock of literature. Even a collective social or political need must be made deeply personal; it is from an individual soul that the nuances of emotion, idea, ethics, politics and philosophy begin to emerge. Literature would not be necessary otherwise, history and sociology and anthropology would be enough.

Perhaps the contemporary notion that one should be able to live by one’s writing is also wrong. I say perhaps because I don’t know. The question remains alive in me because every writer from whom I have learnt, or who has shocked me into sight, has been committed to life in other ways. When I met the deeply courageous Rumanian-German writer Herta Muller, she said she found it abominable to do nothing else but write. Muller had lived under Ceausescu’s regime, standing against it under threat to her life, and she had been a schoolteacher, a tractor driver, and a nurse among other things. Rene Char, the great French poet and visionary, fought in the Resistance, and T.S. Eliot of course worked in a bank. Recently, I met the Chinese poet in exile, Bei Dao, and found that for eleven years he had been a construction worker.

The counterpoint to this is a life of inherited privilege which a writer uses with utter responsibility and internality. Proust, Emily Dickinson, Tagore. In the end perhaps, it is the impulse that is significant. When one wants to “be a writer” and not “to write”, that impulse is misplaced.

All the writers I’ve mentioned here have lasted for very long periods of time. They may or may not have been the bestsellers of their day. Serious literature requires time to be read and understood. It can also be sold fairly widely if publishers use their marketing skills creatively. Marketing after all is not one unified monolithic entity. In a shorter period, a pathbreaking novel may sell less than a mediocre one, but over time, very often, that ratio will change dramatically.

I speak here only of my own endeavour in Almost Island. I do hope that many more individual voices, with their own beliefs and commitments will emerge. We need a plurality of contexts where literature as a form of human enquiry can find many homes, quiet ones, a kind of home that the dominant marketplace is not able to offer, not because it does not have the place, but because it doesn’t have the creativity necessary to build that place.

I would like to bring this piece to a close with words from the very highbrow philosopher Theodor Adorno. “The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, it’s frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth.”

Sharmistha Mohanty is a fiction writer. Her last work is New Life, (India Ink/Roli Books), 2005. Her work has appeared in journals, anthologies and websites in the USA, UK, England and France. She is the editor of almost island, a literature journal on the web. She is currently at work on a new novel and a book of prose texts.