Pempa Tamang/essay

NEPALI NOVELS AND THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
BY PEMPA TAMANG

Impressed and inspired by the writing by Pravin Moktan [NOW Focus! 15, Nov, 2005] on the recently published Nepali novel by Narayan Waagle "Palpaasa Cafe" [2005] which has sold 5000 copies in two days [a record in Nepali publishing history], I sought out a copy of the book to see for myself what the trend-setting best seller was all about. Once I laid my hands on it, I was captivated. I read it in one sitting and have been re-reading it in a bid to internalize the wonder and the spectacle that it presents of the world of present day Nepal and its plight.

While reading this amazing book, snatches from another popular book, "Forget Kathmandu" by Manjushri Thapa kept hunting me. Forget Kathmandu is a non-fiction, journalistic writing, a discourse on history as it happens, a record of events. Palpasaa .... on the other hand is fiction and uses the liberty offered by this medium to flesh out the travails of rural Nepal in starker detail. This is a connection that I missed in Manjushree Thapa's effort, although even Forget Kathmandu is based on travels through the rugged rural panorama of the hills of western Nepal. Here, I reiterate that fiction provides more freedom to a writer. That said, the similarity between Manjushree Thapa traveling with the foreigner friend to the interiors of western Nepal and Drishya of Palpasaa Café making a trip to his village in the remote mountainous area and his return journey to Kathmandu are too striking to be ignored.

In a way thus, Forget Kathmandu is the "Anxiety of Influence' [Harold Bloom] of Palpasaa Café.

But more than popularity and its appeal to masses [read readers] I would like to discuss here the literary aspects and the new trends in Nepali writing that the novel heralds. To put things in better perspective, it also becomes necessary here to bring in reference to two other novels "Sharanaarthee" [Refugee, 1999] by Krishna Dharabasi and "Awataran" [Incarnation, 2004] by Krishna Baral. Refugee is a political-historical novel on the displacement of the Nepalese and their plight. Incarnation is the fiction of fictions - a metafiction.

These three novels present the modern face of Nepal and its people in different moods and situations. Refugee is influenced by the writings of Indra Bahadur Rai and his literary movement Leela Lekhan [playful writing] and by Dubasu Chettri who had actually thought of writing a novel the way Dharabasi wrote. Incarnation is a creation under the "Anxiety of Influence" from Indra Bahadur Rai and the novel Refugee.

Palpasaa Café presents the readers with glimpses of the elite cosmopolitan minority of modern Nepal. Narayan Waglay describes cotemporary Nepal through the eyes of an artist, Drishya. He is the global face of Nepal. He is young and famous. His paintings are appreciated internationally. He travels all over the world, drawing inspiration and developing his art further. He lives a bohemian life, enjoying every moment, friends, parties and women. But the place where he was born [the Pahaads or the hills] remain the same - backward, inaccessible, poor and under-developed. His people live in abject poverty.

The writer has beautifully portrayed the two faces of Nepal which remind us of the postmodern motif of double coding [Charles Jencks]. Jencks defines postmodernism as the art-work simultaneously addressing an elite minority audience through high art-art codes and a mass public through popular codes. Palpasaa Café followis a story line veering to popular fiction as was done by Umberto Eco in his best seller "The Name of the Rose". It has romance, action, drama, tragedy or to put into words of Canadian Critic Northrop Fry "Tragedy, Comedy, Romance and Irony." But techincally Palpasaa Café cannot be called a "Literature of Exhaustion" [John Barthe], meaning, it is not an experimental work. It is a novel of the Saul Bellow genre. Unlike "The Name of the Rose" this novel does not surprise and jolt us.

Although the novel Refugee is also realistic and as bitter as Palpasaa, it is a novel packed with an arsenal of post-modern surprises. It tells the plight of displaced Nepalese as they find themselves in foster homes and countries. It is a moving story of Nepalese forced out from places like Burma, North-East India, Bhutan where they had settled and adopted as their country and their epic journey back to their ancestral country.

In the course of researching and writing, Dharabasi throws lights on many misunderstood myths and theories. Some of the myths he demolishes are one like the belief that Nepali migration was essentially a hill phenomena and that no plains people from Nepal ever migrated. Ironies abound in his narrative. Most of these "prodigal sons" could not adjust to the relocation well and continue to remain refugees even in the "promised land."

But the most striking feature of this novel remain its characters. Most of the characters are borrowed from other texts: Chandra Prakash and Bartha for example come from the novel "Dak Bunglow" by Shiv Kumar Rai, Jaimaya from the story "Jaimaya herself alone arrived at Lekhapani" by Indra Bahadur Rai, Noo from the novel "Noyo" of Prakash Kovid, etc.

Use of such themes from another text technically comes under the correspondence theory. According to this theory, every text will have traces of preexisting texts. This technique is used often in postmodern fictions. Chritine Brooke-Rose has used this technique in her novel "Thru" [1975]. This text borrows many passages from other texts also coping and pasting them into the new one. This technique is called pastiche in postmodern terminology. Besides characters from another text, real living characters like Indra Bahadur Rai, Lil Bahadur Chettri and other also figure in Refugee. The text, in turn, reads simultaneously like a novel, history, reportage and biography. The novel manages to span the quantum leap between fiction, history and biography. In other words it breaks down disciplinary distinctions between history, fiction, biography and reportage, becoming a multidisciplinary text.

Incarnation, on the other hand, is a collection of eight short stories which blend together into novel. Some of the stories are rewriting of stories like "Naaso" (Legacy) by Guruprasad Mainali, "Hod" (Bet) by Biswesar Prasad Koirala etc. Bending rules further, the writer himself figures as a character in one of the stories in which he meets the imaginary character Jai Bahadur and Jaimaya and spends a night with them. This text, thus, blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. This breaking away from the frame of fiction in techincally called metafiction.

This collection of short stories concludes with a postlude of dramatic act. A bizarre thing happens in this episode in which all the fictional characters come out of their fictional worlds as if they were real living actors and decide to hold a meeting ostensibly to felicitate its "senior most citizen" and those characters who have become famous for their roles as characters in different works of fictions. Characters present discourses highlighting their roles in different stories, the importance they had in the episodes, the freedom and the restrictions imposed on them by their writers, their travails and their triumphs as characters.

The reader suddenly realizes that he has been duped by the writer and that he was actually reading a novel and not a collection of short stories.

In the postmodern age, it is not the stories of human triumphs and travails that are the centre stage of narratives but the stories of art and craft itself and what the readers get are only the stories of theories and the language game.

Postmodernism has finally arrived in Nepali literature with the "postmodern condition" of "little narratives" (Lyotard) of Jhapa centric motif and ideology.