Acharya Chatursen

Source:http://tonguetribe.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/a-compelling- journey-though-the-labyrinths-of-time/

Vaishali ki Nagarvadhu by Acharya Chatursen

Acharya Chatursen paints a vivid picture of fifth century B.C. India in his novel Vasihali ki Nagarvadhu. His canvas is large and he fills in every inch of it with brush strokes of fine prose to bring together a story of epic proportions. The author combines history and fantasy, war and love, politics and culture using a multitude of characters and interlinked stories to create an enchanting web which gives a legendary quality to this novel.

The novel begins with the story of Ambapali, a courtesan in the republic state of Vaishali. Though the novel is titled after her, the book soon moves beyond her life to other sub-stories based on social and political themes. These help to describe the Indian landscape of the later Vedic period when many large city states both monarchies such as Magadh and Kosal and republics such as Vaishali and Gandhar prospered in northern India. The leitmotif remains Ambapali’s life–the mystery of her birth and her bitterness towards Vaishali for her disgrace, which break out to the surface time and again from the thick undergrowth (the metaphor seems appropriate because much action in the novel takes place in deep tropical forests) of other detailed and descriptive accounts of political intrigue, caste conflict, and the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. The convoluted sub-plots and sharp turns and twists in the story ensure that the societal upheaval and turbulence of that time are felt acutely by the reader as they negotiate the crossing paths of conspiracy and war on one extreme and love and passion on the other.

Although Ambapali’s central position in the story remains unrivaled, the other female characters are sketched with the equal depth. It becomes somewhat disappointing when these women disappear from the novel rather abruptly. Somprabh- a warrior from Magadh who is hinted to be Ambapali’s brother, Bimbisar-the king of Magadh, and king Udayan of Kaushambi are the three male protagonists in the story and Ambapali’s real feelings for each of them, by clever design, remain a conundrum till the very end of the novel.

The author effectively depicts the pace and thrill of fight and chase. Darkness, danger and movement are dramatically described which gives the novel its ‘page-turner’ quality. A significant feature of this novel is the use of myths and fantasies which bring in a larger than life scale. The antics of a poison-woman ‘vishkanya’, the invasion of the spirit of a human being by supernatural apparition, and the handsome submarine horses that are washed ashore from the sea, enthrall the reader. War strategies and ways to destabilise an enemy country using guerrillas, spies, paid mercenaries, civil war etc. are also well described.

In the middle of the excitement and drama the author has tactfully woven interesting philosophical discussions into the narrative. Should a warrior be loyal towards the king or the kingdom; the status of women–comparisons between the women of Gandhar and Vasishlai; what is better, rule of a king or governance by elected representatives, are some of the discourses which occur as dialogue between the major characters. These discussions climax with the one which takes place in the assembly of Vaishali where the members debate about the kind of government that is suitable for Magadh state who they have just defeated in war. Here some novel insights about the nature of a monarchy and a republic are presented. The monarchical dynasty is compared to a human being’s life with stages of infancy, youth, middle age and old age which, after two or three generations shows signs of aging and is overthrown by a new dynasty. The republic is considered appropriate for homogeneous people with uniformity in race and rank—‘rakt aur shreni’ and therefore it is concluded that the republic system will not work in Magadh where a person is called a Magadhi because he is ruled by Magadh and not because he is Magadhi by clan or tribe.

The book affords another important reflection on the effect of mixing of castes on the Aryan race. The decay of the Aryan race is a cause of worry to the powerful Aryan Brahmin priests who fear that the new castes of mixed blood are mentally and physically stronger than pure bred Aryans.

The appeal of this novel lies in its overreach though the breadth of its narration does lose the reader at some places. The convoluted story-telling becomes frustrating especially when a particularly engaging sub-plot loses connection with the main story and a major character turns out to be actually a disguised version of another character.

With four hundred fifty pages of chaste Hindi, the book may be difficult to fully comprehend for some but Vaishali ki Nagarvadhu of Chatursen still is, without doubt, well worth a read for keen readers of Hindi Literature.

Pinjer: Amrita Pritma

One of the first voices portraying the pain of Partition was that of Punjabi poet and fiction writer Amrita Pritam. And for a long time the only feminine voice viewing Partition from a woman’s perspective. Chroniclers of the women’s stories of Partition like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin were to enter the area nearly four decades later.

What made her first poem after Partition Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu… most poignant was the fact that Amrita was eyewitness to the horrors of Partition and also a victim. She was among the thousands who migrated from West Punjab to make their home across the fence. Her two most outstanding works literary works are the Waris Shah poem, penned in winter after the bloody month of August in 1947, and her novel Pinjar,which appeared in the early fifties.

The novel was too radical for its times because the wounds had not yet healed and the communal hatred as still at its peak. Even in those difficult times, Amrita was able to write a novel that saw the situation from the point of view of the other. In fact, it is only recently that a Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar has been able to tell a similar story on celluloid. It is this novel that has brought the ailing 86-year-old writer the La Route des Indes Literary Prize from France for its French translation. Long ago, the novel had been translated by Khushwant Singh and published with the title The Skeleton by Jaico. It was reprinted when Chandra Prakash Dwivedi made it into a feature film in 2002.

Amrita’s partner Imroz says the award came as a surprise because they were unaware of the translation by Denis Matringe. Denis was a French teacher in Lahore who heard someone singing Heer and was inspired to learn Punjabi. He also married a Punjabi girl later. Speaking of this novel, Imroz says: "It was very radical. A Muslim boy abducts a Hindu girl and she chooses to remain with him rather than be rehabilitated in India after Partition. It was a saga of love of a couple thrown in a situation not of their making, but they rise above the situation with love and caring." Imroz reveals that a number of filmmakers toyed with the idea of making a film on it and some contracts were also signed. But each time the project was given up because it was felt that the story would not be palatable to the masses. "It was only when the new century came, did someone dare to film it," Imroz adds.

Amrita is too ill to remark on this surprise award but when Dwivedi’s film was made, she was able to see it at home on a DVD although she was bedridden. I recall her saying, "The most terrible happening of the times was the Partition. I still shiver when I think of those blood-drenched days. I had already spoken of the fate of women in the frenzy in my poetry. After Partition Shahnawaz Khan and Mrinalini Sarabhai were involved in the rehabilitation of abducted girls. I would listen to the stranger than fiction stories that they told me. It was thus that Puro of Pinjar took shape and the novel wrote itself.

Translation And Its Role In Indian Literature

Questions such as, ‘what is translation…wherein lies its complexity?’ have been asked ever since literature stopped being restricted to one target readership and moved beyond the boundaries of language. The term translation technically connotes the art of recomposing a work in another language without losing its original flavour, or of finding an analogous substitute.

Its complexity lies in it being like the transfer of perfume from one bottle to another. As careful as you are, some fragrance is lost but the challenge remains to capture the essence. All things in nature are subject to change – and so is all cultural matter. Translation is always a shift, not between two languages but between the two types of cultural matter.

India is a linguistic galaxy of unparalleled richness. Few contexts could be better suited than the Indian for a discussion of the processes of translation within a spectacular stellar setting. How does one common ‘idea of India’ make itself available to a Bengali, Tamil or a Marathi in any way save that of translation? Translation provides a cognitive map of India’s linguistic world in all its interrelatedness as well as estrangement. All texts and all readers are both monolingual and multilingual. A text, obviously written literally in one language in a given manifestation faces a multi lingual reader and thus reaches out to a much larger base, unifying experiences and opinions as it expands.

English has to be admitted as a vast reservoir of translation in contemporary India. It may no longer be a colonial language, but it is increasingly a conduit language. This ‘filter language’, as Khubchandani terms it, has today a certain inescapable presence. More English translating have been published in India in recent times than ever before, but our awareness of the need to ensure quality in translation has not heightened the same extent. Who should judge a translation – somebody who can read the original or somebody who cannot? A person who was able to read the language, and enjoyed the original may find no translation satisfactory, whereas someone who cannot is likely to regard readability in English is the prime requisite. It seems unarguable that the only way in which the ideology of ‘unity’ can be explored in a multilingual society like ours is by accepting both the need for, and the problems of, translation.

  

 

The Sanskritised term we currently use for ‘translation’ in many Indian languages is anuvada – which literally means ‘after speech’ so it seems wrong in the first place to discuss it in an ‘Introduction’. It also stands in contrast to anukaran, which implies aping or slavish imitation, but there ought to be a more to the word than just the suggestion that it could involve creative license of a kind?

 

Any discussion of translation leads automatically to the question: who is an ideal translator? The writer himself, or someone who has not been involved in the primary creative art? The task of the translator is to unfreeze the shapes that thought took in one language and refreeze them into another. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but cultural. Translators, even when trying to give us the flavor of the language, are in fact modernizing the source. As far as translators in India are concerned, most Indians who grow up in urban conditions and go to school and college tackle shifts from one language to another so often and so comfortably that translation seems second nature to them.

 

 

TRANSLATION STUDIES

The Pedagogy of Translation by Vanamala Viswanatha

Translation Studies is a young discipline still in the process of mapping its territory. Attempts have been made to define its boundaries and develop its terrain by scholars working in disciplines as varied as Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Culture Studies, Linguistics and Literary Theory.

Viewing translation as a transaction between two languages, the dominant linguistic paradigm has treated it merely as a matter of transfer from the Source Language to the Target Language.

There can be two ways of translating: Transliteration and Transcreation.

Transliteration or literal translation is word-to-word, phrase-to-phrase or sentence-to-sentence carrying over from the Source Text into the Target Text. This means that the words and terminologies would either require exact equivalents in the Target Language or would have to be put as it is into the Target Text. It may be ideal for texts falling under technical registers. But they would prove extremely difficult when done on cultural texts. The aim of the translation is to reproduce meanings of the Source Text and the immediate effect it produces on the native audience for the readers and audience of another culture in whose language the text is to be translated. But, say, every Hindi word cannot have a counterpart in English because of its vast language and cultural differences in certain connotations and structures. Hence, the ‘literal’ translation of cultural/literary works would be like forsaking the duty of a translator.

 

On the other hand, transcreation or cultural translation means a partial or complete freedom to the translator in dealing with the Source Text. The translator has to render the Source Text in a recreated form in the Target Language. It involves reading every word and sentence carefully, but it is not only or simply a literal rendering.

 

Another step in translation is termed as ‘Transfer’. It is the stage in which the analysed material is transferred in the mind of the translator from the Source Text to the Target Text. The final stage is ‘restructuring’ the transferred material. The basic structural elements have to be transferred to the Target Language. It has to be ensured in the process of transformation that the same effect the Source Text had should be achieved for the Target Text for its readers. When the translation produces the same effect as on the original audience then the translation can be considered equivalent to the Source Text.

PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION

The translator has to deal with the problem of finding equivalent words and expressions in the Target Language, which though cannot be substitutes for the expressions in the Source Language, but can come close to it, can raise similar feelings and attitudes in the readers and audiences of the Target Text.

Literary and cultural texts suggest rather than describe meanings. Cultural meanings are very specific and their connotations vary with words in other languages. Therefore, it is really difficult to expect equivalence between the texts of two languages separated by two different cultures. The translator has to interpret and analyse the connotative and suggestive of the Source Text and on the basis of his knowledge of the culture of the Target Text; he has to recreate the meanings in the new language.

Figures of speech, extended metaphors, idioms, proverbs and allegories pose a great challenge to the translator. Even translating dialogues, forms of dressing, different kinds of food can be difficult when it has strong cultural roots. For example, words like ‘saree’, ‘churidar’, ‘pan’, ‘pallu’ cannot have an English counterpart. In India, there is a specific word for every familial relationship. For instance, ‘chacha’, ‘mama’, ‘phupha’, ‘tauji’ are all called ‘uncle’ in English, similarly ‘nana-nani’ and ‘dada-dadi’  are simply ‘grandparents’. Also, the suggested meanings of these relationships can never be translated into any other language.

 

To show how the differences in cultural facts can cause difficulties in the translation of metaphors we may look at the symbolic meanings of certain words in different cultures. ‘Owl’ in English is the symbol of wisdom whereas it symbolizes ‘ill-fortune’ in Persian and is associated to superstitious beliefs in India. Also, ‘pig’, ‘hog’ and ‘swine’ are different words for the same animal but these small variations can create big differences in metaphorical meanings:

Sam is a pig.

Sam is a hog.

Sam is a swine.

The languages which do not have separate words for these different categories would fail to represent the difference between the discoursal value of the above metaphors. Thus, a literal translation may lead to Target Language metaphors with different and sometimes completely opposite discoursal values. 

 

TRANSLATED WRITERS

We are now going to talk about a few writers who have brought out very vividly the different cultures of India through their writing in vernacular languages. The languages we are going to focus upon are Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil and Kannada. It is the voice of this marginalized section writing in vernacular languages, especially of the women regional writers, which needs to be heard. This is possible only through translation, which gives them recognition all over the world.

 

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Tagore was the first Indian Nobel Laureate. He won the Nobel Prize for his translation of the Gitanjali.

His best known works are Gora and Ghare Baire. His works – verse, short stories and novels – are acclaimed for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism and contemplation. Of Tagore’s prose, his short stories are perhaps most highly regarded indeed he is credited with originating the Bengali language version of the genre. His short stories mostly borrow from the deceptively simple subject matter: common people. The translation of his works into various languages has given people across cultures a glimpse of the world of the Bengali common man.

Given below is Robi Dutta’s translation of his poem ‘Urvashi’:

No mother thou, no daughter thou

Thou art no bride,

O maiden fair and free

O inhabitant of Nandan

Urvasi!

 

GULZAR

Sampooran Singh Kalra better known as Gulzar is an Indian poet, lyricist and director. Gulzar primarily works in Hindi-Urdu and also works in Punjabi, several dialects of Hindi like braj bhasha, khadi boli, Haryanvi and Marwari. Gulzar has received many awards including the Padma Bhushan and the Academy Award for his song "Jai Ho".

He has been widely translated into English and other languages. During the Jaipur Literary Festival, Pawan Varma, an eminent IFS officer who has translated Gulzar’s poetry, said that he faced a difficulty translating phrases like ‘tip tip’ and ‘tap tap’ and Gulzar replied “abhi to humne kabutar ki gutar goon shuru bhi nahi ki hai”.

Sunjoy Shekhar, who has also translated Gulzar calls himself a “smuggler trying to surreptitiously smuggle the feelings evoked by Gulzar’s lyrics across an impermissible, alien wordscape.” To give a flavor of the translation of his poetry, given below is a song of his along with its translation:

 

basa cand kraoD,aoM saalaaoM maoM

saUrja kI Aaga bauJaogaI jaba

AaOr rak, ]D,ogaI saUrja sao

jaba kao[- caaMd na DUbaogaa

AaOr kao[- ja,maIM na ]BarogaI

tba zMDa bauJaa [k kaoyalaa saa

TukD,a yao ja,maIM ka GaUmaogaa

BaTka BaTka

mawma Kiksa~I raoSanaI maoM

maOM saaocata hUM ]sa va@t

Aga,r kaga,ja, po ilaKI hu[- naj,ma

khIM ]D,to ]D,to saUrja maoM igaro

tao saUrja ifr saoo jalanao lagao

 

In a billion years when

The sun’s fire dwindles

And ash blows across its surface

Then the moon will no longer wane

And the land not rise

When like a cold, burnt out piece of coal

This earth revolves

Lost in its gyre

Trailing a dying, sepia glow

I think then

If a poem written on a piece of paper was to waft along

And perchance land on the sun

The sun would ignite again.

 

AMBAI

C. S. Lakshmi was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in 1944. Some of her works - A Purple Sea and In A Forest, A Deer (2006) - have been translated English by Lakshmi Holmström. In 2006, she (along with Lakshmi Holmström) won the Vodafone-Crossword prize. For her contributions to Tamil literature, she received the 2008 Iyal Virudhu. Her work is characterized by her feminism, an eye for detail, and a sense of irony. Exploration of space, silence, coming to terms with one's body or sexuality, and the importance of communication are some of the recurring themes in her works.

 

VIJAYDAN DETHA

Vijaydan Detha also known as Bijji is a noted writer from Rajasthan and a recipient of Padma Shri award(2007). He has also received several other awards such as Sahitya Akademi Award and Sahitya Chudamani Award.

He has more than 800 short stories to his credit, which are translated into English and other languages. He is co-founder of Rupayan Sansthan with late Komal Kothari, an institute that documents Rajasthani folk-lore, arts and music. His literary works include Bataan ri Phulwari (garden of tales), a fourteen volume collection of stories that draws on folk-lore and spoken dialects of Rajasthan. His stories and novels have been adapted for many plays and movies including Habib Tanvir's Charandas Chor and Amol Palekar’s Paheli.

He once said "If you do not want to be a mediocre writer, you should return to your village and write in Rajasthani."

 

SALMA

Born in 1968 in Tamil Nadu, Salma’s first poetry collection shocked conservative society where women are supposed to remain silent. In 2003, Salma along with three other Tamil women poets faced obscenity charges and violent threats. Salma is now head of the panchayat (local level government body) of Thuvarankurichi, near Trichi in Tamil Nadu. The government of Tamil Nadu has appointed her Chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board. 

Her novel, translated as Midnight Tales focuses on the inner world of Muslim women in the conservative society of Tamil Nadu in south India. It gives us an insight into what actually goes on in the households of this section of the society and brings it out very effectively. The novel was also long-listed for the Man Asian Prize of 2007.

 

Translating these texts into more widely spoken languages like Hindi and English has taken their voice to a much wider range of readers.

Read more: http://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-language/translation-and-its-role-in-india-english-language-essay.php#ixzz2Z4XcRj4c

Bellow

source: Tom Cono

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), “the genius of portraiture,” straddled the modernism of early twentieth century literature and the postmodernism and detached irony of its middle and later years. In doing so, some would say he bestrode the American literary landscape. Just as many would disagree. For every Irving Malin (“Saul Bellow is the most important living American novelist”) there is a Norman Mailer (“I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist.”) Given that, during his career, Bellow frequently tilted against the windmills of both the literary and critical elites, it is unsurprising that he engendered so much feeling. He is a writer who makes the reader take a stance.

Nonetheless, Bellow did not see himself as being confrontational. “I am going against the stream,” he said. “That’s not an attitude. Attitudes are foolishness. It’s just that there’s no use doing anything else is there?” The stream he was swimming against was the culture of despair and alienation which was dominant in American literature, what Chirantan Kulshrestha describes as “the ideology of exaggerated wretchedness.” In reacting against false optimism, Bellow felt, writers had too often gone to the opposite extreme. Still in thrall to the modernists and their “legacy of pessimism,” still wallowing in wastelands, writers were acceding to the wider cultural expectation to “say no powerfully, ‘in the accent of thunder.’” Where, Bellow asked, was there real life, written realistically?

It is in the question of reality and art that Bellow moved further away from the accepted stance of the day. Kulshrestha perceives that Bellow had left behind early twentieth-century writers’ hostility to the reality of the present and, like mid-century writers, believed that art could not be a substitute for life. “Life or reality, for Bellow, is intractable and mysterious,” he notes. Because it stepped beyond intellectual systems it could not be exchanged for art. Art could, though, be a powerful means of interpreting reality, as seen in the works of many mid-century writers like Camus, Faulkner, Moravia et al. Bellow differed from them, too, however, because he refused to believe in a “lost paradise” or to accept a life-view tinged by a sense of loss. Instead, his fiction was, as Michael Glenday notes, “an effort to grasp a more authentic reality.” Bellow himself states that: “one of my themes is the American denial of real reality, our devices for evading it, our refusal to face what is all too obvious and palpable.” Glenday summarises this as a means for Bellow to expose “the inauthenticity of the everyday.” 

In fighting for realism, Bellow took a stance against what he saw as the macho destructiveness of the prevailing modernist mood, its relentless pessimism. “I don’t see that we need to call for the destruction of the world in hope of a phoenix,” he wrote. Instead, Bellow concentrated on examining the human condition. Writing of Him with his foot in his mouth, Cynthia Ozick states there is:

no romantic aping of archaisms or nostalgias; no restraints born out of theories of form or faddish tenets of experimentalism or ideological crypticness; no Neanderthal flatness in the name of cleanliness of prose, no gods of nihilism; no gods of subjectivity; no philosophy of parody.

Gloria Cronin summarises Bellow’s stance against the current orthodoxy most succinctly:

No other post WW11 American writer has analyzed so completely and so humanely the effects of American cultural anxiety with the age of technology and rationalism, existentialism and the legacy of high modernism.

Bellow’s objections to the orthodoxies of the day – be they modernist or post-modernist – were not superficial: rather, they go a long way to explain his extraordinary, rich, humane prose style. In an interview with Jo Brans, he declared that, unlike Joyce, he had no interest in writing for the literary intelligensia. Although he denied he was trying to teach people how to live, he did accept that he believed he had “something of importance to transmit.” He saw himself “as a historian. Every novelist is a historian.” And what do historians do but relate the story of people? Thus, character – or the representation of humanity – is an essential component of the Bellow ouevre. He concluded his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1976 by stating:

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice.

This is what Joyce Carol Oates alludes to in her portrait of Bellow:

“big ideas”, though obsessively aired, aria-like indeed, seem to us pretexts to enable the author to display, and to admire, and to analyze, the phenomona he loves best: the haunting contours and textures of the physical world, and the mystery of human personality in its extraordinary variety.”

Bellow focused on the individual as a way of understanding the general. He was essentially an optimist who saw beauty in humanity, but who nonetheless deprecated the isolation felt by many in a society which crowded the individual. Christopher Taylor identifies one of Bellow’s great themes as “the fate of the individual in an age which, Bellow feels, doesn’t put a proper value on individualism.” Robert Baker describes the “two themes that pervade [Bellow’s] work – the horrible price of insularity… and, transcending this, the common humanity shared by all.” 

It is here that Bellow rebelled once more against contemporary rhetoric. In his Nobel speech, he quoted Alain Robbe-Grillet:

The novel of characters belongs entirely in the past… Individuals have been wiped out… The exclusive cult of the ‘human’ has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric.

Bellow countered: “Can it be that human beings are at a dead end?” He rounded on the intellectual community – “another group of mummies” – which had “laid down the law”: “It amuses me that these serious essayists should be allowed to sign the death notices of literary forms… We must not make bosses of our intellectuals.” 

Although he conceded that “there is no reason why a novelist should not drop “character” if the strategy stimulates him,” Bellow was clear on the importance of character in his work:

A "character" has his own logic. He goes his way, one goes with him; he has some perceptions, one perceives them with him. You do him justice, you don't grind your axe. I have no axe to grind, one way or the other.

Thus, it can be said that character dominates Bellow’s work. It is through character that his novels and stories gain their narrative depth; it is through the detailing of minor, often contradictory truths – those weaknesses and foibles in all of us – that his voice is formed; it is through thought and belief – and the testing of belief in times of stress – that his vision of humanity emerges.

Therefore, it may be argued that Bellow’s narrative style is more straightforward than those of his predecessors and many of his contemporaries. By concentrating on character, he can reveal his truths through narrative. Glenday notes that: “Unlike Hemingway…or James… Bellow does not rely upon symbolical properties to give narrative depth.” 

This is not to say that he aimed to be straightforward or didactic. In his essay on the future of fiction, he stated:

we have developed in American fiction a strange combination of extreme naivete in the characters and of profundity implicit in the writing, in the techniques themselves and in the language, but the language of thought itself is banned, it is considered dangerous and destructive.

He cited as evidence Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea where the reader is offered:

a sort of Christian endurance… The attempt to represent ideas while sternly forbidding thought begins to look like a curious and highly sophisticated game. It shows a great skepticism of the strength of art.

There is no question that Bellow thought himself a novelist of ideas, and that he used his work to project his own, essentially optimistic, outlook on the world. However, for a man whose entire career was spent in pursuit of his own artistic goals, regardless of current literary tastes, it is unsurprising that there are dissenting voices. Bellow was clear that character led and narrative followed. Of Mr Sammler’s Planet, he wrote: “One doesn't arbitrarily invent these [character traits] in order to put anything across.” 

Allan Massie, however, notes that he was “more interested in ideas than in fiction, or rather interested in fiction chiefly as a vehicle for argument.” Further, he argues that far from being an acute chronicler of human behaviour, Bellow “has a deficient sense of how other people behave.” Sanford Pinsker, writing of Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories, notes that the collection “mercifully” doesn’t preach, as some of his recent novels had done. Sam Phipps writes that Bellow “has always loved the sound of his own literary voice too much to worry about reining himself in.” And David Galloway says:

The imaginative structure fails to provide adequate support for the intellectual structure, so that at crucial moments the author’s ideas fail to be embodied in character, action, or image.

Thus, the author who decried the didacticism of others stands charged with the same thing, while it is suggested that his characterisation, far from being integral to the narrative, is seen as unconvincing.

Who is right? The answer, as always, lies in the middle. Certainly, as he grew older Bellow’s novels became more preachy, less interesting, but it is in his shorter fiction that the qualities of his writing continue to shine. Massie suggests his novels will date and become “old hat” and – since, from Dangling Man onwards, they are undoubtedly products of their time – he may well be right. But in Bellow’s shorter fiction there is the thread of genius. It is in his short stories that character comes to the fore and can truly be said to be fundamental to the narrative drive, to lead the story naturally, to establish a voice and convey a vision which is fresh and original and the equal of any writing in the twentieth century.

20 C. Drama

Source:http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/dramawestern-twentieth-century-drama.html

During the 20th cent., especially after World War I, Western drama became more internationally unified and less the product of separate national literary traditions. Throughout the century realism, naturalism, and symbolism (and various combinations of these) continued to inform important plays. Among the many 20th-century playwrights who have written what can be broadly termed naturalist dramas are Gerhart Hauptmann (German), John Galsworthy (English), John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (Irish), and Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Lillian Hellman (American).

An important movement in early 20th-century drama was expressionism. Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel Čapek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill (American). The 20th cent. also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and MaxwellAnderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico García Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature.

Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored—by using expressionist techniques—to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality. For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.

World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanity's feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair—the sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes, clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are inscrutable.

Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco's Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of surrealism, Dadaism (see Dada), and existentialism; in the traditions of the music hall,vaudeville, and burlesque; and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Playwrights whose works can be roughly classed as belonging to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the 20th cent. also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau.

Somewhat similar to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud, who, writing in the 1930s, foresaw a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a visceral rather than an intellectual reaction. After the violence of World War II and the subsequent threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights. Elements of the theater of cruelty can be found in the brilliantly abusive language of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in the ritualistic aspects of some of Genet's plays, in the masked utterances and enigmatic silences of Harold Pinter's "comedies of menace," and in the orgiastic abandon of Julian Beck's Paradise Now! (1968); it was fully expressed in Peter Brooks's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964).

During the last third of the 20th cent. a few continental European dramatists, such as Dario Fo in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand out in the theater world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays. In the United States and England, however, many dramatists old and new continued to flourish, with numerous plays of the later decades of the 20th cent. (and the early 21st cent.) echoing the trends of the years preceding them.

Realism in a number of guises—psychological, social, and political—continued to be a force in such British works as David Storey's Home (1971), Sir Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests trilogy (1974), and David Hare's Amy's View (1998); in such Irish dramas as Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Martin McDonagh's 1990s Leenane trilogy; and in such American plays as Jason Miller's That Championship Season (1972), Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly (1979), and John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1990). In keeping with the tenor of the times, many of these and other works of the period were marked by elements of wit, irony, and satire.

A witty surrealism also characterized some of the late 20th cent.'s theater, particularly the brilliant wordplay and startling juxtapositions of the many plays of England's Tom Stoppard. In addition, two of late-20th-century America's most important dramatists, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (as well as their followers and imitators), explored American culture with a kind of hyper-realism mingled with echoes of the theater of cruelty in the former's Buried Child (1978), the latter's Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and other works. While each exhibited his own very distinctive voice and vision, both playwrights achieved many of their effects through stark settings, austere language in spare dialog, meaningful silences, the projection of a powerful streak of menace, and outbursts of real or implied violence.

The late decades of the 20th century were also a time of considerable experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such groups as Beck's Living Theater and Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects of postmodernism, improvisational techniques, performance art, and other kinds of avant-garde theater. Some of the era's more innovative efforts included productions by theater groups such as New York's La MaMa (1961–) and Mabou Mines (1970–) and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co. (1976–); the Canadian writer-director Robert Lepage's intricate, sometimes multilingual works, e.g. Tectonic Plates (1988); the inventive one-man shows of such monologuists as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and John Leguizamo; the transgressive drag dramas of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater, e.g., The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984); and the operatic multimedia extravaganzas of Robert Wilson, e.g. White Raven (1999).

Thematically, the social upheavals of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—particularly the civil rights and women's movements, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis—provided impetus for new plays that explored the lives of minorities and women. Beginning with Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), drama by and about African Americans emerged as a significant theatrical trend. In the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka's searing Dutchman (1964), and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (1967) explored black American life; writers including Ed Bullins (e.g., The Taking of Miss Janie, 1975), Ntozake Shange (e.g., For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1976) and Charles Fuller (e.g., A Soldier's Play, 1981) carried these themes into later decades. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the century's African-American playwrights, August Wilson, debuted on Broadway in 1984 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and continued to define the black American experience in his ongoing dramatic cycle into the next century.

Feminist and other women-centered themes dramatized by contemporary female playwrights were plentiful in the 1970s and extended in the following decades. Significant figures included England's Caryl Churchill (e.g., the witty Top Girls, 1982), the Cuban-American experimentalist Maria Irene Forńes (e.g., Fefu and Her Friends,1977) and American realists including Beth Henley (e.g., Crimes of the Heart, 1978), Marsha Norman (e.g., 'Night Mother, 1982), and Wendy Wasserstein (e.g., The Heidi Chronicles, 1988). Skilled monologuists also provided provocative female-themed one-women shows such as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996) and various solo theatrical performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Finley, Anna Deveare Smith, Sarah Jones, and others.

Gay themes (often in works by gay playwrights) also marked the later decades of the 20th cent. Homosexual characters had been treated sympathetically but in the context of pathology in such earlier 20th-century works as Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953). Gay subjects were presented more explicitly during the 1960s, notably in the English farces of Joe Orton and Matt Crowley's witty but grim portrait of pre-Stonewall American gay life, The Boys in the Band (1968). In later years gay experience was explored more frequently and with greater variety and openness, notably in Britain in Martin Sherman'sBent (1979) and Peter Gill's Mean Tears (1987) and in the United States in Jane Chambers' Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1986), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), which also dealt with Asian identity, and Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1993). Tony Kushner's acclaimed two-part Angels in America (1991–92) is generally considered the century's most brilliant and innovative theatrical treatment of the contemporary gay world.

The Grapes of Wrath

Source: Tom Cono

The Grapes of Wrath divided opinion when it was first published. Some declared it a masterpiece, others dismissed it as crude propoganda. Charles Angoff, in his contemporaneous review, noted:

There should be rejoicing in that part of Hell where the souls of great American imaginative writers while away their time, for at long last a worthy successor to them has appeared in their former terrestrial abode. With his latest novel Mr. Steinbeck at once joins the company of Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Norris, and easily leaps to the forefront of all his contemporaries. [The Grapes of Wrath] has all the earmarks of something momentous, monumental, and memorable: universal compassion, a sensuousness so honestly and recklessly tender that even the Fathers of the Church would probably have called it spiritual; and a moral anger against the entire scheme of things that only the highest art possesses.

High praise indeed, it wasn’t all uncritical acclaim: the novel was banned in Kansas and in Kern County, California (location of the Weedpatch camp in which the Joads stayed in the novel). In St Louis not only was it banned but the librarian was ordered to burn copies that had already been purchased. H. Kelly Crockett, a student in Oklahoma at the time of the novel’s publication, recalled in an article twenty years later that a common criticism of the novel at the time was that it was propogandist and, once the situation that had called into being the events it portrayed had been overcome, it would be read merely as a historical curiosity. Crockett’s conclusion, after twenty years, was that this had proved not to be the case and the novel retained its literary power. Seventy-plus years on, is that still the case? The fortunes of any novel wax and wane, and such is the case for The Grapes of Wrath. A largely positive review by Edward Galligan of the 1989 fiftieth anniversary reprint still balked at “purple prose, melodramatic plotting, and sentimental thinking,”, and enough “hamminess” to make us “gag at the prospect of rereading it.” Today, then, while Steinbeck is still read, it is mostly Of Mice and Men, while The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps out of favour. I would suggest that, for all the novel’s faults, this is a pity.

Frank Eugene Cruz suggests that most criticism of the novel categorises it in one of four ways – as a story of migration, a recasting of Christian themes and motifs, a work of social protest or a powerful, sentimental epic. And the latter three representations are, in part, responsible for some of the ambivalence with which we tend to confront the book today. The Christian moralising and socialist rhetoric which some discern in it are too didactic: and it is true that, at times, Steinbeck batters us with his message where some subtlety would have been more effective. The unfairness, for example, of the way the farm owners used the surplus of men to drive down pay does not become any more unfair because we read of it three or four or five or six times: it was unfair the first time and the reader could have been trusted to intuit that. And the sentimentality that gives rise to Edward Galligan’s gagging at the prospect of re-reading it is certainly an issue. But, nonetheless, I would argue that The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel.

What makes it so, for me, is the interconnectedness of those different categories that people ascribe to it. It is all of the things that people have described it as, but it is all of them in combination. If it can be read as a Christian narrative, then it is a highly political Christian narrative, as Stephen Bullivant demonstrates when he points to the novel’s connection of being a “red” with Jesus Christ, in the form of Jim Casy. Similarly, Stephen Railton suggests that Steinbeck’s use of Christianity, in the form of Casy, is a way of insinuating a revolutionary vision of militant socialism. Railton appears to posit this as a criticism, but for me the way the novel gives religious ideas political resonances is one of its great strengths. In any case, politics and religion are backdrops in the novel – essential, unavoidable, but backdrops nonetheless – and the central message is neither purely political nor religious, but rather about the nature of humanity and the need for community. And that transcends everything.

While there is a strongly religious element to The Grapes of Wrath, it is not straightforward. Stephen Bullivant notes a letter from Steinbeck to his editor in which he states that he wants “all all all” the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to be printed at the start of the novel. The repeated alls demonstrate that he is adamant on the point and Bullivant therefore makes a study of the complete song in order to understand why. He notes particularly the final verse:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,    
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make me free,
While God is marching on.

Bullivant is drawn to the third line, noting that, in religious terms, the concept of dying “to make men free” is novel. Martyrdom, in the Gospels, is a transcendent event rewarded by personal salvation; “making men free” suggests more of an immanent event. Such notions, of course, would have appalled social conservatives such as Eric Voegelin or Leo Strauss, suggesting, for them, the hubris of mankind, but there is nothing hubristic about The Grapes of Wrath. Far from it, there is a deep note of pessimism sounding throughout it. It may be replete with Christ figures – Casy, Tom, even Rose of Sharon – but the freedom granted by Jesus’s death is still, in Steinbeck’s vision, a highly qualified one.

Tamara Rombold gives a persuasive account of inversions of the Bible story throughout The Grapes of Wrath, from the superb depiction of drought in the first chapter (an inversion, she argues, of the Creation story) to Exodus (unlike the Israelites who were spared the plagues, the Oklahoma drought blights everyone), to Moses in the bullrushes (Rose of Sharon’s baby cast dead into the water) to the final scene, after the apocalypse of the flood, with Rose of Sharon in the barn with the starving man, reminiscent of Isiaiah, and the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Rombold then draws on Jim Casy’s soujourn in the wilderness “like Jesus”, in which he realises the call of a new spirit, which he calls love. She makes persuasive allusions to Casy’s Christ-like behaviour in his arrest and death scenes. Curiously, though, she makes no mention of probably Casy’s most important speech, just prior to his death. In this, Casy himself makes an inversion of Jesus’s walk into the wilderness. The truth isn’t in the wilderness, says Casy, it is here, in the community, among the people. This is where he finds his soul. An this resonates clearly with Tom, of course, because it forms the basis of much of his later conversation with Ma Joad (and this exchange is related by Rombold), in which he reveals his intention to leave and follow Casy’s example, leading the community against the travails forced on them by the system. Thus, we have in Casy and Tom, two representation of Jesus. Casy, the pure-of-heart lover of humanity, a man who dies for his beliefs, is an earthly Jesus figure, preaching virtue and honesty and decency. Tom is at once his disciple and a symbol of the risen Christ, the one who is “with you always, even unto the end of the world” as it is written in Matthew. Or, as Tom says to Ma:

"Then it don't matter. Then I'll be aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where- wherever you look. Whenever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. If Casey knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an' I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build - why I'll be there."

Casy, then, can be seen as Jesus, while Tom is Christ. And the gospel they preach is a radical one. As Casy says to Tom:

"There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things people do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say . . . What is this thing called sperit? ... It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust sometimes - an' I want to make them happy - maybe it's all men an' all women we love; Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."

For all that, though, I don’t believe The Grapes of Wrath should be read as a Christian novel. It is, if anything, a humanist novel. There are clear Christian resonances, and central characters may be comparable with Christ-figures, but that is because the fundamental tenets of Christian religion such as fairness, sense of community and so on, borrowed as they are from pre-Christian Platonic thought, are equally relevant to modern humanist belief. And so you might consider the novel christian, in the sense of evoking an ideal of human decency, but not Christian, as in following the doctrinal beliefs of any Church of Christ. As Casy says, “Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” Thus, the titular grapes of wrath are not those of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the spirit inside man which will rise against oppression and exploitation. Casy is no longer a Preacher of God but remains, throughout, a preacher of men for men.

Similarly, despite its sometimes overwhelming didacticism, in the end The Grapes of Wrath is not a political novel either. Politics is simply a by-product of Steinbeck’s true interest, which is human nature and human beings, the human community. In the 1930s, the prevailing difficulties which beset humanity were political, and that is therefore what he wrote about. It is Ma Joad who makes one of the novel’s most telling points: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody.” And earlier, she says: "I'm learnin' one thing good. Learnin' it all a time, ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help – the only ones."

Warren Motley, writing in 1982, complains that much of the novel’s critisism until then had focused on Casy and Tom as the core of the film and that the central role of Ma Joad in explaining the family’s gradual realisation of the need for community and cooperation is underplayed. I would agree, and I suggest that Ma Joad is one of the great characters of American fiction. She develops throughout the novel and her gradual assumption of both actual and moral control over her family is beautifully drawn. She is superb. Motley draws on the writing of Robert Briffault to explain the sense of matriarchy as exemplified by Ma Joad’s growing sense of authority over her clan as defining a relationship of cooperation, as opposed to the typical patriarchal relationships based on power. And it is through this that one can sense a note of optimism in a largely pessimistic book. "Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on."

And what a wonderful rallying cry that is.