In the earlier post, I mentioned that Browne wrote out of his experience of living in Norfolk. Sebald lived in Norwich, and Naipaul in Wiltshire. Sebald’s narrator writes by blending memory with the experience of walking through Suffolk. Naipaul’s narrator does essentially the same thing, though he stays rooted in one place. Later, when I read about Knausgaard reading Enigma, I noted that coincidence.
Teju Cole — who has written with reverence about both Sebald and Tranströmer — also has his narrator walking, though in the cityscape of New York. All of these narrators are led by memory, by the weight of history. In Sebald, it ends with people discovering the truth of their lives (that they were victims of the Holocaust or of fascism). In Knausgaard, it becomes an inquiry into how that recognition happens — specifically, why he himself did not become a fascist. In that sense, he goes beyond Sebald. But even so, you can see that his work continues the line of thought of all those earlier writers. Teju Cole, in turn, is driven to explore the history of his own community more deeply, as his later books show. For him too, photography becomes central — not just a technique, as in Sebald, but a device in its own right.
See how, when we follow a particular thread of reading, we arrive at unexpected places. When debates about misogyny in Diop’s books arose, the perspective I brought came from what I had read about the First World War. In the context of the racial questions he raised, those other issues seemed trivial. Criticism is always contextual; it must arise from, and speak to, the questions and conditions of its own moment. If one critiques Gandhi, one may bring in Jinnah. But Narayana Guru has no role in that context. Understanding that distinction is itself important. Yet, if you set Jinnah aside, Gandhi and Guru do share certain parallels. Gandhi, in his political and caste sensibility, could not measure Guru properly. The same Gandhi had to deal with the Malayali Savanna Hegemony while observing the caste rules, bound by the practice of untouchability.
Manu Pillai in his notorious debut, fabricated history by claiming that Gandhi and Guru were brought together by some silly adolescent of the erstwhile royal family, willfully sabotaging the real significance of that encounter. Willed acts like that have short lives. Truth, on the other hand, will remain in some corner of human existence, fragmenting and growing like cells, until one day it breaks open the shell of falsehood and reveals itself. Of this, there is no doubt.