Although I had written this before, there was a time in my reading life when I avoided Rushdie and Naipaul after seeing them dismissed by Krishnan Nair (he was not really a critic but a literary journalist — which, to be fair, suits many so-called “critics” now as well). Later, however, I read two of Naipaul’s books one after the other: Literary Occasions (inspired by a note by novelist Joshua Newton) and then The Enigma of Arrival. Enigma was unlike anything I had read until then (I won’t describe it again here, as I’ve written this elsewhere).
At that time, Goodreads had a feature to suggest similar authors, and through that I came upon Sebald. Sebald’s emphasis is on European history. His writing merges memory and history into narratives that carry clear influences from Bernhard, Kafka, and others. You can see the presence of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (a meditation that begins with Roman burial urns discovered in Norfolk — a text that also, later, influenced Borges and Woolf), as well as Conrad and Nabokov (especially in themes of memory and displacement). Even his insertion of photographs into his books, echoing documentary traditions, reveals his uniqueness (though Anand and Rajagopal used similar methods in their writing, neither of them openly acknowledged such debts). What this shows is that in modern literature, there is no absolute “new” — only continuous transformation.
Even in Malayalam, there are writers still imitating Vijayan. The so-called desamezhuthu (native writing) trend that was fashionable ten years ago was itself Vijayan’s creation. Presenting such viewpoints is the responsibility of a language like ours. Sebald, however, never directly invokes Browne’s Christian faith — what he says without saying is always about the Holocaust. I had also written earlier about the episode in The New Yorker where an American couple, having seen the photographs in his books, approached Sebald in their search for their son.
Why does Sebald write so much about past? Here we arrive at Anselm Kiefer. In post-Nazi Germany, there was a public silence about their brutal history. Kiefer resisted that silence: he went to famous sites, photographed himself giving the Nazi salute there, and then exhibited those images as protest. This is how the Germany of today was made — you can see it when you visit, where every Nazi site is preserved almost like a museum (I have gone and seen this myself). That is the power of art. It is also the mark of a society’s dignity — remember, Germany stands at the heart of Europe, and then think backward. It is these kinds of thoughts that underlie these writings.
Such a thing is impossible in a language that has not yet even passed its adolescence. Who reads Vallathol now? Or Ulloor? At best, one encounters discussions of their caste identity, nothing more. Their value is that they wrote during a transitional moment in the history of the language; the new generation will not grant them greater stature than that. That is the movement of history, and its lesson. Reading itself is part of how we perceive and prove this truth.