The Cult of the Anti-Story

The Shah of Blah had run out of the water subscription from the Sea of Gup. He had to peer blinkingly through the looming shroud of silence that the Land of Chup cast over his cheerful story-telling self.

Meanwhile in the Land of Chup…..
The ruler of the Land of Chup or Khattam-Shud was not simply a nonbeliever of stories, a foe to the narrative tradition. He was also a nonbeliever of utopias, a heretic in the fairy tale world, a feared enemy of the world of beginnings and ends, the happily ever afters and the once upon a times. His religion was the antithesis of organized religion, familiar and reworkable myths, predictable plots or for that matter, radical plots, recognized motifs of the handsome prince, the evil witch, the gullible princess, the scheming step-mother, the humane and the human beast.

The Rasas, namely love, mirth, disgust, fury, compassion, horror, heroism, wonder who were the sentinels of the Land of Gup, mistrusted him and not all the gardeners of the Land of Gup could weed out the deep anarchy that had poisoned the roots of the Hoary Story Tree. Already, the metaphors were withering away, already, the allegories were paling, the tropes swaying dangerously and the fables counting their days. But what the Eggheads, the Blabbermouth, the Shahs of Blah that the Land of Gup spawned did not see was that the ruler of Chup was a man with a mission. He was not simply a man who enjoyed a moment of quiet and God, those Gupwallahs talked so much! Shut up already, won’t you?

He was also a man who hated the mindless utopia, the pointless cheerfulness, the story-says-it-all, the all’s well that ends well or the c’est la vie tragique. In short, he must wage war on the Cult of the Narrative Journalist. He must expose the seedy underbelly of the story-telling crooks peopled by Contradictions, Facile Explanations, Fabrication and Misinterpretation.

He sought to take the war into the very heart of Gup. He must colonize the heart and mind of the son of the Guppest of them all. He must reform Narouh, the son of the Shah of Blah. It would simply not do to teach the world to mistrust the little boy who spoke too much and who told stories to his mother. He must train the journalist out of him when it was still an unpaid intern working for that shifty, gobbledegooking, two-faced Shadir. He must educate the little boy, Narouh of the three principles of Narrative Journalism,

1. Go sniffing for a story even if there isn’t one.
2. Get people to say the things you want.
3. Use a lot of numbers and big words.

Then he educated the little boy of the three Assumptions of Narrative Journalism and in short, those of the Land of Gup,

1. People like stories.
2. All stories are happy stories.
3. The world is a better place for having heard a story.

He then told Narouh about the Narrative Journalist in the fearsome jungle that wrote about the M-people. Unlike the Gupwallahs, the Lord of Chup was a man of subtlety. He did not tell the boy that this Gupwallah was well-versed in the DoubleSpeak of Journalese. For, after all, didn’t that amount to indicting, incriminating, and condemning the Gupwallah in his own vocabulary of redundancy and big, fancy words? He instead thought to play clever. He told them how this Gupwallah worked and what his personal convictions were. This Gupwallah was happy, very, very happy when the M-people one day charged into the camp of the Good Soldiers and did away quietly with each one of them.

Then he told Narouh about the immature Gup who believed he “should” because he “could”. He told him about the wastefulness of the Gups who played games, whacked off people, blew up things, checked out random, hot women in a virtual world of make-believe. All because they could. And all because it made for a Good Story. Fie, fie…, added the Lord of Chup for good measure. After all, even He couldn’t help his occasional lapses into Gup when he came face to face with its evil.

Then he told Narouh about the scheming academic that spent every living day plotting her research, moulding and beating into shape every detail into a narrative that she worked out backwards, having first reached her conclusion. He told Narouh that this girl was a Gup and a Narrative Journalist through other means. By using words like “empirical”, “alterity”, “phantasmagorical” and “hermeneutic”, she was the Enemy of Clarity and Knowledge. Asked to defend her research and asked how something worked, she replied, well, why, of course, by P2CTE or Processes Too Complicated to Explain.

Thus began the education of Narouh who was formally initiated into the Cult of the Anti-Story, the Cult of the Non-Narrators.

The Squandered Wealth of the Political in ‘The Hunger Games’ Trilogy

I just finished reading all three books in the Hunger Games series. Suzanne Collins writes with a deep sense of the political reflected both historically and in a contemporary setting. Yet, the HG trilogy is limited in its political gaze, missing various radical possibilities of critiquing the state and its allied projects of sovereignty, legitimacy and citizenship.

The very obvious referencing of the reality shows apart, these books clearly invoke the penal regimes of post-war societies with their surveillance and disciplinary state apparatuses. The tryst with the early modern state is present too, though it may not have been fully intended. Half way through the third book, the reader may find resonances of the democratic premises of the French revolution gone awry in Katniss’s disillusionment with the power arrangements and authorities who set out to persecute figures and destroy remnants of Snow’s order. Collins may not have intended to recreate disenchantment with the French Revolution in particular – but the stark absence of humanitarian norms in uprooting the wasteful, pleasure-seeking, capitalist (by which I mean surplus-appropriating) political order of the Capitol may be instructive. The willingness to replicate the very insidious and degrading instruments of coercion that the Capitol used to terrorize districts into compliance – the Hunger Games – may not be mirrored in the French Revolution. But the Reign of Terror did significantly feature the use of the Guillotine and in the third book, Coin’s potential inconvenient detractors, including Katniss herself, are sought to be eliminated in a plot that could have been scripted by either the Capitol or the rebel forces.

Collins has got a firm grip of the political possibilities in iconography – the Mockingjay pin and outfits and the birdsong. As my friend G points out, the figure of the Avox or the voiceless, Panem and the Capitol, the names of so many characters like Cato and Cinna are inspired by Roman history and mythology and their functions in the novels partially reflect the symbols they represent. Some of this stuff is at best, plain cheesy and at worst, coarse as in Peeta Bread and the President cold as Snow.

So, what else is deeply political about her books? Walter Benjamin’s (and btw, Derrida speaks of it too) notion of foundational violence springs from almost every chapter in the three books. How can that which is completely lacking in justice at the originary moment, the moment of founding, be trusted to be just after it has been institutionalized and entrenched as legitimate power? The Hunger Games is only the monument to this foundational violence. The granting of tesserae or the food ration to those who are willing to insert their names into the draw for the Hunger Games reinforces and intensifies such violence. The arena of the Hunger Games themselves could be a scene straight out of Agamben’s Homo Sacer where the extra-legal flourishes, where people are allowed to die (“let die” in the famous words of Agameben), where people are reduced to a state of bare life, at other times, their deaths are staged by an all-powerful sovereign, with the additional elements of entertainment and spectacle thrown in. In fact, other strong indications lie in instances where Katniss tries to find an answer to the inexplicable question that torments her, why is she simply not allowed to take her own life, both during the Hunger Games and after she has killed a key figure of the rebellion? These are all themes Agamben explores quite rigorously in his writing – one can’t help wishing for a little more fictional padding that address these questions more elaborately in the HG books.

Another question that eludes me, why are concepts of democracy and human rights so alien to this book? Surely, post the World Wars, the centres or should I say, the capitals of affluence, consumerism and conspicuous wealth managed to appropriate the surplus value of the producers of such wealth (in this case, the workers in the mining, food, and industrial districts, etc) within the paradigms of the welfare state and liberal-democratic institutions? Yes, the right to exercise legitimate violence was violated in stark violation of human rights conventions in the contemporary histories of Western nations, but in the HG trilogy, you won’t even find a ghost of a tribunal of justice. Surely, even the most authoritarian and brutish regime needed the vote of popular sovereignty and surely, the profligate citizens of the Capitol could not have supplied all of it? The willingness to squander Beetee’s technology and Peeta’s leadership qualities in the Arena seems to be the antithesis of modern governmental regimes that are eager to evoke their citizens’ consent to fully exploit their utility. The only shadow of democracy one sees in either the Capital or the rebel organization vis-à-vis the districts is the procedural kind witnessed in the rebels’ use of the vote (the rebel forces ask the surviving victor tributes to vote for or against reinstating the Hunger Games in a post-Snow order) and the overwrought rules of the Hunger Games. And this brings me to the other frustrating aspect of the Hunger Games. This book, though it promises to be about so much more than power and resistance, is constantly lapsing into a book about an evil, unscrupulous dictator baying for the districts’ blood and brooking no resistance either from potential political rivals in the Capital or rebellion in the districts. There is little attempt made to disperse power or to deny the tendency to see authority as emanating from a single monolithic source. There is a tentative attempt to complicate power configurations with the figures of the district Peacekeepers and Mayors who are local strongmen. But these men are clearly agents of sinister forces ensconced in secured fortresses of power (read the mansion of President Snow). There is no attempt to understand the political economy or the cultural aspects of the power they wield. They are present only in their sadistic impulses (as in the case of Romulus Thread) or in their presumed desire to keep their families alive (in the instance of Cray and the older Peacekeepers)

The politics of the rebellion is set adrift from the violence of governmental regimes in recent modernity. Questions like these are coarse and insulting to a fictional enterprise, why does Plutarch seek to overthrow the Capitol, what are Coin’s motivations, what unites this disparate community of dissenters? Clearly, convictions of humanity are an inadequate explanation given what we know of both Plutarch and Coin. One could argue that this is exactly what Collins wishes to avoid, a petty description of intent and conflicting psychologies of personalities. And that would be entirely commendable if we could only have more credible narratives involving the rebellion that give us better insights into revolutionary consciousness. The Hunger Games dominates such consciousness while the regimes of life-denying rationing, the smothering of creative impulse, the quasi-citizenship of these district residents and the violence of a state committed to the protection of its subjects are all disappointingly understated in such consciousness.

We do however get a sense of how a rebellion is compromised in its critique of the incumbent political dispensation from the way it partakes of the same technological apparatuses of bodily tracking, propaganda dissemination and the ideologies of collateral damage (in many ways, Gale is the face of such a deadly compromise). But Collins cannot escape the pathological temptation to assign a face to the resistance (Coin) thereby diluting the inherent flaws of all such subversive formations.

One is seriously tempted to conclude that the Hunger Games offers tantalizing glimpses of the political lost in a populist desire for visual representations of the movie spectacle. But that would be denigrating the medium of Hollywood as lost to nuances of radical politics and surely, that cannot be the case? I wonder what then lies behind the squandered wealth of the political in The Hunger Games?

The Narrative Imperative in Nonfiction Writing

Katherine Boo is able to tell deeply discomfiting stories with a keen and trained eye for narrative detail. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is full of observations that make you wonder at the relentless churning of political patronage, everyday violence, casual opportunism and routinized corruption in an urban poor setting. There is her description of Sunil, a barely adolescent waste-picker who takes his chances balancing himself on a small concrete sluice perched precariously over the Mithi river where he can scoop up trash – presumably because this is a place unfrequented by others in the waste business. The protagonist, Abdul witnesses a particularly wrenching scene at the metal-melding and plastic-shredding machine shed. A boy loses his hand while filling the shredder with plastic but instead of reacting with terrorized pain, he simply reassures his employer that he won’t report the incident in the slender hope he can still keep his job.

Boo’s book is also the product of what I have always marveled in investigative journalists of her caliber, so much grit and self-effacing patience. Given, I am guessing, her unfamiliarity with Hindi, Marathi and Tamil, at least three languages spoken in Annawadi, reporting must have required more than the usual amount of perseverance we are used to praising in Indian writers/researchers/ journalists writing in an indigenous context.

In much of her work, Boo treats her subjects with engaging tenderness, such as when describing Manju’s ethical struggle to understand her mother Asha’s cavalier response to those who come seeking her help – Asha wishes to become a politician and one of the “first-class people” distinguishable from the riffraff of Annawadi.  Above all, Boo’s handling of Husain’s silent strength in a life that is disintegrating owing to reasons that are constantly slipping from his control – partly conjured by his family, his neighbours, by petty ambition and malicious competition in a slum colony, even the Indian economy and the Indian criminal justice system both of which abide in great measure by the logic of the market – is to me, worthy of some award for journalism.

Sketch found on Rediff – click the image to visit the creator’s page.

The book ends with a trial involving the testimonies of many of the characters whose intersecting lives in the slum colony Boo is reporting on. It is in this part of the book that Boo’s writing simply sparkles. There is the subtle significance of physiological evidence presented by plaintiff, witnesses and accused alike who perspire, speak awkwardly and tremble. We are made to wonder at the credibility of court transcripts where the stenographer struggles to translate testimonies worded in Annawadi hindi into official English. The trial is reduced in meaning when we hear the judge fulminate about petty women and their petty fights. We get a sense of the complex arguments phrased in a language alien to the Annawadi residents present at the trial. These arguments follow hostile cross-examination compounding the overall effect of bewilderment and a fear that has no linguistic grammar.

So, with so much to praise about the book, why does it strike a false note in the way it is rendered as well as in its overwhelming concerns?

Let us start with that seemingly innocuous, but significant problem with Boo’s writing style. If the book is comfortable using Americanisms like shitter and dumpster, it is also keen to inject a note of irony and authenticity by employing Indian cultural metaphors from Hindi soaps and Bollywood cinema. The Americanisms are unfortunate for no other reason but that they are culturally inappropriate, much like the linguistic dissonances in Slumdog Millionaire   And the use of Hindi popular culture references in this book, while often adding a dash of colour, at times feature as grotesque imagery in intense moments of grief or shock (which in all probability are intended by the author but even so, render the narrative unnecessarily fantastic). Boo seems to be caught up in the narrative imperative of writing a bestseller, a problematic trait in an author rendering deeply personal stories of poverty and survival. While telling stories is an indispensable skill to investigative or for that matter any kind of journalism, it requires a nuanced restraint…a certain willingness to suppress verbal flourishes at the crucial moment. This is necessary because an overly fictionalized narrative immediately creates a crater of disbelief. A very rigid narrative formula of plot-building, mise-en-scene and denouement allows the readers to sink into a numb disconnect with the characters and to process narratives at a remove. It simultaneously makes the author’s investment in the issues and the characters she is interviewing suspect. There is a sense of selection bias driving the choice of incidents being narrated and characters profiled. The author may be omitting to tell us stories and profiling characters that do not lend themselves to equal dramatic effect. In his Hindu review of the book, Aman Sethi’s compliment to Boo’s writing style saying he admires her ability to “shrug off authorial intent”, is, I feel, misplaced, to the extent that the book contains malaprop cultural metaphors in fraught moments (One of the characters in the book, Kehkashan in a moment of rage provoked by her intense fear for her family is described to look like “Parvati in that soap opera, Kahaani Ghar Ghar ki”)

The book is propelled by certain core normative concerns about the urban poor, some of which were contested by Mitu Sengupta, and defended by Aman Sethi on Kafila. Sengupta challenges Boo’s inferences about the lack of urban poor solidarity in a city celebrated for its collective subaltern consciousness and famous unions. Mitu Sengupta also believes that the book shies away from attempting a rigorous critique of the neo-liberal Indian state which she believes is locked into an irreversible course of rollback in the realms of social security and public funding for welfare programmes. Boo, Sengupta and Sethi are all in dispute over urban poor solidarity in the face of adversity…but to me, a different issue is at stake. Should it be surprising that a scavenger is left to languish in a pool of blood in Annawadi where no other slum resident is willing to help him to a hospital? Have we encountered enough distinct displays of empathy and civic duty in our middle class settings that we might look on in consternation about the goings-on in a slum? Doesn’t a narrative account framing the culpability of slum residents let other actors off the hook? Such as a government that has failed to step in with a meaningful social security programme for the unorganized sector?  Is it equally important that some Annawadians out of superstition refuse to help a burned woman when, by Boo’s own admission and painstaking reporting, the police record false statements and the hospital authorities ignore the need for autopsies? In a book that is constantly indicting various figures of the local state such as the municipal councilor, the policeman, the slumlord, the prison warden and the politician as well as the growth stories of the Indian state, perhaps, a lesser conviction in the responsibility of the slum resident to ethical action would have made the narrative more meaningful.

The “Brave” New Male Anxiety

I just finished reading this somewhat lop-sided review of Brave…http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/06/brave-is-bad-storytelling/

While I don’t mind agonizing over the gender seesaw in general that the author vilifies in his review of Brave, why do I get the feeling he is being patronizing about female gender narratives? Especially in the line when he pits humanity against gender…as if gender narratives with strong female voices are not protesting the conspicuous absence of humanity vis-a-vis women? While Brave did run down the men quite prominently, making them every bit the spear-happy, incoherent drunkards, wasn’t something to be said for Merrida’s humane cause defying royal marriage norms that showed no respect for adolescent girls?

I am also intrigued by the presumption that Scottish Kings can be pacifist and egalitarian in their dealings with their subjects or their wives. Perhaps, they were very eloquent creatures unlike the ones depicted in Brave. That aside, how do you make a film on a daughter’s” rebellion” without managing to show how deeply alienating marriage traditions are and how invested parents were in securing them as a collateral to political alliances? Wrong tree to bark up, maybe?

And finally, Brave was not a story entirely complimentary to women…the inhumanity of a mother who wills herself to be appropriated by the drunkards she is speaking for…is not really to me intrinsically about a gender seesaw. While I have no desire to give away the grand plot of Brave, it must be said that many more films, animated or otherwise, on the subject of gender choices need to be made… if mothers need to be “changed” so very dramatically for them to go along with their daughters’ right against marriage.

And yeah…men do make equality a competitive game.