Narratives off the beaten track
[Book info]
* Title: A Calf in Milk and Milk Chocolate
* Genre: Short story collection.
* Price: Rs. 500
* Publishers: Sooriya Publishers
* Page count: 204
  Jagath
Kumarasinghe, the winner of 2004 Gratiaen Prize, has brought out his
second collection of ten stories: ‘A Calf in Milk and Milk Chocolate -
Advertisements in Spiritual Realism’. Let us not be too worried about
any title of a creative work. But as far as the reader of these ten
stories is concerned the first significant feature is the expression of
human experiences in a storyless or non-narrative form devoid of a
beginning, middle, and end as visible in the conventional form of short
story pattern.
Hence the creator Kumarasinghe deviates as is the main visible form
from the story-telling form to a storyless narrative, which should be
read with that point of view. This does not mean to say that he has no
human experiences to present. As a creative artiste he skillfully
visualizes the off beat type of human experiences, as was observable in
his award winning first collection ‘Kider Chetty Street’. He selects
rare human specimens such as strange farmers, factory workers, vendors,
fishermen, merchants, animals breeders etc, and envelope each character
into a stream of his own conscience.
Thereby the narratives become more and more complex attempting to
depict more of an inner text than an outward story line. As such, though
Kumarasinghe states that he has compiled ten stories, the reader may
read more stories within each story, deviating from the commonplace
short story genre. Perhaps the sort of narrative device if considered at
a deeper level with rest on the plane of either long short stories or
novellas.
The experiences of the stories are related from several stand points.
The main narrator emerges as a storyteller, then gradually detours into
multi faceted areas, where the focus of attention on one single point is
converged to a multi directional pattern like a fan unfolded.
The very title story is the finest example we come across. Perhaps at
the outset the story looks alien and set in a foreign strand. But
gradually the story setting is wiped off to the extent that the central
human experience comes to be more of a local setting with foreign names.
Though there is an indication to milk industry, it is shifted to the
other allied industries like the cheese and beef industries hinting a
humanitarian motive. Then there are dual situations more absurd than
realistic. These situations are interspersed or quickly cut into
religious attitudes as in a screenplay.
There are references to Christ and Adam. Then there appears
prophesies on human fallacies. Philosophies on the misdeeds of humans.
The Biblical dictum which goes as ‘thou shalt not seethe a kid in his
mother’s milk’, becomes the underlying epitaph of the narrative. The
creative writer seems to be posing many questions than weaving a plotted
story. As such this kind of story falls into which category, I wonder?
True enough, the narratives are enigmatic and this itself is the
hallmark of JK.
A similar story is ‘The Barren Womb Ground’ which revolves round in
the beginning linked to a crematorium, but shifts gradually into other
areas both real and fantasy mystery out of the lot the most simplistic
and most realistic stories are ‘A Lad’ and ‘Your Catamaran’. The use of
an experiential language is one of the notable issues of JK. He uses his
language with a local flavour without inhibitions and pretensions.
I observe this factor in most Indian and West Indian creative woks
nowadays. This may not be looked as a drawback in creative writing, for
it needs a closer scrutiny on the part of the sociolinguists, who have
kept at least one step ahead of the average grammarian.
The use of languages can never be classed into typified pattern as it
needs to be a mode of situations as cultural expression. JK in this
direction poses a linguistic issue via his creative pieces. As was once
pointed out by the critic Allen Tate, in his collection of literary
essays ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’: ‘There must be many
techniques of fiction, but how many? I suppose a great many more than
there are techniques of poetry.’
Why this should be so, if it is, nobody quite knows, and if we knew,
I do not know what use the knowledge would have. For the great
disadvantage of all literary criticism in its practical ignorance, which
in the very nature of its aims must be incurable. Perhaps even the very
accepted canons of literary criticism are challenged by the literary
techniques of a writer. I am not trying to minimize the inherent value
of the collection of stories under discussion, but to emphasize the need
to view from a broader perspective.
JK paves the way. Thus on reading this collection of stories, the
most discernible factor I felt was the dissemination of prophetic views
in the form of knowledge than the actual recreation of human standpoint
and its complexities in traditional fictionalized forms. Furthermore
spiritualism pervades each of the narratives in varying manners.
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