From my scrap book

I liked what the Marxist academic and critic Arnold Kettle said: “Sense of life presented
through the novelist’s view of life. Life and pattern are not
inseparable. But pattern is the way life
develops.” Here is another critic
J A Boulton writing on
E M Forster’s novel A
Passage to India: “ This is much more than a novel about the political
situation in India, in the years following the
1914-18 war and
commenting on the novel must dwell on its more enduring
character, but it
certainly is a political novel which explores, with understanding
and compassion,
a political situation

Over the years I wrote entries in my scrap book and found such notes useful. I thought that some of these may interest readers who may have missed reading the significant comments by some authors and critics. My exercise is inclusive of my own views plus authenticity from the greats.Enjoy. Let us first look at what a novel is. A novel is the form of written prose (Vikram Seth creates a novel in admirable poetry) narrative of considerable length having a unified artistic structure and involving the reader in an imagined new world, which is new because it had been created by the author. That is what I wrote THEN.

A novel

If that was my summation, let us see what the author of Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock looks at the novel. He writes “the novel is a picture of life which is a free and formless expanse. So form, design and composition are sought as in any other work of art”. Savage another commentator felt that the” novel is an objectification of truth, absolute truth.”

I liked what the Marxist academic and critic Arnold Kettle said:”Sense of life presented through the novelist’s view of life. Life and pattern are not inseparable. But pattern is the way life develops.”

Here is another critic J A Boulton writing on E M Forster’s novel A Passage to India:

“ This is much more than a novel about the political situation in India, in the years following the 1914-18 war and commenting on the novel must dwell on its more enduring character, but it certainly is a political novel which explores, with understanding and compassion, a political situation.

The novel is an attack on British rule in India. One should be aware of the intellectual courage with which Forster captured the degrading effects of British Rule”

Drama

From the Novel let us shift to Drama.

We have another responsible Marxist critic Raymond Williams writing in his Drama in Performance essay has this to say: “A recurrent problem in modern drama is the realisation of action: movement, intervention, and change as opposed to watching, reacting, and waiting. The latter consciousness to perfectly express in the trapped rooms the inhibited conversations of huge naturalism, has been more confifent, exploratory and radical alternative. The preferred dramatic method corresponds to a dominant structure of feeing.

Brecht’s achievement in Waiting for Godot is the dramatization at an extreme point of this familiar immobility.”

Film

Let us turn to a Lankan critic Nalin Wijesekera writing to the then Ceylon Daily News on Feb 27, 1975 said this on Satyajit Ray’s films:

“Ray’s poetic images are luculent and candid beyond the veil of realism... his artistry is meticulously planned and carefully worked ... “without a trace of theatrical and the dramatic in the drama of human relationships” is a social milieu he knows and loves.

Neo- Realism has been laid to rest, the New Wave is no more fashionable, Cinema-Veite has had its fill, yet Ray’s work blows through serious cinedrama like a fresh breeze”

History

Next, I want to quote a historian-G M Trevelyan. He says: “Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion but very often leading historical thought astray.”

Symboism

A symbolist by name Gipius wrote that” I rejoice in the abstract. I make my life from it.I like al that is secluded and recondite. I am a victim of my mysterious uncommon dreams. But I have no earthly words to empress the unrepeatable:”

Clive Scot in the book called Modernism wrote that “Symbolism contains within itself a shit from a romantic to a modernly ironic aesthetic”

Poetry

I like these lines from John Campbell’s poem

The dawn whitens

A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.

The moon, like a haunted thing

Dropping into the cloud

Islamic countries

I also noted that some of the predominantly Islamic countries in Africa and Asia were the following:

Morocco, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Niger, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Yemen, Iran, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.

A modern tragic hero

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miler was a play that created interest for most of us at the time when we were adolescents. I was reading avidly around the play for at that time I did not fully understand the significance of it.

In my search I came across a comment by John Gasser who wrote on Drama and Cinema. Here is an extract from one of his essays. “The play is a summation of man’s life that would normally be oriented as a chronicle, a horizontal kind of drama, but it becomes instead a spiraling affair.

“It starts with Willy Loman returning home instead of going way on another business trip, because he can no longer trust himself to drive a car, and his story ends with what his committing suicide in order to leave his family his insurance and to repair his personal failure.”

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