Bubble-making...

Context, they say, matters nought. Historical. Biographical. Nought! The author, they say, is dead. The text is yours to fancy-weave meanings out of it as you choose.

I find people finding pleasure in this. I do not.

I have been studying something I keep safe distance from generally. Poetry. English poetry, to be specific. Indian English poetry, to be even more specific. I have been studying it for my M.A. exam. As I am going through my course material (prepared by the JNU professor and littérateur in his own right, Makarand Paranjape), I am pausing, thinking, wondering. Time and again he stresses on how open poetry is to meanings and interpretations. When he goes a little further along the making-sense path, he inserts the “at least to me” qualifier. He openly admits that many of the famed, esteemed, popular even, poets can often be very vague. You see the symbolism but try as you might it can prove hard to find a coherent meaning behind it. Connecting lines, finding out how one idea progresses into another from stanza to stanza and how they relate in the process can be quite a task too, and not always a fruitful one. So in the absence of that coherence, the reader is supposed to have full freedom at interpretation. THIS is what bothers me. I understand that words, thoughts, ideas cannot be straitjacketed but isn't there a line, a line of reason, one should not (ideally) cross?! How fanciful can our fancy really be! Imagination is the food of art (or in more un-Shakespearean lingo, the life-blood) but can it have any real sense or be wholly satisfying if "reason" totally departed from the scene?

I can see what a volatile field of argument this is and how fuzzy the boundaries, but I have always had a compulsive need to “understand” things before I can truly appreciate them, even if my senses lead me on. So it bothers me. This ambiguity, this unsettled state of affairs, these contradictions.

In the end, I can only cling to very basic and very personal lines, which do not suit me, but which is all I have. And those lines do not let me indulge in fancyweaving. They barely let me reach down to the subcutaneous layer. Beyond that, I like not to go. My universe asks for some definiteness. And this is why “context” is not nought for me. For me, it is that which can help me in sifting through this... umbrella of meanings, and follow the one that the poet might have intended to convey. It does not follow that what the poet tried to convey is the ultimate in meaning. Because what was tried might not have been as successfully achieved. But that is another debate altogether. The intended meaning, successful or not, can yet light my path of interpretation.

A friend of mine writes poetry very seriously. She must have her own literary ambitions but “ambition” is less in her case. It is more a way of self-expression for her, a deeply personal exercise, almost a similar outlet as diary-writing is for some of us. So her circle of readers is small and private. She sometimes urges me to read some of her compositions. My deadened-to-poetry mind does not always get her imageries and symbolic representations, but sometimes I do, and when I do, I try to think as she might have thought. Knowing her and her style in writing poems, I can direct my analystic beam of light (*poker face*) accordingly. I need not fear that I will produce far-fetched stuff.

In a similar way, when made to read poetry, it helps in finding a pattern of the poet's thoughts and expressions. I need not distrust myself so much then in making sensible sense.

I would like to contribute a small point to Sujata’s text on Blindness below. She said:

A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters.

That would make it seem that Saramago contrived such a punctuating system for this particular novel, with a particular view in mind. But the same idiosyncratic punctuation is found elsewhere in his earlier work (for instance, in passages of Baltasar and Blimunda) and also in later novels. According to the author, his parsimonious use of punctuation marks “is related to what, in musical terms, is called the tempo, or the measure [of speech]. It is less the rhythm than the measure and the tempo. It is related to how the sentence itself is built”; he adds, furthermore, that “when we speak, we don’t use punctuation marks”. Rather than a local contrivance calculated specifically for the blind, Saramago’s peculiar punctuation is part of a more general attempt to approximate the qualities of real speech on the page.

(Readers of Portuguese may check his declarations here: http://www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=5081&cat=Ensaios&vinda=S)

BLINDNESS, José Saramago

We humans have a great propensity for getting habituated and taking things for granted. Sometimes the most cardinal things of our life. Probably this is what makes José Saramago's Blindness unique and succeed in jolting our senses.

An unnamed country is struck by an inexplicable epidemic of blindness, a blindness that is contagious. People stop seeing all of a sudden, but contrary to the usual darkness that envelops the blind their worlds turn all white. The government goes on high alert and quarantines the first batch hoping to keep the rest of the populace safe till a cure is found. But the medical world succeeds in finding no answers and steadily people keep turning blind across the country. Panic rises, chaos reigns, until a time when the whole nation goes blind and when it becomes a struggle for individual existence, basically a struggle to find food and live on from day to day.

Amid but aside from all these is a horrifying chain of events unfolding inside one of the quarantine camps. An abandoned mental hospital where the first batch of blind men and women had been sent. In that first batch is an opthalmologist and his wife. As inexplicable as the blindness is the opthalmologist's wife's retaining her vision. She is the only person known in the novel to thus remain unaffected. Initially she fakes blindness to be with her husband but later on as things escalate inside the hospital it is this lone woman – this eye-witness to the grotesque reality – who holds out some hopes of survival for a small group of people, the group which takes the core story forward.

The novel has some striking authorial touches. The country is unnamed and so are the characters. The first might only just facilitate placing the story in an universal context but the second really has a role to play. We have the doctor, the doctor's wife, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the old man with the eye patch and so on... but no names. Not once. In a world peopled by blind men and women, this is really significant. Names give us individuality. Names mark us out. But in the world of the blind, what means individuality and of what use such markings! The other marked stylistic peculiarity is the near absence of punctuation marks other than the comma and the period and the complete absence of quotation marks. The continued flow of dialogue without quotations sometimes blurs the difference between two speakers. A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters. With the demarcations between speakers removed, the reader has to grope his way forward just like the blind. This I consider a bit of an extreme reading. To me it seems more like an experimental ploy on the author's part. It definitely symbolises some of the confusion, but it does not go farther than that. Commas come at all the right pauses and once one gets into the flow of the story there are only a handful of places where one is brought to a confused halt.

" When the doctor and the old man with the black eyepatch entered the ward with the food, they did not see, could not see, seven naked women and the corpse of the woman who suffered from insomnia stretched out on her bed, cleaner than she had ever been in all her life, while another woman was washing her companions, one by one, and then herself."

Saramago's brilliance is in his leaps of imagination and his grasp of humanity. How often do we stop to think of what makes us humane, what bases our civilized state and how fragile is that basis? Saramago draws us deep down into an abyss where human dignity is crushed relentlessly. Robbed of the primary 'sense', life soon turns into an animalistic existence... living to eat and eating to live. But even in this world, polarities occur. Inside the hospital, we have the crooks who are still in the grips of greed and power-hunger and extort the other inmates and cruelly deprive them of food. In the end, when there is nothing of material worth left to be extorted, the women become victims of their base savagery. At the other end, we have the central characters who show true grit and sensitivity even when their world has been turned upside down. Thus even as Saramago keeps piling on the horror and accentuating the sense of nausea, he does not let the tragic circumstances spin out of control. The turn of events remain logical (even when stretched to their extremities), the horror remains believable, and instead of being paralysed by the grotesque spectacle, we are left shaken and stirred.

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