Thank you for a very considered response.

Clearly your own scholarly examination of these novels and literature in general as part of your wider work places you on far stronger grounds, I am, relatively speaking, a dilettante! Yet, and perhaps that is why, I remain unconvinced about some of your arguments, especially regarding Sivandan’s novel.

I must say that “despondency” is not the only thing that pervades both novels. Just before responding to your comment, I picked up the nearest copy of SSK and was most intrigued that the last sentence of the blurb on the back-cover should read thus: “The Sweet and Simple Kind enchants us with its combination of authenticity, humour and passion, and haunts us with reminders of what we were and what we might have been.”

In some ways, this sums up a way of looking at SSK in a manner rather contrary to your reading, at least to the extent of the “what we might have been”. The juxtaposition of “authenticity” and “what might have been” is curious and perhaps speak to the as yet unfulfilled destines of Latha and Christopher, for one.

But yes, I do agree with you that the socio-historical perspective in SSK is in a sense more limited than in WMD (a rather unfortunate and even inappropriate abbreviation). Though I would argue that this is a book about a certain kind of family and class; in a sense, the two novels are fictional ethnographic forays across the class spectrum, or its different ends more specifically.

And not for that reason alone they are also very different and to be honest I even experience some difficulty in reading them together, especially on the lines that you have tried to do.

I wonder though, recalling Umberto Eco, how the interplay between the authorial intent and the intention of the reader is altered when the reader becomes, as you and me too perhaps have become, an archeologist? Not a reader of text but a reader (or an excavator) of meaning? And what and how does the text then submit–in the sense of yield–to us?

You say the novels fail to “sustain an alternative vision” because they align themselves with the “conventional narrative of Sri Lanka’s inexorable slide into ethno-nationalist conflict.” Sri Lanka’s slide into conflict had certain definite ingredients–and not others–and WMD, for example, has these very ingredients. However, WMD also offers a compellingly nuanced narrative, one that is as complex as it is humane. If anything, it underlines the dangers of idealism, offering the compassion of Uncle Para as an antidote to the violence wrought by idealism.

Best
Vijaya

Dear P. Vijaya,

Thank you for your comments. Space constraints sometimes preclude detailed and sympathetic analysis of texts. I do not imply that either of these texts simply reproduce the logic of dominant conceptions of nation and nationalism. They are both important precisely because they try to interrupt such dominant views. My argument is that they ultimately fail to sustain this alternative vision because they align themselves with the conventional narrative of Sri Lanka’s inexorable slide into ethno-nationalist conflict.

The issues you raise regarding Sivanandan’s and Gooneratne’s texts are ones that I have dealt with elsewhere. I have addressed the complex dynamics between history, memory and forgetting and the ways in which Sivanandan’s text seeks to interrupt the logic of dominance in:
Rambukwella, H. 2007 “In search of the nation: When Memory Dies and the [im]possibility of a national imaginary in postcolonial Sri Lanka.” The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities XXXIII (1 &2): 57-70

Similarly I have looked at issues of patriarchy, class and ethnicity in The Sweet and Simple Kind to which I devoted a substantial portion of a chapter in my thesis—unpublished but available for downloading from the University of Hong Kong library website.

I would argue that both texts are essentially teleological. There is a sense of historical determinism in both texts and this teleology is reflected in the increasing tone of despondency that pervades both narratives as they move through Sri Lanka’s twentieth century history.

I would also argue that despite the interplay between class, ethnicity and gender in Gooneratne’s text its socio-historical perspective is far more limited than Sivanandan’s. It is effective in critiquing the patriarchal and masculine nature of nationalism but sees ethnic identities in very discrete and bounded terms—much like how the colonial census, for instance, understood these identities. In contrast though, Gooneratne portrays the English speaking classes as a liberal and multicultural exception to the “masses” but who eventually fail in their historic duty of disseminating these values to society at large due to their turn to nativist and expedient politics. This is exemplified in the figure of Rowland Wijesinghe.

The text’s view of Sri Lankan society as a whole is also clearly apparent in the views expressed by Rajan Philips (Latha’s English literature teacher’s husband) that outside the English speaking classes ethno-religious communities are essentially divided. The narrative affirms this view when Rajan and his wife become victims of racial violence when the poor illiterate Sinhala community in which they attempt their liberal experiment turns against them on account of Rajan’s “Tamil” identity.

The article presented on Groundviews is abstracted from a much longer academic paper and my main attempt is to explore the connections between realism as a generic form, the static and homogenized ways in which ethnic identity is often understood, the role of “history” in such conceptions and how this can lead to a certain kind of historical determinism—which in turn has implications for the idea of reconciliation and an inclusive Sri Lankan imaginary.

The issues you raise in your last paragraph about the death of memory (and maybe the death of history?) and the importance of focusing on the present in terms of reconciliation are issues I am addressing in a separate essay on “post-secularist” trends in scholarly work on Sri Lanka.

Harshana

In my view your piece does significant injustice to both Sivanandan and Gooneratne. Not least because you dedicate precisely one para each to discuss two books that are replete with rich detail. I will refrain from commenting on Amarasekara.

As Qadri Ismail has pointed out (in ‘Abiding by Sri Lanka’), the historicism of Sivandan’s work, from a postempiricist point of view, can indeed be considered the book’s weakness. Yet, as Ismail also notes, one of the novel’s many strengths, to a leftist reader, is that “it imagines multiethnic community outside the logic of dominance”. Furthermore, in my view, the voice of skeptical and even critical insiders–Tamil and Sinhala alike–assume great importance.

Similarly, you seem to have totally missed the sketching of patriarchy and class divisions in Gooneratne’s work. The book is also, mostly in fact, a tale of the struggles of two young women seeking to determine and exercise their agency and the right to shape their own destinies.

I am afraid your own analysis suffers from the very determinism you critique. However, in both novels there are many hints, some more obvious than others, at ‘alternatives’ to dominant constructions of the national, communal and indeed the personal, spanning class, ethnicity, gender, caste and religion. Neither of the novels merely narrate the present in the image of the past, on the contrary. In fact, the protagonists are defined by their striving to reshape their present and thereby the future.

I do not quite understand what you mean when you say that “reconciliation is some kind of return….” Return to what? Of what kind? To a multiethnic paradise? Of when? Pre-1983, pre-Independence, or pre-colonial? If anything reconciliation signals a beginning, and indeed both novels, in their own different ways, echo the possibility; even under the clouds of despair, Meena’s “terrible dignity” and Yogi’s nascent ‘coup’ at the very end of Sivandan’s novel are significant.

Last but not least, notwithstanding the scholarship, the question about what exactly is the temporal in literature remains? How does ‘creative’ or ‘fictional time’ relate to the temporality in which the writer is situated?

Moreover, Sivanandan and Gooneratne are as much archivists as anything else. And as Derrida noted (in his lecture Archive Fever), the structure of the archive is but necessarily spectral, a priori; time and place are neither fully absent nor present, there are but traces. Perhaps the roots of reconciliation lie in the death of memory itself–the road to compassion is paved with total mindfulness of the present rather than the past. As Yerushalmi (cited by Derrida in his essay) wonders, “is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice?”

P. Vijaya

Some what 20 years later this model was re enacted by the likes of Nithyanandan who re imagined contemporary Tamil thatre