J.M. Coetzee – Disgrace Nov 27, 2020

 

First edition cover

The novel is short and not designed to offer reading pleasure. The characters seem to act in ways that destroy their own chances of making a reasonable future in South Africa after apartheid, at a time of turmoil in the country. A number of issues are raised: racism, sexual harassment, rape, the future of a country, and animal rights (in recent times, a favourite theme of Coetzee).

No novel has excited as much discussion among the readers, during the session, and continuing afterward in the reading group’s WhatsApp. The passages selected for reading were short, but representative of the novel, covering all the themes and characters and major events. Some readers found the novel complex with honest depictions of various protagonists and the socio-political history of the times. Others found it dark, almost dystopian.

The question arose regarding the title – why is it called Disgrace? One reader answered it was because of the disgrace heaped on the two central characters, David Lurie, and his daughter, Lucy. For David Lurie, the main character, the author has plotted a path of abasement and degradation, one step at a time. The gloom of the novel arises from the failure of all the escape routes, held out and then withdrawn. KumKum added that the book contains disgraceful actions by several characters besides David Lurie – you could include the rapists and Petrus.

Another reader, Priya, said, the book presents a dystopian world , sad and abnormal. It is a difficult book, she said, with bizarre situations, desolate and dreary, loveless , joyless and frightening. It derives its strength from negativity, a space where no ray of hope exists and everything ends in hopelessness. 

J.M. Coetzee  Self-portrait, 1955–1956

One of the pessimistic predictions of the novel (buttressed by the emigration of the author himself) is that S Africa is not a place where white people can live with fairness and justice.

Joe said in a well-written novel we come away with the impression that the characters are free spirits governed by their own fancies and predilections. And the choices they make may be capricious, not in accord necessarily with the active reader’s judgement, but we concede the character made them freely. In this novel we have the distinct impression of the authorial hand guiding every major mis-step of the characters.  The locus of their decision-making is out of their hands. They are contorted into unnatural modes to satisfy the puppeteer, Coetzee. Removing their independence of action constituted the greatest flaw in this novel. 

Some of the readers on Zoom

Women Poets Session — Oct 23, 2020

 The theme announced for this month's poetry session was Women Poets. As it turned out Louise Glück (the surname rhymes with click) was announced on Oct 8, 2020 as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is only the third woman poet to get the prize, the first being Gabriela Mistral in 1945, and the second, Wisława Szymborska in 1996. 

Louise Glück was cited for ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’ – Photo by Katherine Wolkoff

Isolated by necessity since the Covid-19 virus struck, we have been forced for six months to have our gatherings on the Web, with only occasional glimpses of each other. We are longing to meet surrounded by birds and trees. Shoba has invited us to her little piece of forest in the heart of the metro as soon as the virus is defeated:

The women showed up for the session in dangle earrings in various styles. Shoba is wearing silver bidri craft earrings that come from Hyderabad. You can see below adornments worn by some others:

Saras

Devika

The six novels for reading next year have been nominated and accepted; three are by women authors and three by men, and they suitably alternate between long 500-page novels and shorter ones that are like novellas. Coetzee's novel Disgrace is slated for the November reading, and the last session of the year in December will be happy or humorous poems. The custom has been that people dress up in costumes in the holiday season to make the observer a bit giddy. 

Readers recalled the general air of slight madness that animates the group. Geeta did not realise it when she joined, and KumKum said Gopa certainly did not bargain for the December reading in 2019 when everyone came in madcap costumes. It was such fun, said Devika. Aren't you glad we did those crazy things when we could still meet, asked KumKum? Devika said we continue in the same vein even now. KumKum said even Joe wanted to wear a pirate-style dangle earrings when he heard the women were going to sporting such ornaments today. Devika suggested KumKum could give her bangle for Joe to hang from his ears! The longer the better some women say, others don't favour such earrings, yet show them off on occasions like this. Devika said this is total women-talk and Joe does not have to tune in.

We have missed the feasts for a number of birthdays this months. Kavita, the youngest member celebrates her fiftieth on Oct 24, for Devika Oct was her sixtieth and for Joe it was his eighty-first. Devika said not to worry, when the coronavirus is defeated we will make up for all the missed feasts! We miss the coffee with which sessions used to begin when we met at the Yacht Club. 

Geeta had many colours of kumkum and used to apply it with a cigarette butt. Zakia joined and wished birthday greetings to Joe and Devika and offered Durga Puja wishes. KumKum said the Bengali association in Kochi is delivering the puja feast in boxes to the homes of all the senior people – the younger members may pick it up from the premises. Devika jokingly said she will come and visit when the bhog is delivered, if she is alerted.

Kavita briefly appeared before she had to disappear for a visit to Aluva with her sister-in-law. Everyone wished her. Geetha showed up on Zoom and displayed her long earrings. 

Zoom pic of the gathering

Joseph Heller – Catch-22, Sep 25, 2020

 

Written as a satire on war, questioning the pieties spouted patriotically by politicians and generals to urge soldiers on to heroic fighting, this novel was based on the experiences of the author who was a bombardier in a bomber squadron based in Corsica during World War II. The anti-hero is John Yossarian, also a bombardier, whose war-time perch was lying flat in the nose of a B-25 Mitchell bomber, aiming bombs at targets while the plane was piloted over enemy targets enveloped in dangerous flak (anti-aircraft fire).

Mitchell B-25 bomber – about 10,000 were built, 40 are still flying

In another peace-time perch he could also be found naked up a tree at the air-base contemplating who was trying to kill him. He was convinced everyone, most especially the commanding officers and generals, were out to get him. The number of missions to be flown before rotating the airmen back home was continually increased to win laurels for the commanding officers. 

The airman could escape the Sisyphean toil of flying ever more bombing missions if he was declared insane. But he could not ask for a mental evaluation to determine whether he was fit to fly, for such an attempt to avoid dangerous missions would prove the airman's sanity, since: 

“... concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”

That was the Catch-22, a catchphrase that has entered the English language. Catch-22 occurs at points in the novel, to explain a paradox caused by applying a rule; every such problem has a solution which is contradicted by the problem itself.

The novel has lots of repetitions and nobody will say it is elegantly written. It is a collection of episodes with no real story-line to thread its progress. All one can sense is that Yossarian is getting increasingly desperate, and more and more paranoid, seeing enemies everywhere bent on snuffing him out:

   "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told [Clevinger] calmly. 

   "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. 

   "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

   "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered …

As the number of missions keep increasing Yossarian takes evasive action: he alters the line of bombing on maps; he presents himself naked at a medal ceremony; he marches backward; etc. For a generation yet to come of age during the Vietnam War, the novel made eminent sense, justifying evading the military draft, burning draft papers, and even desertion, as being superior to an immoral war. Orr with his survival technique of ditching his plane in the sea and paddling to Sweden in a life-raft with survival techniques he'd practiced becomes the active antidote to Catch-22.

Readers meeting on Zoom for the Catch-22 session

Romantic Poets Session –– Aug 20, 2020

Ten Famous Romantic Poets

The Romantic movement in Britain in the late 18th century embraced a deep interest in Nature as a source of inspiration for poetry. It emphasised the primacy of the individual's expression of imagination and emotion. Furthermore, it departed from all types of classicism and rebelled against social rules and conventions.

Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) one of the foremost poets of her time

While the names on everybody’s lips are those of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, there were female poets too in abundance during the Romantic period. Women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. Hemans was a bestselling author of the nineteenth century, and Baillie, the foremost playwright of her time.

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 - 1806), Romantic poet and novelist

The Romantic Poets were  a varied lot. Wordsworth, you might call almost an establishment figure with his sober ways and accession to Laureate status. Blake was a mystic and deeply religious thinker, though inimical to established religion and its pomps. Shelley was a free-thinking poet and pamphleteer who even got rusticated from Oxford University for an essay The Necessity of Atheism. Dying young was the common fate of several Romantic poets: Keats, Shelley and Byron, but like other geniuses they accomplished incandescent work by their early twenties. Because Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a radical essay to preface their joint collection called Lyrical Ballads, they are considered the theorists and elder statesmen of the Romantic era. However, the letters of Keats can also be mined for a deep understanding of his insights into poetry and the creative process. So too Shelley's seminal essay A Defence of Poetry lays out the dominant role of poetry in language and how poetry enables the mind to realise “a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”

Shoba

Devika

The Romantic movement extended to France and Germany as well. Many famous French poets of the nineteenth century participated, poets such as Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny. Later it gave rise to symbolism in France. In Russia Romanticism flowered with Pushkin who elevated the Russian language to a high level of artistry; his pioneering work benefited subsequent poets like Lermontov and Nekrasov. 

Zakia

KumKum

The number of readers selecting a poet was distributed as follows: Wordsworth (3), Blake (2), Shelley (2), Keats (2), and one each for Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, Byron, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alexander Pushkin, to make 15 readers in all – a record number for our Poetry readings.

Zoom gallery pictures of the reading in progress are captured below:

Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, July 25, 2020

First edition cover Feb, 1962

Ken Kesey's story of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (OFOTCN) began when he started working in 1960 as a paid volunteer in a Stanford University program to test an experimental drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) which they hoped would cure the insane. He discovered instead it could drive normal people insane! Twenty years later it became known that the funding agency was the CIA, the agency of the US Government infamous the world over for its dirty tricks.

Later he worked in a hospital’s psychiatric ward at the nearby Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. During the night shift there he used to converse with the patients. He observed that many of them were thinking people who acted abnormally according to societal standards, but who were otherwise fine. It was the push to conform that had ejected them from the free society in which they lived.

The book depicts therapies for the insane ranging from group discussions under an iron-willed nurse, to the invasive Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and surgical Lobotomy. The inventor of Lobotomy, Egas Moniz, won the Nobel Prize in 1949; but its use has been entirely discontinued after the 1950s because the results were poor. Besides, newer psychiatric drugs were coming on stream with hopes for better results. 

Ken Kesey – the Oregon Author who lived a colourful life

ECT has remained on the treatment list as a last option for maladies like depression and bipolar disorder, but with two radical changes: 
1) it is performed only under anaesthesia, and 
2) it is done with far lower currents and voltages than originally used and employs an ultra brief pulse of less than 0.5 millisec

McMurphy – locked up and alienated, he nevertheless tried to resurrect the spirits of the inmates

The novel can be read as McMurphy’s attempt to liberate the patients of the asylum from the tyranny of Nurse Ratched and the system she represented, so that they could live with dignity even within the precincts of the loony bin.

As before the readers gathered online using Zoom (courtesy of Rachel Cleetus) and were immensely comforted to listen and talk with each other in these trying times of Covid-19. Here is a group picture – only Kavita is missing:

Poetry Session – June 26, 2020

Most of the poets read at this session were American, barring three famous Englishmen (Byron, Tennyson and Kipling), an Irishman (Gogarty), a Greek (Cavafy), and an Indian (Hoskote). The poetry was rich and varied, and gave rise to much discussion.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall © National Portrait Gallery, London

The world is beset by several crises at the moment. The extreme cruelty of the deliberate slow murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, has given rise to reactions around the globe against racism. This is partly reflected in the discussions below of two poets on opposites sides of that divide: James Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling.

James Baldwin – 1963 portrait by Richard Avedon

The Covid-19 crisis also found its way into our discussions when the role of policing in general was discussed. Too often the police is seen as an instrument for political coercion. If the government has not earned the trust of its people, by acting in the public good, in turn the public will hold back from cooperating with the policies of the government.

Rudyard Kipling

One of our readers (Geeta) raised the point about what constitutes 'literary value’ in a piece of writing, and how do you assess it. It comes into play when KRG readers select novels for the year’s reading. It was essential to the famous case of the obscenity charge against the novel Ulysses. The disposal of the case with the finding against the charge, established once and for all that a work of literary merit will not be treated by the law as an obscenity.

James Joyce

For lovers of literature the manner in which the Judge John M. Woolsey arrived at his decision in December 1933 has a certain piquancy in its phrasing:

“I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”

Emetic, but not aphrodisiac.

As before we are under a Covid-19 sentence of social distancing and had to congregate in a virtual manner with Zoom. Here we are:

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein, May 29, 2020

Frankenstein – The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition published in France in 1823

Title page and frontispiece of Mary Shelley’s 1831 (third) edition of Frankenstein

It all began when four friends got together in a villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. On a stormy night in 1816, one of them, Lord Byron, proposed ‘We will each write a ghost story.’ The others were Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and John Polidori, a young twenty-year-old aide to Lord Byron. 

Villa Diodati, where Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori decided to write ghost stories in the summer of 1816

Two years later the expansion of what Mary Shelley wrote was published in London as Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, the first ever novel in the Science Fiction genre. John Polidori’s submission to the same contest was published as The Vampyre, now viewed as the forerunner of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The two established poets fell short, their ghost story efforts dissipating amidst their other labours.

By 1851 when Mary Shelley died the approximate number copies sold of Frankenstein was 7,000: far more than all the volumes of Percy Shelley’s poetry combined.  A copy of  the novel, signed by the author, with an inscription which read “To Lord Byron, from the author” sold for £350,000 at auction in 2013. Not only is the novel Frankenstein in print 200 years later, selling ~50,000 copies annually, but Frankenstein's monster has appeared in almost 200 TV and film productions. 

The films featuring Frankenstein's monster have been instrumental in promoting the story, although most of them deviate from the novel in crucial elements. The most famous portrayal is by Boris Karloff in the 1931 film:

Boris Karloff in Jack Pierce's makeup as Frankenstein's monster

This was Joe’s introduction to Frankenstein at the tender age of six or seven when his godmother took him to see it in Madras at the Elphinstone cinema. Boris Karloff acted in two follow-on productions, Bride of Frankenstein, and Son of Frankenstein.

Gopa says this novel “is not just a horror story about a monster. It is a deeply thought out work of literature and science. The introduction, through a series of fictional correspondences and recordings like that of an ‘epistolary novel’, prepares the ground for multiple narratives. The first narrative introduces an allegorical story and the protagonists. With each narrative the story takes shape. Subsequent narratives highlight the mental and moral struggles of each of the characters and how they search for different remedies to overcome their sorrows.” Frankenstein has become one the most analysed and debated novels of all time.

As before the readers were forced to convene by videoconference using Zoom,  to protect each other from the novel coronavirus. We wish to acknowledge the cooperation of Joe’s daughter, Rachel. 

Here we are at the end of the animated 2-hour session:

Devika, Joe, KumKum, Geeta, Pamela, Arundhaty, Priya, Shoba, Kavita, Gopa, Zakia