The short story as quintessence: The Art of Rabindranath Tagore

When the Kabuliwala is finally released from prison, he comes to pay Mini a visit. It is the day of her wedding, and officially a day of parting in any Indian/Bengali household. He calls for her. She comes down having forgotten her old childhood mate. When he asks her about her marriage, she leaves the room in embarrassment. The Kabuliwala realizes that time has passed and that his own daughter in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, would probably not remember him too. This is how specificity merges with universality in Tagore, with the story exploring the relationships of fathers and daughters and the shadow that falls within.

Structurally, the story is straightforward without taking recourse to “ambiguity” and “ellipsis” as narrative modes. Compared to a short story by James Joyce or Katherine Mansfield, the story puts forward its universal aesthetics in unambiguous ways. Formally, Rabindranath’s pieces are in the tradition of Maupassant rather than Chekov, because not only do most stories have formal completion they also have a more or less definite closure.

The short story as quintessence: The art of Rabindranath Tagore

In Kabuliwala named after a generic figure popular in 19^th century and even early to mid 20^th century Bengal, Rabindranath not only demonstrates his capacious empathy for a spectacularly large range of people of various psychological and social registers, but also his acute observation of his times and the specific forms of domestic trade and barter  in upper-middle class Bengali households. 

The Kabuliwala or trader from Afghanistan, who traded in raisins, nuts and pistachios, items that have always been rare and expensive in Bengal because they are not produced  here, would hail Mini as “Khonki” which was his own inimitable reproduction of the Bengali word “Khuki” meaning  “little girl” but inflected with an inflection that was foreign to Bengali ears. He would walk into the courtyard of Mini’s house, a little intimidating for the women in the house because of his large size and unfamiliar clothes, and not to say, unfamiliar racial antecedents. Even if the narrator’s wife (the narrator being Mini’s father) would express concern over how the Kabuliwala gained easy access into the house and that it might be dangerous to allow their little girl to get so close to a stranger, the father remain indulgent and accepting towards the Kabuliwala, allowing the interactions of the stranger and his daughter to go on. It is possible that there is some self-inscription on Rabindranath’s part here because he too was the father of many daughters.

Eventually, sorrow makes an entry into this pastoral world as the Kabuliwala is taken to jail because he had killed someone in a brawl where a party that had borrowed money from him denied his debt. Simple, unsophisticated and direct, the Kabuliwala stands for a generic type that was known for both simplicity and violence.

The short story as quintessence: The art of Rabindranath Tagore (cont)

Rabindranath seems to follow the nineteenth century dictum upheld by Poe, of using a “beginning,” “middle” and “end” in his stories.   Although, his endings cannot always be termed definitive endings, they do bring the stories to some degree of closure or resolution. In Kabuliwala, the aesthetics of romance, that between a low class father figure trader from Afghanistan, and a little upper middle class Bengali girl child, provides an  ineffable and unforgettable dynamic which illuminates both the universal and specific  conditions of the child and the father in this case. Although, we associate with Rabindranath’s art qualities that have been celebrated in English Romanticism  such as the primacy of the child,  passionate reverence and continual evocation of Nature, celebration of both romantic and Divine love and their interchangeability through the mythic evocation of   the Radha-Krishna paradigm, Rabindranath can also be supremely classical not only in the symmetrical and chiseled finish of  most of his poems and short stories, but as in  Classical Tragedy  he often evokes  the eternal and universal rhythms of experience.

The Short Story as Quintessence: Some Stories of Rabindranath Tagore

                                                            Sreemati Mukherjee

                                              

The short story as a genre made a belated entry into the world of European genres. In its earlier avatars it existed as the fabliau, the animal fables, the Panchatantra stories, the stories of the Arabian nights, as numerous contes, nouvelles and novellas.  It is from the term novella or novelle that the word novel is derived. Having had a career in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Margaret de Navarre’s Heptameron, it surfaced as a full fledged genre in the nineteenth century in the writings of Chekov and Maupassant. Overseas, in America, the short story made an appearance in Edgar Allan Poe, Melville and Hawthorne.

The short story in India and in Bengal in particular, has had a pretty prolific career. Bankim Chandra authored some short fiction, but it is Rabindranath Tagore who took it to a level of thematic and formal fulfillment. The three stories that I have chosen for discussion in this essay are Kabuliwala, Hungry Stone and Subha, which are quite disparate in their focus and approach, attesting thereby to the multifarious reach of Tagore’s art and imagination. Of these, Kabuliwala and Subha are written in what we call the realist mode, while Hungry Stone is conceived within a supernatural or fantastic mode.

In his short but succinct introduction to the short story Ian Reid informs us that the short story is characterized by three formal features, which are “unity of impression,” “moment of crisis” and “symmetry of design.”¹ Symmetry of design refers to an Aristotelian “beginning” “middle” and “end” favored by short story critics like Edgar Allan Poe, who stressed a  tight knit structure and also emphasized the need for closure or a proper ending.  In The Modernist Short Story Dominic Head posits that the short story is a modernist genre, corresponding to the fragmented quality of modern existence, that the span of the story’s events is usually a day as it is in modernist novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses,² and that in keeping with the experimental and innovative aesthetics of the modern project in Art,  it is also extremely self reflexive or self conscious in its artistry.³ Head also points out that Chekov claimed that his stories did not have any “end” but were all “middle” instead.³ Head also points out that in order to work within economical means the short story might use “ellipsis” ⁴ and “resonance”⁵ as artistic strategies.

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

In Song of Solomon, Morrison recreates what might be termed as a black and culturally specific bildungsroman, or an adventure story which has a black male as its central protagonist. European models of this genre, realized most specifically in the genre of narrative fiction, actually begin with epic examples like the Aenid, and grail stories like Parsifal.  They include Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, The Sorrows of Young Werther, David Copperfield and the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as the The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

 My contention in this paper is that Morrison creates a dialogue between the  “dominant” and “muted” of culture by fusing the specificity of black experience with a narrative model that is European. If she is capable of producing in Gates’s terms a “speakerly” text, she is also superbly capable of fusing “speakerly” with scripted traditions, and actually taking narrative to the borders of both the oral and the scripted.

In this novel, a young Black man, Milkman Dead, unwittingly goes in search of his origins as he looks for a treasure that his father and he believe lies buried in some cave in the South. Macon Dead, the father, was wedded to the American dream of power through material acquisition. In this context, it is important to say something about the name Dead, that Milkman and his family all bear. The name “Dead” stuck as a result of a drunken whim of a Yankee.  In a conversation with Thomas Le Clair Morrison talks about how black people lost their names and its psychological impact:

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison...

If a text like Beloved helps to interiorize the life of the “anonymous people called slaves”⁵² through a process that is very “personal,”⁵³ and  if it helps to engage with history on an epic level, Song of Solomon, illuminates certain contexts of black cultural activism in the 1960’s. As Madhu Dubey tells us in Black Women Novelists and the Black  National Aesthetic, Black Nationalism and the Black Aesthetic movement  stressed the unified, historically undetermined black male agent who was perfectly free and autonomous.⁵⁴ In the age of militant black Nationalism, Black aestheticians preferred poetry and drama as suitable literary modes through which the black artist could communicate his message to a black community that was deemed or posited as unified.⁵⁵

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon emerges as a critique of such unilateral positions. Madhu Dubey posits that black women writers of this period emerge as highly interrogative of both the seamless view of history that the black aestheticians and nationalists were positing, and also of the privileging of the black male subject.⁵⁶

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

Although, the last word or name in the novel is “Beloved,” Kristin Boudreau suggests that contrary to the reading of several critics that Beloved was “story” to pass on” and thereby underscoring the commitment  to history that Morrison has emphasized over and over again, perhaps one should take Morrison’s words at face value and accept the fact that it was indeed, “not a story to pass on.”⁴⁹ Boudreau’s contention is that it was “not a story to pass on” because Beloved finally becomes an absence.⁵⁰ She will always embody that part of African-American history that modern day African-Americans do not want to remember. If Morrison can gesture towards the necessity of remembering she can also suggest elliptically, the necessity of forgetting. There are no real closures in the novel. . All this ties in very neatly with the poststructuralist skepticism that history is not a definitive text. However, in keeping with Morrison’s avowed commitment to History, we may accept Caroline Rody’s position that the text embodies, “the affective aspect of history writing, insofar as the historiographic project enacts a relationship of desire, and emotional implication of present and past.”⁵¹