Fiction as the underlying reality:

Post Independence Euphoria and Disillusionment

The period of optimism and energy, which was brought in with the end of the second World War and the grant of independence to Ceylon and a host of other dependencies by the imperial powers, including Britain and Holland, was rather short lived as history goes.

The communal riots of the 1950s and the 60s were shocks undermining the euphoria of independence.

In the symbolic world of literature, Godfrey Gunatilleke's The Garden , a short story written in the 1950s, by using the myth of the creation and the fall, from Genesis, to underpin the plot of a new Sinhala style marriage and its course of happiness, disappointment and hope renewed, seemed to present a schema or a fable of Ceylon's history, since independence.

In that story Tissa, a clerk marries his much younger cousin, Prema (means 'love') and though there is a gap in maturity and education their common background makes possible a common creativity, symbolised by a garden that Tissa and his wife cultivate and enjoy.

"Before they went out into the garden, Prema stopped behind the door and held Tissa close to her. How warm and protective his big body seemed.... As he stepped out into the garden he wondered how his mother and her brothers would view their life together.... He was undeniably happy he told himself.

What was it like? Like a vessel brimmed with curd and honey, curd and honey that was the likeness of their life. Hand in hand they went to the corner of the garden where the new bed had been prepared." (Kaleidoscope 39)

A serpent enters the garden one evening when husband and wife are working on it and the husband, finding himself cornered, appeals to his wife to throw him a garden implement to kill the snake.

The wife forgets her role as partner in a joint enterprise and runs away through fear. Fortunately, Jamis, the servant is there too, and he kills the serpent with one stroke of the mammoty.

Tissa is disillusioned about the marriage bond and stares vacantly into the night, alone emotionally, though sharing the marriage bed. His despair is broken symbolically by the cry of a koha , the Ceylonese lark, announcing the dawn of a new day and a renewed, more understanding relationship.

"For the first time the sense of being a stranger in his world assailed Tissa. The darkness, which flowed into the room reminded him that the lamps had not yet been lit. Rising from his bed he groped his way with an unsteady step, into the dining hall.

Out of the growing night suddenly a koha called, its notes clear and cool as spring water, breathlessly ascending, and then, beginning again. It startled the lonely listeners like an immaculate dew-drop, which one surprises under a blade of grass, in the dull heat of the day." (Kaleidoscope 44)

The intensity of the narrative style, the authenticity of the descriptions of character and scene and the use of an allegory of universal significance-the creation and fall story - makes this story memorable.

Further it adheres to the classical model of story telling beginning with the exposition, continuing with the rising action, leading to the climax (the discovery of the snake and the flight of Prema from the scene), continuing into the falling action (the emotional alienation of husband and wife) and the symbolic resolution, which is given in quotes above.

Because of the creation and fall myth functioning as a deep structure, the story appears to be based on a deeper foundation of imaginative reality. It was published in the 1950s, when turmoil had already set in within Ceylon, with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1948 and the Sinhala Only Act of 1956. It seemed to reflect a current and significant mood, post independence made into a slogan, coined by the Prime Minister Bandaranaike, the elected idealogue: 'the age of transition.'

However I talked with the author, Godfrey Gunatilleke, perhaps the most brilliant intellectual and literary critic of recent times in Sri Lanka, about the symbolic interpretation given above, and he smiled as much as to say, "This is a clear case of over interpretation." He didn't intend those political meanings when he wrote it.

This contrast between the author's intention and the meaning that a reader gives to it brings up clearly the question of 'intention and meaning,' which occurs often. It raises all the issues of the relationship of the text to the reader, which the reader response theory tries to mediate by saying that the meaning of a text is a result of the interaction of writer, reader and text and meaning does not reside in the text alone. A philosophical controversy about the nature of reality underpins the dispute.

I could further develop the concept of literature-symbolic action , which was first presented by a modern American philosopher, Kenneth Burke, by arguing that the author may be unconscious of the deep structure or underlying meaning of his creation.

Mikhail Bhakthin, a Russian philosopher, in his The Dialogic Imagination , explains this notion in another way by saying that the words an author uses are not all his. They also belong to the society and time and place and society may be speaking through him.

To explain this point further let me invoke another story based on the Adam and Eve myth, which tells of a family in USA. It is taken from a university text I used in teaching composition in USA, titled The Critical Eye - Thematic Readings for Writers.

It is located in Idaho, a comparatively bleak and infertile state, better known now for the potatoes grown in its poor soil. It lays on the path of the westward expansion of USA, which had taken place in the period after Jefferson purchased the huge expanse of land between the Mississippi and the Pacific, almost 2500 miles in breadth.

After the purchase, Americans, and particularly new immigrants, were offered the chance to open up the vast territory and stake out claims to any tract they could manage. This was the basis of the immense sense of freedom that Americans enjoyed, the freedom to push the frontiers of their own lives, the freedom to realize their dream.

Into this state, in the late 1800s, comes a pioneer family, man and wife and small kids, to open up a land for themselves, to settle down as farmers. As Clinton F. Larsen narrates it, in a prose poem, reminiscent of Robert Frost, when the winter comes and there is no output from the land to sustain the family, the father leaves the mother and the kids in the farm and goes away to the distant city, to find employment and bring back money to feed the family and revitalize the failed enterprise.

The winter is harsh. A rattlesnake strikes the wife and knowing that her kids will starve to death, when she is dead, she opts to kill them herself, before she dies from the snake's venom. The father, returning after winter, finds everyone dead, abandons the farm and wanders about telling his piteous tale of a lost enterprise, a failed dream.

Does this story have any basis of comparison to The Garden? Both invoke the same myth of a lost paradise. In the American story the failure is total. It is a comment on the failure of hope, the cost of progress and the optimism that underpinned the westward expansion of American society, in a word the failure of 'the American dream.'

Isn't it similar in that way to the theme of The Garden , which is the dream of independence? Except that there is a recovery of hope in The Garden. But if placed in each historical context doesn't the story 'mean' more than what it seems to tell. Is this not what we mean by 'new historicism'?

Note:

If The Garden represents the early period, the first decade after independence other works in the collection called KALEIDOSCOPE-An Anthology of Sri Lankan English Literature edited by D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke (Vijitha Yapa, Colombo) may represent phases in our post colonial history.

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