Expanding the literary horizons in Sri Lankan writings in English:

Exemplary application of literary theory within the fabric of fiction writing

By Ranga Chandrarathne

Art must recreate, in full consciousness, and by means of signs, the total life of the universe, that is to say, the soul where the varied dream we call the universe is played. -Teodor de Wyzewa, 1886

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. . . .

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)

Excelled in the creative application of modern literary theory with insights into diverse mindsets and dealing with myriads of social issues, Hola EI Che offers readers a rich harvest of creativity born out of master crafting at the hand of a young Sri Lankan writer in English Dilshan Boange.

Apart from its diverse styles of writing and voices which at times, reflect and reveal the inner mindscapes of the dramatic personae who peopled the short stories and novella and novelette in Hola EI Che, most of the creations can , in fact, be considered as models in the application of modern literary theory in general and magical realism in particular. Dilshan’s forte seems to be his innate ability to integrate, primarily, the magical realism into plot and the place it in the context of contemporary milieu. For a moment, one should not be under the illusion that these creations are examples of textbook theories skillfully wrapped around ingeniously crafted plots and place them against the contemporary milieu.

They are, instead, creations with flesh and blood and with their own souls; at times, inner soul of a character has been manifested as strange cannibal at the corner room (in the mind of a particular character), anxieties of new generation of students who read English at the university and longing for an alternative space for creativity within the mainstream Sri Lankan literature in English is manifested by way of a fictitious literary festival held in the esplanade of Galle Face green.

The creations in the anthology Hola El Che can be read from diverse perspectives. It is this intertexuality of the creations which clearly distinguishes Hola El Che from much eulogised plain stories in contemporary Sri Lankan writings in English.

In the exclusive interview with Montage, Dilshan articulate some of the issues and techniques he had employed in crafting Hola El Che , which we hope would be a turning point in contemporary Sri Lankan literature in English.

Question: In the title short story, Hola EI Che, you have skilfully used magical realism in bringing down legendary revolutionary leader Che Guevara from the past into the 21st century Colombo. Che represents a powerful symbol embodying a political ideology which is found irrelevant in modern context. In a commercial milieu, old icons have assumed different connotations shedding off their ideological tags. For instance Che Guevara has reduced to a Café Che shedding the ideology behind the iconic figure. How do you define this phenomenon?

Answer:Firstly thank you for the compliment on my writing regarding the use of magical realism. Yes, you have hit on some very pertinent points relating to ideology and symbolism that can be found in the title story. Che Guevara as a symbol today probably serves capitalism more than the ideology he represented as an individual and a revolutionary. And with the changing times and the failure of the communist project Che became more of an icon for idealism which was building itself on a romanticism that youth would embrace without even knowing what Che represented. Perhaps it’s telling of how once a symbol is appropriated b different segments in society there is no ‘patent’ so to speak, of how it is utilized and for what purpose.

I would like to clearly make known that I am not being critical of the capitalist system and the world of advertising. That is not my intention but to portray what I feel is the irony that can be seen related to ideology in its workings in contemporary society.

Q: One of the significant aspects of the short story is the application of the magical realism in bringing down Che Guevara, among other things, to define the contemporary milieu. One of the instances where the younger generation is no longer lured by revolutionary rhetoric is when the youngsters mistake the dictator Batista for a wrestler by the same name. How do you perceive assigning new social values to old icons such as Che Guevara in modern context?

A: Playing around the name Batista was something I developed along the way as the story was building up its points ‘to ponder on’ in my mind. What I hope to convey here is how the present generation and especially the one that take the mantle thereafter may not be attuned to historic significances as much the older generation expects them to be. I think its fair to say that when the word Batista is mentioned without any specific references a youngster who is of the cable/satellite TV teen generation would more likely think of the wrestler who is himself an icon in the world of sports entertainment, rather than some long dead dictator who controlled a country on the other side of the world. And as you say there are very likely new social values and even meanings being assigned to symbols and names of the past that history has classified in a certain way but may not be as significant or treated in the same manner by the fast changing world of the upcoming generation.

Q: Don’t you think that Che stopping comrade Guido Gonzalez hints out that the era of ‘street fighting’ is over?

A: I think you have brought out a very significant point. Looking at the pathway of international socialism I think the actions of the character of Che in the story does indicate that their days of revolution are over. And what new modes will their movements adopt? Maybe its not for us to predict or speculate, but I suppose their days of old style revolution have now come to an end. And again I wish to say that I do not intend this story to make any references to existing political parties or their activities.

Q: At another plain, Hola El Che glances into the lives of rich upper middle class teens whose mores are more or less fashioned out by Western cultural goods such as soap operas, cheap thrash, fantasies, films and television series and their social life revolves around Cafes, hotels and motels. What is the role that this generation can play in Sri Lanka?

A: A very hard hitting question. I honestly didn’t intent to make Hola El Che a social critique but certainly the reader has every right to interpret such meanings from the text. Perhaps there is a need for more maturity and productive thinking amongst certain segments of the present youth who can after all contribute much to Sri Lanka. But thinking styles and outlooks persist that would render such pockets of youngsters to be not to contributory to the greater good. Certainly the fast paced lives of the urban affluent revolves around spheres of lavish living, yet perhaps the youth of such segments can become more attuned and conscious as to what their role would be in the larger context of things. After all the youth of a nation are always the heirs to its future.

Magical realism

Q: The Galle Face Literary Eve is a novella about students of the Faculty of Arts and in the Department of English at the University of Colombo trying to create an ‘alternative space’ in the limited Sri Lankan English literary scene. Apart from the extensive use of magical realism in the novella, the core issue is whether there is an ‘alternative space’ for students in Sri Lankan English literary scene. How do you perceive this situation?

A: I’d say this is something that I felt very close to when I think of how the idea of ‘alternative space’ was very central in much of the ideological discourses that were part of our studies at university when reading English. The issue of ‘alternative spaces’ is somewhat prominent in circles of art and literature, on the one hand for what it means to or hopes to represent. And yet again in such matters we world come across certain aspects of politics being involved. In terms of student activism I think universities could offer much more towards more positive results to the community.

It is such a scenario that I try to depict through the novella with its many aspects of human sentiments and thinking involved that invariably play a part in the final outcome of a project. The narrative of this story is meant to display amongst other things how literature and a passion for it can be a powerful thing, and what heights it can achieve. Though the students fail in rallying up a crowd to challenge ‘the status quo’ of the dominant mainstream it must be noted that what they achieve in terms of knowledge gained through the dialogic discourses is perhaps far more that what they even thought possible from their effort to have an evening of very low key literary activism.

On the matter of what opportunities exist for students and student activism in the Sri Lankan literary scene, I feel there isn’t much, again this is just my two cents on it. The support from institutions for literary activism that can encompass students is not very prominent and not much of a thrust is found even inside the varsity community to build alternative spaces through activism when it comes to literature. Perhaps the novella will come out as a message of how the will of a few determined resolved youth can achieve results which are worth the efforts they are inspired to put in through their conviction that what they are doing has some positive value which may seem at the outset to have at best only some symbolic value. I believe such optimistic and resolved thinking is necessary amongst the university students of today.

Q: Magic or magical realism in the context of post-colonial writing tend to create hybrid space as termed out by Canadian critic Robert Wilson, it is ‘dual spatiality’ where reality is fused amicably with fantasy or magic realism. In other words, it is fantasy within fantasy. How do you define this phenomenon in relation to The Galle Face Literary Eve where the students’ fantasy of creating a ‘alternate space’ merge amicably with characters directly walking out of the pages of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?

A: First let me say thanks for putting this question! I think it can really open some space for a couple of explanatory point to be dwelt into. Before getting to the real core of the question I’d just like to express a few thoughts relating to the existing discourses in literary studies in Sri Lanka at university level. The postcolonial identity and related studies here do not much go into the South American or Latin American discourses as much as African or Asian discourses and I feel it is a lacking at present. When even we were in university and mentioned this to our lecturers the main reason was that there isn’t enough resources to develop a substantial syllabus, of course I don’t know what the position is right now. But I feel studies into this area should be developed to both bridge our part of the colonial experience and that of South America in terms of literary studies, as well as explore new means of expression and narrative technique. ‘Magical realism’ can contribute a lot to explore our own hybrid mould in the context of postcolonial writing and literary expression.

The clash is often seen as between western scientific or logical thinking against eastern non-European ways that have a foundation of the extraordinary, mysterious and what cannot be explained or defies empirical scientific explication. This would set the ground for a clash of civilizations from a perspective of what can be thought as ‘acceptable’ in literary discourses and what qualifies as ‘real’ or ‘realistic’. And in building up the concept of the novella –Galle Face Literary Eve my intention was to create that duality of space in a very markedly Sri Lankan context to challenge the very idea of plausibility utilizing methods of magical realism narrative methods which I studied on my own for quite some time based mainly on the works of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and academic writings that unfolded the methods and their rationale.

The autobiography of Garcia-Marquez proved to be invaluable in getting at the inner workings of the writer and his world of experience that gave much explanations and insights about plot, character development and the general outlook of the author especially regards to what is thought of as his magnum opus –One Hundred Years of Solitude. The spatial duality that I intend to present is one that has some sense of symbolism which I hope the reader which appreciate from a Sri Lankan perspective, since the Sri Lankan characters are very much mundane and identifiable as being real while the two fictional South American characters given new leases of life from the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude in my own work present the extraordinary, inexplicable and perhaps indefinable when looked at from classical realism. Yet what I wanted to present is not a ‘clash of civilizations’ so to say, but rather the very opposite, a harmonious blend of the two poles.

The Sri Lankans and the two South American characters –Remedios the Beauty and Aureliano Segundo, get on famously and present a dialogic explication of the theory or understandings related to magical realism by an analysis of the concepts and events from the texts of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Garcia-Marquez’s autobiography –Living to tell the Tale, and I am hoping this work of mine will also be note for its inter-textuality in bringing references of two separate texts to connect to each other and making a cross-reference text in a new story.

In exploring the hybrid identity or its dual spatiality I am hoping that the text will work as a symbolic space to demonstrate a harmonious blend of two separate mindsets which are united in the objective to learn and explore without having presupposed rejections of the other although the dialogic and introspective investigations they make would certainly be from the Sri Lankan standpoint of questioning and challenging the acceptability or plausibility of an event or a particular notion. However, the fact that there are no fixed presuppositions is something that I wanted to express. I suppose in this context the notion of this experiment is a bit of a fantasy within a fantasy seeing as how it explores the fantastical from a realistic grounding to begin with and then invites the fantastical to the point of merging both ends, and that itself is a bit of a fantasy I suppose, to expect polar opposites to not have any inherent inclinations to reject the other. But then again I feel this is one of the symbolic elements of the text when taken of its totality.

As Sri Lankans will something like the magically real be completely alien to us? If African literature with its shamanism and voodoo and so on can resonate with our own ritualistic practices and be accepted for the power they posses over the beliefs of people, cannot Latin American expressionisms that make ghosts walk and talk with the living with no shocks to the fabric of reality also seem ‘not absurd’ to our Sri Lankan sensibilities? It is the search of an alternative space for expression in a socialized context by the students in the story that allows the discoveries they make about the magically real becoming very much a part of the fantastical. So then where do the boundaries exist? Do the students themselves represent a consciousness of a group who admit that their own place maybe questioned for its realness since they admit they are interacting with two characters from a novel by a Latin American writer? It is this sort of alternative thinking that I hope this story will speak out and as a text become, symbolically, an ‘alternative space’.

Fictional town

Q: Since the characters from Garcia Marquez’s fictional town Macondo find their way into the text, in a way, their (those characters) histories figure in The Galle Face Literary Eve. However, at another level, those characters are part of the literary discussion of the students. What are your views on the inclusion of characters from Macondo and what is the vital role they play in the story?

A: My objective was in a way to make a symbolic representation of the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude to voice out some explanations to a group of Sri Lankan students of literature. So the agents’ would be Aureliano Segundo and Remedios the Beauty. It is in a way a means I sought to let the characters themselves explain their world out of the context of the novel they are found it. We find contemporary writers writing novels and other fictional narratives that are sequels to great works of literature like for example the novel Scarlet which is a sequel to the American epic Gone with the Wind. Yet they are by two different authors.

But the larger picture between these texts may be that they capture a milieu that is explored and continues to arouse the curiosity of generations to be explored further. By no means can the two characters from Macondo portrayed in my work seem to present a sequel of any sorts to the storylines related to their roles in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’d never go that far and its not plausible to say so either when you look at the text. But they roles they each play is one of symbolism in respect of two things I intended –one is that they are the symbolic voice of a great novel that seems to have baffled the more realistic critical thinking of the students, and secondly is that they represent a cultural milieu expressed through the literature of Garcia-Marquez which is unfamiliar to the students yet one that wish to come to know and welcome.

Cannibals

Q: Cannibals in the corner room, is, from a broader perspective, a mapping out of a mindscape of a lonely youth who runs an advertising agency. The protagonist Rukshan’s anxieties are manifested through the Piranha like humanoids trapped in the corner room. The novelette ends with the discovery that humanoids cannot come out of the corner room. Even in this novelette, you have extensively used magical elements in a convincing manner. How did you make use of ‘dual spatiality’ in the context of Cannibals in the corner room?

A: In my opinion this is the ‘odd one out’ from the trio. I grounded the concept to deal with a more grim, dark aspect of the human psyche, and experimented with the mode of magic realism to make the impossible seem actual.

This is an instance where I’d say the harmony is broken at the outset, with critically realistic thinking which is tightly bound to empirical factuality rejecting all notions of the claims made by Rukshan. Yet the fact that their presence is ‘physical’ is the first ‘fact’ that allows the cannibals to be ‘real’. And the systematic development of the acceptability of their presence as true and the need to ascertain their ‘realness’ becomes the dilemma that confronts the characters.

The dual spatiality here seems more grounded in the Sri Lankan urban context that may reject the notion of anything other than the scientifically acceptable as real. Which is in fact what the crux of the investigation is.

Yet we hear of ghost stories and urban legends of the supernatural here in Sri Lanka that defines scientific explanation. Is this not a clash of the postcolonial mindset? How would the mindset of the urban Sri Lankan well set in his logical thinking act and react to such a scenario as presented in this novelette? That is one of the things that I wish to explore through this story. The fact that the physical space perceived by the protagonist is inhabited by unreal elements that challenge notions of logic and what is scientifically real. Also a certain aspect of the human mind’s duality is represented through this story. What we are told is real, what we believe is real may coexist in the privacy of our minds with what we ‘imagine’ or like to ‘imagine’ is real. Which I believe is what marks the rationale in some ways for fantasy fiction to hold such an important place in our lives.

Q: One popular definition of magical realism is that “writing that works both within and against the aesthetics of realism”, this constant compromising with ‘aesthetics of realism’ is present throughout Hola El Che. This aspect is manifested to a greater extent, in ‘The Galle Face Literary Eve’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Cannibals in the corner room’. As a writer, what are your views on the limitations and strengths in magical realism?

Expandable fabric

A: In my own humble opinion I think magical realism presents a highly expandable fabric in respect of the boundaries that it allows us to stretch in devising means to portray symbolic representations of our reality, and the most prominent in this line of thinking is what our imaginations conceive as symbols reflecting our own thoughts both overt and subconscious. Perhaps this is a technique that can help our own explorations to manifest our cultural identity through a more postcolonial expression. With developing trends in spheres of art and literature to ‘respond’ to the modes of thinking imposed on communities that were subjected to colonialism Sri Lanka too could benefit by more academically grounded explorations of magical realism which of course was first mapped out as a concept through art criticism, just as it was the cubist project of painters such as Pablo Picasso that gave inspirations to develop narrative modes as the ‘collage novel’.

I think the strengths of magical realism is that it offers a means to respond to the scientific discourses of Europe that came through naturalism and subsequently realism in a way that would present a sense of normality in the ways of the cultures and people who were colonized, after all it was the colonizer who labeled what is acceptable and not in restructuring the discourse on art, culture and science to support his own rationale and justification of what is ‘civilized’.

The fact that a psyche may manifest its narrative of an event or a series of events that build a story regardless of how absurd it may seem is a strength on one hand. magical realism in my understanding would be conducive in this sense. Yet to be absurd simply to seem absurd would perhaps not what is intended as some may misconstrue. Milan Kundera is a superb example of how the magically real becomes coalesced with hard hitting reality which he demonstrates in a number of his works. Yet in such a case as Kundera the objectives would seem different compared to Garcia-Marquez which offers an aesthetic sense somewhat different to the objectives of a Kunderian narrative. The limitations of magical realism as I can see it from my scope of understanding lies mainly in the nature of the audience.

Magical realism may not be able to cater to audiences who demand that the story present a reality which the reader can immediately identity with and explore to find answers to situations the reader may be seeking. It is the level of connectivity that the reader may or may not find with the story that sometimes determines the success of a work, and in the more traditionally attuned setup, where art is praised for its proximities to reality as a reflection of being empirically recognizable, modes such as magical realism may find stringent limitations.

Object lesson

Q: The rudimentary literary genre you employed in Hola El Che is magical realism. Although majority of contemporary Sri Lankan writers of English attempt to use Magical Realism, most of them failed largely due to their ignorance of it or as they are ill-informed of Magical Realism. In this context, would you think that Hoal El Che serve as object lessons?

A: A very challenging question, I must say. I would say that part of my objective in this work of three fictional stories was to present a scheme of sorts that a reader may be able to move through with relative ease.

And in the course of engaging the narrative I hope the elements of magical realism would become evident and unfold itself as a somewhat educative process as well as being entertaining. Going to a significant part of the question which is the knowledge factor of how magical realism can be employed as a narrative technique, I must say firstly that since I came to understand it through self study and applying theoretical knowledge on literature gained through my university studies perhaps I have been more successful in creating stories that have sustained the elements and flow of a narrative build on a scheme of magical realism. And I am humbled if my work can serve other writers to gauge magical realism as a technique for fiction writing.