Cinderellage Sapattuva:

Informative critique

Reviewed by Dushyantha Madugalle

Cinderella's Sapattuwa is a collection of columns the literary critic Saman Wickremarachchi wrote to Randiva, a Sinhalese weekly. Among other things, the author introduces modern literary techniques such as postmodernist literary criticism and how psycho-analysis plays a major role in modern literary criticism.

A year's collection of columns sheds light on myriad aspects of developments in the contemporary Sri Lankan literary landscape. The collection is entitled 'Cinderellage Sapattuva', the title of the weekly column. An important aspect of the column is that the author introduces appropriate Sinhala terms for some of the complex modern literary theories and exposes bogus literati as well as gross abuse of modern literary theory by some Sri Lankan authors.

Literary criticism

There is no other contemporary literary critic in Sinhala, who has introduced modern literary theory particularly such as postmodernist literary criticism in lucid terms as eloquently as Saman Wickremarachchi. His columns, among other things, manifest in no uncertain terms the vast knowledge the critic has on such complex areas as the application of psychology in literary criticism and in dissecting contemporary literary productions from purely academic and well-grounded theoretical basis.

In his column entitled ' Mano Vishleshana Vichara hevat Hagumkarakaye Adipattyaya Kiyavema', the author has introduced in simple terms the basic tenants of psychological analysis of a text.

The author points out that vital among the fundamental presumptions in psychological literary criticism are the ideas of repression, unconscious, language and desire. Subconscious is the place where the repressed things are deposited and literature is a language based art and psycho-literary analysis, primarily, reads the subconscious through the behaviours of language in a text.

Literary theories

The author deals with myriad issues and comments on different events in the contemporary Sri Lankan literary landscape. Apart from them some columns have been effectively used to introduce modern literary theories to Sinhala readership.

One of such columns is the column which deals with postmodern novel. Apart from introducing postmodern novel to Sinhala readership, the author effectively dispels myths and gross abuses of the term by certain section of Sinhala writers to legitimate their substandard literary productions.

The author states that the novels with fantasies and novels written in unconventional languages are being described as novels having postmodern characteristics.

The author points out that a section of Sinhala writers and critic still consider writers such as Ajith Tilakasena, Simon Navagaththegama, Saman Kumara and Tennyson Perera as postmodern writers quite oblivious to the rapidly changing international literary scene. In providing a working definition to the postmodernist novel, the author states that postmodernist novel (if there is such a genre) is the novel which captures the postmodern moment.

Linguistic realities

It becomes postmodernist not because it refuses linguistic realities and adapts literary techniques such as magical realism and also becoming post-realistic as some would suggest. It is because postmodernist writer would contexualise his or her creation against the contemporary political backdrop.

The author states, "What postmodernism really mean? It is the depiction of the culture of post capitalism. A novel or a creation can be only classified as postmodernist if it captures this reality. What most writers identify as postmodern is structuralism."

Explaining the postmodern novel, the author cites the protagonist of Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai. Saleem Sinai is an Ango-India born at the midnight on August 15, 1947 when two nations were born; India and Pakistan leading to constant displacements and separation.

Historical dynamics

The character is inexorably linked to many historical dynamics and some of the cardinal issues of diasporic existence such as identity and cultural otherness.

Saleem Sinai's life is so linked to the history of India that it is aptly described as 'child of history 'and who is 'handcuffed to history'. Sinai was born out of wedlock as a result of extra-marital relations.

He is eventually brought up by a Muslim family after being exchanged at birth by his nurse, Mary Pereira.

One of the instances where the idea of cultural otherness is manifested is when Saleem Sinai played the role of Zubin Varla in a theatrical version of a novel.

Sinai strongly relates the story to himself and to his own family; "His own family hailed from Bombay's tiny Zoroastrian community, and he grew up in Britain with a sense of cultural alienation similar to that of his character".

Although Saleem Sinai is a character of no significant social standing, Rushdie uses Saleem as an allegory of political crisis in India.

The author observes that in postmodern society, the socialist political ideas based on class system has shift to a multiple identity politics and the novel which identifies marginal identities against the dominant discourse can be identified as a postmodern novel.

Postmodernist art always goes against the ideology of modern art. Postmodernism rejects the idea of high culture derived from modernist school. Postmodernist art does not worry about the links between 'high' and 'law' genres of art.

The close relationship that postmodernist maintains with popular culture interprets as anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical and anti- conventional stance.

Some of the salient characteristics postmodernism are the rejection of mimetic representation in favour of a self-referential "playing" with the forms and conventions and icons of "high art" and literature.

It also questions the cult of originality in recognition of the inevitable loss of origin in the age of mass production. Postmodernism does not believe in conventional notions such as plot and character as meaningful artistic conventions.

Although it rejects meaning itself as delusory, postmodernism derives artistic material from western culture and classics.

Andy Warhol's multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Kathy Acker's re-writing of Cervantes' Don Quixote manifest postmodern trends toward bricolage; the use of the bits and pieces of older artifacts to produce a new, if not "original," work of art, a work which obliterates the traditional distinctions between the old and the new and even between high and low art.

Postmodernism in literature is usually associated, among others, with Acker, Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Bartheleme, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and John Ashberry.

What is noteworthy in Cinderellage Sapattuva is that the author, Saman Wickremarachchi has profitably used a popular column to educate and enlighten the masses who read in Sinhala. The column stands out among 'literary column' in Sinhala newspapers which are more or less dominated by vacuous literary gossips, eulogies of writers and appreciation of substandard literary productions.