Magam Soliya and contemporary Sinhala novel

In this week’s column, we explore the Sinhalese novel Magam Soliya and the status of the contemporary Sinhala novel. What is obvious is that the present crisis in the contemporary Sinhala novel is in the content and the form.

Mohan Raja Madawela’s Magam Soliya offers a flicker of hope for the contemporary Sinhala novel, at least, to salvage it from the bog-mire of largely misunderstood and misinterpreted post-modernist novels and the subtle and complex applications of the de-constructionist mode in fiction writing. Given the scores of trash produced over several years and ‘literary awards’ bestowed on them (For Sinhala and English literary productions), it is obvious that the crisis in the Sinhala novel is a deeply-rooted one and the need of the hour is to salvage it from the present impasse.

In this light, Mohan Raj Madawala’s Magam Soliya would mark a significant trajectory in the evolution of the contemporary Sinhala novel. It stands out among contemporary Sinhala novels for its impressive diction, the use of diverse narrative modes as well as creating a surreal fictional realm within the larger canvas of a traditional village in transition against the backdrop of a turbulent period in the history of the nation. It is a village bordering the wilderness and rarely depicted in the Sinhala novel.

The extremely grabbing narrative is interspersed with magic and supernatural occurrences, the practice of black magic and occult, deeply-rooted Asian mystic spirituality and in the periphery of the evolving saga of the village with its myriad of inter-personal relationships, chants, rituals, miraculous occurrences and dominant morality and sexuality, is ranging Uva Wellasa rebellion.

One of the significant aspects of the narrative is the criss-crossing of literary genres. It is, indeed, hard to classify Magam Soliya into prominent literary genres such as magic realism, historical novel or purely fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings.

The novel is woven around a fictional village at the edge of wilderness against the backdrop of turbulent times with the formation of the Uva Wellassa rebellion against British rule in Sri Lanka. The novel commences with a description of the temple which is the nucleus of the social activities in the village and offering a brief history of the temple and the village.

Precedence

Magam Soliya is exceptional on many counts; one of the major characteristics that it differs from most of the cheap literary productions is that it does not further the filthy discourse in the contemporary Sinhala novel, a discourse which encourages and sets a precedence inducing writers to use a grotesque depiction of sex in its lowest form and the intention of such writers, seems that such threads in the narrative would ensure a sizeable market share , particularly, in the lower echelons of society. Although sex has been one of the major threads in Magam Soliya, it has been skilfully integrated into the narrative.

The author has depicted sex life in the village, a myriad of incestuous relationships and the individual sex lives of some of the major characters in such a manner as to shed light on complex human predicaments, strongly suggesting that those characters are, in fact, victims of the circumstances and the collective destiny of the village. One of the significant aspects of the novel is that the author has used colloquial idioms in a profitable manner (not abused to cover up one’s weakness as often done by some Sinhala writers). However, the novel may be subject to diverse readings and interpretations given the sheer complexity in the narrative.

Therefore, Magam Soliya permits, at least briefly, a discussion on the theory of the novel to understand the sheer complexity in the genre.

Franco Moretti in The Novel: History and Theory observes, “ A form divided between narrativity and complexity: with narrativity dominating its history, and complexity the theory. And, yes, I understand why someone would rather study sentence structure in The Ambassadors than in its contemporary Dashing Diamond Dick.

“The problem is not the value judgment, it’s that when a value judgment becomes the basis for concepts, then it doesn’t just determine what is valued or not, but what is thinkable or not, and in this case, what becomes unthinkable is, first, the vast majority of the novelistic field, and, second, its very shape: because polarisation disappears if you only look at one of the extremes, whereas it shouldn’t, because it’s the sign of how the novel participates in social inequality, and duplicates it into cultural inequality. ”

What is interesting to observe is that the contemporary Sinhala novel ( in its present form) is the end-result of a process of evolution which continuously derives inspiration, and is influenced largely by European, Russian, French and Latin American and post-modern and de-constructionist modes of fiction writing.

Politics

Moretti observes how the politics and economics which are underscored threads of the novel, play a vital role in shaping the modes and nature of the modern contemporary novel: “ The anti-type of the spirit of modern capitalism, for The Protestant Ethic; a slap in the face of realism, as Auerbach saw so clearly in Mimesis.

What is adventure doing in the modern world? Margaret Cohen, from whom I have learned a lot on this, sees it as a trope of expansion: capitalism on the offensive, planetary, crossing the oceans. I think she is right, and would only add that the reason adventure works so well within this context is that it’s good at imagining war.

Enamoured of physical strength, which it moralises as the rescue of the weak from all sorts of abuses, adventure is the perfect blend of might and right to accompany capitalist expansions.

“That’s why Köhler’s Christian Warrior has not only survived in our culture—in novels; films; video games, but dwarfed any comparable bourgeois figure. Schumpeter put it crudely and clearly: ‘The bourgeois class . . . needs a master.”

“It needs a master—to help it rule. In finding distortion after distortion of core bourgeois values, my first reaction was always to wonder at the loss of class identity that this entailed; which is true, but, from another perspective, completely irrelevant, because hegemony doesn’t need purity—it needs plasticity, camouflage, collusion between the old and the new. Under this different constellation, the novel returns to be central to our understanding of modernity: not despite, but because of its pre-modern traits, which are not archaic residues, but functional articulations of ideological needs. To decipher the geological strata of consensus in the capitalist world—here is a worthy challenge, for the history and the theory of the novel.”