Amarasekera and the art of complex seeing

‘The older I get, the more I see things as having more than one explanation.’
- Alice Munro,
Nobel Laureate (2013)

The latest collection of short stories by Gunadasa Aarasekera, ‘Kiyanu Mana Divi Arutha’ constitutes a remarkable effort both in terns of content and technique. It consists of five stories of varying length and many of them test the limit of the short story form in challenging ways. Amarasekera is fully aware of the fact that art and creativity thrive under the shadow of imposed limitations. I say so for three primary reasons. First almost all the stories contained in this volume present complex and multi-faceted human situations that do not admit of simplistic judgements or hasty verdicts.

They are full of ambivalences and internal tensions. The challenging situations, whether it is a magistrate torn by conflicting loyalties or a highly influential politician who has lost power, or an expatriate whose romantic dream is shattered, operate at different levels of artistic apprehension. There is a density – social, cultural political – in these stories that is somewhat uncommon in short stories in general.

Second, in terms of the architecture of the stories the author has juxtaposed, at times through cross-cutting of images (to use the language of cinema) a series of incidents which ultimately lay bare their own social and poetic truths. For example, in the first story titled ‘Mai Da’, there are three intersecting plot-lines that ultimately lead to the superimposed images of a young girl enjoying her birthday party and another young girl dazed by her mother’s death. I I I It is generally asserted by literary critics that a short story should lead to a unity of impression.

Amarasekera achieves this through the conjunction of a plurality of episodes by giving pride of place to an overriding image. In the story titled ‘Mai Da’, it is the image of the two girls, one bereaving the death of her mother and the other celebrating her birthday, superimposed that creates this unity of impression. Third. the author has sought to present characters displaying psychological complexities and these are, contrary to what is most often the case in literature, not aberrations of the mind but the outcome of social experiences and cultural formations.

All these three efforts serve to test the limit of the short story form and Amarasekera has widened its representational space in interesting ways. In this regard, I am reminded of some of the stories of Alice Munro - the new Nobel Laureate from Canada who was also greatly influenced by Anton Chekhov. Both of them, while extending the representational space of the short story, present literary experiences that leave a characteristic afterglow in the mind of the reader.

Memorable characters

In the five stories gathered in this volume, Gunadasa Amarasekera creates a parade of memorable characters that inhabit a space of uncertainty and ambivalence and through their motivations and actions serve to illuminate troubling nerve-centers of a rapidly degenerating society. What this means is that below the focused social critique is a call for re-thinking wholesome social values and invigorating social bonds that are needed to arrest what is almost certainly a headlong plunge into chaos and despair.

He creates characters, some very powerful, who are destined to move through life falling victim to various forms of deception and self-deception inducing in the reader a profound sense of disquiet.

His aim, through the unveiling of these multifarious deceptions, is to encourage new ways of thinking, feeling and living. And his quest is allied to delight of discovery.

‘Kiyanu Mana Divi Arutha’ consists of five stories. The first set against the temporal background of the May Day consists of two sharply contrastive modes of life united by an uneasily situated magistrate’s consciousness. We as readers shuttle back and forth between the centre and the rim of his consciousness ,(where shadowy forms begin to take shape) in the process deepening our own self-awareness and social understanding.

The second story deals with the plight of a student who is about to lose the house that has been pawned in order to receive her higher education. This is based on a true story that was widely reported in local newspapers. What Amarasekera has sought to do is to situate this incident in a wider social, political and literary horizon. Chandralatha, a university student overwhelmed by economic necessities is forced to resort to extreme measure, as desperate times call for desperate measures.

Narrative

The third story titled Ragena Ma Ata Saminda, Kiyanu Mana Divi Arutha, is a splendidly realised narrative. This story, which in terms of achieved literary art and depth of probing, is the finest in the collection, displays Gunadasa Amarasekera’s characteristic strengths – narrative control, evocative power, perceptive dissections of human motivations and the highlighting of the combination of psychological and social factors in the formation of human personhoods. Here the author pursues a moral grandeur that is wholly appealing.

The story deals with Deraniyagala who was once a formidably powerful minister, now having lost power has to face the bitter reality of his death by cancer. His present miserable state contrasts sharply with the way in which he once moved in the world. The interaction between the narrator and the protagonist is a very important facet of the meaning of this story.

Deraniyagala is presented as a complex character that manifests strengths and weaknesses in equal measure and the narrator is torn between admiration for, and revulsion against him.

Creative intelligence

As the narrator presents to us the predicament of Deraniyagala, he is commenting on his own limited existence and seeking to find meaning in it. ‘Ragena Ma Ata Saminda’ illustrates the way a mature literary artist with an indubitable creative intelligence can make the short story into a site of profound human inquiry.

The fourth story titled ‘Rohale Ginna’ pivots around a minor bureaucrat called Wijesinghe who is implacably against Tamils as a consequence of his perceived fear of hem, and he seeks to channel this anger for destructive purposes or to cover up some of his more immoral activities. We see how some basic human animosities rise to the boil with disastrous consequences. His final and wantonly cruel act proves perilous for him.

Here the author presents us with a complex human situation that calls for mature reflection.

As in all his stories, the author cautions us against rushing into easy judgements and encourages us to explore the full complexity and multi-facetedness of human predicaments. The fire in the story is a physical event as well as multiply articulated symbol.

The fifth story is called ‘Maha Gedara Soya A Gamana’ and deals with the character of Gunasoma who has lived in Australia for many tears, and now longs to return to Sri Lanka and lead a simple and austere life. On the one hand he is deeply troubled by the consumer oriented and hedonistic lifestyle in Australia. On the other hand his memories of childhood which tend to invest the rural life with a romantic glow and privilege simple and austere living draws him to the land of his birth.

Terrorism is over, and he feels new period of peace and contentment and emotional fulfilment has dawned. It was his intention to renovate his old house and live there. However, as he arrives in Sri Lanka he begins to realise that the actual conditions on the ground are far different from what he had expected. Gradually the harsh reality intrudes upon his cherished ideal; he is disillusioned and decides to sell the house. The house stands as an organising and vibrant symbol in the story.

Rather than summarise the plots of the five stories contained in Amarasekera’s new book, what I would like to do is to pick out a few analytical themes that would interest serious students of literature and comment on them. All the stories, it seems to me, in one way or another, display the theme of entrapment. It could be entrapment through economic deprivation (Chandralatha) or through the entertainment of delusions of grandeur (Deraniyagala) or through the operation of deceptions and self-deceptions (Gunasoma, Dharmasiri, Wijesinghe).

It is evident that the protagonists in these narratives are struggling in their entrapments and the narrators of the stories (whether they are omniscient or first person narrators) are straining to guide us through their predicaments. The moral visions of the narrators are extremely significant in these stories. What makes their navigation of the complex and treacherous terrain marked by competing agendas even more significant is that they themselves harbour doubts about their own moral imagination, strengths and limited compasses of understanding. Their amorphous moral anguish, of course, has a way of producing its own maps of possible meanings.

Complex

One of the most productive ways, it seems to me, in making greater sense of Amarasekera’s newest collection of stories is through the concept of complex seeing. This collection of stories, more than any other collection of modern Sinhala stories that I know, displays the relevance and usability of the idea of complex seeing. This idea was first propounded by Bertolt Brecht in relation to is much discussed epic theatre.

To the best of my knowledge, it was first expounded by Brecht in his notes to The Threepenny Opera. There he says that, ‘some extreme in complex seeing is needed – though it is perhaps more important to be able to think above the stream than to think in that stream.’ Here he is focusing on the kind of critical detachment of the audiences that he so ardently desired.

This idea was later developed by the British literary critic Raymond Williams in his books such as Modern Tragedy and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. He sought to direct attention away from the spectator that Brecht preferred and focus on the complexities of the text itself. For Williams, complex seeing entails a double vision in a narrative text – what is available and what is possible. In other word, if I understand him correctly, he wanted to focus on the seeable in the visible. This was indeed an important move. What I wish to do is to focus on the author himself, his ability to see multiple possibilities in any given human situation. (Alice Munro’s statement that I used as the epigraph is relevant here).

So I have highlighted the author himself in the process of complex seeing as opposed to Brecht’s highlighting of the viewer and Williams highlighting of the text. At a time when it is proclaimed by certain modern theorists that the author is dead, this might seem an anachronistic step, but one that I am firmly convinced is needed. It is this complex seeing that marks the five stories collected in Amarasekera’s latest work that lends them such weight and density of meaning .

It is only a writer of exceptional creative intelligence who can successfully carry out this demanding task. The multi-facetedness of the human situations that Amarsekera reconfigures with all its moral ambiguities can be usefully understood in terms of the idea of complex seeing.

Ideological complicities

Closely related to this is the idea of symptomatic reading. It is a form of reading that seeks to uncover the hidden ideological complicities in a text. Enunciated by Louis Althusser, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s analyses of latent and manifest content, it was further developed by literary theorists such as Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton. Symptomatic reading, bearing in mind the medical trope it embeds, is a form of diagnostic reading. Symptomatic reading is an activity performed by the reader on a given text.

This activity can, I am persuaded, be performed by the writer as well, in his reading of society. This is what Gunadasa Amarsekera has done; he reads modern Sri Lankan society looking for hidden ideologies at work. The webs of human relations and their psychological, social and political determinants that he presents to us for our consideration are products of his distinct way of reading modern Sri Lankan society. Hence they can be construed as a form of symptomatic reading.

Powers

What is most noteworthy About Amarasekera’s latest collection of short stories is its human depth, the weight of critical thinking it carries, without forfeiting the emotional and affective powers of the art of the short story. In these stories, the author invites us – readers – to join him in a quest for meaning that is motivated by a desire to uncover the undesirable and destructive forces at work in modern Sri Lankan society,, largely growing out of mindless consumerism and think of alternate ways of seeing, feeling and living.

This is what the act of complex seeing that I referred to earlier entails. In these stories Amarasekera has responded admirably to three imperatives – the imperative to critique society, to uncover the hidden psychological roots of behaviour and to display the emotional power of the art of the short story. That he has responded so cogently and admirably to these three demands is a testament to his indubitable creative intelligence.

There are two types of short story writers – I would like to refer to them as minimalists and expansionists. Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver (whom many regard as one of the greatest modern American Short story writers), are largely minimalist, while the recent Nobel Laureate Alice Munro and Gunadasa Amarasekera, I wish to argue, are expansionists.

The desire of expansionist short story writers is to fashion the short story into an efficacious site of reflection and self-reflection through the power of densities of interpersonal, social, cultural eventfulness and ever widening landscapes of meaning. In this regard, I wish to make the point that Alice Munro and Gunadasa Amarasekera share many other features in common apart from the expansionist inclinations.

The ability to focus on seemingly trivial gestures, actions, incidents and uncover depths of meaning is indeed a feature shared by both of them. Here I am reminded of Arthur Schopenhauer’s memorable statement that. ‘It is with trifles, when he is off guard, that a man reveals his character.’ Amarasekera’s and Munro’s stories are full of such revealing instances. While both Munro ( whom Salman Rushdie has described as a ‘master of the short story’) and Amarasekera excel in meaningful narration, It has to be conceded that there is a more pronounced political edge to Amarasekera’s stories.

As a short story writer, Amarasekera is concerned with is the shape of social truth. This is what partly inspires him. Hemingway once said that,’ A writer’s job is to tell the truth….his standard of fidelity to truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.’ A truer account can be had only by a proper re-contextualization of facts. The power of this statement of Hemingway is well illustrated by Amarasekera’s latest collection of stories.

The five stories gathered in his newest collection can best be understood as cultural texts with plural layers of meaning of ascending complexity. They seek to illuminate, with the prasticed and steady hand of a master story-teller, facets of contemporary society that are at once troubling and inescapable By the same token, our attempts to assess these stories should be guided by frameworks of analyses that are cultural in nature.

What this means is that cultural meanings, cultural presuppositions, cultural visions should enter the effort to evaluate them in a significant way. A mere formal analysis, important as it is, would fail to do full justice to the complex social and literary experiences reconfigured in these narratives.

Over the years as a short story writer, Gunadasa Amarasekera has been exploring the best way to reconcile the rival demands of personal emotion and social experience and strike a meaningful balance. In my judgement, he has, in many ways, succeeded in achieving this balance in his latest collection of short stories. Amarsekera’s capacity for human discernment and feel for character is truly astonishing. ‘Kiyanu Mana Divi Arutha’, then, is a collection of short stories that represents the art and wisdom of a mature writer at the peak of his powers, driven by a deep social conscience. His narrative skills, questing mind and acuity of vision have combined to demonstrate the possibilities of the art of the short story.