Narrating The Nation

The Road From Elephant Pass:

by Dr. Wilfred JAYASURIYA

Scene from the film ; faithful to the original writer

The concept of the epic as the art form of the tribe and of the novel as the art form of the nation was discussed earlier in this essay. This broad categorisation was made by Bhakthin. In the essay titled the "Karmic Theater" I have discussed the stylised plays of Sarathchandra, Maname and Sinhabahu, as expressions of the Sinhala nationalist revival which came after independence. They can also be categorised as products of the tribe in the Bhaktinian sense. They deal with a consciousness of self which is definitely pre nation state and contain characters who are either aristocratic or serf like-in any case not middle class and we may think of the nation state as a middle class creation, historically, beginning with the British nation, and on to the French Revolution and the 19th century in Europe and the Americas. In India we have, closest to us, the development of the middle class and the nations state, in its liberal form. Together with it there is a flowering of culture, in English, the unifying language as well as in the local languages.

In Ceylon immediately after independence there was an efflorescence of English literary activity, which was soon undermined and overshadowed, after the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by an outburst of Sinhala and Tamil language literary activity in the 1960s whose momentum continues to this day. Though one must not be prisoner of categories yet it is feasible to suggest that Sinhala and Tamil activity can be classed as tribal, because it does not envisage an audience which encompasses the whole nation, which includes, Sinhala, Tamil and English speakers. Nor was the audience primarily middle class.

JVP

After the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna JVP (Peoples' Liberation Front) insurrection of 1971, (which was the subject of Curfew and A Full Moon, discussed earlier), the sense of stability of the order inherited from one and half centuries of peaceful British rule, with its economic development based on the plantation industry and the private ownership of the means of production, its superstructure of politics and democracy and its social order of the English speaking, educated middle class and the large class of farmers and workers, its sharing of power, and feeling of optimism in the future of the Ceylon polity-this sense of stability was badly shaken and the political elite began to resort to drastic changes, away from the inherited order, shocked by the unexpectedness of the failure of their nation building. The changes which created even further instability were the land reform by which large land holdings were nationalised and the land holder class removed from political power, and the change from a constitution, which guaranteed minority rights legally (though not in fact) to an authoritarian ruling style, which saw the use of the armed forces as the true guarantor of security and not the trust and support of the people expressed thru free and fair elections. The two main political parties, The United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, made their common platform the persecution of linguistic and religious minorities, rivalling each other with promises of victimising their opponents and the minorities to win the next election. This brought about a heightened sense of disunity and a culture of violence as the modus operandi of political action. The main minority, the Ceylon Tamils, who were mainly Hindus, and Tamil speaking, saw no future for themselves in the new style polity, and began to look for security in a federal system and later in a separate state, supported as they were by the 50 million Tamils in Tamilnadu, across the narrow Palk Straits, in India. They set up a de facto separate state led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in the north and east of the island.

A fair amount of literature, discursive as well as imaginative, described the crisis of the nation state caused by ethnicity and the lack of a sense of belonging to the "imaginary community" of the nation. "Graetian Awards," by the foundation set up by a world famous author, Michael Ondaatge, for the best work of fiction, made annually, are an index of the focus on the problem of ethnicity. The Sinhalese majority was obsessed with the fear of the creation of a legal separate state. Almost all the winners of the annual award focused on a drama related to the political issue and this struck a chord in the hearts of the judges, who felt justified in making selections which dealt with a common and dominant theme. Among the winners of the award are a journalist, Gamini Akmeemana's fictionalised biography of Dr. Ranjani Tiranagama, a Tamil medical professor murdered by the LTTE, Sam's Story, an airline pilot/author's version of a servant boy's Huckleberry Finn like view of middle class life in Colombo, ending up with the Central Bank bomb, which was detonated by the LTTE in Colombo, a scientist, Neil Fernandopulle's account of the war situation in a collection of short stories titled Shrapnel and Nihal de Silva, a businessman's, creative work in the Road From Elephant Pass.

Best seller

Of these Nihal de Silva's novel undoubtedly was the best seller and has also been translated into Sinhala as Ali-mang-ker-der Sita. Elephant Pass, is a narrow neck of land, connecting the mainland of Sri Lanka with the Jaffna Peninsula, which is the homeland of the Ceylon Tamils. The major battles in the war centered around the control of Elephant Pass. The novel tells the story of a journey, from Elephant Pass, thru the wilderness of Wilpattu National Park, undertaken by the two enemy participants, a Sinhala male soldier, Captain Wasu or Wasantha and a Tamil LTTE girl soldier, Kamala Velaithan. Though belonging to the two enemy camps, the Sinhalese and Tamils, theirs is a common enterprise to reach Colombo from Jaffna for an important, secret "mission impossible." For them the Sinhala army as well as the LTTE cadres, as well as the denizens of the jungle, are obstacles to their special mission, which may lead to victory in the war for the Sinhalese and freedom from the tyranny of the LTTE for the Tamils. It is an ambiguous situation and the tension in the novel arises from this ambiguity.

The plot enables the presentation of individuals with power to make decisions about their own lives. The story enables the reader to share the sense of empowerment which comes from the single individual's ability to make a difference i.e. to be a hero or heroine. The circumstances of the war presented in the trek from Jaffna to Colombo are manageable. However the reality of mechanised war in Sri Lanka is probably very different from the picture of romantic heroism painted in the story. In Kamala Velaithan's narrative of the pogrom of 1983, which led to the exodus of Tamils from Colombo, some of the reality of mass hysteria is shown, and what the story does is to examine the impact of such mass action on an individual, and whether it is possible to negate such impact thru individual relationships with the enemy. The journey from Jaffna to Colombo, a journey thru space and time is a metaphor for the journey of Ceylon from the time of independence in 1947 to the present day, a journey whose main concern has been the relationship between the Sinhalese and the Tamils.

The emotions functioning in the hearts of the protagonists are too strong to be artistically presented full blown. So the solution is to be economical and factual: "let the facts speak for themselves" as the audience already shares the emotions of the characters and only needs to be presented with an objective correlative, a series of events and characters, which will depict, in an imitation of reality, the themes which are already imploding in the hearts of the audience. The novel therefore is central to the consciousness of Sri Lanka at the turn of the millennium. Its translation into Sinhala has been an equal success. Its success is due to the skill and the adroitness with which it handles the feelings of the audience. This skill is shown in the way the two characters talk about themselves or present themselves thru the third person narrator.

The Sinhalese hero refers to himself as "Captain" and the Tamil heroine, whose name is Kamala Velaithan is always spoken of as "Velaithan." The Captain had unwittingly created a space for Kamala to tell her life story, how she was a Colombo Tamil, whose family had been victimised in the July 1983 riots. After that the Captain reflects:

"Velaithan had been like a zombie all morning, withdrawn and remote. Perhaps she was haunted by the memories I had unwittingly stirred up last night. I didn't really care about her problems and thought it best to stick to business." (111)

The need to have common ground between Captain and Kamala is beautifully satisfied by making Kamala's father, who was a victim of the 1983 riots, into a dedicated bird watcher, who had trained his daughter in that hobby.

Happy theme

This gives the narrator a great deal of space to bring them together on the neutral and happy theme of indigenous birds, of which we know that the author, Nihal de Silva, himself, was a great enthusiast.

"I had discovered one way to snap her out of a foul mood. We did at least agree that birds were interesting creatures."(112)

The scope of the novel, dealing as it does with an archetypal situation, the Romeo and Juliet theme of enemies in love, includes many other archetypes.

Archetypes are representative figures or events, easily recognisable as belonging to the human experience. Thus a journey itself is the most archetypal of themes, representing metaphorically man's journey thru life, or from birth to death. The pilgrimage is one of the best known types of representative journeys and is best known in literature in works such as Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress'. Stories which deal with incidents such as climbing Sri Pada or visiting the holy places in Anuradhapura or Kataragama are, at least partly, in this category.

On a grandiose scale we have the epic journeys of Rama in search of Sita or of Ulysses returning home after his wanderings, or of Vijaya looking for his destiny in the Mahavamsa. The hero not only explores and discovers the external world but also discovers who he or she is-"who am I?" is as incessant a quest as can be discovered in this life. So 'The Road From Elephant Pass' is also a quest, a journey thru the wilds of Wilpattu as well as thru the jungles of the Sinhala/Tamil relationships, a journey of discovery of ourselves as readers, identifying with the Captain and Kamala.

Archetypal Struggle

Within this major archetype of the journey are other archetypes. There is the archetypal struggle for survival where the hero is either rescuing the heroine from an enemy or is helped by the heroine to defeat the enemy. In R.L. Spittel's 'Savage Sanctuary,' the life story of the Veddah hero, Tissahamy, we have the encounter with the bear, when Tissahamy is taking his young bride, Valli, thru the forest. The description of the brutal and exciting battle is quoted in this essay "Narrating the Nation." In this book, in an earlier essay, we have a quote from Leonard Woolf's 'Growing', which is compared with a similar scene in Silindu's account of an encounter with a leopardess in Woolf's novel, 'Village In the Jungle'. In the journey thru Wilpattu the heroic pair have an encounter with a leopard who has just completed killing a deer. The hero decides to take a portion of the dead deer, while the leopard is still standing by, and "stares down" the leopard, which loses its nerve and slinks away without a fight. He is able to perform this act of bravado because the girl comes forward to support him.

Two people will look more intimidating than one," she said reasonably. "The leopard won't know I am a woman." (125)

After the confrontation the Captain suddenly feels weary.

"...the reaction hit me. My forehead was clammy with sweat and my knees felt weak.

'You could have got us mauled, even killed," Velaithan said furiously, "do men always have to act like idiots?"

"Only when they are showing off to Tamil girls."

The reaction was making me light headed. For just a millisecond something changed in the back of her eyes. I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking at her when I said it. It was like a shutter of a camera, gone in a flash, to be replaced by her customary glare." (127)

In this episode Nihal Silva improves on exploiting the archetypal situation.

He makes it produce a revelation consistent with the development of the theme and uses a metaphor and language (millisecond...shutter of a camera) which grounds the scene in middle class reality. "Tamil girls," as a phrase, echoes the sense of identity which Sinhalese have of themselves, of the Sinhala self and the Tamil other, by which the presence of the self becomes known. Apart from being Sinhala and Tamil it is also a boy and girl interaction, which is suddenly foregrounded. The unity is caused by a common danger.

In scenes such as this, one is reminded of a Russian film, which was shown in Ceylon during the cold war period, possibly in Kruschev's time, where a Russian girl soldier and a European man soldier were presented breaking the ideological barrier thru mutual attraction. I cannot remember the title but I remember a scene on a beach where the two soldiers meet. This scene in Nihal Silva's story reminds us of the "mind forged manacles" in which we all are bound. The camera shutter opens just for a millisecond to reveal the prison in which each one voluntarily resides. No doubt too it is a script for a blockbuster film. The secret of the popularity of the story, whether in English or Sinhala (and no doubt in Tamil, if it is translated) is that it portrays or brings to light the insistent and secret longing each one of us has, to find peace and humanity among ourselves, though the "objective" situation demands war.

Some readers of this book, of the older generation, would have had visited the places and people described in the book, with such great skill. I am reminded of my youthful days as a District Land Officer in Amparai and Polonnaruwa, where work necessitated visiting the wilds and meeting with animals and birds and rural people. Reading about the journey from Silvatturai on the Mannar coast to Murunkan, and southwards from there to Wilpattu, I am reminded of a "circuit" that I made to this area, ending up in Jaffna, across the lagoon by ferry, from Pooneryn. These were peaceful places as late as the mid nineteen seventies. The tense journey of the Captain and Velaithan contrasts with my own travels past Murunkan (which is close to the railway station called Madhu Road, where the church is), to Periyapandivirichhan where I visited an irrigation project as Assistant Land Commissioner, in charge of all "major colonisation" in the country. The British had welded the country together with roads and irrigation structures and Ministers C.P. de Silva and Maithripala Senanayake developed the dry zone as a unifying program. Reading the story tells me how the world has changed from then. It tells the reader what it feels to be a Sinhalese in the Tamil speaking dry zone. How could we have created this disaster? It is the contrast with the past that compels me. Here is Silvatturai.

"The town was a dreary place with rows of tiny houses on the land side. The few shops were distinct from the houses only by having a wider front door of the type that is shut by inserting a series of vertical planks. The shops were open but had few customers at that time. A cart creaked past with an old man seated at the back of the yoke, whacking the bull with a thin stick.

Some men rode by on bicycles, one of them with a skate (a fish) tied to his carrier rack, its long whip like tail almost touching the road."

The details are perfectly described. The audience can identify the scene.

But though it appears scientific it is also a symbolic picture. Its symbolism emerges from the emotions which the audience brings to bear. We know why this place is like this.

The novel may be compared with other war novels, perhaps specifically, with Ernest Hemingway's 'For Whom The Bell Tolls'. The style of writing is particularly reminiscent of Hemingway. Emotions are conveyed thru descriptions of external events. There are no explanations of feelings, though the third person narrative does convey, with superb consistency in point of view, the intimate feelings of both protagonists.

"Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner.

It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic males who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." (Ernest Hemingway. Wikipedia).

Because Hemingway and later fiction writers were writing to a homogeneous audience, who shared the cultural background of the author it was not necessary to be explanatory of the feelings of the characters. The economy of style emerges from the unity of speaker and audience and this can be finally seen in minimalist writing, by authors like the Americans Raymond Carver and Susan Minot, among the moderns. Because Nihal de Silva, also shares with his readers an understanding of the situation which needs no explanation, he too can convey meanings with short hand refernces like the cryptic:"Only when they arer showing off to Tamil girls."

The historical background of the story produces the plot and the characters.

Part of the success of the story is based in the way the plot combines surprise with the expected. Thru most of the story the reader is told that Kamala wishes to avenge herself on Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, and though this may sound improbable since Prabhakaran is still alive it does provide a conditional motivation: "the willing suspension of disbelief" as Coleridge defined fiction or art. At the last moment however, because of her love for the Sinhalese "Captain" Wasantha (or Wasu) she reveals the real reason for her journey to Colombo i.e. to get an Indian "do gooder" killed by a Sri Lanka airforce air raid on LTTE territory, and thereby help the LTTE cause by making India the enemy of the Sinhalese government, theough India was already angry with the LTTE for having killed the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. These tortuous events fit into our sense of the progress of the war and we are willing to believe that too. Then when Wasantha manages at the last moment to turn the tide of events set off by Kamala's mis-information to the Sinhalese government high command, by just changing by one hour the time to raid, its an LTTE leader who is killed.

This saves Kamala's life and ensures her escape from Sri Lanka to Canada.

But Wasantha himself goes back to join the Sinhalese forces that are retreating from Elephant Pass, after the fall of Elephant Pass, and gets killed. So there is private love and public hate, in the classic pattern of Romeo and Juliet.

Truth and fiction

Thus truth and fiction are carefully entangled so that the story becomes credible even though most of the time it was based on the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief." However it is not the story and its details that hold the narrative together but the underlying theme of the possibility of changing hatred into love, of war into peace thru the symbolic actions of Wasu and Kamala. In relation to the real world of contemporary history we remember that in the brief period of the "peace process" from 2000 to 2002 it was this exploration of a commnality thru experiential or existential effort that was seen as the key to success, though there was no so called "master plan for peace." In fact, I can remember Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Prime Minister, and proponent of the peace process quoting Cardinal Newman's "Lead Kindly Light" on TV as the answer to a question put to him as to how he is going to do it. The lines could well be a summary of the progress of Wasu and Kamala from Elephant Pass to Colombo:

Lead kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom

Lead thou me on

The night is dark and I am far from home

Lead thou me on

Lead thou my spirit, I do not wish to see

The distant scene, one step enough for me.

It is in this spirit that the story is written, and why it enthralls us is because of its faithfulness to the realities of the world of hate and misunderstanding into which the protagonists are born. Interpreting it from a structuralist point of view we can see that the "deep structure" is that of the Romeo and Juliet theme, where children of parties, that hate each other unremittingly, fall in love and are driven to suicide. We are familiar with many examples of this structure in our own times and place, in real life, from media accounts of suicides. The prologue to Shakespeare's play explains the plot as if it is a predetermined event: "star crossed lovers." By investigating such stories we try to investigate the meaning of our own existence. Nihal de Silva's novel THE ROAD FROM ELEPHANT PASS is a great novel for that reason.

Another achievement of the novel is the faithfulness to the "point of view." The idea of "point of view" was perhaps brought up by the American novelist, Henry James. He claimed that in every narrative there should be a "central intelligence" and the reader's guide thru what goes on is this "central intelligence." When I followed courses in fiction writing in Southern Illinois University, taught by practising novelists, this was the primary point made. You have to get the reader into the mind of one character and not move from it, so that the reader feels that he is leading another life. In this novel the reader is in Captain Wasantha's mind and he never leaves that point of view. That is an enormous achievement in consistency, over a long story, and that is what holds the reader in the narrator's grip. Even though Kamala is an equally important character it is only Wasantha's point of view that reveals her. To clarify this idea further let us compare the novel with Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'. In the drama we see the action from many different points of view e.g. in the balcony scene Romeo and Juliet are seen from each other's as well as from the dramatist's point of view. This type of story telling is more difficult to make into a success than when the author sticks to one person's point of view. And that is part of the difference between the novel and the drama. In 'The Road From Elephant Pass' there is a consistent first person point of view, which holds the reader in its grip.

'Note on theory' Note: This extract is from the Internet, the Wikipedia, which is a free encyclopaedia. The italicized section however is an intervention from me.

Structuralism in literary theory and literary criticism

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.

The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two 'friendly' families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.

Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. In the Road From Elephant Pass there is a variation from the Romeo and Juliet structure or formula. Wasantha/Romeo dies in what is virtually a suicide because he joins a retreating army. But his death is in the logic of the structure. On the other hand Kamala/Juliet changes from her loyalty to the LTTE, because of her love for Wasantha, and thereby does not die. So there is a change in the "surface structure." However Kamala's survival and redemption can also be justified in structural terms because it negates the deep structure formula, and thereby creates a new structure. It is similar to what would have happened had fate been kinder to Romeo and Juliet by allowing Friar Lawrence's message to reach Romeo before he reached the grave. Nihal de Silva indicates the change in the world view of Kamala, when Wasantha sees her prostrate before the alter in the Catholic church.

"I was about to turn back when I saw her. She was stretched full length on the ground in the space between the first pew and the alter rails. I thought for a moment she'd had some kind of seizure. She had her face to the ground and, as I watched silently, I saw her body shudder from time to time. She got to her knees then and I saw her hands join in prayer, her eyes fixed on a large crucifix behind the alter."

I left her to it and went back. (399)

In the real world of Sri Lanka, after the breakdown of all that was common among the Sinhalese and the Tamils, the only remaining link is the Christian religion, which has adherents among both groups. It is only by finding some common ground that peace and love and unity can be restored. As it is The Road From Elephant Pass remains a tragedy, reflecting the reality.

One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."

Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-bearing.

There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism. The other branch of literary structuralism is semiotics, and it is based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.