The sea, the sea, see?

I'm most of the way through "The Village by the Sea" by Anita Desai, and am finding all sorts of thoughts mingling and brewing, about fiction again. This post will probably take on the pretentious tone my writing adopts when I start talking about literature again, so I guess you'll have to put up with it.

The village in Desai's novel is undergoing a huge social change, with the arrival of 20th century modes of production. The villagers laugh at the idea that fertilizer (which they think of as manure) needs to be produced in a factory, and that anybody would want to set up such a factory in the middle of their oasis of forest and ocean. But of course, the tide changes.

The monsoon arrives at the critical point in the novel when these changes are coming into place and the village is to be changed beyond any hope of return. The descriptions of the palms, the beaches, the vulnerable little huts which families crowd and huddle into, in a pathetic effort to shelter themselves from the elements, convey the revolution in India's social framework. The main character, Hari, is discovering the grimy, bustling world of a capital city while his sisters witness the combined storm of the monsoon and the industrial revolution in their haven of coconuts and fish. Social change, individuals reckoning with their own identities and needs... the whole novel is constructed on a beautiful yet harshly realistic canvas of allegories, metaphors and descriptions of the simple, fragile beauty of rural livelihood.

This is how fiction meets reality. I think Desai hits the two birds with a powerful lyrical stone, sculpting a piece of fiction (which is fundamentally imaginary, aesthetic) into a tool for us to dig into social realities (which are empirical, pragmatic). The Village by the Sea becomes a symbol for what the novel does best: uses the unreal to help us better understand reality.

I've been struggling during this blog to come to grips with the paradoxes of writing, and give some sort of vantage point to my own queries about writing. Why we do it, why we read it, and why it matters after all, when one third of the world is busy trying to feed itself from one day to the next. But none of this is worthwhile if nobody reads these reflections.

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Yours,

D