But Flies an Eagle Flight: The Questions of Canon-formation and Literary Elitism through and around Gujarati Fiction Writer Suresh Joshi
Symbolic struggles are always much more effective (and therefore realistic) than objectivist economists think, and much less so than pure social marginalists think. The relationship between distributions and representations is both the product and the stake of a permanent struggle between those who, because of the position they occupy within the distributions, have an interest in subverting them by modifying the classifications in which they are expressed and legitimated, and those who have an interest in perpetuating misrecognition, an alienated cognition that looks at the world through categories the world imposes.
- Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice
Humanities all over the world have been struggling in the past decade to appropriate possible meanings and culturally contextually relevant implications of the terms elitism and cultural elitism. These weighted terms not only have social and political senses to accommodate, but also have epistemological as well as ontological underpinnings to critically point at. Elitism essentially is an offshoot of class division and hegemony of dominant values in society. The complexities implied in terms such as elitist and cultural elitism, when applied to literary canon-formation processes point at traces of literary elitism that leads to monoculturalism that confirms tradition, valorises the univocal and the singular, subtly upholds segregation and marginalization and emanates into homogeneity.
This paper is particularly interested in interrogating into the processes that form a literary canon and the condition of the uncanonical while simultaneously contemplating upon an altogether different configuration of cultural elitism. Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow in their recent work on style and elitism indicate, “We define elitism as a person’s orientation or making a claim to exclusivity, superiority and/or distinctiveness on the grounds of status, knowledge, authenticity, taste, erudition, experience, insight, wealth or any other quality warranting the speaker/author to take a higher moral, aesthetic, intellectual, material, or any other form of standing in relation to another subject (individual or group). Elitism then is a claim or bid for an enduring identity position which requires constant, momentary and interactive enactment. In this sense too, elitism could be distinguished as a discursively achieved identity and subject position from elite which, as it has typically been discussed in sociological literatures (e.g., Carlton, 1996; Field and Higley, 1980; Dogan, 2003), is usually conceived of as a material, social category describing those who rule or lead through instrumental, political power.” This suggests, elitism is a condition of structural inequality. It is a condition of social, political and economic relations of unevenness that is produced through a systematic and violent categorisation and hierarchisation.
An entirely new social identification – the cultural elitist – seems to have surfaced up and caught the attention of social scientists, it is said, as a result of various processes and impacts of neo-liberalism. This is a social group that does not easily align with the category analysis that might be applied to categories indicated by theories of capitalism or socialism. Elitists make for a category that is deprived of the social agency that Karl Marx attributed with industrial proletariats. It also lacks the autonomy attributed with geneology-based identity of the peasant subaltern theorised by tenets of postcolonialism.
I am presently pursuing my doctoral research where I am trying to understand and evaluate reflections of elitism in Gujarati literature by analysing select canonical Gujarati literary works and influences of Western literature and philosophy on them. After the Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto laid the foundations of the Elite theory in 1915, it was Gaetano Mosca who helped to popularize the term in intellectual circles, and it has been used in the social sciences increasingly since the 1950s. C. Wright Mills in the 1950s gave the term wide currency.ii It means in general, the existence of groups with privileges not available to everyone and of superior or specialized frames of mind. Elitism as a term came into general parlance and usage as a pejorative term, and it still continues to bear that aura. Elitism is also the attitude of mind that believes in the necessity of specialization and hierarchy of specialists and experts. It is opposed to that frame of mind that stresses the equality of all men in all respects and the necessity of the equal distribution of all goods and political power as a goal. My doctoral study, in this regards, aims at brooding over whether elitism in some sense is inevitable in literature especially the literary canon. This paper on reflections of elitism in Gujarati Literature aims at problematizing the amnesic acceptance of canonical literature. The paper hints at an unconscious valorisation of those who kept reaffirming a stylesheet and built an aspirational value for the others to climb up the ivory tower resulting in an output of the long-breeding literary elitism, through detailed evaluation of ornateness, open-endedness and obscurity in Gujarati fiction by Suresh Joshi.
Something has been going on in literary studies having to do with “aesthetics” and “Canon”, with “Avant-garde” and “Canon”, and, surprisingly, it has been going on for long. “A two-fold recognition is now developing namely: (1) the dismissal of aesthetics as a legitimate means for approaching culture relied upon superficial and often inaccurate ideas of its aims and (2) after countering a culture with its biases and exclusions, it is necessary to adduce reasons for why certain aspects of nature and works of art are held in great esteem.” (McQuillan, 2012) Similarly, the shift from Modernism to what came to be known as Avant-garde or postmodern is an intriguing field of interest for art-critics and sociologists. As accurately put in the anthology From Modernism to Postmodernism, “Philosophical opinion regarding the postmodern family is deeply divided. For some, postmodernism connotes the final escape from the stultifying legacy of modern European theology, metaphysics, authoritarianism, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and domination. To others it represents the attempt by disgruntled left-wing intellectuals to destroy Western civilization. To yet others it labels a goofy collection of hermetically obscure writers who are really talking about nothing at all.” (Cahoone, 2003) It is inside the complexities and perplexed rooms of contradictory understanding that a study like this with a sociological inquiry into elitism which such incongruous, self-contradictory art theories could unknowingly point at and substantiate for, that the conviction for the relevance of investigating into kinds of class-divides of the intelligentsia, literaria created thereby, springs.
Suresh Joshi’s principal achievement is to make the literary West meet the literary East: bring the avant-garde to Gujarati literary spheres. He is recognised as the harbinger of the modernist and post-modernist trends in the post independent period of Gujarati literature. His standing as a fiction writer and critic par excellent remains unmatchable ever after. Abstractionism and formalism in Gujarati fiction writing is credited to him; he brought into Gujarati criticism the western methods of the critical evaluation of a work of art and scripted a new era in the history of literary criticism in Gujarat. He is hailed as the most significant spokesperson of the distinctive role of the new poetics.
An academic at the M S University, Baroda, an editor of five literary periodicals, poet for four poetry collections, five short story collections and four novels, prolific essayist with five collections of essays that include around a thousand essays and highly regarded critic on theory of literature with nine works of literary criticism and finally around eleven anthologies edited by him, Suresh Joshi has been a recipient of prestigious awards of Gujarat Government prizes, Soviet Land Nehru Award, Ranjitram Gold Medal, Narmad Gold Medal and Nanalal Memorial prize. (Joshi S., 2005) He declined the Sahitya Akademi award (1983) for a collection of critical essays, Chintayami Manasa, because the Award / citation did not recognize his creative writing.
Various literary historians as well as critics have hailed Suresh Joshi as an epoch-making influence. A Gujarati writer and academic Suman Shah indicates that Joshi ranks among the first few Indian writers who went a long way towards giving Indian literature a new shape and a new direction. (Shah, 1978), while renowned critic C. Topiwala gives him all the credit of bringing freshness and newness to Gujarati. According to him all the literary manifestations of 1976 and 1977 in whatever forms they are, have been deeply related to the idea of modernity and pure creativity set up by Suresh Joshi since 1960. The idea has been acquired from symbolist to surrealist manifestoes and movements. It has been primarily accepted that any work of creative literature is, first of all, an art of language. It is not the explicit transcription of inner experience but the simultaneous process of interaction between language and experience. (Topiwala, 1978)
The first collection of Suresh Joshi’s short stories Grihapravesh came out in 1957 and the last one titled Ekada Naimisharanye in 1981. His critics have wondered about total 62 stories being a lesser turnout in these nearly 25 years of his writing career. Given the socio-political and economic backdrop of the time when Joshi takes to writing, the air was filled with a sense of despondency and fizzle. Some of his contemporaries had started considering the Gandhian values as quite sanctimonious and distant. The world outside India, especially the West had reached a point from where modernity and new ways of life had invited much criticism on the uncertainties and insecurities of human condition, with vital questions around the purpose of life and the existential tensions. Suresh Joshi entered the realm of writing and contemplating over these questions with quite a critical view on the state of Gujarati short stories of the time. His foremost contention was about undermining the importance of creative flight in the narrative technique and potential of language as a key constituent of a story. Most of the Gujarati short stories of those who were acclaimed writers were either stories filled with an element of truthful depictions of real episodes of action in life or those adopted from the folk tales with linear narrative in journalistic language of reportage that would aim at simply creating a joyful discharge of one of the primary emotions. Not only that Joshi provided a penchant critique of the existing state of the stories, when he entered writing and publishing, he also practised his credenda of what is a good story and constructed the base for newer possibilities. All these stories can be divided into three broad thematic categories that aim at addressing, when put together, two primary points of Joshi’s literary quest: thematic inquiry into existential embroilment as the only pertinent human predicament at large and formalistic take on art. According to Joshi exploiting language and form to embody the artwork was the most essential expression of art. Materialism would consider physical things as more valuable than the spirit and pessimism or scepticism would raise questions about the thingness of things which are important in human experiences.
Suresh Joshi propagated a theory of fiction known in Gujarati as Ghatanavilop, which insisted on minimising the plot element from fiction and enriching the suggestive potential of language and style. He unstintingly promoted this theory of fiction which he called Ghatanavilop; the theory emphasizes upon evocative prospects of language that are much more effective according to him instead of the plot element or the story component in a work of fiction. What earned the repute of being unique-of-its-kind and therefore Avant-garde for his literary works is the phenomenological treatment to experiential realities in and around a story element. According to him the ‘event’ or happening is far too stolid and obtuse an element to be allowed into the art form such as short story. He found the highest achievement of art in the disappearance (tirodhan) or dissolution (lop) of the event (ghatana-tatva); he sets his sights on the de-realization (nigarana) of the tenor (upmeya) in metaphor. In doing so, Suresh Joshi’s ideas about literature and his literary craftsmanship have focused more on how instead of what – the longstanding debate on the form, materiality and the matter.
Second distinguishing feature of his modernist aesthetic Gujarati literary register, as J. Birjepal’s puts it, is his continuous violation of the conventions of Gujarati by fracturing language with irony, hovering between received meaning and polysemy. He writes, ‘His Gujarati assimilates the semantics of Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi as well as English, French and German. The text is always already outside the ramparts of ‘regular’ Gujarati. It is an ‘ecriture’ that does not conform the normative theories of language.’ His text is not only subversive but in it lurk the ghosts of other languages. Arresting the flow of his textuality with a literal English prototype results in the loss of texture. (J. Birjepal, 2001) There is in his language a certain sentimental streak, a vein of romantic longing of the Yeatsian kind. These features stick out as prominent contributors to his canonising attributes among his general modernistic, dry, intellectual cast.
In Suresh Joshi’s short stories the container becomes the contained; structure is the story. Thematic codes or storyline, if any, would generally be woven around an extremely subtle thin-sliced part of an emotion or it would be a stream of consciousness rundown of several thought-series in the mind of one of the characters. More than a story or an episode Joshi’s stories are interested in delineating a pen-picture of a moment, in a moment about the moment. The use of high-sounding elitist literary Gujarati vocabulary that knits a complex design of symbols and imagery describing a moment trapped in a psychosocial grip called for a different categorization Gujarati literature had not witnessed until then. He was deeply read in Eastern and Western philosophy and literature and drew on a whole repertoire of artistic strategies. He experimented in Gujarati with cinematic montage and trompe-l’oeil competing narratives where the embedded secondary reality superseded the primary world. Renowned academic and critic Digish Mehta praises his slant toward experimental sophistication and suggests that that has been celebrated as the hallmark of Gujarati short story; he views Suresh Joshi as a pioneer among modernist writers. Stories like Grihapravesh, longer narrative compositions like Chhinnapatra and Maranottar are taut in form and display a narrative self-reflexivity on an unprecedented scale. (Birjepatil, 2001) Joshi made a great impact on a whole generation of new writers through his theoretical standpoints and criticism on the modernist aesthetic in Gujarati. J Birjepatil translated ten of his highly acclaimed short stories into English; in his introductory piece he hails Joshi as ‘a renaissance figure’. He says, ‘He did for Gujarati literature what Satyajit Ray did for Indian cinema. …Joshi’s literary industry helped transform the cultural face of Gujarat and provided a useful matrix for intellectual give and take for gifted young poets like Ravji Patel and artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Gulam Sheikh whose paintings have earned international reputation.’ (Birjepatil, 2001)
These are stories that work like poems as far as their lyrical appeal, thematic encapsulation of ideas and experimentation with the form are considered. Suresh Joshi’s novels earned high acclaim of creating a unique category of ‘a novel that is not a novel’. His most celebrated one titled Chhinnapatra (titled as Crumpled Letter in English translation) was formally given a tagline as ‘an outline/a draft of a Novel I planned to write’. It does not have a plot; neither the usual relatable, contextual consosiation of a novel with history, society or culture, nor the broad philosophic, biographic or journalistic functional purpose of a novel. After trying hard one would locate the setting of the novel in a city that looks like Mumbai. The protagonist Ajay is a poet who loves Mala. Probably he loves Leela too. Three other men called Amal, Arun and Ashok also like Mala. Ashok gets to get intimate with Mala who keeps getting reminded of lines from Ajay’s poems while in those moments of making with Ashok. The reader enters the world of emotional complexities of the characters, about whom we do not get any other details except their names, through unposted letters that Ajay had written to Mala. The translator of the novel Tridip Suhrud compliments Chhinnapatra as the very act of stepping out of conventional canon that made Joshi create his own distinct canon. (Suhrud, 1999) According to Suresh Joshi to ground the truth in a story the creator does not create a story but actually creates the context similar to the context in his own emotional-imaginary cosmos; this is when the story breaks free from its stationery locale and transcends to become more true to experiential realities of life. Beyond becoming the only spatio-temporal continuum, the story inspires intuitive actualization in the mind of the reader. (Joshi, 2005) It is modern; it negates the age old formula of what a novel is and should be and aesthetic of the extent of poetic intensity that it can be called a lyrical novel.
Modernism was, for its critics, a notoriously elitist affair. A commentary on whether Western literary devices such as degrees of experimentation and modernism take the work away from the native Eastern common reader is an area for investigation; an evaluation of Suresh Joshi’s fiction both by virtue of its ‘high’ subject matter and in the sense used by Gerald Gillespie in writing of the ‘elitist metanarrative’ of comparative literary history, where ‘elite’ points to the intense degree of specialization of each practitioner of literature, requires to be analysed, therefore. Phenomenological investigation as to what kind of impact new forms and materiality that Suresh Joshi inspired it made on not just development but also adjustments in function of literature with focus on the agency of objects and the significance of matter lead the discussion to what can the new concern for materiality suggest about the object forms of literature and the networks within which it circulates.
In Aristotelian sense, literature is heteromerous, since it does have internal structure, with different parts of different literatures made up of different stuffs leading to understanding of genres, styles and thematic variations as constituents of matter and form. Taking cue from this tenet, this paper focuses on questions like: Are ornateness and modernity in the style and open-endedness and obscurity in the means of expression as form inclusive enough if evaluated through reader-response theory; does striving for experiment and innovation in style that made modern Gujarati literature difficult for many, eventually made literature reserved only for those who are deeply within what literature is; does persevered presence of ‘form’ative features suggest that the acquired substantial ‘matter’ for a generation of writers and readers is simply a shape? Modernism in its reduced sense as literary craft in Suresh Joshi’s fiction recognises literary materiality as more important over literary matter.
Gujarati literature underwent several changes under the colonial impact. Among these changes the democratic thought and ideals of literature, shaping of new genres, new stylistic devices and overall shift in the thematic representation gradually contributed to creating a refreshed understanding of canon. Joshi’s poetry embraced the imports of colonial modernity in literature from its inception. Not only the colonial project of introduction of English as the ‘high’ language defined arenas that determined access and marginality in society at large, but the measures that altered the universe of literature and cultural practices and introduced crucial hierarchical and ideological divisions between the newly-English-educated writers and poets and traditional-mindset or folk poets created sections around which negotiations of canon-making got processed. A powerful stimulus to this argument is provided by Guha’s thesis that colonial power ruled through dominance without hegemony. (Guha, 1997) His arguments, claiming that colonial ideology signified the limits of bourgeois social rationality, are well-taken, as also his observations on the severely elitist nature of the efforts of the colonial state to cultivate ideologically amenable native intelligentsia. The similar can be claimed about the highly elitist nature of the colonial imports to newly defined poetic charge in poetry of Umashankar Joshi and abstractionism in fiction written by Suresh Joshi that cultivated docile native literaria; the canon-formation practice around which, gradually creating a class called literary proletariats. Veena Naregal calls for an analysis of the conditions under which the intelligentsia and literaria in Wetern India was able to achieve a position of ideological influence which has given South Asia its own unique set of questions about the displacement of the meaning and spaces for hegemonic articulation within colonial modernity, attention to which is underpaid hitherto. (Naregal, 2002)
The question if the thematic formulae and formalistic devices of Suresh Joshi, having inspired a generation of Gujarati authors have led them to a stereotypical understanding of what is meritorious literature is a pertinent one. How far have these unconsciously collective literary mannerisms gone in defining and redefining Gujarati literary spheres is a larger topic of analysis. What are these literary processes that create a literary tradition which is convention-disguised, and if they serve as contributors to a society with many enclosures is a crucial question. The answer is not to pretend that elitism and its related specialization do not exist. It is rather to ask what can be done about it. Shutting our eyes to the problem of elitism will only exacerbate it and create the destruction one would seek to avoid. In asking these questions, we are reminded of Sianne Ngai’s point that while art struggles to be socially powerful within its “cordoned-off domain in an increasingly specialized and differentiated society,” its ostensible weakness might make it uniquely “capable of theorizing social powerlessness in a manner unrivalled by other forms of cultural praxis” Ngai further characterizes modern and contemporary art’s situation as one of “restricted agency” as part of her inquiry into aesthetic examples of “suspended agency” characterized by “affective gaps” and “dysphoric feelings,” suggesting evocative resonances between artistry and precarity, between the ambivalences of form and the uncertainties of making do and making a life within shifting economic currents. (Ngai, 2005)
Another research paper by the author throws light on the processes of bureaucracies, (institutionalization) that, by their very nature, have difficulty assessing something as imperceptible as literary merit. When organisations and institutions intend to assess creative artists for publication, membership, employment or promotion, it is expected that they find or devise some apparently objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed, “A poem or a story is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.” (Bawer, 1995)
Here I postulate that Suresh Joshi and his ardent followers almost unknowingly constructed the Ivory Tower of what they understood as poetic genius and literary canon. An ivory tower may also be an entity of “reason, rationality and rigid structures that colonizes the world of lived experience,” as explained by Kirsten J. Broadfoot in an article about the possibilities of postcolonial organizational communication. The imagined literary, academic group of the privileged brings to surface a lived sense and experience of exclusiveness and superiority. Broadfoot explains this as a group that “functions like an exclusive club whose membership is tightly controlled by what might be called a ‘dominant frame.’” (Kirsten J. Broadfoot, 2017)
To conclude, analysis given so far on canon-making attributes in Gujarati literary arena with specific discussion on the towering literary figure namely Suresh Joshi clearly suggests that the argument on the canon has gone astray from the very beginning. As John Guillory puts it in his work, “…that its true significance is one of which the contestants are not generally aware. The most interesting question raised by the debate is not the familiar one of which texts or authors will be included in the literary canon, but the question of why the debate represents a crisis in literary study.” (Guillory, 1993)
Various examples of the use of imagery in Joshi’s fiction corroborate with his idea that language is not one of the literary devices but language is the only perfect amalgamation of literary device and the literary effect. Language embodies the meaning not only in connotative meaningfulness of the words but mainly in its form and structure through which it expresses the meanings. The imagery of a black, hunched animal that runs all throughout in Vidula aimed at representing an emblem of death as a participant in the novel, which keeps lurking with its multifaceted-ness, subtlety, abhorrence and omnipresence, makes a qualification for modernist a style that rates indirectness, impenetrability and strenuousness high. In Kathachakra various different types of imageries of darkness are used for emblematizing the continuing thoughts of the protagonist. Multiple categories of imagery used by Joshi such as visual, auditory, olfactory and kinaesthetic make it a kaleidoscopic parade of ideas.
The narrative technique is generally a distinguishably stylistic employment in modernist writing. The first person, singular narration in Viduala makes the character become one with the author. The structuralist claim that the writing performs rather than documents comes alive; the author and the character keep drifting positions and the reader would wonder who is writing who? In Vidula Joshi’s ideological standpoint about life and relations are put in the mouth of the characters. Almost a kind of self-insertion of the author is at work in Vidula where the principal character is also a writer and a novelist, who is, instead of getting clearly distinguishable, seems to get blurred with Joshi’s real persona and ideology, particularly when the character keeps reciting Rabindranath Tagore or when Vidula says that grey drabness clouds him every time it is the month of Jeth (the month of retiring summer). As Chandrakant Topiwala notes, “It is almost impossible to find a polyphonic form of the language in Joshi’s novels because all his characters speak his language and tone.” (Topiwala, 1978) That is primarily a characteristic of modernist writing, particularly for select authors like Joshi who have exploited language for the formalistic effect they aimed at creating. The aim is purposefully designed not to reap a polyphonic array of voices and personae, nor does it aim at creating cacophony and attaining the effect of which by attempting to make it an absurdist fiction; the attempt here is to peep deep inside the psyche of the protagonist.
Several admirers of Joshi have praised his language for his excessive and conscious use of Tatsam (as directly from Sanskrit) phraseology. His language is, as Topiwala notes, “elemental, twenty-four carat pure and comme il faut. Vidula keeps quoting from Kalidasa to Tagore and Villiers which brings a sense of nobility to the novel’s prose.” (Topiwala, 1978)
The question if employment of language as a device in modernist writing end up resulting in an unconsciously accorded sense of nobility, purity and virtuosity and that resultantly according a sense of superiority of the writers and readers who do so is a pertinent one. The modern in the Gujarati fiction was thus not just unprecedented and untrodden but was also unrelated with various other contemporary writers and their literary works. The imaging of this kind of literature as modern shaped into a revised understanding about what started getting considered as literary canon. More complex, more abstract, more convoluted and more esoteric got to be recognised as higher a literary merit. The gradual disappearance of the familiar traits and devices in a piece of fiction got replaced by the unfamiliar delineations of the inadvertent thoughts of a mind in a virile metaphoric charge. An attempt to sketch out a human condition with an existential dilemma and seek possible avenues out from there dissolved the concrete references of a specific human condition and gave way to abstractions. The abstractions made an easier way for metaphoric cross-references and emblematic suggestions. The description of the reality of a human condition would get expressed in an elusive manner making the real merge with the fantasy and blurring the lines between the concord and discord in the reader’s mind. Modernist style employed concealments that were complex to the nth degree. The absence of the familiar devises in a story required the reader to read an imaginary fiction and further imagine possible meanings. A reader’s easy access to bringing his own sensibility and emotionality to use would get obscured with requiring to think up through an unfamiliar set of interpretive sensibilities. ‘Only an enlightened mind of a reader will be able to see through these blurred lines’, says Suresh Joshi in his essay ‘Navalkatha Vishe’. Advocacy of a meritorious reader and his efficaciousness hints at a tacit expectation of learnedness and reflectivity in consumption of complex literary texts, thereby limiting the dissemination of the literary texts only among the literary circles. The propagation as well as reception of literary texts in a case like this would take to becoming exclusively limited in reach and elitist in the end.
For while the debate seems to its participants to be about the contents of the literary canon, its significance goes well beyond the effects of any new consensus about a truly ‘representative’ canon. The canon debate signifies nothing less than a crisis in the form of cultural capital we call ‘literature’. The argument that one should suspend judgment on behalf of the politically urgent objective of making the canon more ‘representative’ of diverse social groups invited the reactionary objection to the abandonment of ‘standards’. The most politically strategic argument for revising the canon remains the argument that the works so revalued are important and valuable cultural works. If literary critics are not yet in a position to recognize the inevitability of the social practice of judgement, that is a measure of how far the critique of the canon is still from developing a sociology of judgement.
Canon-formation works, it suggests, as what Lauren Berlant has termed as ‘lateral agency’. (Berlant, 2012) In their essay as an extention to Berlant’s postulation, titled ‘Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics’ Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman maintain, ‘Taking lateral agency both as an agency of what has been termed the precariat, meaning peoples who lack the opportunity and energy to move onward and upward within normative horizons of capitalist ambition and neoliberal self-valuation, and as an agency that is itself precarious — a partial or remnant agency that tenuously attends in the subjectivation of “bare life” and attendant attritions of individual and collective capacities.’ (Elizabeth Adan, 2015) While making a commentary on Humanities today, Simon During suggests that humanities academics have come to belong to a class called bourgeois precariat – bourgeois because it does perform some socio-spiritual functions and antithetically precariat too because of material insecurity of employment becoming rarer in the humanities. (During, 2015) On similar lines this paper makes a case for writers and poets who have come to belong to a class called literary precariat. Taking cues from Negri and Hardt who suggest in their work, Empire, “A new notion of “commons” will have to emerge on this terrain (Negri & Hardt, 2000), a new notion of literary proletariats might have to get identified.
According to English professor Stephen Behrendt, canons can never altogether escape this exclusivity. “Canons are always about closed communities – who is excluded is at least as important as who is included. It is the ‘in’ crowd that usually controls the entrances, which means that the canonized or canonical writers largely resemble those who have judged them to be ‘major’ or ‘important’ or ‘classic,’” Behrendt said. “But this judging still rests on the tastes and preferences of the judges, who have traditionally been conditioned, whether they are aware of it, to prefer certain things – familiar things, mostly – over unfamiliar ones.” (Bates, 2013) It is the inescapable fate of the canon that some limited group of people will have to select its contents. And regardless of which group is doing the choosing, Behrendt said he believes the selection will always be biased.
It is in continuation of all these arguments that the ending note of this paper offers a penchant critique through a question whether traces of elitism in Gujarati literature leading to supremacist grandiose generalisations about what we understand as literary merit and backs up canon-formation, whereby generalisations such as this necessarily involve exclusionary categorisation making concerns about latent politics of literature, of representation and of cultural production at large more poignant. Gujarat has always been a multicultural region; given the cultural history of the state and how arts and literature have organically grown and evolved with development of the society and people in the early times of this region, this present-day long-standing credence that only the privileged section can know, understand, appreciate, relish and nurture as well as preserve arts and literature is telling about what Gujarat has become as a society. Where that thin line from where the exclusive becomes exclusionary is a question to those who operate from the Ivory Tower. The true end of literature, is to free us from our intellectual bonds so that we can develop the capacity to relate thought to action. In its philosophic attainment, the research aims at examining if literature is an intellectual and aesthetic produce of the privileged only and how does privilege get understood, misunderstood, used and abused.
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