'That Sense of Mystery'

Di Nguyen at the little white attic has suggested I visit a literary blog, Argumentative Old Git, tended by Himadri Chatterjee, who seems like a sensible fellow. In his Sunday post, “What I look for in fiction,” Chatterjee begins by asking: “Why do we like what we like?” Origins and motivations are often of interest, though ineffable. When I interview engineering students and faculty, I eventually get around to inquiring after the source of their attraction to computational mathematics or mechanical engineering. Some answers are revealing, others inarticulate and tedious. 

Chatterjee concludes: “I tried thinking of the novels and plays and short stories that I most love, but couldn’t really find any distinct pattern emerging.” My conclusion exactly. Critics often seek grand unified theories to explain such things, but most of us are more complicated and less consistent than that. Plus, we’re too busy reading. I love the work of Italo Svevo and Giovanni Varga. Where’s the commonality, besides both being Italian? To muddy things further, Varga was translated and championed by D.H. Lawrence, a writer Chatterjee admires and I detest. We can’t take offense at differences in taste. De gustibus . . .    

 

Next, Chatterjee asks a promising question, one likely to prove more amusing: “What don’t I look for in fiction? Or, in other words, what turns me off?” Again, he’s right on the money: he has no use for “representative narratives” – an ugly coinage stinking of academia. Not once in my reading life have I said to myself: “I think I’ll read a book by a Bulgarian. Or a Sikh. Or a quadriplegic.” Good fiction specializes in the human and transcends mere demographics. As Chatterjee puts it:

 

“Whatever the background of the character, whatever minority or majority they may belong to, however marginalised or centralised they may be, each character is, and should be depicted as, an individual. I find I have little time for ‘representative voices’. I certainly haven’t encountered any voice in fiction resembling my own, and neither would I want to: for one thing, I’d be too embarrassed.”

 

We read to self-forget. In my non-reading life I’m already too self-centered. I don’t go looking for me in novels, though that's the dogma foisted on kids in school. Chatterjee’s paragraph beginning “One finds one’s common humanity” is especially good. I differ with him when he writes: “Of course, childhood influences are important: what is impressed upon the mind when that mind hasn’t yet hardened remains for the rest of one’s life.” That’s the case with a handful of books I first read as a kid – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Pilgrim’s Progress (about which Chatterjee agrees), Kim. But I also read a lot of crap, even science fiction, and I put away those childish things a long time ago and blessedly forgot them.

 

Obviously, Chatterjee is a practiced, commonsensical reader. I value experience over theory, and he avoids all the fashionable arguments and jargon. See what he has to say about George Eliot and Dickens, which is basically the opposite of my own judgment. Too much fiction comes packaged with a pre-fabricated explanation – the dreaded “message.” He writes:

 

“Human emotions point to a human mystery, and each human being is a profound mystery: the works I tend to respond to most keenly are those that confront me with that sense of mystery.”

 

Thanks, Di, for introducing me to Chatterjee. It’s always gratifying to read a grownup. He concludes his post:

 

“In any dispassionate view, we humans are really quite absurd beings: farting, puking, nose-picking creatures, with mean thoughts and often meaner acts. Even our transgressions tend not to be so great: small and petty – that’s all we are. And yet, by some mighty paradox, we are, nonetheless, in that old phrase that Shaw uses, temples of the Holy Ghost. And the religious imagery of that expression no longer embarrasses me as it might have done in my younger days. The literature that means most to me is that which attempts, at least, to confront and to depict this great mystery.”