Dear Reader,
The death of the English writer, A.S. Byatt, on November 16 took me back to my university days, when I was furiously reading novels by her and those by her friend and mentor, Iris Murdoch, for my thesis. Their novels are chaotic, often overwrought, sometimes downright tedious, but their use of language is such that the stories play like a movie in the mind, complete with details like, say, the fluttering chintzy curtain or the Wedgwood vase on the table. The world they create is so sumptuous that the reader can start living there, rent free. My living quarters at that time was a mouldy room with a rented bed and creaky table, but in my head I was in a Morris wallpapered cottage with a fire in the grate and a cat to cuddle.
One of Byatt’s last books was Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), a retelling of the Norse myth of the apocalypse. It’s an unusual little book, where Byatt tells us about her childhood, and what made her a writer, before taking us to the legend, which, in her retelling, shows the power of writing, among other things.
Cover of Ragnarok: The End of the Gods | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
The Norse gods are forces of nature: when they decide not to control the world any more, it collapses upon itself, taking all living beings with it. In this version of the world’s end, there is no consolation, no mercy, just wanton destruction, as mountains and seas roar and swell to annihilate life.
Byatt recreates the bleakness with her customary adeptness—she makes us shiver in fear because what she describes might well come to pass in our world of unchecked climate change. What emerges strongly is the artist’s ability to create a world, nature, even the gods, with her words. Everything—a boulder, a flower, the sea-forest—is vigorously alive in the book, and her sentences are like incantations (“secret, scarlet, creased and frilly flower-flesh”) breathing life into inanimate objects. Byatt’s Booker-winning novel was Possession (1990), and she can indeed possess the word, and the reader, making us see things like never before.
If Byatt had been born in medieval times, she would probably had been burnt at the stake for heresy since, in theological terms, the ability to create rests only with god. However, many reformist sects, both in the West and in our part of the world, have imagined a more personal god who lives not just inside human beings but in every object that populates the universe. The 17th century Marathi saint, Tukaram, who too believed in an egalitarian god, announced brazenly, “Tuka says: It’s because of us, god,/ That you exist”.
Nachiket Joshi writes a heartfelt review of the book, Behold! The Word is God: Hymns of Tukaram, translated by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, in the latest edition of Frontline. The book’s title is a pointer to Tukaram’s philosophy, which, with its stress on individual agency, made him a Modernist long before its time.
Read: In Tukaram’s earthly paradise
Jamini Roy’s famous painting of a cat. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Coming back to my Byatt-induced dream of a blissful life with a cat in a cottage, I must confess that I believe animals are divine, closer than us to god, if there is one. Late art historian B.N. Goswamy’s recently released book, The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs, proved to be his last. After reading the book, I wanted to interview him, but by then he had already taken ill. Goswamy, of course, is so thorough in his research on the cat in Indian art and literature, that any further question had to be borrowed from what is already in the book. I gush about Goswamy, and the cat, in my review of the book here.
Read: B.N. Goswamy’s ode to the feline mystique
More on faith and felines next time.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
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