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Book Review
Critical essays
COMMONWEALTH AND AMERICAN LAUREATES IN LITERATURE — Essays in Criticism: A. L. McLeod — Editor; Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., L-10, Green Park Extension, New Delhi-110016. Rs. 390.
THE EDITOR of this attractively titled volume has always been a sympathetic listener to what the Indian writer has to say.
The reason for putting between covers a rather haphazard set of seminarial presentations is given in a disarming preface (apparently the Cauvery problem between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka prevented several delegates from attending the seminar organised by the Institute of Commonwealth and American Studies at Bangalore in 1996) that laments the loss of critical interest in Nobel Laureates: "Who now reads Pearl Buck and Sinclair Lewis, for example? Although Tagore is still almost revered in South Asia (where his poems are the national anthems of two countries), elsewhere his work is familiar to very few. Steinbeck and Hemingway are at present rather overlooked than overstudied; Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, and Toni Morrison are the current cynosure, while Derek Walcott may be more honoured than read.''
Bitter truth indeed. The reader of such "serious fiction'' is increasingly a rarity thanks to the television on the one hand and erotica paperbacks spread around even by established publishing houses on the other. "We have to survive!'' Pushed more and more into the stultified diction of academia, the significant writers become even more unattractive.
Consider the essay of Cynthia Vanden Driesen on "Bakhtian polyphones in Patrick White's texts.'' We move far, far away from Patrick White and get entangled in applying Bakhtian strategies to analyse a scene or two from Voss.
There is very little light here for the common reader though plenty for spawning other look-alike critical essays to enrich the corridors of our academia. As a contrast, H. H. Anniah Gowda bases himself firmly in White's plays and the manner in which they were projected and received by the public. He creates "interest'' in White; and that is what Judith Hen does for Ernest Hemingway, Vimala Rao for White's A Fringe of Leaves and Shobha Rajpai for Saul Bellow.
Among other critics who draw us to the shelf containing the work of Nobel Laureates like Rabindranath Tagore, Wole Soyinka and Eugene O'Neill are V. Ayothi, S. Chandrasekharan, Madhu Mehrotra and Anjali Roy.
Marian B. McLeod has a very informative essay on the changing patterns in Nobel awards for literature, while C. Dominic Savio finds Toni Morrison's character, Sula, to be an icon of black feminism. John B. Beston brings up the rear with a challenge: Why not award the Nobel Prize for Alice Munro, a writer of short stories from Canada? He finds Munro's Friend of My Youth (1990) pure Nobel stuff and Canada has not had a Nobel Laureate so far.
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
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