Having never read Marcus Aurelius it was relatively difficult to understand Agastya's facination with this text. He stays true to it to the end quoting, "Today I have got myself out of my perplexities; or rather, I got the perplexities out of myself-- for they were not without, but within; they lay in my outlook."
What a great line to sum up how I thought of this novel. The story was very dull, though funny at times, but it was all in matter of how you looked at it. Looking around the class I could tell some of us were more into it than others. I was not particularly fond of it though I did enjoy reading some parts of the novel. Some of us saw things in this novel that were very intriguing and I did not see a lot of those. I read this novel as what some would call "An airplane read." It was very discriptive of superficial environments and did not delve into issues that it set itself up to, namely politics in India. It raises issues of corruption, but in Agastya's attemp to remain apart from that world we do not see a strong stance by the author on these issues. This was very different from the previous novels read in the class.
I am left perplexed because the novel does not fit our established pattern of novels which have a clear goal to expose certain things of India and take a stance on them. Maybe its all in my oulook of this novel.
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I completely understand your difficulty in finding English, August to be a relevant narrative to incorporate in this course. I also find it very clever that you were able to utilize Chatterjee's ending and Aurelius's words to reconcile your dissatisfaction with the novel's movement and purpose. However, I find that the narrative brings into view a perspective on poverty that none of the previous novels presented. The lens from which we encounter poverty in this novel shows how it can oftentimes be completely ignored. Agastya's outlook focuses on the absurdity of all things, poverty being a level of that absurdity that is distanced from his own dislocation to the point of near illusion.
ReplyDeleteEnglish, August felt like a full stop in the momentum of the course texts. I agree that the rest seem to pose not simple but direct responses to poverty and corruption and any other social issue described by each narrative. Agastya is indecision, masturbation and smoke. He is avoidance more than anything as he struggles to find his Real India. His efforts are spent internally which is a dramatic shift from our previous texts and even some of the short stories. There is value here in specifically that--in the idea of a government appointee, a young educated Indian man searching for purpose far from the megalopolitan city lights. Agastya's experience of India is far different from that of the rest of our protagonists and considering his origin and position, it is a telling critique of an generation.
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