The Return of the Repressed

Some writers and publishers shared discontent, in hushed whispers, about being seen pregnant with content. Others seemed very content and stepped up to bridge the gap, pitching books through prepared videos and other digital material.

As someone who writes novels, writes about them, and generally works in the medium of prose, I've always had an unspeakable envy and admiration for literary forms that take on the moving body of performance. That envy has energized my fiction in important ways. My second novel The Firebird, which rooted in a young boy's fascination with his mother's life as a theatre actress, tried to import the ancient force of theatre in the modern realism of the novel. Likewise with poetry – how torn is it between the realities of print and performance? The Middle Finger, my most recent novel, has been driven by the anxiety of this question. But this anxiety, I've come to realize in different ways, also indicates a serious crisis of liberal modernity, rooted in the bourgeois gentility of print.

This became clearest to me when a few years ago, I spent a couple of days at the Mumbai Film Festival. I was invited to speak at the author's corner, which I did, and had a fine time hanging out with several other authors, publishers, and a wide range of people from the entertainment industry: producers and directors, architects of platforms such Netflix, Amazon, SONY, Star, and then soon-to-be launched venue by Reliance Jio, over two days of dining and wining under the ambitious arcades of the Juhu Marriott. All right across from Jalsa, the Amitabh Bachchan residence, which no driver in Mumbai ever fails to point out while driving past.

There were also some strange things happening there. Over the two days, I kept hearing about something called "content," which apparently writers were supposed to produce – one of the many ingredients that went into the making of a web series or a film, along with costume, set, make-up, location, cinematography, the whole nine yards.

I had never thought of writers as producing "content," which appears to be some permutation of story, character, and context to which the film or web series was to give corporeal body.

Some writers and publishers shared discontent, in hushed whispers, about being seen pregnant with content. Others seemed very content and stepped up to bridge the gap, pitching books through prepared videos and other digital material. Was that a blueprint of work to be done, or a kind slice of the labor of the cinematic producer who was being seduced to adopt it? Who could tell? In this world, probably the most generous imagination of books was as sheet music, a promise of something that is incomplete till made visual.

I'd never seen literature reveal the anxiety of performance this way before. Literature was now content, deeply discontent till given the legitimacy of a film, TV show, or web-series.

Writers, and champions of books everywhere, must take serious notice of this restlessness – one that fuses political reality with trends in cultural consumption.

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We have finally arrived at a moment when literature needs to reassess its relation with liberal modernity. The economic and technological embeddedness of literature in the rise of print and a large middle-class with the means, leisure, and literacy to sit and read in private is again, the (crucial) scaffolding of the story here. No less important is the spirit of literature as a modern art form, with its preoccupation of authorial subjectivity, artistic interiority, creative originality, and with its relationship with realism and verisimilitude, none quite possible to imagine before the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, whether in European culture as well as the non-western cultures that came under the purview of this modernity through the global spread of colonialism.

Today, much of the world feels restless with this modernity. The modernity within which both the idea and practice of literature is still embedded for the most part. Writers, and champions of books everywhere, must take serious notice of this restlessness – one that fuses political reality with trends in cultural consumption.

The anxiety of performance that haunts literature today is merely the return of the repressed.

It is a reminder that the time is ripe for literature to embody the rhythms and patterns of art forms that predate the modern – those that appear far less affected by its current crisis than the culture of writing and reading has been. I'm imagining literature that is more musical, more rhythmic, more visual, more theatrical, more performative. Poetry, for several decades the neglected stepchild to the mainstream publisher, has renewed its vibrant micro-lives across South-Asian cities through a culture of performance, be it in cafes and galleries or in informal social collectives, and now on YouTube and Instagram. Poetry, vibrant long before modernity, was communal, religious, ritualistic, and performative before it became a new art form in print and the culture of private reading. Even as we continue to delight in the modern genre of written poetry, it is heartening to see poetry reclaim its old premodern life, which is also its new postmodern one.

It is prose, and especially prose fiction for whom the challenge to disrupt or transcend modernity is the greatest. Prose fiction, particularly which hinges on the invented story to be read in private, is the special child of Enlightenment modernity. The material body of this genre faces a crisis today, in that neither print nor the culture of reading is what it used to be. At the same time, the expanding appetite for the creative reworking of mythical stories indicate an affinity with premodern audiences, who had no expectation of an original story but looked for retellings of stories shared by the collective memory of the community.

Fiction's disruption of modernity, in many ways, must be a disruption of its own origin, creating prose that pushes to the limit its own literariness – its containment in the abstract artifice of language, its capacity to be anthropological, its embeddedness in secular reason. Fiction that is variously performative, musical, rhythmic, visual.

There is prose that performs but is bereft of the anxiety of performance. That is performative on its own terms, without looking for performative legitimacy in another medium. Merrier if that act of translation happens – but it is complete without it, and yet miraculously disruptive of the complacency of liberal modernity in its subversive performativity.

As Arundhati Roy once said about The God of Small Things, that it is a deeply visual but stubbornly unfilmable book. Literature that performs, but on its own terms, not on those of others.'

Saikat Majumdar's novels include The Firebird (2015) The Scent of God (2019), and The Middle Finger (2022).