Romesh Gunesekera, in an e-mail interview, talks about tradition, art and how a novelist’s job is to let a novel become itself. Subash Jeyan
(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on May 7, 2006.)
As a writer, to which tradition, if any, do you see yourself as belonging? As a Sri Lankan writer, a Commonwealth writer or as an English writer? Or, all these labels totally extraneous to the process of writing?
These three categories are not of a kind. One relates to a country, the other to history and the third you could say is to do with language. They are not mutually exclusive. Categories are useful for people who want to classify writing, but is of limited value to a writer.
Forster is probably right to say that one should not put novels (or novelists) in any form of artificial category.
As for tradition, what does it mean? Is the English tradition Austen, Lawrence, Forster, Defoe or Sterne? Is the Russian tradition Tolstoy or Dostoevksy? Is the tradition of Indian writing in English Narayan or Rushdie?
As a writer I feel I have to make a new genealogy for every book I write. Novels feed on everything that has gone before. The point is to burst out of old boundaries. Rather than think of myself writing at the end of a tradition, I find it more useful to think I am writing at the beginning of a new one.
How exactly do you look at your relationship to Sri Lanka, a dominating presence in your work so far? You have said elsewhere that novels are not just about places but about something inside, about imaginative journeys. But surely, even imaginative journeys, especially imaginative journeys, are determined by places of mooring and points of departure?
Of course imaginative journeys grow out of specific places just like a plant in a garden. The two are linked but should not be confused for each other. For me the strength of fiction is in the reality of its invented world.
A novel has to create a world and cannot simply rely on the real place to provide sustenance. Sometimes it is the real place that gains sustenance from the fictional. But it is a complicated relationship: think of Narayan’s Malgudi, or Leopold Bloom in Dublin or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.
Sri Lanka is part of my experience and one that engages me, but so do other places I know including Britain. I am not trying to explain Sri Lanka, the place, but I am trying to understand the world I live in.
However senseless the violence and the backlash of the “other” Sri Lanka, you seem to be suggesting in Reef that the educated elite have brought it on themselves through their self-indulgent insensitivity and utter lack of a social vision or compassion. Surely, the relationship between Triton and Ranjan Salgado, a power relationship which manages to transcend and move beyond that, is an idealised one which doesn’t exist outside that house?
Is the relationship between Triton and Salgado idealised? I think working out the structures of power is crucial. Triton’s tries to do just that. You might say that in the end it is Triton who actually gains the power to survive.
A lack of compassion and a failure of vision is indeed a major problem and one that afflicts all types of societies, not only colonial ones.
You were a poet before you became a novelist. How has that influenced your style as a novelist?
Poetry hopefully makes you attend to the power and drama of each word and syllable in every line. I think this is useful for fiction where you are trying to create a world out of nothing but words.
Do you still write poetry and can we expect a volume of poetry from you?
Yes, I still do write poems and sometimes they find their way into print. And yes, eventually I hope there will be a volume of poetry, but I am in no rush.
In your novels you never confront directly the tragedy of Sri Lanka…. They are like background markers which punctuate personal journeys. But, do we have a right to expect a novelist at some stage to go beyond and try and take a stand?
As for taking a stand, that is a different matter. To be a politician, a public spokesperson, a representative or even a columnist may be useful and important, but it is to be something other than a novelist. The business of a novelist is to write novels and the obligation is to make them as good as you can.
Your novels seem imbued with an awareness of the inevitability of change, the passing of what one values…. Do you conceive of art as a consolation against the inevitability of time?
Not a consolation but a response. Faulkner said that “writing is to make a mark in the wall of oblivion”. I can understand that…. Writing was invented as a strategy to defeat time. Many writers, therefore, are often obsessed with time. Perhaps that is also one of the reasons we read: to be outside conventional time.
The Match feels more positive in its ending. Has that to do with the way this particular novel has been intrinsically conceived or does it reflect changes in your outlook on life?
A novel has to find its proper, true shape and tone. It must become itself.
My outlook has varied, like anyone else’s, over the three years of writing this book.
At the end of the day, when you retire with a book, who are the authors you are likely to be reading?
Quite likely to be authors who seem, at first, very different from me, or else authors I have met or heard of, whose books suddenly seem to whisper “now is the right time”.
Last night I was looking at a book by C.L.R. James that I had neglected for ages, and today I might pick up a novel by Tayeb Salih.
How often do you visit Sri Lanka? Do you think that peace stands a realistic chance, in spite of recent developments?
I visit Sri Lanka quite regularly. Last year I was there twice. Parts of The Matchwere written there, as indeed parts of my other books.
I no longer know what a realistic chance for peace means. By the time you publish this interview things would have changed yet again. I can only hope that there is no real alternative to peace, and less appetite for war than many assume.
Tales I tell myself 