Reading the Uninteresting: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting.

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing.

Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 1852

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At the beginning of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, takes a leisurely boat trip up the Seine. “At every bend of the river,” we are told, “the same curtain of pale poplars came into view. The countryside was deserted. Some little white clouds hung motionless in the sky, and a vague sense of boredom seemed to make the boat move more slowly and the passengers look even more insignificant than before” (17). As Peter Brooks has observed, this is hardly the most auspicious of opening sequences, for “we as readers expect that voyages will lead somewhere, and that the voyagers who fare forth on them will make not only their goal but their experience along the way the source of significance.” Indeed, “[t]o be told that we are scarcely advancing, in the company of the insignificant, makes us wonder why we are to bother at all with a five-hundred-page novel” (Reading for the Plot 178). At certain junctures, readers of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story (1988) may be inclined to ask themselves the same thing. Insofar as it could be said to “do” anything at all, the novel chronicles the experiences of a young civil servant, Agastya Sen, who has been posted to the provincial town of Madna for a year’s administrative training. But if the reader is expecting anything to happen during this purgatorial year in the provinces, if they are anticipating the usual pleasures of an unfolding narrative, they are likely to be sorely disappointed. Right from the outset we are informed that “[t]he district life that [Agastya] lived and saw was the official life, common to all districts, deadly dull” (28). In the words of another civil service employee, “It’s sick [here], there’s no one to talk to, no place to go, nothing to do, just come back to your room after office, get drunk, feel lonely, and jerk off” (88–89). And this is precisely what our hero does for one calendar year and 322 pages: masturbate, smoke marijuana, read Marcus Aurelius, and lie in bed “staring blankly up at the ceiling” (77). Granted, he completes his training, too, but these bureaucratic duties also turn out to be “ineffably dull” (63) and inconsequential—stifling whatever proairetic possibilities the narrative may inadvertently generate as it inches toward its conclusion.

So where does all this leave us as readers? What are we supposed to make of a novel with such pronounced “anti-proairetic” tendencies, one that gives absolute precedence to the boredom and banality of the nonoccurrence? Where do these tendencies originate, and what impact do they ultimately have on the narrative’s production of meaning? These are some of the questions I will seek to address in the following pages. I shall begin by arguing that the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) are primarily responsible for generating the novel’s entropic tendencies. This entropy, I would like to suggest, eventually leaks into the structure of the narrative itself, provoking a crisis of meaning and disruption of desire that very nearly brings it to the point of total collapse. Typically, realism is supposed to do everything it can to achieve a “commanding structure of significance,” as Leo Bersani writes (53), and a full and final predication of meaning, but the leakage of negative affect in this case threatens to undermine both of these traditional generic imperatives. As the energy that drives the narrative forward dissipates, Agastya enters into a “purely iterative existence . . . where the direction and movement of plot appear to be finished” (Brooks, Reading 122). Under these circumstances, to narrate one day is to narrate every day, and to narrate every day is to narrate the same...