Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction

3. H. Hatterr and Sauce Anglaise: G.V. Desani

All About H. Hatterr begins with a prefatory “warning” that includes an anecdotal account of a disgruntled peasant who tries to derail a goods train because his house had been burgled, and a short dialogue about the status of this novel as gesture. This is the first indication that G.V. Desani’s only novel challenges conventional notions of realism. Metafictional in intent, the dialogue between the surrogate author and reader ends with the author conceding that the limits of the novel can be stretched to include the present work, although it should probably be labelled more accurately as a gesture rather than a novel: Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, if you do not identify your composition a novel, how then do we itemise it? Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know. Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know. Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, there is no immediate demand for gestures. There is immediate demand for novels . Sir, we are literary agents, not free agents. Notes to chapter 3 are on pp. 191-92. 51 CHAPTER 3 H. Hatterr and Sauce Anglaise: G.V. Desani Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a novel. Sir, itemise it accordingly. (12) The author/narrator remains deliberately vague about the precise definition of the terms, thereby letting the work speak for itself. Among the few critical articles and one monograph on Desani that have appeared over the last five decades, Syd Harrex’s analysis of Hatterr focuses on the notion of gesture as performance. As he puts it: “consider the word ‘gesture’ as it applies to physical actions and expressions of personality, consider the very theatrical qualities of Desani’s writing, and it follows that Hatterr is aptly described as a dramatic gesture. Desani has virtually turned the novel into a performing art, just as his characters perpetually make performances of their own lives”1 (215). A gesture is also a truncated form of action, an act that is less dependent on a temporal framework than the multiple intersections of the moment. Desani’s artifice thus becomes an act of combining various modes, of accommodating the visual and the dramatic properties of drama within the framework of the novel. At the very end of the novel, in what serves as a mock-defence of the work, Rambeli (alias Beliram) argues that motive, moral, and plot are essential aspects of each chapter, thereby implying that, unlike Mark Twain who said about his work that “persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted, persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished , persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (309), this novel does in fact conform to those features that define a conventional novel. But obviously, the very assertion also admits the opposite . In terms of genre, the difference between a novel and a gesture is also illustrated, albeit obliquely, through analogy in which a causal link between the two episodes pertaining to the peasant is conspicuously absent. According to an unnamed Anglo-Indian writer in the novel: “Melodramatic gestures against public security are a common form of self-expression in the East. For instance, an Indian peasant, whose house had been burgled, will lay a tree 52 Counterrealism in Indo-Anglian Fiction across a railway line, hoping to derail a goods train, just to show his opinion of life. And the magistrates are far more understanding ” (12). If at one level the whole incident of derailing a train could be read as a parody of abstruse psychoanalytical theories of motive, it is also a way of saying that causality along traditional lines of realism is not the objective of this novel. Put differently, the judge who understands the reasoning of the peasant is no different from the discerning reader who perceives the necessary disjunction between one action and another. Causality along empirical lines, which would be a characteristic feature of realism, is hardly the mode of this novel. Hatterr begins with a binarism that equates the novel with forms of causality and linearity, and a “gesture ” with properties that are associative, synchronic, and counterrealistic . The distinction that Cronin draws between Narayan as novelist and fabulist finds an echo in the self-reflexive comment with which Hatterr begins. If one were to look for...