Mulk Raj Anand - Form and Content

 

Mulk Raj Anand

Form and Content 

Anand holds a definite view on the relationship between form and content. Form is important in a work of art, but it should not be achieved at the cost of content. In his review of Henry Green’s Loving, he states that the primary concern of art is not form but sensibility. However, this does not mean that content is all-important. Form- the ‘shaping principle’ as Northrop Frye calls it - is equally indispensable to a work of art. As a matter of fact, both should be complementary and supplementary to each other. He rightly points out that the technique of fiction writing greatly changes with the passage of time. The changed human situation and environment necessitates new devices in place of the old ones. That is why the modern novelist, in order to delineate the contemporary human situation and environment dominated by the modern technology, employs the techniques which are radically different from the narrative devices used in the earlier centuries.

In his writing Anand makes use of the various narrative modes. He is aware of the basic advantages of every one of them. He knows that the first-person singular narrative technique enables the writer to make the infrequent comments and generalizations convincing. He illustrates it by referring to Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope, and stated that the novelist’s use of the first-person singular method “helps to make the incidental comment natural”. Anand points to another advantage of the use of the first-person singular in a novel. The ‘I’ of this narrative mode may be purposively employed in a book as a neutral character, who can have his own identity as much separately from other men and women in the book as from the author himself.

Anand resorts to this narrative technique in his well-known novel, Private Life of an Indian Prince, and comments on this device in his “Author’s Note” prefixed to the book:

The neutral ‘I’ of the first-person singular has tended, in this book, to become a character in his own right. …the ‘I’ in this novel is not to be mistaken for the author, who has reverted to the Indian tradition of anonymity and looks on, like Siva’s searing third eye, at the unfolding of this tragicomedy.

Anand regards the omniscient-author device as indispensable for probing and depicting the intricacies of the people. An omniscient narrator is like a God, seeing and portraying men and women in the most effective manner: … the novelist is a new kind of God, who loves people, who overcomes his own isolation, puts his own knots alongside theirs, grows with them, manifests himself in the multiplicity of their beings and releases them into their own unique life, and co-exists with them in the joys and sorrows of their very human life.

Anand holds that a definite advance in the novel form has been made by James Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique, extended further by Dorothy Richardson and refined by Virginia Woolf. It was a coincidence that he got a copy of James Joyce’s banned book, Ulysses, from his friend and literary mentor, Bonamy Dobree, and was deeply impressed by it. Also, he chanced to see Proust’s remarkable use of the stream of consciousness technique in Remembrance of Things Past, which absorbed him for years “with its reiterations of feelings, in integral musical rhythms”.

The stream of consciousness technique, according to Anand, is the product of the shattered world of the modern machine age in which man incessantly strives to achieve integration amidst the tensions and pulls of too much of technology. Naturally, Anand is of the view that a modern writer, who has something significant to communicate to the world, will, in all probability, resort to Joyce’s process, and cannot go back to the narrative form of the novels of earlier periods. This technique is invaluable for recording the various levels of the consciousness of the people and the drama of the soul. Besides, the unities of time and place are possible by recording the details of one day of the life of a character with the help of this technique. More than that, the device can enable the novelist to reproduce “the disturbed, restless and paranoiac stream of consciousness of the people of our time”, not in the form of raw material as Joyce has done, but in such a manner “as to suggest value judgments about the characters”.