Mulk
Raj Anand
Stream of Consciousness
Anand regards the stream of consciousness
technique as something very valuable, and uses it, with slight alteration, in
his first novel, Untouchable and in The Road and The Big Heart. He elaborates
the advantages of the use of it in Untouchable thus: first, it has enabled him
to impart the book a fairly neat framework, appropriate for the dramatization
of the central character’s inner experience; secondly, it has given him the
joyful awareness of eternality of time which specially pleases the Indian in
him. He employs it effectively in The Road, and is aware of it as shown by his
following remark:
I,
therefore, pursued the mirror game, at various levels of consciousness of the
people, concave and convex, involved in this drama of the road. You will notice
that, technically, it is not a straight narrative, but diversified by breaking
through the obvious planes to the impalpable world of feelings of the
characters involved.
Thus,
Anand finds the stream of consciousness technique a convenient device to be employed
limitedly for the purpose of depicting directly the internal experiences of the
characters so as to reveal their essential humanness and the fusion of their
inner psychological reality with the outer social reality.
Nevertheless,
the artist in Anand does not fail to perceive the danger of this device of story-telling.
If an intellectual novelist attempts to render the stream of consciousness of a
naïve character, he runs the risk of falsifying the illogical logic of his
character’s heart by inserting in it his own intellectuality. While writing
Untouchable, Anand faced the difficulty in making a correct and artistic use of
it. He was confronted with the problem of keeping artistic detachment so that
his own intuitive experiences might not intrude into Bakha’s stream of
consciousness. In a word, Anand uses this narrative technique in a modified
form, simplifying it in order to present effectively a vivid picture both of
his character’s mind and of social milieu. But for Untouchable, The Road and
The Big Heart, he usually follows in his novels the conventional modes of narration.
A novelist, in Anand’s opinion, can amalgamate the various techniques of
storytelling in his work. He cites the instance of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura in
which the author interpenetrates the narrative with character analysis and also
employs “Joyce’s technique and automatic writing in long passages, assimilating
these influences within the context of prophetic writing”.
Anand
is aware of the importance of style in a book, though he has not talked much about
it in his critical writings. No doubt, the content is of vital importance for a
writer; but the manner of presentation and expression cannot be ignored. In his
discussion on “Creative Writing in the Present Crisis”, he states: ‘Of course,
it is not enough to want to say something. Everything depends on how one says
it - how the imagination of a writer can transform the various realities,
interpenetrate characters with insight, and ‘connect’ the poetry and the prose.
And, certainly, there has to be some kind of style’.
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