Fame and Recognition:
A writer's success and greatness are measured by the fame and recognition which he achieves through his works. He should be read and appreciated by common readers as well as literary critics. Some writers attain success during their life time while some other gain recognition and fame after their death. Narayan is one of those lucky writers who have attained success and recognition with the publication of their very first novel. Narayan appeared on the literary sky with the publication of Swami and Friends in which he not only draws an admirable picture of school life but also gives us the glimpses of his knowledge of child psychology by delineating the world from the viewpoint of the boy at school. He has been acknowledged as a successful novelist in India and abroad. His reputation has spread far and wide and his works have been translated into most of the important languages of the world. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide which has also been filmed. Today he is regarded as the greatest of the Indo - Anglian writers of fiction. Narayan has Indianised the novel an essentially Western art - form.
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| R.K. Narayan's Greatness As A Novelist and His Achievements |
A Pure Artist:
Narayan is a pure artist. He is a great supporter of the view, Art for Art's sake. Novel in Narayan's had is not a medium of propaganda. He does not show the least interest in political, economic, moral or religious problems of the day. Nor is he a didactic novelist. In each of his novels he presents a slice of life as he sees it, impartially and dispassionately. In this respect he is different from Mulk Raj Anand another great Indian novelist for Anand is a spokesman of underdogs and downtrodden section of society. That is why Anand's novels have grown dated while those of Narayan have perennial freshness about them. They have the universal appeal of all great art. There is another difference between Narayan and Anand. The latter employs Indian abuses and vulgar words in his novels. In his prose we also find Indian translations of regional idiomatic expressions. These things are considered demerits of Anand's prose. But Narayan's prose is free from it. Narayan is a regional novelist but he does not use any such word or idiom as is particularly spoken in his chosen region of Malgudi.
Narayan's Message:
Narayan writes with the view art for art's sake. But this does not mean that he has no vision of his own. It simply means that there is no intrusive message, philosophy or morality in his novels. He is completely free from all didacticism. But he has a deep knowledge of human passions and motives. He knows how a man acts and behaves in ordinary day to day life. He makes a penetrating analyse of human behaviour and this makes him a great critic of human conduct. He writes about relationship within family circles. Money and sex are his major themes which determine relationships between father and son, husband and wife and men and men and from them we learn how to establish right relationships. Mental or moral abnormally disturbs our normal life and creates disorder and disharmony, sanity lies in the return to , and acceptance of normal and set norms of life . Life must be accepted and lived, despite to many shortcomings, follies and foibles. This may be said to be the Narayan's message but the reader has to read between the lines to grasp this message from his works.
Malgudi - Narayan's Chosen Region: Narayan's novels are set in the background of Malgudi. It is his chosen region. He has made this region famous in the world through its living and realistic description in his novels. His treatment of it is so realistic and vivid that many readers think that it really exist somewhere in South India. They try to identify its geographical features and other landmarks that constantly re - occur in his novels. Various views have been expressed about it. Some think that it is Lalgudi while others are of the opinion that it is Coimbatore. It is also said that Malgudi is like the Wessex of Hardy. But this view is also not correct for Wessex is a name given by Hardy to a district in the South West of England. In the preface to far from the maddening crowd, he said, “I first ventured to adopt the word ‘Wessex’ from the pages of early English history and (gave) it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in the extinct kingdom.” But Malgudi is a pure country of mind in which various physical features of various place, intimately known to the novelist have been rearranged, modified, mingled and magnified. Malgudi's description is not same in each of Narayan's novels. It has undergone various changes and is seen growing from a small town to a big city. We are also told of its history, customs and traditions. The recurrence of the some landmarks serves to weld the various novels into an organic whole. They may rightly be called Malgudi novels, just as Hardy's novels are called Wessex novels.
His Universality:
Narayan is a great regional novelist but his range is not narrow. He is not merely local. He has studied this region not only with a poet's eye but also with the scientific precision of an antiquary and social historian. He is fully acquainted with all the places of Malgudi and every aspect of its life. That is why, when he is drawing a native of the Malgudi with deep feelings and susceptible of finer issues, he is superbly successful. It is against the backdrop of Malgudi scenes and sights that Narayan studied life's little ironies, which have always been the same in every age and country. His novels are tragi comedies and his characters are led to failure or ruin either by chance or by some wrong decision. He presents his characters in predicament which, essentially, has always been the same. From the particular, Narayan rises to the general, and intensity and universality are attained by concentration. To sum up for all that Narayan makes such a play with the local characteristics of his scene, yet always he penetrates beneath them to those universal facts of human existence. In spite of the loving exactitude with which he details the characteristics features of Malgudi life, he never lets us forget that this Malgudi life is part of the life, of the whole human race and is essentially connected with it.
His Characterization:
Narayan is known for creating a whole picture - gallery of interesting characters which remain fresh in reader’s memory for a long time. Actually a novel is a story about human beings, and if the reader is not made to feel that they are ' convincing human beings ' the story cannot move the reader. In this regard Narayan succeeds a lot. His stories are really moving stories, made move so by their characters. A number of life-like interesting characters are depicted in his novels. Most of his characters belong to middle class. They are neither very rich nor are worried about money and position, nor dehumanised by absolute need. His hero is usually modest, sensitive, and ardent about himself and sufficient conscious to have an active inner life and to grope towards some existence independent of the family. But his range is limited like that of Jane Austen. He has none of the variety of and complexity of characters of Anand or of Dickens. His range includes students, teachers, city men, vendors and moneylenders. He is more successful in showing his heroes and other characters in relation with their family. Certain characters return in the fictional world of Narayan. Such characters are swamis. beggars, prostitutes, simple and credulous villagers . Beggars, prostitutes etc., symbolize the economic backwardness of the nation, the swamis are the spokesman of traditional values, although out of grace with rational men of commercial civilization.
The Narayan Hero:
The characteristic Narayan hero always has the capacity to be astonished by the turn of events. He is a flat and colourless character. He has no dynamism. He does not undergo much change. Narayan's heroes are not of high rank. They are simple Malgudi people with no sophistry and affection. They have certain formlessness and a lack of finish. Their characters are influenced either by external influence or by inherited tradition. The most characteristic feature of Narayan's hero is that they are taken from among the ordinary people. There is nothing heroic about them, like other ordinary people, they are also tempted by money and sex. But in spite of their weakness, they are realistic and living and amuse and entertain us. What is so attractive about them is the charm and authenticity of their Indian colouring, what makes them immediately recognisable is that they seem to belong to a substantial human nature.
Women Characters:
Narayan has portrayed two types of women characters in his novel. In the first group we may put the typical Hindu housewives who bear the tyranny and callousness of their husbands but remain faithful to their husbands and children. Sometimes they may rebel against their husbands as does Savitri in The Dark Room but ultimately they return to their homes. To the second category belong to butterfly type of women such as Rosie, Shanta Bai and Shanti. They are influenced by city life. They are glamorous and not very particular about chastity and other virtues. These fashionable ladies create disharmony within the family but finally peace and normalcy is restored. Rosie the heroine of The Guide is the most complex of these characters. She is enigmatic, mysterious and both Marco and Raju fail to know her true nature.
Human Relationship:
Narayan's novels make a fine study of human relationship, particularly family relationship. He seems to be most interested in depicting father son relationship as it is frequently studied in his novels. As he attained maturity in the art of fiction writing, his study of human relationships became more complex and intricate. Such complex relationships are particularly delineated in The Financial Expert, The Guide and The Man - Eater of Malgudi. In these novels money and sex are presented in different guises and are explored and studied from different angles. When a character is excessively pre - occupied either with sex or with money, his normal life is disturbed , but peace and harmony ultimately return and normally is restored . This disruption of accepted order and the ultimate restoration of normalcy is such a selected theme of Narayan as is found in almost all his novels.
Comedies of Sadness:
Narayan is the only Indian novelist writing in English that has written 'Serious Comedy' a very difficult art form. “His novels are comedies of sadness. The sadness comes from the painful experience of dismantling the routine self which, the context being Indian, seems less a private possession than something distilled by powerful and ancient convention and, secondly the reconstruction or more frequently the having reconstructed for one, of another passionately. The comedy arises from sometimes bumbling, sometimes desperate, sometimes absurd, exploration of different experiences in the search for a new, and it may be done exquisitely in the appropriate roles.” “The complex theme of Narayan's serious comedies , then is the rebirth of self and the process of its education." Narayan's novels are woven of the material gay and the serious, the tragic and the comic and so when we read them, we smile through our tears.
Humour and Irony:
Humour and irony are found in abundance in Narayan's novels. He is one of the greatest humorists among the Indo - Anglian novelists. He is a pure humorist whose aim is to provide amusement to his readers. He is also a satirist but his satire is usually kindly and tolerant. In his novels humour is all pervasive and it is found in its various varieties. Humour of character, farcical humour of situation, verbal humour, wit, irony, etc. are all there. Margayya of The Financial Expert is one of Narayan's greatest comic characters and the end of The Guide is like that of tragi - comedy. There is ironic contrast. Narayan feels amused to see the follies and foibles of mankind and he skilfully conveys his joy to his readers.
Limited Range— Artistic Self - Control:
Narayan is a great artist who has attained eminence by recognising the limitations of his range and he keeps himself within his range. Like Jane Austen, he has achieved greatness by working on his ‘two inches of ivory’. He ultimately knows his chosen region of Malgudi and he rarely writes about other places and people. He belongs to middle class and is well acquainted with every aspect of the life of this class and he draws his characters from this class alone. In his novels men are shown in relation to men and not in relation to God or religion or politics because such relationships are outside his range. He is not the least interested in contemporary politics. Gandhi and his freedom movement are introduced only in one of his novels, Waiting for Mahatma and the result is rather disastrous. Further his range is confined by his comic vision. He creates only such comic characters as are fit for comic treatment. It is for this reason that the passions. “The stormy sisterhood” is avoided and attention is confined to the surface reality of life. He does not probe into the sub conscious or the unconscious. Narayan does not soar high because such soaring is incompatible with the comic mode.
Conclusion:
Narayan as a novelist follows the ancient tradition of story - telling but adapts it to his form and style taken from the West. The instruments of his critical strategy are comedy, irony and satire. Narayan paints the surface reality, for his aim is to bring into light the tragi - comedy latent in ordinary life. His endevaour is to present to the reader a picture that strikes him as typical of everyday reality. For this he depends on selection. He, therefore, does not touch such aspects of reality as are not accessible to comic treatment. He sketches only such picture of life as may bring smile on to the lips of a reasonable being. He is also careful to examine his subject matter from an angle from which its comic aspects are must prominently visible.