Is the Language of New Fiction Androgynous?

On travel recently I decided to go by the general rule I had broken for years. I chose two anthologies of short stories and memoirs of editor Vinod Mehta, instead of my usual quotas of long novels. Two vastly different writers authored the two books of short fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri, a stunning new literary voice recently discovered in the US, and The Interpretor of Maladies, her debut book of nine short stories. She was all of 28 years, as her luscious page size photograph amply demonstrated.

The second was by a veteran literary name in Malayalam, Paul Zachariah. Collected short stories of the author's writing career spanning several decades. I loved both the books, and used Mehta only to space out the devourings of the two with some lighthearted and occasionally perceptive banter. Of course, Mehta had some interesting pieces, but too many of them were dated.

An interesting thing happened because I asked my travelling partner, a 50 something-former teacher which of the books she liked more than the other. Then, like the Maugham's loathsome Mr Know It All, I ventured to guess that she would have preferred Lahiri to Zachariah.

The 'I told you so' worked. The reason, as I thought about it , was that there might actually be a distinct kind of difference between the literary tastes of men and women. That’s not terribly profound, but it is also not clearly available in daily life either. The fact that men and women are actually from different planets, and the most they could share, was probably a favourite spot for holiday.

And yet it was not that simple either. My companion had more adjectives describing what all she liked about Zachariah's stories. Minutely imagined and brilliantly inventive throwback to Kafka and his fabulist ilk. Each story a solid chunk of a story pickled in a pungent mixture of devastating satire, subverted individual questions to God, devil and politician.

But she said she identified more with Lahiri's urban melancholia lit in mellow soft lights that slowly brought out the subtle complexities and robust mundanity of the lives of geographical and cultural migrants. Some displaced through human catastrophe, others sheltered by nature's seemingly pernicious drives.

A friend of mine is of the opinion that women writers are best at letters, diary writing, epistolary novels, and emotionally moving tales. On the other hand, men are better at thought provoking, form bending avante garde kind of literary works. He obviously is not much of a politically correct kind. The issue is submerged, however in the generality of tossed prejudices. Once this crust is shaved off, the question is, does literature too have sex? And is there a sexual preference for readers too?

Among the copious literature on the God of Small Things that I read, and cannot recall by any definitive index, was the fact that the book sold a lot in the US. One major reason was that women in hordes were buying it. Arundhati Roy's Ayemenem, and the tale of the zygotic twins caught in the madly swirling passions of their fiercely independent mother, and the still oppressive heat of the social milieu of village Kerala, touchingly naïve at times and full of sublime flights at others, was an instant hit. Emotions thrived all the way to the bank for Roy, riding on woman power.

There are of course Marquez, Kundera and even Rushdie who sell. Perhaps equally appealing to both sexes. The only reason could be that these novelists are what one might call writers of epics. More Marquez and Rushdie, less Kundera. But, Kundera has the advantage of a prose style that is sensuously androgynous in the cocktail of politics and private dilemmas that he creates. Just as Rushdie and Marquez leap through the tropical suns of their respective lands into fantasies that address the children in men and women, rather than seek men and women readers.

In Marquez's biography of sorts, it is actually an extended interview by his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza

The Fragrance of Guavas, the Columbian writer says his greatest fan was a woman who copied out the entire translation of One Hundred years of Solitude in her own hand. She wrote to him saying she could not decide who was madder, him or her. Of course, she loved the book.

Despite the fact that college forces youngsters to discover and marvel at the achievements of Kafka, Beckett and Woolfe, these authors remain milestones gathering moss of a receding memory. Eventually, you get over The Wasteland too, just as you did get over Shakespeare. Maybe all these are the slow and gradual development of the secondary sexual characteristics in the reader. And eventually he or she reaches literary adulthood, and soon has individual preferences for writers. And the heterosexuality of the majority of the population reveals itself also through the choice of writers, not through the gender of the author but the gender of the work.

Oddly enough, writers themselves fall into the seemingly female counterpart in the argument of reason versus instinct. I remember, not long back in a panel discussion of nobel winners on the BBC, Gunter Grass was the only winner of the literary Nobel . Others on the panel included primarily science, economics and peace winners.

The debate was on how responsible was science in regards to mass destruction. Besides Grass, the physics prizewinner whose name eludes me, was the only one who raised the question of whether science need be as amoral as scientists want it to be. The other argument was of course, that it was mostly political leaders who choose to subsume scientific discoveries to morally questionable ends.

Gunter Grass argued for extending the responsibility of the end use of scientific discoveries and inventions to the scientist. The other scientist who was with Grass was, unsurprisingly, a proponent of peace and part of an anti-nuclear think tank. There was one more thing that joined them, both had seen the destruction of the world war as children.

Mexican poet writer Octavio Paz too had views that almost sound sentimental, for a man who eschews all sentimentality in his poetry and his perceptive essays. In his Nobel address he pleaded for a more humane society saying

" … the triumph of the market economy (a triumph due to the adversary's default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a mechanism the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both conscience and compassion. We must find a way of integrating it into society so that it expresses the social contract and becomes an instrument of justice and fairness. The advanced democratic societies have reached an enviable level of prosperity; at the same time they are islands of abundance in the ocean of universal misery. The topic of the market is intricately related to the deterioration of the environment. Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers and the forests but also our souls. A society possessed by the frantic need to produce more in order to consume more tends to reduce ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and people themselves to consumer products. Everything becomes a thing to be bought, used and then thrown in the rubbish dump. No other society has produced so much waste as ours has. Material and moral waste."

Of course, there has been Hemingway, who profoundly relegated feminity from fiction to the kitchen, collected wives, established a sparklingly new style of writing and finally put a bullet through his head. But, Hemingway is hardly the icon of the literary world he used to be. The new modernity is the androgynity of fiction and its language. It is not the brief triumph of ideal, like the sixties' generation. It is the synthesis of the ideal and the practical. The time not to be ashamed of idealism, confusion, and sentiments but for the survey of these, while also treating the fracture of focus, ideology and commonality