The biography of a village breaks brave new ground
The unconscious is outside time because it will not be denied expression. It resists the lure of history. It cannot be pinned down once and for all in a narrative. However, Madhavan Kutty's attempt is precisely this impossible task. To find an idiom that will bear witness to the insistence of the cultural unconscious of his childhood.
Written in a style that distances itself from the crop of realist fiction that readily sets themselves up as national allegories, Kutty's experimental narrative pushes Indian writing in interesting new directions. Published originally as A Banquet of Memories in Malayalam, this riveting book is precisely that-though I don't like the word 'banquet'. The cultural unconscious is not something that the author enjoys. It is rather the author who serves as a conduit, albeit an intelligent one, for the autonomous enjoyment of the cultural unconscious.
That is why O.V. Vijayan's comment on the jacket is so accurate. He says categorically that "whether this book is fiction or memory is besides the point". Touche. The unconscious or psychic reality cannot distinguish sufficiently between the two. However, if memory is the point at which Madhavan Kutty's narrative interfaces with the cultural unconscious, what sort of enjoyment is at stake here?
What else but in the surprise of sexuality? And in its underlying traumas. Did not Freud posit the traumatic awakening of the child's mind to the riddles of the sexual body? Does not the childhood gaze of the narrator focus compulsively on the women of the community? On their submerged, wet bodies in ponds and rivers and its elusive relationship to their clothes? Bodies at work, bodies at play, bodies revealed unexpectedly, bodies that reproduce in defiance of a momentary passion.
Bodies that must, it appears, finally come to terms with the seductive ploy of the mundu. This book reads at times as an anecdotal study on the role of the mundu in the fantasy structure of the Keralite. The exact place and frequency with which the mundu is tied or untied is a major clue to a character's psychosexuality.
The traumatic core of the narrator's memories in this book revolves around two women that he encountered as a boy. Both these women are sites of enjoyment. The first is Kunjhumadhavi, the village prostitute whose operative fiction is a teashop. The second is Kuttimmalu Valliamma, a legendary beauty, who is summoned into marriage on two occasions by the local Thampurans. These aging Thampurans decorated their households with trophy wives. But died soon enough for Kuttimmalu to return home a wealthy virgin. And, no doubt, much wiser about the libidinal politics of patriarchy.
The superhuman powers of sexuality invested in these women by the narrator as a boy is rudely called into question in retrospect. What was it about sexuality that made these women into mere objects of exchange? Why were their escapades merely tales that the narrator 'overheard' or was sworn to secrecy before being told? Wherein lies their aura?
Kutty's narrative is an achievement because it unravels these psychic knots without falling prey to the deities of local morality. Though bereft of a plot and surfeited with characters, this admirable experiment will, one hopes, help our wannabe novelists disentangle their private neuroses from the burden of being midnight's children. Madhavan Kutty serves us a useful corrective. The writer must write out of his symptom, not merely about it.