R. K. Narayan was an Indian writer born on October
10th, 1906 in Madras (now Chennai), British India, into a Hindu family. He was
one of eight children, six sons and two daughters. His father was a school
headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father’s school. As his
father’s job entailed frequent transfers, Narayan spent part of childhood under
the care of his maternal grandmother, Pavarti. During this time, his best
friends were a peacock and a mischievous monkey. When he was twelve years old, Narayan participated in a
pro-independence march, for which he was reprimanded by his uncle, as the
family was apolitical and considered all governments wicked. Narayan moved to Mysore when his father was transferred
to the Maharajas’s College High School. The well-stocked library at the school,
and his father’s own, fed his reading habit, and he started writing as well.
After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance
examination and spent a year at home reading and writing. After a brief job as a school teacher, Narayan
realized that the only career for him was in writing, and he decided to stay at
home and write novels. While vacationing at his sister’s house in Coimbatore,
in 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl who lived
nearby, and married her. After that, Narayan became a reporter for a Madras
paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The job
brought him in contact with a variety of people. Narayan sent the manuscript of Swami and Friend
(his first novel) to a friend in Oxford, and the friend showed it to Graham
Green, who recommended the book to his publisher, and it was finally published
in 1935. R. K. Narayan developed his literary career in the
English language and is considered one of the most important Indian
storytellers of the 20th century. Graham Greene considered himself a friend for life and
decreed success in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Narayan was for a long time,
before Salman Rushdie, perhaps the best-known storyteller of Indian origin. He wrote about situations in a provincial society in
which shopkeepers, beggars, businessmen and a greedy petty bourgeoisie live
bustling side by side with the old and static world of the peasants and saints.
His novels are set in the imaginary city of Malgudi, especially in the streets
and popular settings, a microcosm of South India that still reflects the values
and customs of the rural and archaic Indian world, but at the same time also the
encounter/disagreement with the modernization that advances inexorably. However, what stands out in Narayan is his use of
irony, the acute observation of the changes that are taking place, rather than
social or political denunciation. It also highlights how his characters and
their environments continuously refer to the literary and religious heritage of
India (sacred books, traditions and Hindu rites), a heritage that the author
particularly loves and studies. This makes Narayan the singer of a world that,
although not closed to the modern, continues to be deeply proud of its identity
and cultural heritage. Narayan received various awards and honours, such as
the Padma Bhusham or the Sahita Akademi, India's second and third highest
civilian awards. R. K. Narayan died on May 13, 2001 in his hometown of
Chennai.
A Horse and Two Goats
This is the history of a misunderstanding between a
poor Indian man, Muni, and a rich American tourist who is visiting the village. Muni is a very poor man who only has two goats and lives
in a thatched hut. One day, Muni wakes up with the craving for something more
sumptuous than the balls of cooked milled and raw onion he eats for his daily
meal, and asks his wife to make a curry for dinner. She agrees to make him a curry,
provided he can go to the local shop and buy the necessary ingredients for it. Muni goes to buy them, but the shopkeeper refuses to
allow him to purchase the items on credit, as Muni has no money. Muni returns
home to inform his wife of the bad news. She exasperatedly orders him out of
the house to graze his two goats, which are all he has left of a once large and
healthy herd of sheep and goats that was afflicted by a pestilence. As Muni walks toward the highway with his two scraggly
goats, he arrives at his favourite spot, an area beside the highway that is the
site of an old and grandiose statue of a warrior and a horse. Suddenly, a
foreigner in a yellow station wagon comes barrelling down the highway, only to
stop abruptly in front of Muni. He reveals that he is interested in buying the
statue from Muni, whom he assumes to be its owner. They both talk for a long time, but they don't
understand each other at all. Muni explains to the foreigner the miracles and
wonderful deeds carried out by the warrior of the statue, while the American
tells him about his life in New York and what he wants to do with the statue in
his mansion. The foreigner offers him more and more money, thinking that Muni
is haggling, and Muni believes that he wants to buy the goats, so he takes the
money very happily. After that, the American loads the statue in his
vehicle and drives it away, thinking he has bought it. Muni returns home triumphant, informing his wife that
he has managed to sell his goats, that had proven to be a curse to him as a
constant reminder of how far he had fallen in the world. His wife initially
assumes that he must have robbed someone, as the sum of 100 rupees is a small
fortune. However, Muni’s elation does not last long as, soon enough, he hears
the bleating of his goats at his door, and his wife threatens to call the
police. For me, the most interesting thing about the story is the detailed vision of life in India for poor peasants like Muni, and the huge difference of cultures that is reflected between that type of life and that of the foreigner. The sense of humour and irony that there is, transforms a hard to believe story in a fun and interesting one.
QUESTIONS
Talk about the characters
Muni (age, job, daily routines…)
His wife
The shopman
The postman
The American
Tell us something about the postman’s relationship with Muni. And with the postman.
Say something about Muni’s village.
What kind of conversation do the American and Muni have? What do they talk about?
What do people usually do when they try to communicate to a foreigner?
Once upon a time, offering a cigarette was a way to break the ice to start a conversation. Do you think we now communicate less because we smoke less?
“At seventy-one didn’t run, but surrenders to whatever came.” Do you think there is an age when every one of us has to surrender?
The America got stuck in the Empire State Building’s lift for hours, and then he decided to travel. If you had undergone a big thread in your life, what would you do to make up for it?
What is the American going to do with the statue? How did he carry it?
What kind of souvenirs do you by when you travel?
What is an “avatar”? Do you know something about Hinduism?
What is really communication? Is it always necessary to say something that makes sense?
What did Muni dream to do if he had some money?
What did the American buy, and what did Muni sell?
What happened when Muni arrived home with the money?
BIOGRAPHY: Clarice
Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 as Chaya Pinkhasivna
Lispector in a Jewish family. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war.
Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled,
penniless, to the other side of the world. They fled first to Moldavia and
Romania and finally to Brazil in 1922, where they adapted their names to the
Portuguese. Since then, Chaya received the name Clarice. Her mother died when she was 10
years old. She continued her education and entered the Law School in Rio de
Janeiro, but she followed her dream in the newsrooms, where her beauty and her
brilliance made a dazzling impression. In 1940, she published her first novel
“The Triumph””. Three months later his father died at 55 years old. As a student she met her future
husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, whom she married in 1943 and whom
she accompanied to many different countries, and she didn't only leave her family
and country, but her job as a journalist in which she already had a reputation.
For 15 years Clarice led a boring life as a perfect wife, but she never stopped
writing and always missed Brazil. On her first trip to Europe, in
Naples in 1944, during the Second World War, she was a volunteer in the
infirmary assisting Brazilian soldiers. There she confessed “I don't really
know how to write travel letters, I really don't even know how to travel”. In 1946, she published her second
novel “O Lustre” before they settled in Bern where her first child Paulo was
born. Back to Rio de Janeiro in 1949 she
returned to her journalistic activity under the pseudonym of Tereza Quadros,
but in 1952 she left Brazil again moving with her husband to Washington D.C.,
where her second son Pedro was born. In 1954, she published the translation of
her book “Near to the wild heart” into French, with a cover by Henri Matisse. In 1959, she separated from her
husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. There she resumed her journalistic
activity in order to get the necessary money to become independent. A year
after, she published “Lazos de familia”, which had some success, and the next
year “La manzana en la oscuridad”; in 1963 she published “The Passion according
G.H.”, which is considered her masterpiece. In 1966, the writer fell asleep with
a lit cigarette, which started a fire in her room and burned much of her body.
She spent months in hospital. Her right hand would never regain its mobility.
This had a big impact on his state of mind and caused frequent depressions. Clarice made many translations due
to her command of Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and Hebrew
and Yiddish with some fluency. The only translation into Spanish was “Historia
de los dos que soñaron” de Jorge Luís Borges in the Jornal do Brazil. Between the late sixties and the
early seventies she published children’s books, translations and adaptations of
foreign works, getting great recognition. She died in 1977, victim of ovarian
cancer in Rio de Janeiro, some months after the publication of her last novel
“La hora de la estrella”, at the age of 56.
STYLE: Clarice
developed a unique literary style marked by singularities and linguistic
innovations. She does not adopt the normative grammar standard, the sentences
are not made with coherent rigour, but with a chaotic syntactic structure.
Nevertheless, they are full of beauty and freshness of artistic expression. Her fiction focuses on the deepest
regions of the unconscious, she centres her work on the individual and her most
intimate afflictions, reproducing the thoughts of the characters. In this way
she tried to make the readers to analyse her works on their own. Therefore, the
common denominator of her texts is the idea of knowledge in itself. So, it is
the spontaneity of the representation of thought of the characters what
characterizes the chaos of such a literary mark. Currently, the work of Clarice
Lispector continues arousing interest, which leads her to be considered one of
the most widely read and recognized Latin-American authors in the world.
THE
SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD: This
story is part of a collection of thirteen short stories called “Family Ties”.
It was published in 1960 after the Lispector’s permanent return to Brazil from
the United States. This short story begins in the
depths of Equatorial Africa. The French explorer and hunter, Marcel Pretre,
comes across a tribe of surprising small pygmies. He was even more surprised
when, among the smallest of these, in the Eastern Congo, Marcel found himself
facing a woman no more than forty-five centimetres tall, adult, black, silent
and pregnant. “Black as a monkey” he informed the press. He called her “Little Flower”. Her race will soon be exterminated.
Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, the
great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes that hunt them with nets
and eat them. For strategic defence they live in
the highest trees. The Likoualas use only a very limited language and their members communicate primarily by gestures. The explorer is amazed by this
unique creature, considering her the rarest and most extraordinary creature on
the earth because of her minute size. A photograph of Little Flower was
published in the colour supplement of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was
wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. She had a flat nose, a black
face, splay feet. She looked like a dog. When readers of the Sunday newspaper
see the photograph, they react in different ways: A woman said “It gives me the
creeps”.
A lady was upset all day, almost if
she was missing something. Little Flower made a little girl
feel that “Sorrow is endless”. A mother said to her daughter “Poor
little thing! How sad she is! It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn't human
sadness”. A clever little boy had a clever
idea: “She would be our toy!”
In another house they imagined her
serving their table, with her big little belly! In the meanwhile, in Africa,
methodically the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest human being.
It was at this moment that the smallest woman in the world began laughing warm,
warm. Little Flower was enjoying life. She was experiencing the sensation of
not having been eaten yet. So she was laughing. The rare thing herself felt in
her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer
and also the explorer’s ring and the explorer’s boots. In the jungle, love is
not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange colour
of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed. He coloured, prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. The explorer getting control of
himself, severely recaptured the discipline of his work, and went on with his
note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few
articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower answered “Yes. It’s
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in.” Marcel Pretre had some difficult
moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. “Well”, declared an old lady,
folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He's
doing”.
COMMENTS: In
my opinion, Clarice Lispector tells the reader a beautiful story, which serves
as an excuse for us to reflect on some topics. One of them is how people around the
world react to the image of “Little Flower”. Without knowledge or cause, these
people express fear of what the “civilized world” doesn’t know. This image
evokes highly emotional responses. Lispector calls attention to many individual
reactions. In two cases she noted the emptiness
of love and silence of Little Flower. In a home, a girl about to be married
felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mamma, look at her little picture, poor little thing!
Look how sad she is!” “But”, said the mother, “It’s the sadness of an animal.
It isn’t human sadness”. Here we can see the sympathy and subsequent
dehumanization of Little Flower. In another house, a boy asked his
mother if Little Flower would howl and if she would be their toy. Her child’s reaction makes her have
a lot of thoughts about her own feelings and the superficiality of their life. In another house, in each member of
the family was born the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for
itself. “Imagine her serving our table”. Meanwhile, in Africa, the explorer studied
the little belly of the smallest woman in the world, and for the first time he
felt sick, because for the first time she was laughing. She was enjoying life
because she wasn’t being devoured. This is the secret goal of a whole life. The
explorer was baffled. She loved that sallow explorer and
his ring and his boots too. The explorer had some thoughts about
the difference of the meaning of love in his world and in the humidity of the
forest where love is not to be eaten. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed; he coloured prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. Severely he recaptures the discipline
of his work. He has learned how understand some of the tribe’s few articulate
words. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower's answer “Yes. That is
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in” maybe could be interpreted as
an invitation from her to the explorer… At the end of the story, there is a
lady who declared “God knows what He’s doing”. In my opinion, with this end,
Lispector wanted to express that everything in our life can serve to reflect
and to improve in our feelings.
In the story, there
is the expression “a box within a box”. It’s something like the Russian dolls
called matryoshkas. There are some stories like matryoshkas, e.g., The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John
Fowles, where the story situated in the 19th century gets mixed with
the story of the two protagonists situated in the 20thcentury. In
our case, there is a big story, a “container story”, and then some smaller
stories inside the big one.
👉Do you remember other novels or narratives
with a similar struture?
*
👉How much is it, in centimetres, seventeen and
three-quarters inches?
*
The story is about a
pigmy woman. Pigmies exist now, and they live in the Congo basin. But some
years ago an ancient race of small people was discovered in Indonesia, in Flores
Island. They don’t exist anymore, but this people coexisted for a long period
of time with the humans as we know them now. Some people say some specimens of
this race were hiding in the jungle of their island... in the last century! But
our question is the “otherness”, the fact that, when we meet someone different
from us, we become some more aware of our identity. And there is a debate about
what is better for us people: to try to avoid or reject what is different from
us, or to try to get mixed with this alterity.
👉What is your opinion about this?
*
The explorer called
the woman “Little Flower”. This is a kind of compliment, but it’s also a evidence
that somebody have power upon another somebody. The explorer acts as if he was God: he gives
names to unknown things.
👉Why didn’t he ask her name? Why didn’t he introduce
himself?
*
In the story, two
tribes are mentioned, the Likoualas, whom Little Flower belongs to, and the
Bahundes, that hunt, kill and eat Likoualas.
👉But, which is the worst danger for the
Likoualas, the Bahundes or the explorer? That is: is the ecosystem as good as
we usually think for some species?
*
The Bahundes are
cannibals. Do you think that when we eat meat we are a kind of cannibals? There’s
a sentence in the story that begins “The sadness of an animal...” Can an animal
be sad as a human being? Animalists say animals have feelings, and so we cannot
kill or eat them.
👉But, when in a documentary you see a frog
being eaten by a snake, can you see horror on the frog's face?
*
The story talks about
a woman belonging to a tribe, but no other member of the tribe appears in the
tale, not a man, not even the woman’s child’s father, not even the chief of the
tribe.
👉Why do you think is that?
*
In “The Smallest...”
we have again (remember Conrad) a western man that compares the non western
being with a dog.
👉Do you think this comparison is a good one
(the dog is the man’s best friend) or, the other way round, a negative one (it
compares a person with an animal)?
*
Another topic we mentioned
when we talked about Zweig (his novel The
Heart’s Impatience) is the “perverted tenderness”, the confusion between love and pity. I think it happens something similar with philanthropy.
👉Is philanthropy a positive useful thing or
a perverted one?
*
“The woman [the one
who saw the picture in the paper] was upset all day, almost as she was missing
something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the
air.”
“And she had a horror
of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at
life and happiness. [...] ‘I’m going to buy him a new suit’, she decided.”
You can see here a
mixture of deep thoughts combined with ordinary observations or common desires.
This is a reminiscence of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism:
we are transcendental beings, but, notwithstanding this, we have to eat,
breathe, walk..., the commonest of actions, because we live in the material world.
We are free spirits in a world that isn’t free, that is compact. They say Clarice Lispector was an existentialist
writer.
👉Can you tell us a bit
more about this existentialist thinking?
*
The woman loved the explorer, loved his boots, his ring..., and because these material objects, she loved him from head to toes, body and soul.
👉What is love, real love? Can we say "love = love + its circumstances"?
Jozef Teodor Konrad
Nałęcz-Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in Berdychiv, Podolia, back
then Poland occupied by the Russians, now Ukraine.
His father was
dedicated to writing and translating Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and at the
same time was a political activist in the service of the Polish nationalist
movement, for this reason he suffered a sentence to forced labour in Siberia.
His mother died of tuberculosis during the years of exile and four years later
his father died.
At the age of 17 he travelled
to Italy and then to Marseille where he enlisted as a sailor aboard the Mont
Blanc ship. By this experience, he found his passion for adventure, travel, the
marine world and boats.
In 1878, he moved to
England to escape military conscription, there he worked as a crewman on ships
iin the ports of Lowestof and Newcastle, he spended his free time reading
Shakespeare and because of that at the age of 21 years he mastered English and
writing all his work in this language.
After obtaining
English citizenship, he changed his name to Joseph Conrad.
When he was 40, he
settled in an English country house and wrote regularly. What he had experienced
until then had given him enough material to write several biographies. He has
been one of the best English writers of all time.
But he was not loved
by everyone, in 1975 a Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe called him a racist; he
said that his book Heart of Darkness was an offensive book full
of degrading stereotypes about Africa and Africans.
He died in
Bishopsbourne, England, on August 3, 1924, at the age of 66.
The Story
This story is full of
symbolisms and reflects the reality of the world we live, a constant struggle
of our thoughts and the moral ambiguity that exists when we have to make
transcendental decisions for our life.
In this story the
author reflects the conflict he felt between, reality and illusion, betrayal
and guilt, and guilt versus honour and heroism.
-Reality versus illusion:
through a narrator we can see the difference between what characters believe
themselves and what they actually are.
-Betrayal versus guilt:
when Arsat's brother had fallen and Arsat didn't help him, he ran away with his
love, and because of that his brother was murdered.
-Guilt versus honour
and heroism: after Arsat's love died, he decided to get some kind of revenge,
this way he could regain his honour and his loyalty to his brother.
Literary Figure
Conrad said that his
aspiration had always been "a meticulous narration of the truth of
thoughts and deeds"
In this story I found
many words that define a contrast
-black / white
-heroism / cowardice
-reality / illusion
-light / darkness
which is a typical
characteristic in the stories that Conrad has written.
Conrad's descriptions
of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago, and South America were based on his experiences
and observations. For everything else that he couldn't delve into, he used
literary sources.
In his novels he represented
singular universes, he strove to create a sense of place, his characters often
represented his destiny in isolated circumstances.
Fun Facts
One of the most
watched films of the last decades, Apocalypse Now, is based on Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.
In 1995, a series
based on the life of Joseph Conrad was broadcast on Spanish television.
«...TVE-1, the first
channel of TVE, transmits from today the series El rajá de los mares, which
narrates the life of one of the best English writers, Joseph Conrad....» El País. (August 31, 1995)
THEMES / QUESTIONS
Characters, plot, scenery.
Do you think possible writing well in a language
that isn't your mother tongue?
Exiled writers: to write about your country, is
it better to be an exile?
Some say that all the literary works are
autobiographical. Is it possible to write something completely
non-autobiographical?
According to Sebald, Conrad said he felt his
only presence in the Congo was already a crime. Do you feel guilty of the world
problems? That is, if you are a man, do you feel guilty of injusticesagainst women? If you are white, do you feel
guilty of injustices against black people?
Is it possible a friendship between opressors
and opressed ones?
Is exotism a kind of colonialism?
In some of Conrad books, the protagonist tries
to get redemption for some past guilty deeds doing some kind of heroicity. Do
you think is it possible to redeem completely our past mistakes? How?
W.G.
Sebald, in his book The Rings of Saturn,
writes a chapter about a period of Conrad’s life and about the singular meeting of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement. Roger Casement was a British diplomat
and an Irish conspirator who worked for the independence of Ireland. There’s a
novel by Vargas Llosa, El sueño del celta,
where he relates the life of this fighter for the freedom of his country. Well,
it’s curious to see how we can understand better situations that don’t have
any effect on us or that are very far away from us than situations that are nearer
in space or time. But, to go back to our topic: Casement denounced the
atrocities committed by the Belgian companies and colons under the rule of king
Leopold II during the Congo conquest, and Conrad meet Casement in his travel up
the river Congo at the end of the 19th century, and they agreed completely about
this point. There’s a book about this horror: El fantasma del rey Leopoldo. Now, when you consider why Belgium or
other countries became all of a sudden very rich, you have to suspect...
In his
book, Sebald explains that Conrad had to live a very adventurous life. When he
was five years old, his father left his business to dedicate entirely to the
cause of the independence of Poland, at this moment under the Russian Empire. So,
very young already, he saw conspirators, secret conversations, mysterious
people, intellectuals, poets, writers trying to overthrow a foreign government
imposed upon their country. In this period, the supporters of the nationalist
party wore black clothes (that was forbidden by the tsar) as a sign of mourning
for the repressed people. In Ireland, in the past, the British government also
forbade the green colour. And you know already about yellow. But Conrad’s father
(a writer, poet and translator) was arrested and exiled to a very cold town. In
consequence of the conditions of this exile, his mother died (she was 32) and
four years later his father (he was 49). So Conrad was an early orphan and
lived under the tuition of his uncle. However, he got a very good education in
languages (e.g. French) and sciences.
When he
was 17 he expressed his desire to go to sea, to be a seaman. This was the most
extraordinary calling for a member of the Polish gentry and for somebody who
had never seen the sea. So she went to Marseilles and worked as a sailor. But,
when he wasn’t at sea, he stayed at Marseilles and meet very peculiar people: bohemians,
adventures, etc., and... Spanish Legitimists! There were machinations, conspirators,
illegal trade, smuggling, etc. Conrad was involved in many of these things and
even had an affair with a woman called Doña Rita, an ex-goat shepherd from the
mountains of Catalonia, or perhaps Paula, an ex-goose girl from Hungary, (at the
present we still ignore if she was the same person); she was Prince Don Carlos’s
lover. At the crisis of this love affair, in 1877, Conrad was shot by a rival,
or shot himself, in the chest, but he survived.
He went
aboard again, now to Constantinople, and then to England, where he lived and
learn English for 12 years. At this moment he went back to Poland to visit his
family and there he applied for a job with the Société Anonyme Belgue pour le Commerce du Haut Congo. They offered
the command of a steamer to go up the Congo River. At the time the Congo was a
vast unmapped land. The Société established
there a slavery system of work where 500.000 people died every year for
exhaustion and cruelties; however, in 10 years, the value of the company shares
was ten times higher.
Conrad realized
then that, by his mere presence in the Congo, he was guilty of that horror.
After
some months, he went back to Europe completely down because of what he had witnessed.
