Ian Powell
English 214
Jamie Stock
5/8/2012
Interpretations of Masterpieces
Is Interpreter of Maladies a masterpiece, a classic book, both, or neither? Jhumpa Lahiri is a talented and well respected writer, her characters are relatable and sane, and her settings uncommon and carefully described. She meets all of the criteria for being called a good writer, and surpasses most others because of her writings’ unique poise. Isn’t it odd that so many authors create great works while so few ever craft a classic, let alone multiple? There are many writers, including women, who are established as having written classics, but not one of those women is among the likes of Plato, or Shakespeare, or even Tolstoy, who died only a hundred years ago. Women writers do not have an icon to aspire to in the same sense that men do. Perhaps they could aspire to be like Jane Austen, but what do many men think of her books? Plato wrote a full two millennia ago, Shakespeare will turn five hundred soon, and even though Tolstoy did die in the last hundred years, his works eclipse all other women writing during that time in terms of esteem, popularity, and general interest among the educated. War and Peace is perceived as superior to Jane Eyre. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but are there really no women from Russia writing at the same time who could have told an equally compelling tale from a woman’s perspective? Possibly the reason is that men have tended to dominate consumerism, education, government, and religion for nearly all of known history, forcing most women into less intellectual pursuits like childrearing, essentially loading history’s deck of cards with classic male writers and leaving the few women who sneak in to fight over what scraps of influence remain. The so-called “modern classics” are more inclusive, but as writers from every background join the canon competition increases. To stand out takes an excess of skill, and Lahiri has arguably got it, but does writing a classic take skill, luck, or something else entirely? Lahiri’s books will be read by many, and many of them will pass it on to others, but in a millennia her name will likely be forgotten, because there is something that she, and almost every other writer alive lacks, which is that ability to connect with people on a completely universal level, apart from separations in time and space. Her stories are decidedly middle class and Indian, her style is too elegant and pretty to be liked by everyone, and her characters do not accomplish the impossible tasks or make any of the great realizations so many popular book heroes do. They are only real, like she is, and her works will live on for as long as reality remains parallel to the way she writes it.
A perfectly valid question would be why are the classics important? Does society even need them anymore, or should people read modern books, written for modern people? While it may be easy to dismiss classics and their study as unnecessary, the plain and simple fact is that the classics never die, even if the entirety of society wanted them to disappear and burnt every last book, classics would live on in the minds of those who read them, never leaving, likely tunneling their way into the subconscious forever. The love affair of Romeo & Juliet, the wisdom of Plato’s Republic, and the inspirational, splendid gallantry found in Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have contributed greatly to western society, and are a few examples of these undying words. Those writings have all shaped culture, especially modern culture, which is entirely dependent on tweaking the culture of the past, and brought society to a point where most people believe in equality, rights for all, and peace worldwide, but still don’t have any women regarded as masters that even a man should strive to be. Italo Calvino writes in “Why Read the Classics?” that classics are books which people most often say they are rereading, rather than reading for the first time. He says they are books which are never finished saying what they have to say. His statement “A classic author is also one that you cannot be indifferent to, who helps you define yourself in relation to him” rings especially true in many ways, the most revealing being that he considers a classic author to be a man.
Another writer on the subject of classics from a different background was Fannie Clark, a 1920’s school marm, who tackled the question with her surprisingly insightful essay “Teaching Children to Choose.” She questions what should be read to children to educate them. “Is it from judgment, or tradition?” she asks, brought on by a student stating that she felt the classics are those books which should be taught in school. She wanted to promote modern authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose stories exist in a world not unlike the one her students occupied. Another thing she noticed was a severe lack of perspective from the boys in her classes. She asked all of her children what their favorite books were. Some had standard answers, some liked books on electricity, others travel, but she noticed that “in no case was a boy committed to a girls’ book… a great many girls on the other hand, prefer boys’ books… one girl wrote apologetically, ‘Maybe I’ve been unfortunate in my choice of girls’ books but so many of them seem sickly to me.’” Clark also thinks that more modern books should be read than before. Because for every classic there is a modern story with a message for the people of the time, a vital message she says, that matters only to the people of the time. To cement her point Clark lists some books which she feels should be read to modern students, because they concern modern problems. The Virginian, The Big Fight, Who Goes There?, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, not a single book on her list is recognizable to an average contemporary reader, and several are no longer in print, yet they are the books she felt were most important.
One could argue that for any woman artist or writer, a greater man in the same genre could be named. For Austen there is Cervantes, for Cassat there is Monet, for Dickinson there is Dickens, for Janis Joplin there is Jimi Hendrix, for every woman who has created art, there is a man whose recognition overshadows her. While it may be true that the best painter, or singer, or poet whom ever did live was a man, it is just as likely that it is a woman, in fact it is more than likely a woman alive today (as more than half of the population is women, as well as at least half of the world’s creators of art, and there are many more people alive and educated now than ever before.) The same could be said about writing, but Jhumpa Lahiri is no such woman. Her work is not flawless, but flawed like a good character should be. It has limited ambition and does not exceed the humility of its author. Few readers will have a profound moment within her text, because her style forces the reader to contemplate her story, and to then derive meaning from it, without the use of obvious motifs or allegories.
So many writers are exemplars of the craft while so few ever become legends. To write even one classic would immortalize your name and viewpoint. To write more than one could change the course of history. Take Aristotle, who studied under Plato and taught Alexander the Great, the man who conquered over half the world by the age of thirty-three. Take Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War is still read by military strategists and historians alike, and whose all inclusive battle tactics were mandatory read for Eastern military commanders for millennia. Take Plato, perhaps the most influential person to ever live, who studied under Socrates and wrote The Republic, which formed the basis of democracy as the modern world knows it. Shakespeare’s dozen or more classics have given so much to the English language that in a given day one is likely to hear to him quoted at least once, if not many times. No woman has that sort of claim, and no society values any woman’s work even close to the way the West views Shakespeare, or the East Confucius and Siddhartha. Not forgetting that religion is based on literature, every major religion’s principle books are written by men. A few books of the Old Testament, Esther and Ruth, represents women’s points of view but the overall narrative in the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, even America’s own Book of Mormon is the viewpoint of a man. In the case of the widest spread Abrahamic religions, women are seen as antagonists to men who seduce them and force humanity out of paradise. Human history has passed down passive dismissal of females for centuries, leading to a modern society which values equality but is unable to obtain it, even in something so seemingly easy to change as a list.
Is the fact that Jhumpa Lahiri is a woman a hindrance to her eventually becoming a classic writer? Statistically it would appear so, as women only make for at most twenty percent of the writers of classic books, and that is on the most inclusive lists. “The World Library,” a list developed by the Norwegian Book Club, was created by surveying a hundred writers, male and female, from fifty-four countries to select the ten best books, in any age. The list of writers chosen was evenly distributed amongst the East and West, with about a fifth of the authors selected for the list being women. Among the women chosen were Emily Brontë, for Wuthering Heights, Elsa Morante for History, Jane Austen for Pride & Prejudice, Toni Morrison for Beloved, and Virginia Woolf, who has the distinction of having two books on the list, the most out of the women (several men have more books on the list than her like the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). The list makers chose not to order the list, apart from calling Don Quixote by Cervantes the greatest literary work of all time, as it was the most picked book, seemingly loved across all cultures and peoples. There is no surprise in a man’s work being chosen as the greatest of all time, even on a list praised for its inclusiveness and equality.
Many women have written classics, like the Brontë sisters, with a half dozen classics between them. Emily Brontë & Jane Austen have several classic books that are household names still thanks to popular films. Virginia Woolf remains a household name, same as Mary Shelley and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. All of those writers are considered, on some level by society and the elite, as being for women, and are sometimes even called women’s writers, whereas men like Cervantes are everyone writers if the situation is reversed. This attitude seems to be changing, but as always history cannot. Recognition of great writers, even those obscure, can still happen, especially in a society as connected and global as the modern world.
The stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies center around the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans living on either side of the world. The short story which shares a name with the book is a perfect example of how Lahiri creates relatable people despite the exotic locations or situations they find themselves in. Like Mr. Kapasi, who is a tour guide leading the Das family to the Sun Temple at Konarak in India. The family are young rowdy Indian-Americans with stereotypical tourist behavior. Lahiri makes these characters so believable that it’s easy to forget that they were Indian too, because of how strange everything seemed to them. “They were all like siblings… Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents… It was hard to believe they were regularly responsible for anything other than themselves.” Mr. Kapasi, and Lahiri, could be judging western parenting on a whole with his thoughts on the Americans. Parents like the Das family are the types of people everyone knows, they barely watch their kids, and they are more self absorbed than their kids are. The sentiment seems harsh, but as the story progresses so does Mr. Kapasi’s attitude toward them. Mrs. Das, the irresponsible mother who acts like a bratty older sister to her kids, takes an interest in Mr. Kapasi’s other job as a translator for a doctor, telling the man what ails the people who speak only Gujarati. She seems fascinated that he is an “interpreter of maladies,” and talks to him in detail about some of the people’s conditions. This conversation sparks a fantasy in Mr. Kapasi. “She would write to him, asking about his days interpreting at the doctor’s office, and he would respond eloquently… make her laugh out loud as she read them in her house in New Jersey. In time she would reveal the disappointment in her marriage, and he in his.” Lahiri’s description is both beautiful and sad, considering that Mrs. Das later loses his address and forgets all about his stories, albeit staying together with her family and her responsibilities, which in almost any case is a good thing. The tragedy of Mr. Kapasi is reminiscent of, but wholly different from another master of tragedy.
Why is William Shakespeare a household name while Jonson, and his widely praised comedies like Bartholomew Fayre, known only to the educated, and those few eccentric conspiracy theorists? Why are there dozens of Shakespeare festivals, but only a handful for someone as prolific as Tennessee Williams? Why are cruel fables like Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel well known around the world, while the dozens of other short stories which are in many cases far more child appropriate, compiled by the Brothers Grimm, known only to people who pick up their book? What does it take for something to become a classic and not just a masterpiece? Why are so many more ubiquitous books written by men? Can the words of an Indian woman become as commonplace as one by the most renowned British men? It is easy to argue that Interpreter of Maladies is a masterpiece of short fiction which accomplishes everything it attempts. Is that enough for it to become a classic of our time, even if only in one facet of American culture? For some the book should be constantly off the shelf, in the hands of some friend, some coworker, a son or daughter, always on the move, affecting readers in the slightest of ways, just enough for them to spread the word. In her own way Lahiri will be a legendary writer, but not one in the sense that Shakespeare was.
Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, & Harper Lee are more contemporary examples of women writers not relegated to being “women’s writers” by society. They are unfortunately, among a few women writers of such stature among a sea of men with more prolific and well regarded careers. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce hold much more esteem than their female counterparts of arguably equal or superior greatness, when speaking of craft and universality of themes. They are the sorts of writers who act as a benchmark to tell if someone is informed or not. They will be read in a century, possibly in many centuries, because of what their stories can show humanity about itself. For Fitzgerald it was the embodiment of the American experience. For Hemingway is was his unpretentious style and ability to engross without embellishment. Joyce is altogether different, with sometimes near incomprehensible syntax and extreme vulgarity, his stories stand to get more popular as society becomes more openly accepting of offensive behavior. To Kill a Mockingbird will always be read by American society, but in future decades it will be for its depiction of history, not of society as it is. Toni Morrison will be seen the same way, as a means of telling the history of a people, not all people, and not in all times. Lahiri will be read like Morrison, a woman with the ability to connect two places, people, and times, her works will be read, and studied, and praised, but they will never be classics. It isn’t possible to know who will be regarded as “the writer of the generation,” but safe to assume that it will be a man, possibly for the last time, because society may benefit from a reversal of perspective.
Society forces women to empathize with and relate to men in all forms of media. Disney movies star heroic thieves like Aladdin while the girl’s role model, princess Jasmine, is in trouble but pretty looking, Snow White eats an apple and dies until the great Prince Charming saves her, the sleeping beauty Briar Rose falls asleep until she receives the kiss of one who loves her; the names are numerous but the story is the same; girl in distress, man saves her, her actual problems, like the fact that she has absolutely no control over her own life, are never addressed. While it isn’t only the case even when a girl is the hero, she never deals with explicitly girl problems, never forcing the boys watching to actually to relate to her as a female, only as an heroic person acting with bravery.
The Odyssey, Tom Sawyer, Ulysses, Moby Dick, all classics of the highest regard, and all stories about heroic men with whom all are supposed to be able to relate. Haven’t all men hunted something our whole life to the point where it consumes our thoughts? Hunted down and killed every last person who came to suit your wife while you were supposedly dead? These perspectives are important to the canon and all are deservedly classics, but Jane Eyre should always be among them. At least a single book by a single woman, but it is debatable if any are. Certainly there should at least be one great woman writer in all this time, one as popular and omnipresent as Shakespeare, it seems that in all of this time it would happen. The problem is that societies led by men without the ability to relate to female perspectives lead to very situation mankind finds itself in today, preaching about equality that no one in power wants to give.
Lack of perspective leads to oppression and likely is the reason that women are largely left out of the Western Canon. If the world’s most comprehensive and inclusive list of modern classics, assuredly the time when female writers have had the most exposure, which is regarded at the most equal with writers representing all of humanity, has less than a fifth being written by women what does that mean? Does it mean that a writer like Lahiri doesn’t stand a chance, because her writing appeals to those with more refined tastes, or because her characters come from the middle of society and hold no one responsible for their misfortunes? Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer of “uncommon poise and elegance” as Amy Tan put it on the book’s sleeve, but unlike Tan, whose Joy Luck Club will likely be read by middle and high school students for decades to come, her works will not be forced on unwitting children, who will not encourage their progeny to read it too. Her stories will be for curious people to find out about, and only for those who look. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies lacks anything obvious, anything too easy to like, no upbeat anthems about the wonders of life, no straightforward themes, not even an overarching tone to grasp onto. Instead it has more rewarding finds, like deeply heartbreaking characters, impossibly inept relationships, surprisingly well bonded families, and beautiful pieces of observation and setting.
The widespread use of the internet and this generation’s extreme ability to connect with other parts of the world has made people like Lahiri able to become popular in places she never would be a century ago. It has also lead to a change in mindset about the status of women artists and writers. There are dozens of sites dedicated to women in art, and many pose the question of why there are no great women artists. Maybe if enough of them ask society will be forced to answer, and maybe a great woman will emerge, or some woman of the past will have works exceeding Klimt and Picasso at auction. As for writers the change is all in the form of self examination, and writers asking what they can do to change the mindset of the future.
Bibliography
Calvino, Italo. “Why Read The Classics?” The Uses of Literature. Boston: Mariner, 1987. Print.
Clark, Fannie. “Teaching Children to Choose.” The English Journal 9.3 (1920). Web. Apr.-May
2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/802644>.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Mariner, 1999. Print.
The Norwegian Book Club, ed. “The World Library.” The Norwegian Book Club. May (2002). Web.
Apr.-May 2012. <http://www.evene.fr/livres/selection/les-100-meilleurs-livres-de-tous-les-temps.php?>.
