THE URGE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVELS OF
ANITA DESAI
Mallam Naveen
Anita Desai
comes as a fresh breeze at a time when novelists in India began to shift their
emphasis from the larger concerns of life to the individual characters creating
a wonderful interior landscape, experimenting with new themes and new
techniques. Fiction for her is the medium, through which she seeks to explore
the innermost areas of the psyche of her protogainsts. Her feminist world-view
covers various aspects of man-woman relationship in the Indian context.
Edmund Fuller
observes that people suffer not only from the external problems like war, lack
of security, famine and poverty but also from inner problem, a conviction of
isolation and purposelessness of life.
Anita Desai is very much interested in the psychic life of her
characters. For her, it is ‘depth’ in a character which is interesting rather
than going round about it. Her main concerns are the agony of existence, of her
protogainsts whose values, beliefs and structures are jeopardized which in turn
stand in the way of the individual’s self-consciousness.
Desai has
successfully drawn the portrayal of inner world of her characters. They are
extremely sensitive like Maya in Cry, the Peacock
or Sita in Where Shall We Go this Summer? The problems
faced by her characters are not merely of survival. Some of them are eccentric
like Monisha in Voices in the City.
They can’t
adjust to the standards of life, and the general tendency of life. As Desai
opines:
I am
interested in characters who are not average but have retreated or been driven
into some extremes of despair and so turned against, or made to stand against
the general current. It is easy to flow with the general current, it makes no
demands, it costs no effort. But those who can’t follow it, whose heart cries
out the great “NO”, who fight the current and struggle against it, they know
what the demands are and what it costs to meet them.
Desai wants
to explore the consciousness of relationships with a remarkable intensity and
consistency. Her characters are intense, self-absorbed and possessed by the
consciousness that never allows them peace of mind, constantly analysing,
probing and merciless in its passion for introspection. The price they pay for
being individualistic and assertive is heavy. Some times it is their sanity as
in Cry, the peacock and
some times death as in Voices in the City and Fire on the
Mountain. Arjun in Cry, the peacock proclaims that,
“life, no matter how elegantly lived is meaningless when it is lived for
nothing but one’s own pleasures”.
The
fragmentation of experience brought about by the familiar authority, the
tyranny of tradition, the conflict between generations and the resultant
loneliness and isolation of the individual are strikingly presented through
Desai’s technique of ‘stream of consciousness’. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly
explains why Desai uses this technique:
Since her
pre-occupation is with the inner world of sensibility rather than outer world
of action, she has quick, supple and suggestive style enough to convey the
fever and fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal
characters.
Desai shows
how her characters are caught in the in the unsavoury condition of their
married life and how they struggle to achieve self-definition to understand the
nature of life and lead it meaningfully and peacefully. She sets herself
seriously to voice miseries and helplessness of millions of married women who have
existentialist problems and difficulties. She is mainly concerned in
investigating the emotional world of women, understanding of feminine
psychology as well as sensibility.
She conveys her main motives at the end of the novels such as Voices in the City, Where Shall We Go this Summer?, Fire on the Mountain, and Clear Light of Day. Thus Anita Desai’s fiction talent in effectively delineating the battle in the psychic-scape of self-consciousness of her characters has added a new dimension to the Indian English fiction.