Metapfiction

Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.


Metafiction - This won't be there in the final draft probably.

The thing about writing a novel is this: where does one start? The form itself is puzzling in 2016 December. Is it about writing a lakh of words? Or is it about passion and intensity? Is it form and genre, structure, style, language, mood, ambience, atmosphere, plot, story, characters, characterization, settings, details, feelings and emotions, points of  view and all the other things he teaches like exposition, rising action, conflict, confrontation, complication, climax, falling action and resolution? Is it having a giant vocabulary and having an impeccable grasp of grammar and syntax as well as dialects and registers and a feel for the language as it is used now and was and will be later? Using lakh reveals one's nationality. "Where do I begin? To tell the story of how great a love can be?" "Let's start at the very beginning." But where does 'a great love story' begin?  One that is 'older than the sea'? And 'younger than the mountains'? Is he a plagiarist for using all these quotes? No. He puts them in double or single quotation marks and it does not matter in creative writing. Is this going to be just that or something more? Can he roll all three stories he wants to into it plus the story of the nation or nations he has been in to make it what he really wants to, an epic novel like the ones the Russians wrote. The novel had died after them. Tagore's Gora and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandmath and Lalithamabika Antharjanam with her novel that included Gandhi in it were all written in its heyday in a sense by their getting to know of the greats only later and so they had been still been able to write 'proper' novels. Every great novel after that was proof of its deconstruction, be it Ulysses or Death of Virgil or American extravaganzas like Gravity's Rainbow which he hated and could not finish or Beckett's classics or any other novel that still mattered after the Russians, especially after Anna Karenina. This dissolution of the well-made novel existed even in War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago. It could be seen even in Jude the Obscure and in the fact that Dickens could not finish his last Drood novel.

He is that rare phenomenon, a great writer stuck in the past in a world that no longer cares for such a gigantic misnomer or freak and he wants to write a novel, this one - part of a trilogy but starting with the last one first and not yet knowing how to go about it but feeling his way.

It makes for good reading, though, as it always did.

One could start with repetition. That is how one always starts. The first woman he loved was his mother. Then his sister. After Freud, no such statements are possible without admitting that it is all incest, too, of some kind or the other. Oedipus complex. What is the word for sister love complex? He does not know. There must be one. Sibling love, probably. Interesting. Must google it or look it up. Musil was the one who dealt with it in his classic incomplete novel. Diotima and Ulrich. The novel had killed him or he had died while writing it. Would this one kill him too?

GSA, it seems.

'Roll call of names. Names fly in the wind.' He has written of it in Anamika too and thus in a diary ages back and was now writing it here again. This would not do, one does not talk of love by listing out the names of every girl or woman he had ever had a crush on as if it was a poem or a shopping or laundry list. That does not lead to the novel - what would lead to it is planning, research, preparation, writing, perfect execution - the things he blamed Modi of not doing regarding demonetisation.

So where does one begin?

Humour?