Postmodernism in Indian Subcontinent Literature in English (Talk given for EFLU 1/9/2021)

I saw a Hindu Keralite woman who is pro Dalit but believes in intersectionality, all details I gathered from the comments to her post, write on FB a sentence as a post which read "Every man is a Brahmin." I do not know if the post was a barb at Brahmins or a compliment (said tongue in cheek) but from the comments it seemed like a barb, but the point here is that it made me think of discourse, text and context, subtext, and finally, my topic for today, postmodernism. So let me launch into it with full vigour and vim. The said lady was not aware whether she was inverting the tradition of awe and reverence surrounding the word Brahmin or not, but not giving a context was centering her discourse on India, Hinduism and caste, not aware that her readers may not be from India or Hindus or aware of the nuances or implications of the layers of meaning a word like Brahmin used in such a context may have. Postcolonial writing or fiction in India has such a seeming drawback by becoming too national, regional and local, unlike the writing that deals with theory,  but to come to postmodernism, this reminded me of the writer I consider the first postmodernist of India, someone Salman Rushdie also considered that, namely GV Desani. I need to start with him as I am going to speak of Postmodernism in the Indian subcontinent's literature in English briefly

But first the usual definitions of postmodernism.

Brian Dunigan says: "Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement in philosophy and literary theory that generally questions the basic assumptions of Western philosophy in the modern period (roughly, the 17th century through the 19th century)." He means the philosophers of the Enlightenment as we all know. " Postmodern philosophy is characterized by broad scepticism or relativism and a general suspicion of reason. It also broadly asserts that Western intellectual and cultural norms and values are a product of, or are in some sense influenced by, the ideology of dominant or elite (political and economic) groups and at least indirectly serve their interest." "Many postmodernists hold one or more of the following views: (1) there is no objective reality; (2) there is no scientific or historical truth (objective truth); (3) science and technology (and even reason and logic) are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power; (4) reason and logic are not universally valid; (5) there is no such thing as human nature (human behaviour and psychology are socially determined or constructed); (6) language does not refer to a reality outside itself; (7) there is no certain knowledge; and (8) no general theory of the natural or social world can be valid or true (all are illegitimate “metanarratives”)."Although some postmodernists reject the relativist label, many postmodern doctrines constitute or imply some form of relativism. Many postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective or that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false (implying metaphysical relativism), that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (implying epistemological skepticism or relativism), and that there are objective, or absolute, moral truths or values (implying ethical subjectivism or relativism). Instead, reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by “discourses” (shared linguistic practices) and can vary with them."Some famous thinkers associated with postmodernism are Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre-Félix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Slavoj Žižek."

My personal footnote is that postmodernism has two streams, for explaining it simply, one being that anything that follows modernism can be called postmodern but I am more interested in this second narrower stream limited by theory and defined by what I read out in this talk though I will be shifting from one to the other at my own sweet will and pleasure.

My entry into post-modernism will not be through theory but through literature, having done my research on Samuel Beckett. That his later plays, novels, short stories, short prose pieces, short pieces of criticism, and poems are post-modernist there is no doubt. Anyone who has read Beckett on Joyce and then the third part of his trilogy Unnameable will get what I mean.

Beckett says of Joyce in his essay "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce": Why, Mr Joyce seems to say, should there be four legs to a table, and four to a horse […]? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you, and in the meantime must be content to know why horses have not five legs, nor three. He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. (32)

Beckett, Samuel. “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” Disjecta Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment: Samuel Beckett, edited by Ruby Cohn. Grove Press, 1984: pp. 18-33.

This Joyce who is on the way to omniscience bothers Beckett as he later says of himself, in comparison, in contradistinction:  "I am a non can-er, a non know-er." This fundamental Cartesian doubt without reaching Cartesian foundationalism which comes to be predominant in the work of Samuel Beckett is at the same time Socratic as well as deconstructive of the Enlightenment philosophers who begin with Descartes and who are postmodern to the core. 

If we trace out post-modernism's major writers who follow his footsteps or go on parallel journeys at the same time but in their own ways we would have to mention Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe Grillet, B S Johnson, Sam Shepard, and several others, one of whom I will come to later.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1985 was awarded to Claude Simon "who in his novels combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition."

He says in his speech receiving the prize: "Nothing is sure, nor does it offer any other guarantees than those Flaubert, following Novalis, speaks of: a harmony, a music. Searching for it, the writer makes only laborious progress. Feeling his way forward like a blind man, he goes up culs-de-sac, gets bogged down and starts out anew. If we at all costs must find some edification in his efforts, one could say it lies in seeing that always we are advancing across sands which shift under our feet."

This strikes the note of postmodernism in creative writing so well that it needs no further explication, except to point out that by still talking of words like harmony and music and advancing it suggests that it is not a totally destructive or nihilistic enterprise.

To come to GV Desani and his All About H Hatterr, Rushdie says: "  "H. Haterr is the first post-modernist Indian novel if you like. It's much more self-conscious and reflexive than Midnight's Children." The sentence is self-evident, Rushdie considers postmodernism as self-consciousness and reflexivity and of course complexity in the use of language and experimentalism/experimentation with it in the Joycean rather than the Beckettian tradition. Rushdie is echoing Linda Hutchinson here, knowingly or unknowingly in her book on Metafiction, that was once staple diet for us researchers who wanted to know about (postmodernism. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236818644_Salman_Rushdie_A_Postmodern_Reading_of_His_Major_Works_review)

But first, before coming to Rushdie, more on Desani. "Desani's penetrating insights that a) there are no small deeds, that b) thoughts are things, and that, c) sincere, energetic practice of any faith or religion can lead to personal peace — conclusions from his decades of mental culture and researching religious practices worldwide — is an underappreciated contribution to world religious dialouge." "Desani's teachings are respectfully summed up as follows: The ancient goals of Vipassana and Enlightenment are real and attainable. However, the quest is difficult. It is not for everyone. Others should simply try to live good, ethical lives."

https://www.desani.org/Home#h.p_pkQhfFXgTndW

According to me these are already there in ab ovo in his first novel and he too would agree as effect according to him could bring about cause in his study of nadi texts, and so the post modernism is not in his self consciousness or reflexivity but in the abyss opened up by his use of language which is opposed to his content which is an attempt to reconcile East and West, whether successful or not, a "positive trajectory." towards peace by one firmly entrenched in the East more than the West. What I mean by abyss here is that he did knowingly, not at all like Amos Tutuola, author of the "Palm Wine Drinkard", constructively, to language, that decolonisation that has led to its present "bastardization", but in the process making the West acknowledge that he knew what he was doing. This deconstruction of language to make it Indian English is what makes him post-modern uniquely.

While for Rushdie the definitive text of Indian postmodernism is this novel on Hatterr, for me it is Rushdie's Satanic Verses. This is because while Desani is a wider ecumenical in his outlook, like thinkers like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Bede Griffiths, Ken Wilber to some extent, and Raimondo Panikkar, Rushdie is guardedly deconstructive of the tradition he belongs to.  His novel has the points noted above which are 1. a suspicion of metanarratives, in this case his own Islamic one, and 2. a suspicion at the same time of the narrative process itself whether as practiced in the past in the writing of the Quran or in the present in its practice by himself as the controversial parts are put as magical realism or a series of magic dream vision narratives that may or may not be taken as a serious or playful subversion of the story telling's ideological notion that it has to be "truthful", which is one of the reasonable assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. He also demystifies the idea that writing is "Sacred" in some inspired Grecian sense of coming from above and not from the unconscious. 

Since this is about subcontinental literature let me now come to the one writer in Pakistan who to me merits the title of postmodern more than any other.  That is Zulfikar Ghose who was a friend of BS Johnson and influenced by Beckett. His concerns and Rushdie's and Desani's have some overlap but what makes him interesting is his transition from modernism to postmodernism, that is from Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Proust and Beckett but for him form, style, aesthetics and images as well as a creative pattern and chance matters and the sentences that lead to the unfolding of what happens along with the imagination. This is very postmodern especially in his trilogy on Brazil which some call magic realism and some a travelogue but he calls a  superimposition of the story of Jason and the Argonauts on South America and America, the first part coming from chance in taking it on from Bullfinch's Anthology. I refer to "New History of Torments".

In Bangladesh, post-modernism is often connected to a writer like Taslima Nasreen. While hers is postmodern in being a criticism of the majoritarian discourse in her own country from the standpoint of a suffocated minority whether it remains the same when in exile is something we cannot be sure of. Other writers we need to consider are Arvind Adiga and Arundhati Roy but I do not know if they fit the post-modern bracket as well as a Jeet Thayyil may in Necropolis which is more experimental. we can also consider a Shyam Selvadurai and Queer Theory in works like Funny Boy if we want to bring in Sri Lanka.

More interesting than these writers who seem to me to be more modern than postmodern is Jhumpa Lahiri's novel in Italian and what Homi Bhabha says of it:

1. HOMI BHABHA: She's going to Italy, where she moved and lived for many years
2. until quite recently.
3. I think she's just returning to Princeton.
4. But I think that for her, it's again a theatrical move.
5. It's like saying, scene change, you know, scene three.
6. Now you are in Italy.
7. Now do what you do.
8. Make your life again and your work in this other language.
9. And of course, the interesting thing about the book
10. is that I think it's a bilingual tradition.
11. It's published both in the, as I understand it--
12. DAVID DAMROSCH: Right, bilingual, right.
13. And then a translation of the Italian.
14. HOMI BHABHA: So you have both side by side.
15. DAVID DAMROSCH: Yeah, yeah.
16. HOMI BHABHA And I think that is a very interesting and courageous
17. interpretation because in the seam of the book where the two pages end
18. and meet, you begin to get this notion of what is translatable
19. and what is untranslatable.
20. And of course, if we just extrapolate from that,
21. the possibility of people living side by side,
22. whether they are in a migrant situation or a situation of refugees,
23. living side by side demands not a fence or a wall between people
24. so that they can tolerate each other.
25. But what it demands is that people are able to experience
26. that scene, that untranslatability.
27. In some ways, I know it sounds pious, but to respect that
28. and then to work around it, its difference has to be worked.
29. Difference is not what you come with in a negotiation of peoples.
30. And that's what I tried to suggest when I wrote
31. and continue to write about hybridity as a form of translation.  "https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:HarvardX+HUM12x+1T2019/block-v1:HarvardX+HUM12x+1T2019+type@sequential+block@09f75f946df940e5a290ed500fd93eec/blockv1:HarvardX+HUM12x+1T2019+type@vertical+block@782a43583c6b4196bad1380d0899d7b0"
    "This novel consists in a series of short chapters, between 2 to 6 pages long, in which we follow a nameless narrator as she occupies different spaces. The titles of these chapters in fact refer to the place—not always a ‘physical’ one such as in the case of the recurring ‘Tra sé e sé’ chapters (an expression that for the life of me I cannot translate in English)—she is in or thinking of. She’s on the street, in a bar, a restaurant, a museum, her apartment, by the seaside…you get the gist. The novel takes place during a single year, and our narrator will often remark on the current season. She’s a solitary woman, and although she’s deeply aware of her loneliness, she’s not burdened by it. It is perhaps because she’s alone that she can get lost in her surroundings or in her thoughts. Even in those occasions where she interacts with others—who also remain unmanned and are referred to as her former lover, her friend, a professor, etc—she remains a lonely person. By seeing the way she interacts or navigates certain spaces, we learn more about her. Ultimately, however, she retains an air of mystery.
32. "Dove mi trovo, which will be published in English as Whereabouts next spring, is the first novel Jhumpa Lahiri’s has written in Italian. Having read, and deeply empathized with, Lahiri’s In Other Words—a nonfiction work in which she interrogates her love for and struggles with the Italian language—I was looking forward to Dove mi trovo. Although I bought this book more than a year ago, during my last trip to Italy, part of me wasn’t ready to read it just yet. A teensy-weensy part of me feared that I would find her Italian to be stilted. As it turns out, I should have not second-guessed Lahiri.
33. https://wishfullyreading.com/2020/10/22/dove-mi-trovo-whereabouts-by-jhumpa-lahiri/
34. This brings us back to Samuel Beckett and his ability to write first in French first and then translate it back into English in a sense,  affirming that there is nothing new under the sun as he says in his novel Murphy echoing Ecclesiastes, but also to post modernism where the onus is not on meaning in any common or usual sense of the term.
35. Footnotes:
36. Modernism/modernity 10.4 (2003) 789-790 Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works. Sabrina Hassumani. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Pp. 154. $35.00 (cloth). If the status of Salman Rushdie's fiction is still in doubt—and for all his post-fatwa fame and the fact that Midnight's Children won the Booker of Bookers in 1993, there are still many critics who share Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra's opinion that it is but "a marvel of clotted sententiousness . . . an alarming new kind of anti-literature"—few would deny the eloquence and force of Rushdie's non-fiction writing. His essays and reviews, many of them collected in Imaginary Homelands and Step Across the Line, are more often than not sharp-toothed but illuminating polemics on topics as various as the failure of black film-makers to tell populist stories, the Raj revival of the early 1980s, and the relationship between politics and the novel. They try—succinctly and with the fevered intensity that deadline-driven journalism induces—to grapple with metamorphosis, cultural hybridity and many of those themes enumerated in The Satanic Verses: "broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home." Given this rich archive of self-scrutiny and auto-critique, scholars who choose to write on Rushdie are faced with a particular challenge: namely, that Rushdie has almost certainly tackled or theorized the same issues they are now raising."

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 7 (On characterisation - the second part)

 Now let me look at characterization in a traditional way by giving examples of them from novels that are popularly common.

Flat character -  "Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader." (https://www.britannica.com/art/flat-character)

Typical examples are villains and sidekicks or friends of the hero. Horatio is always loyal to Hamlet right to the end, and loyalty is his characteristic from beginning to end with no change, except to be a foil for Hamlet to say things to him like " there is more in heaven and earth than what is written of in your books, Horatio" and "tell my story." We do not know if he does or not but presume he will, as the story comes to us from Saxo-Grammaticus and Shakespeare and not Horatio, interestingly enough. Such characters are also called stock characters and stereotypes, static ones.

Dr Watson is also the perfect foil or sidekick.

The perfect villain is Moriarty. He is the antagonist who even kills the protagonist, hero, but fails.

Round characters are dynamic and become archetypal, are often major or main and hero, heroine and protagonist. 

Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times by Charles Dickens is a round, developing, changing character, who becomes a hero by virtue of a change of heart. He thus becomes a protagonist and not just a central character. This is true also of Louisa Gradgrind who evolves into a heroine over time. But minor characters too change and evolve or degenerate, as Rachael becomes more angelic, despite her suffering and Tom Gradgrind in the course of the novel grows progressively worse. 

As usual, while talking of these things, I go over familiar ground so get bored but more interesting is absent character, and the character of non-living things and living creatures others than human beings that make novels interesting.  Another thing that really interests us is the comic character. They are memorable when pulled off well, Falstaff is a famous example. My examples come from drama twice, here, hope you don't mind. The jester, the clown, the harlequin, the fool, Punch, they are a type that enthralls us. 

To come back to Merrylegs, the dog, in Hard Times. 

‘Thquire,—you don’t need to be told that dogth ith wonderful animalth.’

‘Their instinct,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘is surprising.’

‘Whatever you call it—and I’m bletht if I know what to call it’—said Sleary, ‘it ith athtonithing.  The way in whith a dog’ll find you—the dithtanthe he’ll come!’

‘His scent,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘being so fine.’

‘I’m bletht if I know what to call it,’ repeated Sleary, shaking his head, ‘but I have had dogth find me, Thquire, in a way that made me think whether that dog hadn’t gone to another dog, and thed, “You don’t happen to know a perthon of the name of Thleary, do you?  Perthon of the name of Thleary, in the Horthe-Riding way—thtout man—game eye?”  And whether that dog mightn’t have thed, “Well, I can’t thay I know him mythelf, but I know a dog that I think would be likely to be acquainted with him.”  And whether that dog mightn’t have thought it over, and thed, “Thleary, Thleary!  O yeth, to be thure!  A friend of mine menthioned him to me at one time.  I can get you hith addreth directly.”  In conthequenth of my being afore the public, and going about tho muth, you thee, there mutht be a number of dogth acquainted with me, Thquire, that I don’t know!’

Mr. Gradgrind seemed to be quite confounded by this speculation.

‘Any way,’ said Sleary, after putting his lips to his brandy and water, ‘ith fourteen month ago, Thquire, thinthe we wath at Chethter.  We wath getting up our Children in the Wood one morning, when there cometh into our Ring, by the thtage door, a dog.  He had travelled a long way, he wath in a very bad condithon, he wath lame, and pretty well blind.  He went round to our children, one after another, as if he wath a theeking for a child he know’d; and then he come to me, and throwd hithelf up behind, and thtood on hith two forelegth, weak ath he wath, and then he wagged hith tail and died.  Thquire, that dog wath Merrylegth.’

‘Sissy’s father’s dog!’

‘Thethilia’th father’th old dog.  Now, Thquire, I can take my oath, from my knowledge of that dog, that that man wath dead—and buried—afore that dog come back to me.  Joth’phine and Childerth and me talked it over a long time, whether I thould write or not.  But we agreed, “No.  There’th nothing comfortable to tell; why unthettle her mind, and make her unhappy?”  Tho, whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him; never will be known, now, Thquire, till—no, not till we know how the dogth findth uth out!’

‘She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she will believe in his affection to the last moment of her life,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don’t it, Thquire?’ said Mr. Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy and water: ‘one, that there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t’other, that it hath a way of its own of calculating or not calculating, whith somehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!’ (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm#page216)

And absent characters? Sissy's father Jupe is one.

Godot is powerful as he is absent, back to drama.

The more absent a character the more powerful. In Jane Eyre, there is a character who is absent mostly, Rochester's wife, and her maid Grace Poole is suspected to be her, but this "madwoman in the attic" who set the house on fire after finding out that Jane is to marry Rochester on seeing her bridal gown and other wedding finery, a fire in which Rochester is badly wounded, is a very powerful presence, so powerful as to get another writer Jean Rhys to write a  novel on her, called The Wide Saragasso Sea.

The tragic heroine is powerful, witness Ophelia.

So is the femme fatale, witness  Medusa.

The heroine who succeeds is powerful, as in the story of Jane Eyre with her "reader, I married him" at the end, making us feel thrilled. The one who does not, like Catherine, in Wuthering Heights is too. The woman of loose virtue fascinates us as in Madame Bovary and Nana, or at leat fascinated men, and women love witches, as in Macbeth. 

But which character do I love the most among women. Hester Prynne, the woman in the Scarlet Letter, and her child Pearl hold endless fascination for me. 

And the most chilling villain? Roger Chillingworth of Scarlet Letter.

Chapter 15.

Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men's memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier, the higher he rose towards heaven?

[213]

“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as she still[214] gazed after him, “I hate the man!”

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days, in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study, and sit down in the[215] firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her[216] heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. “He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance?

The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

“Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”

[217]

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it, with winged footsteps, to catch the great snow-flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds, that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her[218] sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.

Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter,—the letter A,—but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then, she heard her mother's voice, and flitting along as lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne, dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.

“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment's silence, “the green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught me in the horn-book.”

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but, though there was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.[219]

“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”

“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's face. “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”

“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but, on second thoughts, turning pale. “What has the letter to do with any heart, save mine?”

“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously than she was wont to speak. “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with! It may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?—and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then[220] be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker coloring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could be made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging—and could have been, from the very first—the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage,—an uncontrollable will,—a sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-respect,—and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavors of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.

Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her[221] errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind, with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching questions, once, and again, and still a third time.

“What does the letter mean, mother?—and why dost thou wear it?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! If this be the price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it.”

Then she spoke aloud.

“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister's heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold-thread.”

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognizing that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed,[222] and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.

“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other inquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter:—

“Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!” (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25344/25344-h/25344-h.htm)

And the hero. Gilgamesh and Achilles. No need to look further though both are not from novels.