Amarasekera and the experience of culture

Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera turns 80 tomorrow

By Prof. Wimal Dissanayake

(November 11, Colombo,Sri Lanka Guardian) Martin Wickremasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera, more than most other Sinhala writers, have sought to focus on the experience of culture and its ramifications as vital stepping stones to analysis, both in their creative and critical works. Culture attains the status of a character in their fiction. Gunadasa Amarasekera’s octalogy of novels establishes this fact very vividly. Amarasekera calls attention to the experience of culture in relation to the two rival concepts of nationhood and globalization. In this short essay, I wish to underline the importance of Amarasekera’s work in understanding the densities, contradictions and ambivalences associated with the experience of culture in a rapidly modernizing world. My intention is to suggest a possible framework of analysis of his work. This would explain the overly abstract nature of the essay.

One of the defining features of the modern period is the increasingly convoluted and complex interplay between internationalization and local culture, and its implications for the idea of nationhood. Clearly, this process has been in operation for centuries, but the velocity of it has risen very sharply during the past four or five decades. This interface has generated remarkable transformations in the spaces of economics, politics, and culture, as newer forms of capital, originating in Western societies, began to display their local visibilities and inflect in unexpected ways historically and culturally sedimented practices. How the symbolic forms of Western capitalism are legitimized, localized, transformed in most countries in terms of the historical narratives and changing shapes of life worlds is at the heart of the discourses of local culture. This problematic is imaginatively explored by Gunadasa Amarasekera in his fiction; that is why the theme of the experience of culture is so vital to a proper understanding of his work.

A fruitful way of comprehending the dialectic between the global and the local, the world and the home, is through an engagement with the production of newer and more nuanced indigenous cultures. When we seek to explore the intersecting narratives of the global and the local, our target of observation is the production of indigenous cultures and their ever changing contours in relation to the imperatives of the global. The local culture is never static; its boundaries, both temporal and spatial, are constantly being re-demarcated. It is characterized by a web of power plays, interest-based agonistic confrontations, pluralized histories, and struggles over asymmetrical exchanges in action. The local is ceaselessly re-inventing and re-fashioning itself as it tries to reach beyond itself and meet the forces of the transnational. What is interesting about the experience of culture the twentieth century and the twenty first century is that it foregrounds and gives figurality to the these complex processes as they interact within the national space. Gunadasa Amarasekera’s fiction invites our attention on account of the manner in which he focuses on this many-sided experience of culture in relation to the agonistic forces of nationhood and globalization. A symptomatic reading of the eight novels of Amarasekera that begins with Gamanka Mula should enforce this point.

The eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz is surely right when he remarks that social understanding and cultural re-description calls for a continual tacking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in a way that would bring them simultaneously into our path of vision. The celebrated French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari highlight this phenomenon when they came up with the idea of de-territorialization, in which the creation of local culture is inflected by the constellation of forces operative elsewhere. What is interesting about Amarasekera’s work is that he has made available a representational space for the expression of the local imaginary in relation to the contest between nation and the transnational. When we seek to make greater sense of the life of his protagonist Piyadasa, and the numerous conflicts he encounters, we have to keep in mind the density of local culture as it strives to situate itself within the contested terrain of nationhood and the global. Consequently, the idea of politics of culture in the wider sense is central to Amarasekera’s analytical ambitions.

One productive way of understanding the experience of culture in the globalized society that we inhabit is through the dialectic between culture and civilization. Raymond Williams believes that the word culture is among the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so in large part due to its complicated trajectory of evolution. The word civilization, which shares a common territory with culture, is at times employed interchangeably and at times antithetically. F.R. Leavis, for example, pursuing an avenue of thought opened up by Mathew Arnold, perceived culture to be in an antagonistic relationship with culture. As the title of his short work Mass Civilization and Minority Cultures suggests, culture has to undertake the salvage work after the levelling down influences of civilization. However, some other critics see culture and civilization as unproblematic partners. The modern world is witnessing the convergence of culture and civilization. In modern society, culture and social life are conjoined with each other in novel ways as reflected in the aesthetics of commodification, the cultural imperatives of consumerism, the emergence of the society of the spectacle and image capitalism. Hence we need to disentangle the ambitions of culture and civilization. In Gunadasa Amarasekera’s writings, reading between the lines, we begin to see how he values culture as a useful shield against consumer-centered civilizational forays as he probes into issues of tradition, social memory, history and modernity. This is an angle that has not been adequately commented upon by critics who write about Gunadasa Amarasekera’s work.

The many-sided relationship between the global, and local and the experience of culture has to be framed in terms of the dynamics of cultural modernization. Amarasekera has accomplished this re- framing cogently. Indeed, his entire body of work can be described as a template for understanding the changing shapes of Sri Lankan modernity in relation to tradition, culture and history. In contradistinction to the modernization theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, modernity is now regarded as protean and that the process of modernization is never linear. As Amarasekera illustrates in his creative writings, modernization is a global process that reshapes our understanding of self and community, time and space, in culturally specific terms. As he emphatically points out, modernity is never reducible to the economic imperatives; its relationship to culture is significant and demands close attention. That is why Amarasekera challenges in his commentaries on Marxism and culture the simplistic bifurcation of base and superstructure, and attempts to value culture as vitally linked with the modes of production. At the same time, Amarasekera demonstrates very convincingly in works such as Sinhala Kavya Sampradaya, that an understanding of culture presupposes a deep encounter with language; insensitivity to language precludes cultural understanding.

The interaction of tradition and modernity, which is one of Amarasekera’s chief interests and a phenomenon that he explores perceptively, is not one of direct opposition; modernity seeks to engage tradition at different levels, promoting concomitant re-valuations and re-inventions of tradition. Cultures, to be sure, are not timeless and immutable entities, but products of history, geography and politics. They are terrains on which meaning systems linked to everyday life are constantly made, unmade and re-made. As we read Gunadasa Amarasekera’s fiction we begin to appreciate the value and importance of this line of thinking. It is the frame of intelligibility supplied by this mode of analysis that enables us to make greater sense of novels such as Gamanaka Mada, Vankagiriyaka, Yali Maga Veta and Athara Maga. They are not simple narrations of contemporary social history; they are re-framings of contemporary social history within a distinct analytical optic.

As I pointed out earlier, the global cannot be comprehended by de-linking it from the local and issues of nationhood. This, to be sure, is not a simple antithesis as some tend to think. As Amarasekera has illustrated in his fiction local should not be equated with the parochial; or mythical; the normal tendency to mythicize has to be avoided. As we see in the experiences narrated in novels such as Gamanaka Mula, Inimage Ihalata as well as collection of short stories such as Vil Thera Maranaya, the local becomes both a site of crisis and hope, of acceptance and resistance, of accommodation and subversion. As evidenced in the trials and tribulations of Piyadasa in Amarasekera’s eight novels, this interplay between the local and the global fuels his dilemmas. If we are to attain a deeper understanding of the shape and movement of the experience of culture in contemporary societies, we need to undertake more situated and culturally-grounded analyses. This is what Amarasekera is seeking to do in his fiction. We feel the need for newer analytical vocabularies that enable us to transcend the easy dualisms that we alluded to earlier; this would allow us to grasp the essence of the experience of culture in modern times. Gunadasa Amarasekera’s work offers us a helping hand in this undertaking.

Another important facet of Amarasekera’s work, theoretically speaking, is the way in which it focuses on the concept of experience. Admittedly, this is an idea that demands conceptual clarity. In recent times, this term has engendered a great deal of discussion. The post-phenomenological turn during the last three or four decades has had the effect of devaluing the concept of experience as ideologically suspect. It is a product of discourse. The writings of such scholars Derrida, Lyotard, Althusser serve to emphasize this point. The formulations of Barthes and de Certeau tend to reinforce the importance of experience while Foucault and Bataille adopt a position in between. Lyotard has expressed the view that experience is in terminal crisis and that the forces of technology and science, the mass life of the metropolis, and the lack of a clear sense of temporal direction conspire to undermine it.

Theorists such as Raymond Williams see the value of experience as a concept while recognizing its fraught nature. It is Williams’ conviction that experience signifies an appeal to the whole being, consciousness in its entirety, as against reliance on more restricted faculties. Therefore, it is a part of that general movement that which underwrites the evolution of culture. Williams articulates the view that the power of the appeal to wholeness, against modes of thought that would exclude certain types of consciousness as being merely personal or emotional, is reinforced in the history of literature. Like Raymond Williams, Gunadasa Amarasekera recognizes the value of the idea of experience as a mode of understanding the leading edge of culture in a rapidly globalizing world. In collections of short stories like Marana Manchakaye Dutu Sihinaya and Vil Thera Maranaya and in the novels, we see the way Amarasekera underscores the importance of experience, which is inextricably linked to history and culture, as a way of coming to grips with the problems of being-in-the-world.

The concept of experience appears to shuttle back and forth between two extremes. Intellectuals such as Althusser assert that experience is the medium of ideological illusion; it is only through the production and deployment of concepts that we can understand reality. Critics like Leavis, on the contrary, have argued that we need to regard experience as the space of truth. Both these viewpoints are extreme and misleading. One should be able to anchor ones analysis in experience while recognizing the formative powers of ideology that play on it. It seems to me that it is this approach to experience that Amarasekera adopts in his creative writings. The way he has drawn on some of the ideas of George Lukacs, such as reflection and totality and typicality in his critical writings, further enforces this point.

As I stated earlier, what is distinctive about Gunadasa Amarasekera’s work on the experience of culture is the way he underlines the importance of the national space. He points out the necessity of recognizing the fact that global circulation of capital, commodities, desires and pleasures associated with modernity have a way of compelling us to re-think the significance and functionality of nationhood. At a time when social commentators are quick to write the obituary of the nation-state, Amarasekera in his work has repeatedly illustrated its resilience. His attributions of meaning to the idea of nationhood, national belonging, are replete with diverse resonances. One way of making sense of them is through the experience of culture as it connects up with nationhood.

As Gunadasa Amarasekera has pointed out, especially in the later volumes of his chain of eight novels, the capitalist global economy, information technologies, consumerist imperatives have contributed significantly to the re-imaging of nationhood. It is his conviction, as exemplified in his creative and critical writings, that in the final analysis, the interaction between the global and local, the production of new transnational mobilities, have to be re-thought against the background of transnational capitalism and the vitality of the nation-state. These issues can best be understood as national allegories of modernity. This is why I believe that Amarasekera’s corpus of creative works can justifiably be characterized as representing an allegory of national modernity. He, more than any other Sinhala writer, has demonstrated the fact that the changes occurring in the national space provides us with a crucial point of departure, and a useful and inescapable point of reference, for the study of globalization and the experience of culture.

What Amarasekera is arguing is that the highly acclaimed work of Benedict Anderson which sees nations as imagined communities, insightful as it is, does not pay adequate attention to the divisions and fault lines with a nation and that we need to understand these fissures in terms of the experience of culture. Another important facet of Amarasekera’s effort, which is closely connected to the facets described earlier, is his emphasis on the idea of place. Scholars such as Arif Dirlik have persuasively argued that in our euphoria over globalization and transnationalization of culture, there is a proneness to ignore the importance of place. Throughout his writings, Amarasekera has emphasized the salience of place and the importance of fashioning a place-based poetics. This emphasis on place is tied to the idea of nation and the nuanced enframing of cultural experience.

What I have sought to do in this short article is to focus attention on the rudiments of a potential framework of analysis for coming to grips Gunadasa Amarasekera’s work. To my mind, the themes of experience of culture, nationhood and globalization are vital to a proper appreciation of his creative and critical agenda.

-Sri Lanka Guardian