Beyond the Confines of Fiction
“How are the mighty fallen..”
It’s a line that reflects mockery. Mockery, that society imposes on a father who’s incapacitated when it comes to something as simple as reaching out to his troubled daughter. J.M Coetzee, through “Disgrace”, tells one such tale, which engulfs a father, much self-involved, in a vortex that throws him into his daughter’s seemingly turmoil-ridden existence. Moving far away from this set-up, we visit a black and white existence of a lawyer, with his two children, in the throes of adolescence. He’s a father Harper Lee carved out, to make appear the task of handling a child, effortless. Isn’t it a contrast of sorts, how two authors from two diverse backgrounds brought to light two very different facets of a relationship so commonplace?
We move to similar set-ups, in a time zone, that such authors might fail to identify with; with pressing familial issues that wouldn’t have crossed the mind of the average person, when books were themed according to political and cultural set-ups. Atticus Finch finds himself grappling with a situation that raises questions of morality. But his transition between the professional to the domestic, from the wrong to the right seems quite the humanly impossible thing to David Lurie. Lee and Coetzee, with divergent mindsets have painted with their pens, one fundamental truth – a relationship is perceived in a way that the players in it wish it to be.
Many a times, does one wish that the most complex of issues in the most ordinary of households, would give way to something consequential – something worth crying over. Many a times, does one wish that life remained confined to the 300 odd pages of the text, where all would ultimately fall into place. It’s a thought that seemed to cross my mind as I ran through my bookshelf this evening. How some books fail to let the reader detach themselves from the core issues is something I couldn’t fathom.
I laid focus on the very troubled relationships that most daughters try to come to terms with – that with the man who spells “support” for them. It’s a relationship that daughters try and run away from, to distant universities, to a marriage or to just a vacation, even though the escape is temporary in the last!
We find solace in the cure that the last chapter provides us, in the reassurance of the epilogue. But then, in the reality outside the confines of the jacket covers, which author, so powerful, might like to put us comfortably back into that one term – “Fiction” ?
Shaswati Das
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[image courtesy: http://bit.ly/4tl0Wh]
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