Hi friends…
I was reminded of this incident when I was writing the previous post…this happened way back in 1997 in Bangalore…I was working on my PhD at (the then) CIEFL, here in Hyderabad, and my parents were residing in Bangalore…I had gone there for a brief break in June… I was working on the early days of the novel in Kannada and books and information and research material on this topic was difficult to come by and moreover, scarce…so, Bangalore was the place where I would visit all kinds of book shops, old and new, and places like Kannada Sahitya Parishat and Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Kannada Pustaka Pradhikara to see whether I could get hold of early novels, articles in old Kannada journals, books on criticism in Kannada, etc., and one such bookshop that I would visit every time I visited Bangalore was located in Jayanagar 4th Block in the shopping complex there…I would also buy other kinds of books also there like English novels…and one such English novel I purchased there was one of the earliest novels to be written in English…
‘This’ novel was published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767 (yeah…that early!!!)…Prof Aniket Jaaware, who taught us English literature at Fergusson College, Pune, would often talk about ‘this’ novel when discussing early English novelists like Richardson and Fielding, though ‘this’ novel was not prescribed for our study… ‘this’ novel, he said, defied the conventions of novel writing at a time when the ‘novel’ was just about beginning to establish itself as a genre in English literature and pointed out the unique narrative employed by the novelist…like distortion of chronological sequences, blank pages, blank sections in within chapters, actual drawn squiggles to indicate the movement of how a particular character flourished his cane, chapters only with chapter number headings with nothing else in it (almost telling the readers that I don’t have anything to tell in this chapter!!!), chapters that begin with a lot of star marks, and so on…the novelist looked to be actually laughing (sarcastically, I think) at the entire convention of novel writing…and poking fun at the various trappings of the new genre…I was intrigued and curious and went to the college library to take a look at ‘this’ novel…a cursory look was enough to understand the novelist’s intentions, though I didn’t read it at that time…
So, when I saw this novel in this shop in Bangalore, I bought it…and it was one of those inexpensive editions and didn’t burn a hole in my pocket…the first thing I did when I went home was to flip over the pages trying to locate all the ‘interesting’ things that the novelist did with ‘this’ novel…and as I was doing this, I noticed that almost ten pages, from 209 to 128, were missing…I was frustrated and was getting irritated thinking about the distance that I’d have to travel to return this and get an unflawed copy…I went there the next day and (fortunately, I hadn’t written my name or covered it with a polythene sheet as is my usual practice…) showed them the book and the page number jump and asked them to give me a complete copy…the shopwallah (again, I forget the name…) took out another copy of the novel and gave it to me…
I thanked him and before leaving, I thought I should verify this copy to see if it was complete in all respects…I did a good thing…this copy too had the same page jumps…I showed him this copy and he was surprised…and then he brought out all the copies that he had and we started flipping pages…I found the same problem in all the copies that I examined…and he too found the same problem…by now, I was getting angry…he then told me that probably all the copies in the stock that he got were flawed and started blaming the publishers and printers for not paying attention to such things…he said he had another unopened box of novels from the same publishers in his storehouse and that he’d get it the next day and it might have whole copies of the novel and that I can get my fresh copy then…I was thinking of another wasted journey and a return the next day…
I don’t know what struck me, but I paused for a few seconds and told myself…this can’t be possible, decided to further examine the novel…when the novelist has done so much to twist around the form of the novel, he could be ‘trusted’ to make further mischief…I went to page 208 and read the page …it had continued from the previous page and I saw the heading ‘Chapter 23’ in the middle of the page and the page ended in a sentence with a full stop…so, Chapter 23 has only begun…it probably continues in the missing pages…and I then saw the next page, 219, it began with a chapter heading ‘Chapter 25’…oh, so, the entire Chapter 24 is missing and a substantial part of Chapter 23 along with it…without much interest, I glanced disinterestedly at the opening paragraph on page 219…I struck my forehead with my palm…dhath teri ki…why didn’t I guess…being a literature student, I should have had some literary instinct and after everything that the novelist had done to ‘this’ novel, he was not above pulling another narrative trick…and there it was on page 219 opening paragraph of chapter 25…the evidence of another narrative trap…
“ – NO DOUBT, SIR – there is a whole chapter wanting here – and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it – but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy – nor is the book a jot more imperfect (at least upon that score) – but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as I shall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner. – I question first, by the by, whether the same experiment might not be made as successfully upon sundry other chapters – but there is no end, an’ please your reverences, in trying experiments upon chapters we have had enough of it – So there’s an end of that matter.
Very clever…and then the novelist goes on to tell in the next paragraph…
But before I begin my demonstration, let me only tell you, that the chapter which I have torn out, and which otherwise you would all have been reading just now, instead of this – was the description of my father’s, my uncle Toby’s, Trim’s, and Obadiah’s setting out and journeying to the visitation at ****.
I don’t know how many of you have experienced this…I then showed this to the shopwallah…he was not at all amused…
The novel is Tristram Shandy and its writer…Laurence Sterne…
In the current post-modernist age where playing around with the narrative is de rigueur for many novelists…Laurence Sterne stands out as the ‘dada’ of all post-modernist novelists in a pre-modern age…sadly, this ‘art’ was not taken up by subsequent English novelists and we had to wait for the post-modernist age to see such ‘deceptions’ again. That part will be for another post…
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