Despite headlines that tell us people read less these days due to social media and television, more and more people are reading, claimed William Dalrymple during his keynote speech to the Jaipur Literature Festival on Wednesday, 21 January 2015. Dalrymple is a prolific writer and a Festival Director of the five day mega-event, which has grown exponentially since it first started in 2006 with only a couple of a hundred guests. “The footfall reached almost a quarter of a million last year,” he continued. “About 10,000 books were sold during the course of the festival.”
The Jaipur Literature Festival attracts writers, artists and visitors from not only India and the South Asia region but across the world. Due to Jaipur’s rich cultural heritage and India’s literary tradition, among other things, the festival’s scale, reach and impact is unique. Its success has inspired about 60 literary festivals in the region and neighbouring countries. “Minds are being ignited,” continued Dalrymple, comparing what happens at the festival to the lighting of firecrackers, which leaves cascading trails of explosions.
The sheer scale of the festival is worth recalling. Five venues simultaneously host about six to seven panel discussions, book launches and lectures every day for five days, which means that there are about 150 sessions over the course of the festival. Further, musical events take place in the evenings at the festival venue Diggi Palace, and at bars and clubs throughout the city of Jaipur. By the end of Day 1, I had managed to listen to giants from the literary and art world such as Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, travel writer Paul Theroux, novelist Hanif Kureishi, Byzantine scholar Peter Frankopan, along with Naseeruddin Shah, who read from his autobiography And Then One Day, and Javed Akhtar, who delighted audience members by reciting his poems.
The festival is also an opportunity to discover writers one may never have heard of, which is what happened to me earlier this morning when I decided to sit in on a panel titled “The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Will Self in Conversation with Jeet Thayil”. Highlights from the session follow:
On Sanity
British writer and journalist Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity is a collection of short stories that came out in 1991 – his debut. The book’s themes suggest that there might be a limited amount of sanity in this world, and that the afterlife may be a suburb where people have “dead boring” jobs.
When asked to describe the circumstances that led to the book, Self explained: I was twenty-seven-years old, working at a dull job in a business publishing company, newly married with a pregnant wife. I always wanted to write. If I don’t write now, I thought, I’ll be genetically superseded. So I started waking up at five-thirty in the morning to write.
Self was given 1700 pounds as an advance. The book won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1993.
Self started thinking about mental health from a young age. His obsession with the mind is personal as well as political. He was dismayed at the way psychiatric institutions were treating their patients in the late 1960s, and came to associate himself with a movement in England that views mental health “issues” as just another way of being – a movement labeled “anti-psychiatric.”
“When we are disturbed by aspects of the world or dissatisfied in our personal relationships, we get internally unsettled,” Self elaborated, “I think the Quantity Theory of Insanity (QTI) is true. Societies organize themselves around very narrow ideas of what’s proper and who is sane. If anyone is eccentric, unconventional, has unique aspirations or are religious heretics, they are not usually supported. The QTI assumption – how there might be a limited amount of sanity in the world – is a satire which alludes to society’s anxiety with being normal and regular.”
On Satire and Censorship
In another book by Self, Cock and Bull, a woman grows a penis and a man gains a vagina, another example of Self’s “grotesque and fantastical” themes. “I don’t write fiction for people to identify with and I don’t write a picture of the world they can recognize,” Self was quoted saying on a different occasion. “I write to astonish people. What excites me is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable.”
“Is that book the work of a moralist?” asked Thayil.
“Satire without a moral view is just unpleasant,” answered Self.
“We live in a country where people are killed over books. In light of that and the recent Charlie Hebdo shootings, what are your views? Do you think a certain kind of censorship is necessary?”
“Good satire should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. What was the point of Charlie Hebdo? It was a kind of humour that afflicted people who were already oppressed. I call it fossil humour from the French Revolution era. What the revolution achieved is remarkable. But that was a long time ago. Times have changed. People are different now. Everything changes. We need to rethink ideas around “freedom of speech and expression”. A lot of the time, people in the West are misusing it. It’s a result of their guilty conscience, of not knowing how to be and what to do.”
On Drugs and the Creative Process
The media has portrayed Self as a drug user; in 1996, when covering an election campaign for the Observer, he became involved in a drug scandal.
“I just happened to have heroine,” confessed Self casually to Thayil and to the audience at the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival.
“So it was more of a maintenance issue…But tell us, is your most current work, Umbrella, the only book you have written without being under the influence?”
“I never write under the influence,” replied Self. “One can’t write seriously when one is hungover or drunk or stoned. Writing is a skill that demands every bit of your faculties. It’s Art. Art requires all your attention.”
“So you write when you are sober?” Thayil pushed once more, seemingly surprised, generating widespread giggles and laughter from the audience.
“I know why you are surprised,” Self chided Thayil. “There’s so much opium in your book that I could smell it while reading. It’s like if you smoke the pages, you’ll get high.”
Jeet Thayil is a poet and author of the book Narcopolis, which won the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Narcopolis was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.
