Subimal Misra interview

It's nice to see that Tehelka newsweekly has published an interview with Subimal Misra, an underrated but real Bengali writer,who I have known long since - personally as well as through his writings. V. Ramaswamy has recently translated his earlier stories in a book entitled The Golden Gandhi Statue from America (Harper Perennial)

Q: What have been the major changes in your stories since the stories in The Golden Gandhi Statue from the 60s?

A:There have been many phases in my writing over the past few decades. Getting out, and then getting away from montage, collage and cut-up, I tried to make my voice more pin-pointed, so that even without seeing the writer’s name people could know for certain that this was Subimal Misra’s writing. (There are both positive and negative aspects of this.) In my writing, I have used the form of the story, my own secret diary, reportage, excerpts from advertisements, pornography, slang – even a series of interviews with dacoits from south Bengal. Everything was mixed up, to became a unified whole. I walk along my own path through all this, whether this is an advance or not – I don’t know. I am unable to say how much of it is story, and how much simply text.

In my writing, and especially in my current writing, there is a conscious tendency to abandon “meta-narrative”. There need not be a definite, fixed meaning of all the words, all the time. One may discover that the same words may have been used in diametrically opposite ways in the same text. Or one may find that the text is broken up and thus de-constructed and made inter-penetrating and inter-dependent. In the sequential flow of the narrative, “yes” and “no” become mutually interdependent.

What I sense now is that if a person continuously and consistently wants to rebel, then at a certain juncture he also has to become a rebel against his own rebellion. Finally the business of de-construction has itself to be de-constructed.