Anita Desai

1
Anita Desai

• Fasting, Feasting

2
Desai and Style

• Desai is often praised as a stylist, in
  particular for her use of imagery. She has been
  referred to by reviewers as an imagist novelist
  . . . Her use of images is a remarkable quality
  of her craft.
• Where are there particularly powerful images in
  Fasting, Feasting?
• Desai claims that novels give her the scope to
  reshape and reuse images, to make their meanings
  flexible and polyvalent. Where do you find her
  recycling images in the text?

3
Womans Language

• In a review of the novel in feminista!, Lakshmi
  Chandra says that Desai uses womans language
  not only through her women protagonists, but
  also in her narrative style. Here are the
  qualities which she claims create womans
  language
• The need to use modifiers in declaratives to make
  the woman sound polite
• The use of declaratives with an interrogative
  intonation
• Plurality of meaning
• Refinement
• Tact
• Knowledge of domestic details
• Fluency
• Open ended conclusion
• Do you agree that these are elements of womens
  langage?
• Can you find evidence of them in Desais text?

4
Uma

• Frederick Luis Aldama, in World Literature Today,
  says that the last thing Uma desires is a man.
  Rather, he says, Uma hungers for a world without
  men and seeks the companionship of other women,
  like her widowed aunt, Mira-masi.
• He continues Mira-masi seems to be an
  appropriate role model for Uma she too is an
  outsider. Her grand holy pilgrimages, Hindu
  chants, and frequent ashram sojourns make her the
  family outcast. However, like other socially
  different female role models Uma looks to,
  Mira-masi turns out to be so self-centered that
  she ultimately fails to give Uma the attention
  she thirsts for.
• What do you think? Who are her other female role
  models? Are they self-centered, too?

5
Fasting, Feasting

• Lakshmi Chandra, in a review of the novel for
  feminista! observes that all of the chapters in
  part I, except for the last one, are divided into
  two sections, one written in the present tense
  and one in the past. She says, I think that
  Desai feels that living in the present is a kind
  of fasting while you can feast on the past. Do
  you agree or disagree with this observation?

6
Humor?

• Desai says that although a lot of people tell me
  my books are extremely pessimistic, and extremely
  dark, . . . I would prefer to think of them as
  facing the truth, not having illusions. But, I
  do make an attempt also to show the fact that
  India is full of laughter even in a family like
  Umas theres room for humor.
• What do you think?

7
The Plain Face of Truth

• If what Fasting, Feasting reveals is the plain
  face of truth (see dedication) can Desai herself
  also be said to connive at womens entrapment?
  For one of the questions we take away with us is
  what freedom can there ever be for women like
  Uma, since the routes laid down are undeviatingly
  marriage, which either casts one as a victim or a
  tyrant, or, outside of marriage, the religious
  life? What else? Unless it is the burning
  ground, or the deep river where swept by the
  current, Uma feels not fear or danger but
  something darker, wilder, more thrilling, a kind
  of exultation.
• Shirley Chew Review in the Times Literary
  Supplement
• Next Slide before discussion.

8
Narration and Purpose

• Frederic Jameson has said that narrative is a
  socially symbolic act that tries to affect the
  world indirectly. We try to make sense of the
  world we live in by telling stories. This being
  the case, Lakshmi Chandra wants to ask Desai this
  question
• If we can change the world by changing the
  stories we tell, should not we at least try to
  change the stories we tell?
• Is Desais story disempowering because it only
  reports, repeats the actual, instead of
  attempting to restructure it, instead of offering
  possibilities beyond those Uma and the other
  woman in her life must deal with?

9
Families Everywhere

• Desai says that the contrast in families in
  Fasting, Feasting is about the fact that, no
  matter where you travel, you come across the same
  emotional hungers and needs. What is different
  is our ways of satisfying them. In India one
  imagines religion should satisfy them. If you
  have nothing else in the world at least you have
  religion. In America people think that a trip to
  the shopping mall is best.
• One critic says that the Part II of the novel
  asks the question How close can we get to
  understanding the needs and hungers of others? As
  an outsider and an observer, Arun sees the
  likenesses and differences between his new life
  and the one he left behind, yet he doesnt
  necessarily understand what he sees.
• Do you agree? Or not? Why?

10
The Pattons . . .

• Coatzee, the Pulitzer Prize winner from South
  Africa says this about Arun and the Pattons
• Arriving in the United States, Arun had exulted
  in his newfound anonymity no past, no family .
  . . No country. But he has not escaped family
  after all, just stumbled into a plastic
  representation of it.
• Do the Pattons represent American families? How
  does Desai capture and/or stereotype American
  families through the Pattons?

11
The Pattons still

• The Pattons, with their excesses, counter the
  Indian household, says one critic.
• Why does Mrs. Pattons complaisance towards her
  husband recall Aruns mothers more evasive
  tactics? (194)
• Why does Rods assiduous pursuit of health
  resemble the pressure Arun is under to perform a
  role, to be worth all the trouble and effort and
  expense?
• Why does Melanies anger have the contorted face
  of an enraged sister who spits and froths in
  ineffectual protest? (214)
• Why does Mr. Pattons expression when thwarted
  remind Arun of his own father? (185-186)
• Shirley Chews review in Times Literary Supplement

12
The Pattons some more

• Earlier, I quoted Chandra who said that the novel
  is about fasting in the present and feasting on
  the past. She also claims that this luxury of
  feasting on the past is denied to the Pattons,
  who are condemned to a life in the present tense
  which for them is a kind of feasting.
  Melanies bulimia could be a direct result of too
  much feasting, perhaps symbolic of American
  consumerism as a whole.
• At one point in the novel, Arun is surprised to
  see the look of deprivation, neglect and
  misunderstanding he saw so often on Umas face on
  Melanies. He ponders the question What is
  plenty? What is not? Can one tell the
  difference? (214).
• What does Desai say about the difference?

13
Arun

• Arun himself, as he picks his way through a
  minefield of puzzling American customs, becomes a
  more sympathetic character, and his final act in
  the novel suggests both how far he has come and
  how much he has lost, says a critic for
  Publishers Weekly.
• How far has he come?
• How much has he lost?

14
Part II

• Several critics of the novel have said that Part
  II of the novel ruins it.
• For example, Gabriele Annan in the London Review
  of Books, claims that Uma would be better off if
  she had her touching and fastidiously written
  novella to herself, and Arun were consigned to
  the sacred river.
• And, Frederick Luis Aldama writing for World
  Literature Today, asserts that Desai would have
  written a better novel if shed have spent more
  time fleshing out Uma. He says that in spite of
  the novels half-baked denouement, Fasting,
  Feasting is an exquisitely told, powerfully
  tragic story of the Umas, and the Melanies, of
  the world who are born gasping for air in a
  gender-imbalanced social order.
• What do you think?