Source – Live Mint and
The Wall Street Journal
It had taken a single reckless tweet to blow the
cover of the real identity of author Robert Galbraith, weeks after the first
Cormoran Strike mystery, The Cuckoo’s
Calling, was published last year. But the best literary minds, it would
appear from the second instalment in the series, are ingenious enough to
reinforce a conceit that has already been busted, if only by using devices that
are loaded with sly, and at times even blunt, symbolism. In The Silkworm, J.K. Rowling, writing for
the second time as Galbraith, plays truant with the very image of the
androgynous author she had failed to protect after the publication of The Cuckoo’s Calling. She repeatedly
invokes gender ambiguity in the new novel to poke fun, often viciously, at male
ego as well as female vanity, and eventually turns it into a key vital to the
detection of the crime around which the plot turns. One of the characters in The Silkworm is, literally, a
hermaphrodite, while another is called Orlando, a reference to the
gender-bending protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel. Then there is
someone called Epicoene, a nod to Ben Jonson’s protagonist in the play of the
same name. Nothing less inventive could be expected of the creator of the Harry
Potter series, in which magic and metaphor, wit and wizardry, keep playing off
each other, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride of clarity and
confusion. The effect of reading The
Silkworm is no less heady, though its plot unfolds with the stately pace of
its predecessor. As in The Cuckoo’s Calling,
it takes a while for the crime to be committed. Private investigator Strike,
the one-legged veteran of the war in Afghanistan and illegitimate offspring of
a rock star, stumbles upon the corpse of the very person whose disappearance he
is employed to investigate. The case, though not as glamorous as his previous
one involving the death of supermodel Lula Landry, is compelling nonetheless,
simply for being as macabre as it is. ‘Novelist Owen Quine is found dead, tied
up with ropes—à la Fifty Shades Of Grey—on a dining table, set for seven, in a
house that he co-owned with a former friend, who also happens to be a writer,
though far more successful than him. But it feels like an understatement to
call Quine merely dead. For his killer not only takes care to bash him on the
head well and truly with a metallic doorstopper, but to also tear open his
belly and pull out his guts, before ending with a thorough dousing of the body,
and nearly everything else in the house, with the severely corrosive
hydrochloric acid. The textbook examples of such murders can frequently be
found in 17th and 18th century Jacobean revenge tragedies. Unsurprisingly,
lines from the plays of Thomas Dekker and John Webster appear liberally in the
epigraphs to most of the 50-odd chapters that comprise The Silkworm. The motive
behind this spectacular ritual of violence, it seems, is an incriminating
manuscript that Quine had finished, in which he spilled the dirt on more than
half of literary London, and which his agent had inadvertently circulated among
a couple of publishers, some of whose thinly veiled sexual exploits (or
failures in that regard, as the case may be) happen to figure prominently all
over the story. Densely allegorical, like a perverse version of 17th century
writer John Bunyan’s novel The Pilgrim’s Progress, Quine’s work is called
Bombyx Mori, the scientific name of the silkworm, which, as one of the
characters explains to Strike, Quine had probably used as a metaphor for the
figure of the writer. Like the larva that has to be boiled alive before one can
extract the fine silk, the author must “go through agonies to get at the good
stuff”. For a remorseless cad and philanderer like Quine, with a gift for
poisoning almost all his friendships, such gratuitous cruelty is as seamlessly
woven into his art as his life. In Bombyx Mori, Quine seems to have surpassed
his imagination for nastiness. He gives his characters names that insinuate, in
no uncertain terms, their innermost vices: Phallus Impudicus, Vainglorious,
Succuba, Effigy, Epicoene, Tick—the list is a testimony to his prodigal
appetite for kink. Much of the detection work involves a close reading of the
text, sieving through the imagery for clues embedded in it, in the way A.S.
Byatt’s Possession or Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose requires its readers to do. Mischievously,
Rowling pulls off quite the same trick as Quine in her own novel, which bears
the same title as Quine’s, except that hers is in English, not Latin. With this
subtle twist, she doubles the perspective of her narrative, allowing one plot
to mirror the other, and leaving the reader to negotiate between the two
parallel levels of storytelling: the framing novel (Rowling’s), and the
meta-novel (Quine’s) nestled into the core of it. But the triumph of The
Silkworm goes beyond its ability to sustain a complex and acutely cerebral
structure. Rather, its pleasure is multiplied many times over by Rowling’s
ability to humanize her characters, especially the unlikely detective and his
assistant. The chemistry between the two seems to have deepened, though not
necessarily lost its darker edges, in this book. Having a dead writer at the
centre of the plot also allows Rowling to take persistent digs at contemporary
publishing—especially at the industry’s craven indulgence of mediocrity for the
sake of profit, the triumph of online self-publishing over sound editorial
control, and the alacrity with which people tend to take offence at being
turned into fodder for somebody else’s fiction. The hint of a celebrity scandal
in the plot also allows her to return to one of her favourite bête-noires: the
intrusive and insidious operations of modern media. The overwhelming impression
is that of publishing being an all-boys’ game, where the rules are set by a
bunch of maniacal men—be they writers or editors—feeding off one another’s
weaknesses, while women are left on the fringes, fuming with impotent rage.
Between these two extremes lurks the figure of the hermaphrodite, the golden mean
blessed with the best, and the worst, creative energies of the male and the
female, a persona that seems to find a rousing validation in the figure of
“Robert Galbraith”.
For more information read - Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction
Abstract
History give an
access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and
manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate
with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents
rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about
the past. What happens when a fiction
writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is
based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between
fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does
the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform
about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into
each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference? The questions
become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective
territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history;
they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative
structure and their representation through language.
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