U. Karunatilake and Nihal de Silva – “Vessels of consciousness”

(A sequel to “U. Karunatilake and Nihal de Silva - The better craftsmen” appearing in The Sunday Times of October 1)

By Priya David

Henry James described as “vessels of consciousness” the fictional heroines around whose heightened consciousnesses the stories of his novels were woven. This would also seem an appropriate description of those writers whose literary sensibilities are of such a quality as to add value to the consciousness of their readers. U. Karunatilake and Nihal de Silva are two such writers.

An examination of the approximately half of Karunatilake’s “Kundasale Love Poems” that are actually love poems convinces us that, as T.S. Eliot suggested a long time ago, the primary motivation for poetry may well be consolation – in this case for the death of the wife of his youth. Despite the contrary persuasions of religion and philosophy, which also make themselves felt in the poetry, it is evident that for the poet it would be nothing “less than a treason”, in the worlds of Robert Frost, to “bow and accept the end of a love or a season”. Mixing memory and desire he returns over and over again to the experiences and scenes of what, in his own words, was a passionately happy marriage. It is not that the grief of separation is played down. There is an abiding sense of desolation as poignant as that evoked by Thomas Hardy in the handful of great poems he too wrote from the perspective of bereavement, eg., The Voice. Consider this, at the end of “Kumbukkana Channel”:

“And I thought, love, if we ever come here together again
These leaves will be falling and floating
But will all else be the same?”

Yet, as the poet confesses at the end of “On Track”, his “lone vision is tainted still with too much joy”. The cultivation of memory and desire serves not only to heighten the sense of loss, but to recreate the joyful experience of the relationship and to reaffirm the positive values it represented. As effectively as John Donne in “The Good Morrow”, he enables us to see how the mutual devotion between man and wife “makes one little room an everywhere”, and how such “love all love of other sights controls”. The amazing thing is that, unlike Donne, Karunatilake celebrates this triumph of marital love whilst evoking the experience of bereavement!

“Whisper and tiptoe in the sleeping home
While I slipped the glitter off you
For our own sacred rites
Mysterious as the pending dawn but fond and full
And warm as the waiting bed”.
- from “Bread”

The implication of the poetry is that the passion and the ecstasy, the loyalty and the devotion, that true lovers share are realities as powerful and as irresistible as the death which eventually separates them. This is, after all, the conclusion of the greatest of all love poems, The Song of Solomon, viz: “…love is as strong as death is, insistence on exclusive devotion unyielding as the grave...”

Turning to Nihal de Silva, The Road from Elephant Pass could, of course, be read simply as an adventure novel. Indeed, it has been dismissed as such by those who have failed to perceive that the literal adventure becomes the objective correlative of a deeper and more exciting adventure, namely the development of the relationship between the army captain and the terrorist defectress. The way their mutual contempt is transformed gradually into mutual devotion is a narrative tour de force, the psychological drama unfolding almost imperceptibly with the unfolding of events.

The relationship eventually reaches the last degree of intimacy. But it does so without the sexually-charged build-up and the sexual explicitness that a lesser novelist might have resorted to, and that would have vitiated its significance. Sexuality is almost an accidental, eleventh-hour discovery between the two. It is the result, not the occasion, of the deepening of their relationship which is achieved, rather, with the growth of experience, knowledge and appreciation of each other. Thus, the romantic union between these two representatives of forces opposed to each other in the conflict becomes symbolic of the rapprochement that is desired on a universal scale.

But this is, alas, a “love begotten by despair upon impossibility”. Concern for each other’s survival necessitates their parting permanently, she to foreign exile and he back to military duty where he becomes a casualty of the retreat from Elephant Pass. Yet it is this very outcome that underlines the validity of the relationship. However transitory it served to bring about drastic changes in the personalities of protagonist and antagonist. Or rather, to bring out the inherent goodness in their natures that negative nurturing by their different worlds had all but laid to rest.

“Where had the sullen, angry woman gone? I tried to picture her, as I had seen her on the first day, and found it hard. Had I changed too?”

In their different ways both works are about love. In “The Kundasale Love Poems” it is the power of exclusive devotion between man and wife to provide the romantic fulfilment that literature tends to portray as available only outside the marital arrangement. And the sustaining power of such a love even in the face of death. In “The Road from Elephant Pass” it is the power of love to break down barriers that exist not only externally but also within ourselves. And the courage and self-sacrifice that such love entails.

So do these two writers, without a trace of moralizing but entirely through their literary creativeness, cause us to redefine our view of life, adjust our scale of values and, in the process, enrich or add value to our consciousness. Which is why they both qualify to be regarded as “vessels of consciousness”.