The major and the minor
Sometimes, the book finds you.
The mail’s subject was ‘On Revolution’, and it felt like both despair and hope, for we all know where dreams of revolutions end, and yet, there’s that hope that maybe, maybe this time it could happen, a lot like love. The blurb started with, “Is it possible to fight for social justice if you’ve never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you’re in love?” The book was called ‘Gramsci’s fall’ and was by Nora Bossong, a translation by Seagull Books.
I did not read a word further in the blurb, and grabbed the book, for what a tantalising premise is it to talk of Gramsci and talk of love. I met the Prison Notebooks almost two decades ago, and whatever I read of it, made so much sense about big ideas that as a young person you grapple with — revolution, state power, media, culture, and the word everyone I knew then used as a convenient filler, an adjective or noun as was their whim, to describe anything that irritated them, hegemony. Hegemony of age, hegemony of urban planners, hegemony of bollywood — it could wetly slide in with ease anywhere, and seem to glisten with both spittle and sense.
Now, in my middle ages, here I was to meet Gramsci again, and the themes promised to be communism and love. It isn’t that difficult to see how they both are intertwined, for, I think, you need to love this world to imagine that it can be better. It is an act of ‘imaginative sympathy’, which is at the heart of any creative endeavour, be it art or social change. And yet, it is one thing to dream of a better world, to dream of love glittering with all that it promises, and it is another to act, and in the action lies the difficulty, for we are all but humans. We have the capacity to imagine, and have to contend with reality.
Somewhere I read that the novel is born in action, if you just think about something looking out of the window, it is a philosophical treatise, and only when the heroine jumps out of the window, can the novel begin. For, action has to contend with reality, and when it comes to the reality of political action, as well as love, you have to deal with all the human frailties, our insecurities, ego, idiocy, whims, pettiness, and casual cruelty. And so, what happens when the promise of communism and the promise of love are faced with reality? What happens when Lenin becomes old and there’s young Stalin watching from the sidelines? What happens when the musky, milky sweat from a pregnant, swollen body punctures your romantic day dream?
If you have read my letters over the past few years, you would know that the one book I think everyone remotely interested in a relationship should read is Elena Ferrante’s ‘Days of abandonment’. Elena’s what-ifs are the questions we fear — what if the one whom we love leaves us — and then goes on to write a novel to describe in excruciating detail those days of abandonment. Gramsci’s Fall could be the second book in that series. The book weaves two stories, the love story of Gramsci and Giulia, and her sisters, and the other, the marriage of an academic who is looking for one of Gramsci’s notebooks.
The book starts with:
I laughed on reading this, because I knew then what kind of a novel this promised to be. There’s a certain kind of novel that I associate with a stylised, dispassionate, and cynical tone of talking about love that cracks open in certain passages to give you glimpse of the loneliness and agony that the next page will quickly tuck away. Consider this passage: “The term affair seemed to be understood less and less, which I held to be proof of the decline of culture, and an affair was the limit of what I shared with these women, and only because I enquired into what was going on with them, apparently no one else was interested, but that does not mean that we ever had anything like a relationship.”
The love such novels speak of is not the one that involves chocolates and movie marathons for heartbreak, here, they wander around in cemeteries asking existential philosophical questions that almost seem comical, highlighting the absurdities involved in any strong emotion that roots in the human heart, be it dreams for revolution or romance. Irony as a rearview mirror, if you will, the only way to behold the carnage left behind.
The novel deals with different kinds of death, the death of a relationship, the death of an idea, the death of a dream, the death of hope in prison, and it feels like death is a must in such books on love, almost inevitable, for only death holds the gravitas to weigh down the unbearable lightness the heart can conjure. In those moments or decades when that something releases its last few breaths, the heart’s desire seems most potent. “For what exactly is this love? An aberration threatened by loss.”
It is not one of those books where you meet a character and fall in love with them or want to hug them, protect them, fight for them, or take your morally righteous action pick. There’s no proverbial pulling of heart strings here. You don’t like these characters much. You in fact could strongly dislike some of the characters and what they do. Their misfortunes, and choices (that could stand in for misfortunes) do not inspire sympathy or its bankrupt cousin, pity. Rather, what happens is that you recognise parts of yourself in some of them, especially those parts you wish no one will ever come to know. What happens is that you recognise, as the novel says, that, ‘Life wasn’t made up of right and wrong, but major and minor.’