 Lecture 4 and 5 of this module are devoted to the writings of much admired Albert Camus. The reason we picked up Albert Camus is because his literary diaries formed a very important part of the creativity elective in IIT Bombay. That particular way of teaching creativity and creative writing within the elective framework, it depended a lot on one's own intuitive grasp of the subject, because as I said we did not really want to be in the imitative mold. So, we will be able to share some of the work that we did, although let me also at the outset point out that often we are not able to really undertake detailed textual analysis, because of copyright reasons, we are very aware of the difficulties that these impose on us and therefore, we are using material in a very conservative manner. This particular lecture is divided into three parts and all these three parts actually are devoted to this attempt to find the best way or the optimal way of generating creativity and understanding it. So, some of the ideas that we had discussed earlier, these are interwoven in the first part, which I have described as preliminary explanations of our approach. These may also be seen as somewhat pre-critical frameworks or ideas that we have placed before you again, because many of you may not have been exposed to literary analysis of the kind that the textual details require. So, we are placing some critical ideas before you again. So, we hope that you will begin to familiarize yourself with the terms that we are using. We will keep refining them and reusing them later on. The second part deals with reading commute and commute's Indian connection. That is mainly to justify why we picked up Albert Camus and not any other writer. The reasons are actually related to some of the historical links that develop between Camus's writing and that of Indian writers in various regional languages as well as in English. Part 3 deals with some of the challenges of reading the other. This notion of the other is a very complicated one, but also a very important one. So, what we thought of doing is to link it to the fact that for us also Camus is the other and he is the canonized other. So therefore, both the issues of canon formation which are also subject to critiques and they are being debated very vigorously and I think rightly so, but at the same time what does it mean to read a canonized writer from another cultural location. So, by and large this is the framework and let me explain it in greater detail now. For example, we have already discussed these ideas, so this is an interwoven sort of pattern. We had earlier talked about the changing fluid aspects of writing as a form. The fact that once you commit yourself to creative writing, it requires certain understanding of the unpredictable experiential patterns that it may come from. That is why we are very keen on this element of search which is really embedded or which also emerges from our own context, from our own consciousness. Although reading critically is also important, but the greatest danger of that position is related to reading in an imitative mode. So, how does one read and at the same time how does one listen to oneself. So, there are these elements which actually make writing very exciting because it helps you undertake a deeper journey into your own consciousness. So, we place that before you very carefully. Now, of course, constantly one is concerned about the varied student exposure to writers. That is you may have read different writers or you may have read very few writers and also you may have read them randomly without really thinking about them very carefully. The other thing that we have kept in mind is that if you want to start writing seriously, often you really do not have sufficient understanding of writing as a vocation because like every vocation it has its own demands, it has its own ways of organizing the writing process. However, unpredictable it may be. So, we have kept that in mind in sort of simplifying the discussion and clarifying it also without actually losing a sense of complexity. It has been a hard task for us, but that is an attempt to communicate with you in terms of the variety of backgrounds, educational reading backgrounds you come from and to then find a common ground that creates resonances and is also useful for you. The other idea that we had talked about and I think we had sort of almost belabored this point is related to the fact that creativity and writing, these are contested terms. We had pointed out that teaching of creative writing that is sort of a term which needs to be placed within the academic setup and immediately this really tends to evoke this kind of tussle between freelance writers and writing within the institutions. Writing does require great deal of autonomy. It requires of course, volition, but it also requires tremendous amount of internal space to really create. Institutions often tend to impose their value system on the writer. So, whether you can survive within a pre-given value system in order to create autonomous independent work that is something that I suppose writers have to deal with if they are within the institutional location. Now, for you and me who are already part of an institutional location, these questions still need to be addressed. These questions still actually remain very vital in order to keep us very alert to certain kind of complicity that may develop between our thought processes and the institutions that may impose value systems that we want to alter. So in other words, it is this contestation that perhaps we want you to keep in mind at whatever level you can understand it, again to find more productive, more creative, more fruitful directions for yourself. So finally, within this thought process, this constant striving for meaningful content ought to really define our direction. So, this is the sort of interwoven pattern that I was talking about. The other idea from the last lecture that we can pick up for a fruitful way of also placing Camus in a sort of productive framework is related to the fact that even the institutionalized creative writing programs elsewhere in the world, they do devote their attention to the process of writing. For us, we need to enlarge that sense of the process by not only talking about the aesthetic process per say, but also creativity in terms of issues within our society, within our own institutional framework or at whatever level we want to really place this inquiry, we need to pay attention to what we consider is creative for ourselves. We will again use some of the useful ideas from pre-given sources or sources that have already shown enough potential for further discussion, but we will bring it back to independent way of formulating our own work. One thing I again wanted to emphasize is related, it is related to the writing workshops. Many of the creative writing classes, they function more like writing workshops. Although I must say that I prefer a blend of the traditional lecture mold or seminar mold and then the writing workshop mold because as I said we have an enlarged framework within which we wish to operate, but the writing workshop as a metaphor as we have noted is really very useful model because it allows for divergent thinking. And I think those of you who are on the other side right now listening to me, I hope you would have a situation where a lot of you get together and you decide on certain issues and also try and listen to each other in terms of how you look at the same literary problem or same creative issue, how you can problematize it. And by sort of talking about different ways of doing it, I think this really encourages very important democratic processes, but it also helps you arrive at your own decision much in a much better manner. So, now our focus of course has been on the youthful audience that we have in mind, whether they are within institutions or outside of institutions. I think one is thinking of young people who want to start a writing career and also therefore, we have encouraged you to look at some of the models that deal with an evolving sense of the self and not really stay with a very static, narrow definition of your own self and also try and see the crisis and growth patterns in order to understand your own sensibility. So, that you understand the complexity of your own self and as Shikshant Mehai has pointed out, this complexity of the self is actually meant to help any individual understand the fuller potential that he or she is capable of. That is why we are keen on connecting to the insights offered by developmental psychology. Interestingly, developmental psychology also has borrowed a lot from many of the older more ancient, but at the same time I would say enduring philosophical insights from the Indian setup. So, in some ways if you really begin to look at it more carefully, many notions from developmental psychology, especially Maslow's notion of self actualization, many of these issues they have an overlap with philosophical traditions that you may be familiar with although not in a systematic manner, but even in terms of general statements that are made and you hear them in your surroundings and at home etc. We had also in order to look at the aesthetic aspect of writing, we had picked up some of the writers and teachers of writing and I think it is very useful to remember that you know on the one hand one is talking about the sense of the self and enlarging the scope of our discussion before launching our attempt to study one or two writers whom we have singled out because they provide very interesting insight into the way the literary process unfolds. They show the signposts of that process, they do not reveal the whole process. So, I think again a writer like Pamukh when he pointed out that writing you know is of course has a spiritual and philosophical dimension and also that it is a craft. The sense of the craft is also very important. So, we do not want to lose out on a balanced approach and therefore, both these dimensions will try and evoke as we go along. I have said here that the critical questions regarding reading writers, preparatory notebooks or autobiographical insights or analytical essays about their vocation have been chosen very, very deliberately and in that sense we have departed from traditional literary you know studies mode where the primary focus would have been on the creative writing such as essay, fiction, drama, poetry etcetera and very rarely would a traditional literary course would start with a writer on his or her own writing, but we have given importance to that because that is what we want to learn. Are there signposts or are there ways in which we can understand the writing process better through the accounts and documents that the writers themselves have provided. For example, Albert Camus wrote his literary notebooks in pencil in a notebook absolutely without any thought of publishing it. He was persuaded to publish it much, much later when his work gained the kind of you know following that you know that we know about now, but at that time he really had no clue that he would do that and of course there are different writers who maintain different kinds of notebooks or they have a different way of even showing their writing process in a creative work, but we are more interested in this separated material that is available to us in terms of what the writer has to say about how he or she looks at this very complex process and then learn from it in our own way. Now, of course so far as Albert Camus is concerned in order to understand what Albert Camus means to many writers in India, I think we need to look at some of the historical events that have unfolded around him. This is of course a brief presentation, I have elsewhere discussed this in greater detail that paper is also referred to in the reading list. So, if you are interested you can have a look at it, but basically I sort of feel that the presence of Albert Camus who wrote in French, but his translated texts, they became available in most libraries and in the European homes in the 60s in India. Now, of course I am talking about libraries that stock literary material. The startling echoes of Camus were felt with the changing scenes in post independence India, but let me explain it in a proper way. After independence the most visible writer's position was linked to the progress of writer's movement in India, I have called it the post colonial progressive writer's movement and many of the writers across many languages they felt that through literary activity by writing about different characters, by writing plays about different issues, by writing essays about unfolding nationalist concerns, they were contributing to this exhilarating task of nation building after independence and prior to that for fighting for the kind of freedom that every nation requires, but gradually that voice became much more complicated in terms of post independence situation when more and more and many problems of the nation emerged, the voices became much more critical and not simply though the voices of celebration of nation building. Camus seems to have created some kind of resonance in the second stage of our nationalist writing process. I remember reading this particular statement that Adil Jaisawala made when he published what was called new writing in India then and it really seemed way way new at that time because this really provided a much needed pan Indian perspective in terms of Indian writing from various regions that was translated into English, much of it had this kind of progressive zest and at the same time a sense of critical distancing that I was just describing to you a minute ago. He pointed out in that editorial that it is no accident that the most potent foreign influences on Indian writing today are Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Sartre. Now Camus and Sartre they of course belong to what is described as the existentialist movement in France. Of course Camus did not like that label, Dostoevsky was a very important, very intriguing Russian writer, we will refer to some of his work later on, a very very powerful voice and wrote many sort of novels that dipped into ideas and how they shape human consciousness, sometimes how they consume human beings completely. Kafka again is extremely important and so he is club these together. I do just want to add one more name, I think around this time although Jaisavala has not really looked into this connection, but I think Simone de Beauvoir the French existentialist who worked with Sartre. Her work also began to create a fairly major impact on the feminist consciousness in India and if you want to see these connections maybe you can pick up a women writing in India and some of the editorial comments there will help you understand this influence. So the point is that in the process of our own search we have been shaped by ideas that have come from different parts of the world and that is the way the dialogue ought to be, but Jaisavala's observation I have singled out primarily because the rest of that essay and the choice of material in new writing in India, it shows certain amount of tension between what is very often perceived by Indian critics and thinkers as a contradictory pull between social commitment and existential despair. The term existential despair gets linked to what philosophers like Camus, Sartre etc. were talking about, I will explain it in a minute, but I am just trying to mainly again suggest that Camus's presence in India is really fairly I think palpable phenomenon. Between Franz Kafka and Albert Camus why have we chosen Camus? Now this is of course a personal choice although these are really very important writers, but let me just go over some of the contrasts between them and perhaps that will help you understand why we have chosen Camus over Kafka not because of any literary judgment that we are making, but because of personal choices that do colour these exercises because if we were to choose Kafka we also had access to his notebooks, but we have not done that. Kafka as you know is of course one of the most influential writers of 20th century. Camus of course is also equally important because of what he said and also the diversity of activities with which he was engaged. So he sort of provided a sense of a very complete literary personality and in that sense I think to the progressive writers and writers in India who were engaged in this task of nation building this feeling that a writer is also a public intellectual, a public figure, a writer is also you know a person who is accountable in terms of what, how he wants to present a problem not in this way a politician etcetera is, but in terms of certain space within the community or within the language group in which the writer operates. I think that was still there and therefore the appeal of Camus was really very great and also you know there is a kind of startling surprise that is writing brought to our consciousness. So I think it is this sense of reticence of Kafka that I felt you know I actually did not really take a very critical stand as I said I was more attracted by Camus and also the fact therefore that it would sort of help us deal with many different positions that we want to take about our own writing whether we want to have to place it within the framework of social commitment or within the framework of a sort of critiquing, estranging ourselves from a social framework in order to first understand it fully and then commit ourselves to any social action. So in that sense let me again place some of the key ideas from Albert Camus before you so that whatever I have said is substantiated. As I said we are slightly conservative in terms of quotations because of copyright convention. Now this particular statement that he made about the writer's role was made in the myth of Sisyphus which is a very very famous book of essays written by Albert Camus and he has after that he wrote the rebel. I think it is important to place those two books together because Camus did not want to stay with ideas he propounded in the myth of Sisyphus. I will talk about that a little later when I come to the next slide but here he says considered as artists we perhaps have no need to interfere in the affairs of the world but considered as men yes I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life toward those whoever they may be who are humiliated and debased they need to hope and if all keep silent they will be forever deprived of hope and we with them. So I am sure I need not say more because I have already talked about a certain sense of this engagement with a culture and the engagement with the marginalized the oppressed the dispossessed that Camus was very sharply aware of because he himself actually was located in that framework and you know he was born in a very low middle class family in France he was born in Algeria but he was French and also he continued to feel very deeply concerned about issues of marginality. So this again is a key statement from Albert Camus about what the writer can do in the world today that was the subtitle of this essay which I read elsewhere. The other important idea philosophical idea and we should not be afraid of the term philosophical lot of times people begin to sort of feel worried if they can understand these ideas or not we are not really taking a full fleshed course in philosophy and philosophical discourse but at the same time even in terms of writing processes when you think about their you know mechanism and their rationale we are actually philosophizing. So you need not worry about terms please get friendly with the terms. So Camus philosophical notion is expressed in the notion of absurdity. Now this is again a technical term and therefore it is you should place it within his existentialist philosophy although as I said he did not like that term but often Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Albert Camus they are clubbed together in terms of a common term the existentialist philosophy. I am not going into that but I am just extrapolating one particular statement about absurdity and of course later on he had many more explanations to provide to clarify this notion of absurdity and what he meant by it. We will come to that also in the next lecture but this is the state of mind of this state of mind of absurdity that startlingly sort of started a kind of chain reaction in the Indian consciousness also. He says a world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a very important and familiar world but on the other hand in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights man feels an alien a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life the actor and his setting is properly the feeling of absurdity. Now this therefore is the second you know key statement and as I pointed out to you that in the Indian location already there was this strong progressive commitment to social issues of marginality of justice, freedom etcetera and on the other hand there is this other sort of dominant way of looking at a world where pre given meaning does not make sense to the individual. So, there is a kind of a rupture that is a kind of a you know sharp change in one's experiential orientation. So, this led to a lot of debates you know in terms of Indian writers and in fact I remember Ramvila Sharma whose book on new poetry and existentialism in Hindi it is translated as Dahi Kabita or Astitwavad existentialism is Astitwavad and new poetry is of course Nahi Kabita. He referred to Mukti Bodh the very very important Hindi poet a very important voice in terms of experimental poetry in you know modern Hindi writing and he actually basically finally conceded despite his misgivings about existentialism and the impact of the notion of absurdity and related writing he had polarized it in terms of progressive you know writing on the one hand or progressive thought process on the one hand and on the other hand this writing of existential despair is a sharp polarization between the two groups and it continues to exist but in terms of Mukti Bodh finally he pointed out that poets like Mukti Bodh combined their social commitment with existential despair and so he conceded that you know this blend also it gives a different nuance, a different you know intensity to the notion of social commitment you know which is born out of the fact that pre-given value systems do not justify the world and at the same time there is need to give meaning to one's activities and to one's value systems in a manner that you really bring justice to most people. So in that sense this is really really very close to Camus own evolution but it had its own locus in terms of the internal changes that were unfolding in India. I thought I would just read excerpt from one of Mukti Bodh poems which tries to capture this void that he really talks about time and again in his writing. There is a right of you know diary that Mukti Bodh wrote, Ek Sahitik ki diary but again I did not find it very useful unfortunately and therefore I decided not to share it with you but you know if you get interested in Mukti Bodh is much that you can also discover there. This particular poem is titled Zero and it is a vivid example of the sense of void that could not be glossed over by the sensitive writers. So this is how he described it describes it in these words. These are excerpts, you have to read the full poem may be in the original to really get the full flavor. Such is the space totally black, barbers, naked, dispossessed, small, self-immersed. I excite it with word and deed. So that is Mukti Bodh's sense of what this void, this sense of absurdity, this sense of lack of connect with meaning system that is provided. Now so this is to suggest that when we picked up Albert Commune, there was already a kind of ethos within which we were functioning but at the same time this is not to suggest that the students had the same connect because I belong to another generation and the students belong to yet very different generation. So this is really it still requires picking up a text like Albert Commune's even diaries or fiction or essays, it requires reorientation and also one cannot quite predict how the students would take to this writing at all. So I again felt that it is necessary to place some of the challenges of reading a writer like Commune who we can describe as the other. In fact as I said he is the canonized other. So how do we deal with this sense of otherness of Commune and at the same time as I said we do not want to be imitative but we are in the discovery mode. We read these writers in the mode of discovering something important about the craft and also about the philosophy of writing. Now in terms of otherness one can say that the word itself I like you to play around with the notion of the other. Otherness perhaps is can be posited against an entity in contrast to which one is constructing an identity. So the reader as the cell, the writer as the other that is one simple kind of relationship but there are many issues that we need to really contend with. This otherness in some ways therefore when it is beneficial and it is working very well as in the case of let us say I the reader and Commune the writer, Pamuk the reader and Commune the writer then that otherness is a kind of a mirror that sort of shows us something about ourselves. Let us see what Pamuk has to say about Commune is fascinating I mean I really feel very very connected to this statement. He says this is from another essay I think other colors in the book of essays. He says when we are attached to a writer it is not just because he ushered us into a world that continues to haunt us but because he has in some measure made us who we are. Commune like Dostoevsky, like Borges is for me this kind of elemental writer. Such a writer's prose ushers one into a landscape waiting to be filled with meaning suggesting nonetheless that any literature with metaphysical designs has like life limitless possibilities. I mean very very eloquently expressed but that is the kind of connection sometimes writers are able to make in the consciousness of the reader. I am not suggesting that the same writers will work for you but I was fascinated by Pamuk's comment because it really in some ways is very close to my own personal experience and also my reasons for choosing Commune for you know a creative writing program. Now, the approach that we have developed and I think this will be substantiated in the next lecture is related to interconnected reading that is if even though we have chosen a particular writer it is really not possible to look at all his writing at one go it is just impossible you know within a semester we are talking about a semester long course. So now what we did is to place the literary notebooks, the essays along with the book fictional or other creative work of the writers. But some of the critical questions about otherness that really we could not ignore are related to the fact that this reading and interpretation of canonized writers from another historical period location language culture poses a constant challenge in the reading process because also remember that this is the translation from original French into English. So, there are lots of debates about different translations also and we are translating it culturally. So, what we have still tried to sort of suggest is that despite these difficulties and complex complexities which we can integrate in our discussion there still is some important common ground. They provide in terms of the insights that are provided about the complex interweaving of the writer's life and his or her act of imagination. So, how is this texture how does it unfold, how does it develop that is what we really want to understand you know since all of you want to be writers and so we want to understand this kind of complex interweaving. So, here is our life here is our experience and you know in what way does the imagination take a leap and therefore in that sense Camus again provides these signposts there is no clear formula and therefore I want to emphasize that these are not prescriptive texts, but they are prescribed reading material. So, I want to make that distinction. The other issue which is again critically very important is the fact that when we deal with a canonized writer then we have to recognize that and Camus is a canonized writer he is a Nobel prize winner and he is almost a very big cultural institution now, but canon formation is also a value laden activity. So, what you consider important and what you do not consider important all those battles of value and judgments are fought within canon formation and therefore canonized writers are also reread time and again from different vantage points. I think it is sort of useful to emphasize the historical approach that is apart from the canonization I think the fact that the writer is placed within another historical location and you the reader is placed in an entirely different historical location that would bring some very very fruitful positions in deciphering the writing. So, you may be aware of the canonical status of a writer, but finally what you feel from the vantage point of your own historical location is very very important. So, the reader may discover aspects of the work that the writer may have evoked or repressed unintentionally. Now, that is a whole area of concern and I want to mention that Edward Said after writing Orientalism in which he pointed out how western way of constructing the Orient is a hegemonic activity and therefore it is full of stereotyping that needs to be critiqued. After that he wrote this other very important study titled Culture and Imperialism in which he sort of emphasized that despite the egalitarian outlook of Albert Commune despite his socialist commitment, despite his political role in the French underground and his highly you know significant philosophical discussion of absurdity, meaning of life etc. His great fiction and despite all this the fact is that there is complexity that we need to see independent of Commune's own self view and this is what he I think has to say. I think primarily because he feels that Commune needs to be re-read from the Algerian perspective. Remember Commune was born in Algeria although he was French he was born in Algeria to a lower middle class family and but you know according to Edward Said somewhere even his hegemonic tendencies those are hegemonic tendencies of imperialist framework of France it sort of has not left Commune untouched. And from that point of view he says that this reading re-reading of Albert Commune from the Algerian point of view may unblock and release aspects hidden, taken for granted or denied by Commune. That really is a very weighty very important statement and therefore when we deal with canonized writers let us be aware of some of these difficulties because we are not thinking only of our own reading we are also looking at the reading of others in order to really strengthen our critical acumen. So then finally you know we recognize that writing and reading both require writing is of course they require independence. Writing is an act of independent creation with its own textual internal coherence. So each work has that textual internal coherence but it needs to be opened up for discussion. And therefore very often literary work becomes a cultural site for contending views but instead of looking at it as a negative process we should see it as a process that adds deeper layers to our conversations about the world and how it is constituted. So I think finally I would say that Pamuk's emphasis on the naive and the sentimental is worth thinking about and each aspiring writer has many ways of learning and unlearning. I think unlearning is also equally important maybe patterns that one has learned earlier which need to be discarded that is part of the creative process, editing out what is not working. So learning about writing processes is a form of knowledge and that is what we wish to develop through our detailed discussion of Albert Camus literary diaries and some of his writing and later on Atwood's essay in the next two lectures. So then that is what is awaiting you and this is our reading list we have already mentioned much of it and therefore I will just rush through it. Thank you.