(There is a long standing debate on the necessity, or otherwise, of authenticity when writing on cities and history in literature, and Kochi figures in this debate in its limited portrayal in both books and film.)
***
“In
a time when people everywhere tend to speak alike and live alike, I consider it
my good fortune to be able to record, through my writing, a unique way of
living and speaking that is being lost. And yet, the purpose of the art form
that is the novella is not the documentation of a society, or a description of
its life and its customs and rituals. To do that, a historian or an essayist
would more than suffice. In fact, they would be more qualified to do it than a
writer of fiction. These are but mere ingredients in the writer’s effort to
create a fresh flavor in fiction, a completely original artistic experience. If
it does not create the experience of delight that is art, then all
page-stuffing that goes by the name of novel writing is but in vain.”—Johny
Miranda (From the author’s note to Requiem for the Living)
***
Of the great many concerns confronting
an author of fiction whose work is premised on a place like Kochi, a cultural
milieu shaped by labyrinthine historical narratives, aspects of authenticity are quite likely to be the sternest. It is in a way a case of the very factors that in
the first place attract the author to the work turning out to be its most
intriguing impediments: your imagination is stimulated by the milieu; now how
will your language interpret and translate this stimulus?
The path of rigourous and exhaustive
research is the most popular one embarked on in this pursuit, especially in
contemporary Indian fiction where, in addition to the perennial sway it has
from ancient times held over purveyors of literary imagination, a complex matrix
of sociopolitical factors—of which the interests of market is not the least
significant—has made history a fashionable and oft frequented fictional
location. Common sense dictates that the more information you have about the
place where your work is set—its people; its geography; its customs and
traditions; its fashion and culinary culture— the more authentic your work is
likely to be, and, as an obvious consequence, more powerful.
Not everyone, however, is in
agreement.
There is a school of thought—classical
and conservative, but which in the contemporary world of Malayalam literature is
not, and does not quite care to be, vociferous enough to be heard above the din
and sloganeering hubbub of a sensibility that associates itself less with the
formal components of art and more with its visible political content—which
argues that authenticity in literature is in essence an effect that can come
only from within, as a consequence of the work’s inner, invisible structure
woven by myriad intricate strands of which political content happens to be just
one; and as such, even the most well researched work is bound to be a sham if
the perspective of the research is framed by an outsider’s eye for the exotic. Those
who stand by this argument believe that fictional authenticity has to, and can
only, be understood as an abstract, aesthetic ideal, and not as a consequence
of precisely assorted and maneuvered sets of researched data. Johny Miranda and
P F Mathews, authors of two of the finest, albeit little known even in
Malayalam, Kochi novels, are firm advocates of this notion. What matters, they
say, is not whether this or that nugget of information is historically precise,
but whether it is aesthetically valid. To impart knowledge is none of fiction’s
business; what it strives for is to lead the reader to dimensions that can
exist only in the plane of imagination, of dreams.
Both Miranda and Mathews, who hail
from the Latin Catholic community of Kochi’s cluster of tiny backwater islands,
affirm that the decision to base their novels 0n Kochi and on the life of Latin
Catholics was not borne out of a conscious urge to write a Kochi novel that
focused on community assertion. The urge, instead, was to write a novel that
conformed to universal ideals of aesthetics based on what was closest to them
and what they knew best, and what for them were not reams of exotic content but
merely lived experiences of day-to-day existence. Kochi, thus, was not the focal
point of imagination, but a mere medium for these writers who locate themselves
unequivocally on the side of art in that ancient, but still unresolved and
therefore not any less significant, debate about what art is for: for its own
sake or for the sake of life? In fact, it is within the framework of this
debate that they prefer to place the discourse on authenticity in fiction,
instead of reducing it to a squabble between the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’.
Given the unabashed propensity with which contemporary Malayalam—its print
media, social media and academic discourses—straightjackets works of art and
literature on grounds of ideology and identity, this is indeed a significant
point of view.
Johny Miranda, whose novella Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees, first
published in 2004 by Mathrubhoomi Books, and which has till now remained
obscure in Malayalam, says
that when he set out to write his book, his only aim was to “write a good novella—by
this I mean a book that would satisfy the literary reader-someone who is
honestly and sincerely looking for an aesthetic experience as opposed to one
who reads for exotic content, or to learn about history, or for sociological
reasons.” The novella has now been translated into English by Sajai Jose as Requiem for the Living, published by
Oxford University Press. Malayalam, however, still remains blind to this
remarkable work which was hailed by Paul Zacharia, one of the greatest
Malayalam writers, as “a gem of Bhasha
literature” that “depicts an overpowering world of make-belief, a medley of
religion, ritual, custom and superstition that solidifies into the life system
of the islanders—a phantasmagoria of real and imagined pasts in which the
ornamental inheritances of the Portuguese days and the harsh realities of a
marginalized people are intermingled.”
Miranda’s unwavering commitment to the
‘good novel’ and to its ‘literary reader’ is matched in its intensity by the
contempt with which he regards the ‘easily pleasing novel’ that caters to the ‘lazy
reader’. Presently employed as a lineman with the Kerala State Electricity
Board, he is particularly scornful of the “well-researched-but-lifeless-novel”
which, according to him, is an exploitative genre and a market driven project
that aims at nothing more than to take commercial advantage of the reader’s curiosity, a treachery that he
believes will be exposed ruthlessly by the forces of time.
“This is the information age, and
there are plenty of works that you come across, especially in Malayalam, where
you know the writer has chosen a certain topic and has then proceeded to write
a fictional work on it. Or he or she has obtained exotic or unusual information
from sources like the internet. Still others do ‘fieldwork’—ie, meet people,
especially old people, tap into their memories and then use it in their
writing. Such ‘research based’ works often reveal their true selves later
because often the ingredients lie separate and half baked in the final dish”,
says Miranda who believes that literature is not even obliged to be on the side
of the human.
And yet, despite it not being his objective,
the novella has turned out to be one of the most powerful narratives of
community assertion in Malayalam literature. No work of fiction has illustrated
the ethos of the Kochi-Creole world and the life of the Anglo Indian Latin
Catholics with such disturbing grace and panache as Requiem for the Living has. In her introduction to the English
translation of the book, J Devika, eminent scholar and critic, attributes this
to the fact that “Requiem for the Living
does not seek to be a substitute for anthropological description. Nor is it a
simplistic attempt to claim and assert a community identity—and indeed this is
what marks it as a unique literary effort. It faces upfront the reality of the impossibility
of asserting miscegenated identities in a culture so obsessed with purity of
birth.” Miranda, too, avers that Requiem
for the Living was not meant to be a comprehensive record of his community’s
life and culture, and makes it a point to emphasise that the novel’s worldview
is not a flawless articulation of the community’s worldview.
While both Miranda and Mathews do not
argue with the notion that a written text can be read in whichever way the
reader wants to, they feel that the mainstream readership is shortchanging both
themselves and writers who are committed to ideals of artistic intuition by
reducing everything to inflexible—and very easily navigable on account of its familiarity
by way of mindless repetition—discursive trajectories of political correctness.
According to them, it certainly does not help that from early works written
with the proclaimed goal of community reform to the works of progressive
writers movement—Purogamana Kala Sahithya
Prasthanam—inspired by proletariat Communist idealism in the first two
decades after independence to the works of identity assertion that gained and
continue to have prominence from the nineties, Malayalam has a long history of
literature that catered readily to the demands of reductionist political
readings masquerading as literary criticism.
The emergence of identity studies,
initially in the early part of twentieth century as a political movement within
various subaltern communities and then later in the nineties as a post colonial
academic project which mainstream magazines appropriated into a journalistic
genre that some publishers now catalogue as life
writing, is of pivotal significance in this context. Given the way it
confronted, and to an extent successfully toppled, the domineering Savarna hegemony
of mainstream imagination, any rebuttal, especially in no uncertain terms, of
its theoretical framework stands the risk of being exposed as elitist and
snobbish. However, both Miranda and Mathews hold the view that in the last
decade or so, identity studies has become yet another oppressive norm, a
prisoner of its own devices, sabotaging its very premise by means of crippling
the agency of writers who are coerced into boxes their creative selves instinctively
loathe getting into; a classic case of critique against one hegemonic order
turning out to be another hegemonic order.
“Any writing”, Miranda says, “that
attempts to tell a story by restricting itself to a frame—for instance, these
days you have women’s writing, Dalit writing, suchlike, for e.g.—is according
to me a failure from the very beginning. I’m proud that Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees does not fall into any
such category. To my mind, literature is not something that should be
restricted to a certain framework. When you sit down to write, it’s not the
kind of reader who form the majority of your audience that you keep in mind,
but the readers who stand on the highest plane in terms of sensibility.”
P F Mathews, author of the novel Chavunilam (Dead Land), a hypnotic
account of the life in a nameless Kochi backwater island populated mostly by
Latin Catholics, wonders why only writers from subaltern cultural locations are
expected by mainstream academic discourses to carry the burden of being “voices
of their community”. Citing his own experience, he says that subaltern writers find
themselves right in the middle of a two-pronged battle where on the one side
they have to face up to dominant upper caste voices—both Hindu and Syrian
Christian—to be even heard, and on the other resist the academic patronage of
those who are insistent on deploying their works as mere political artillery in
an ideological war.
First published in 1996, Chavunilam, a novel that with a chilling
tenderness portrays the human condition as a carnival of death—almost each of
the twenty five chapters in the novel has vivid descriptions of deaths and
ghosts—was hardly even acknowledged as a published work until 2010 when, after
Mathews won the national award for the best screenplay for the film Kuttisrank, it was published again. Even
after that, it has remained largely obscure, while many of the few who did read
it chose, much to Mathews’ consternation, to focus on aspects of identity and
cultural landscape than on its aesthetic topography. “It is a very difficult”,
he says, “for a writer like me to make his presence felt in a literary culture
that has always been dominated by Savarna voices. And to make matters a lot
worse, when I am read, the focus is usually not on what I set out to achieve.
It is a terrible dilemma. Does anyone ask MT Vasudevan Nair how he feels to be
the voice of Nair community? Why do people choose to focus on aesthetics when
they discuss MT and burden writers like me and Miranda with the responsibility
of being some sort of cultural ambassadors for our community?”
Mathews believes that one major reason
for such inclinations to reduce everything to the realm of crude moralistic
binaries—whether a certain work is offending or not, whether it is politically
correct or not—is the influence wielded by weeklies and monthly magazines which
to all intents and purposes determine the tone and tenor of the literary
culture in Malayalam. The emphasis journalism places on contemporary reality as
the supreme form of reality, and the myopic view with which it frames a populist
and easily readable mode of communication as the most politically correct form
of literary expression, according to him, is a trap which has consumed both
readers and writers. The advent of social media platforms where the “shallow
spontaneity of reactions” is the unforgiving norm, he believes, has only exacerbated
this situation.
“The intellectual Malayalee”, he says “takes
great pride in thrashing ‘painkili’
literature (a popular term for literature of the masses). But the way I see it,
what is published as political and academic discourses in these mainstream
magazines is also one kind of ‘painkili
literature’. They are both cunningly designed to attract readership, especially
those readers who are on the lookout for easy equations to instantly theorize everything
they encounter in life, and therefore betray the very politics they claim to be
standing for. Most of what they publish as literature is not literature and most
of what they publish as critical theory is not critical theory.”
***
Despite its much celebrated historical
grandeur; despite being the only metropolitan city in Kerala; and despite the
popularity of a very thriving literary tradition of ‘writing the land/desham’ (nation), Kochi has not featured
that often in Malayalam literature. While the near absence of literature that
depicts the coastal life in the region has been ascribed to several reasons—the
dominance of Savarna voices in both mainstream Malayalam literature and the
left liberal ideology that provides its theoretical structure; the distinctness
of its cultural life (a consequence of its miscegenated identity) that is at
odds with the upper caste Hindu elitism which defines Kerala’s mainstream
cultural life; the economic backwardness of the region; the lack of sufficient historical
documentation of its culture—it is quite surprising, given the predisposition
Kerala has towards celebrations of both its ancient cosmopolitanism and a self
constructed, almost delusional, image of a sociologically conscious
contemporary society, that neither the colonial past of Kochi—a city that was
colonized by three different forces in a span of three decades and from where
India’s colonial past had begun—nor its present status as a thriving metro
especially notorious for its high crime rate has been explored much in fiction.
Parishkara
Vijayam (Victory of Reform),
written by Variyath Chori Peter, and published in 1906 by Kochi Union Press, is
the first Malayalam novel to portray the life of Latin Catholics in Kochi. As
the title would suggest, it was written with the specific intention of
achieving community reforms. Written in the tongue of the region, the novel
provides a vivid portrait of the life at the time. However, it did not inspire
a successor for a long period until Ponjikkara Rafi, towards the middle of the
last century, came up with Swargadoothan
(Heaven’s Messenger), a brilliant stream of consciousness novel that also
presaged the destiny of obscurity which was to befall Miranda and Mathews on
their literary journeys. It remains out of print in Malayalam, and is seldom
mentioned in academic discourses as well, while many second rate novels of the
same era are still talked about for their ‘revolutionary merit’. Rafi’s other
novels—Paapikal (The Sinners), Oro Pro
Nobis (Pray for Us), Kanayile Kalyanam (Marriage at Cana)—also are based on
the region, though his later novels focus more on cultural documentation—thus,
ironically, making them excellent research material for modern day writers—than
on the one of a kind experimental streak that distinguishes Swargadoothan.
Both the Progressive Writers Movement
post independence and the high modernity movement inspired by European existentialism
in the seventies did not feature significant Kochi based works. The notable
exception in this regard is the short stories of Victor Lenous, arguably the
most stylish writer of urban male angst and loneliness in Malayalam. In a career
spanning twenty years from 1972 to 1992, Victor wrote only twelve short
stories, almost all of them based on the city of Ernakulam, while most of his
contemporaries had preferred Delhi as the city for their rootless heroes lost
to the debauchery of existential pathos. Victor was least interested in
exploring the historical dimensions of Kochi, focusing instead on weaving into the
beguilingly laced fabric of his stories, with a distinctly minimalist
sophistication, the urban ethos of modern Ernakulam, which at the time was still
evolving into the globalised metro it was to later become. His sleek stories
also present the first, and perhaps still the finest, instance in Malayalam of
investigating the aesthetic possibilities of crime and underworld. Though they
have gone to achieve cult status—especially since his death in 1992—the stories
remain largely obscure in the domain of mainstream literature.
The most famous Kochi novel in
Malayalam, inarguably, is N S Madhavan’s masterly crafted Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal, translated and published by
Penguin Books as Litanies of Dutch
Battery, which tells the story of an imaginary island named Lanthan Bathery
through the voice of its intriguing narrator, Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita
Jessica, whose tone is at once intensely autobiographical and objectively political.
Unlike Miranda’s and Mathews’ novels, Litanies
of Dutch Battery is kaleidoscopic in its narrative structure and covers a
far broader historical, political and demographic spectrum. If in Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees
and in Chavunilam, the geographical
isolation of the island is reflected in the way its characters disengage
themselves from both the world around them and the opulence of historical
narratives that define their existence in mainstream consciousness, Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal rigorously
chronicles the ways in which the island and the history of the world around it
reach out to each other, thus accomplishing the narrative of isolation by means
of describing its very obliteration at the altar of politics. In that sense,
the mien of the novel is post colonial and historical as opposed to the magical
realist version of an old school existentialism—a Dostoevskian twist to Gabriel
Garcia Marquez—explored by the other two. This is hardly surprising either,
coming as it does from a writer like Madhavan, a pioneer in Malayalam at
developing a form and structure that with intricate precision map the archetypal
emotional crises of his characters on to the contemporary political crises of
the world around them.
Lanthan
Batheriyile Luthiniyakal,
which has been both critically lauded and commercially successful, has had its share
of critics too. J Devika, for instance, argues that Madhavan, in his attempt to
reclaim the multicultural legacy of Kochi, employs Parankis (the Malayalam term for Kochi-Creole people, literary meaning
Portuguese) as “one of the elements in constructing its exotic allure”. P F
Mathews, too, believes that the novel stands guilty of exoticising history,
which incidentally, according to him, is one of the main reasons for the
universal acceptance it has garnered. “There is no doubt that Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal is one
of the most meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted novels in
Malayalam. Its sentences are sparkling, and the imagery is eye-catchy. But that
does not hide the fact that it approaches history from the perspective of a
dominant other. That, I suppose, is why he is so insistent on providing so much
historical data for the sake of authenticity.” Mathews is also critical of the
voice of its narrator Jessica, in particular of the way Madhavan chooses to
cast her in the same Biblical mould as Jesus. “All of that seems a little too
contrived”, he says.
Kochi and its colonial history have
found expressions in English too, most famously in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh where, in a manner
so typical of him, Rushdie has chronicled the history of a Rushdian Kochi, a city invented upon the edifice of a colonial
historical imagination with the dreamy astuteness of a post colonial Victorian
sensibility that defines his oeuvre. George Thundiparambil’s Maya, which features Kappiri Muthappan—the
mythical, cigar smoking African slave who, according to legend, was buried by
the Portuegese under large trees along
with their treasures when the Dutch had claimed Fort Kochi—as the hero is another
recent work that excavates the city’s past for its inspiration. (Kappiri is
derived from the Arab word Kafir, used by Arab travelers to describe the people
of Africa.)
With the emergence of Kochi,
especially Fort Kochi, as a prime destination in the international tourist map,
a glut of travel guides and coffee table books have of late started coming out.
In sync with its projected image of a tourist site that provides a sumptuous
feast of colonial vestiges, these are usually bland reproductions of popular
historical narratives that faithfully glorify the city’s imperial legacy.
***
Interestingly, while its literature
has not had much to do with Kochi, Malayalam’s cinema has, since the advent of
millennium, turned the city into both its cultural and industrial headquarters.
This, at the level of logistics, is a direct consequence of the industry
shifting its financial base from Chennai, where it had been headquartered from
the time of its inception, to Kochi following the emergence of modern studio
facilities in the city. Soon, the city—again, especially Fort Kochi—also became
the favored location for many filmmakers.
In fact, a whole new genre of Kochi films emerged which located the city
as Malayalam’s own underworld; a Chotta
Mumbai, as the title of a blockbuster movie says.
But despite the fact that according to
official figures, Kochi has, for the best part of last ten years, found a
permanent spot right at the top of the list of cities with the highest crime
rate, this cinematic underworld is a blatant misrepresentation, a slipshod
caricature inspired more by the commercially appealing visual possibilities of
its setting than by any meaningful interpretations of an existing social
condition. With its crisscrossing networks of narrow alleys; its massive
godowns; its graffiti laden walls; its harbor; and its colonial architecture;
Fort Kochi and the adjascent Mattancheri are tailor made locations for run of
the mill action thrillers. A lot of these are also blatant rip-offs of foreign
language movies, especially Korean ones, prompting Anvar Abdullah, an eminent
film critic, to ask if Kochi is the capital of Korea. The only noteworthy
exception in this genre is Rajiv Ravi’s Annayum
Rasoolum (Anna and Rasool), a
Shakespearian romance in the Vishal Bharadwaj mould, in which Kochi is as much
a character as a location.
Along with its visual peculiarities,
the idiosyncrasies of Kochi’s vernacular too are a commercial factor that Malayalam
cinema, in particular the much celebrated (and much maligned as well) ‘new
generation Malayalam cinema’, has exploited. Here too, the emphasis has been on
parody than on a faithful cinematic reproduction of a distinct accent. If
literature had sought to exoticise the history of Kochi, cinema’s endeavor has
been to exoticise its present, populating it with Godfatheresque dons
and dope crazed ‘freaks’. Needless to say, the actual dynamics of crime and its
tangled operational networks are paid scant regard. Had that not been the case,
more crime/action/underworld thrillers would most certainly have had the
globalised and haphazardly crowded urban milieu of Ernakulam as its background
rather than the dazzling locales of Fort Kochi. Ironically, cinema itself has now
birthed a local underworld of a different kind, one that controls such production
processes like renting buildings, providing local ‘extra’ artists, etc.
In literature, V M Devadas’ Pannivetta (The Bohr Hunt), published in
2010 by DC books, is the only contemporary novel of note to explore the aspects
of Kochi as a hub of crime and its complex post-globalisation sociopolitical
ethos. The plot of Pannivetta revolves
around the life of a set of local gangsters who have been hired to be part of a
Russian roulette in connection with the setting up of a corporate industrial
township named Info City. Grushe, a
Russian born Jew who had migrated to USA following the collapse of USSR, is the
woman who has been assigned to conduct the roulette. The novel is narrated as a
set of profiles of the gangsters Grushe meets after she arrives at Kochi.
Devadas, who hails from Thrissur,
Ernakulam’s neighbouring district, says that he was drawn to the idea of a
Kochi novel primarily on account of the possibilities the city offered to
investigate the multifarious dimensions of globalisation as both a political
and personal experience. Rather than on the documentation of the city’s
colonial past, the novel’s focus is on documenting the history of crime and
violence of Kerala society from 1970-2010; and to explore the interconnected
networks of state and its machinery, various business mafia and conventional
political and economic ideologies. Kochi, in Pannivetta, is deployed as a metaphor for the novel’s philosophical
pursuit, a modern city that has both geographic and economic hideout-islands in
its margins. “In that sense”, he says “the objective of choosing Kochi as a
background was not to write a Kochi novel per se, but to use the place as an
ideal location where people from different parts of Kerala, and India, can
meet. That is why, I have not focused on one particular community: you have, in
addition to characters from Kochi, Tamil immigrants, people from the north
east, Jews, foreigners etc. Also, there
was a conscious effort to include the various geographical dimensions of Kochi,
and not to stereotype Kochi as Fort Kochi or a backwater island.”
However, Pannivetta too, has been criticized for the ways in which it seeks
to transform Kochi into a populist fantasy. P F Mathews, for instance, says
that the novel is “an escapist narrative that does not address the harshness of
either the historical or contemporary realities it seeks to portray”; an
illustration of “how things can go wrong when you approach a place like Kochi
with an outsider’s preconceived notions.” To this criticism which implicates
him of exoticising the contemporary, Devadas responds by arguing that following
the advent and categorical consolidation of a globalised world political order,
the conventional notions that went into the construction of land/desham (nation)—language, traditions,
customs, regionalism—have collapsed, and consequentially, those that used to
distinguish an insider from an outsider as well. For a globalised citizen, he
says, the idea of one’s own Desham is
that of a fluid and hybrid entity composed of heterogeneous elements, and whose
boundaries are by nature protean. “That is one reason why I chose to base my
novel around a conspicuously fictitious element like Russian roulette. It was a
narrative tool to establish the plane of my novel as the plane of hyper real.
And yet, its historical contexts remain very real.”
Interestingly, though they differ on
what constitutes authenticity in literature, they are in agreement on the topic
of literature that panders to fixed norms of political correctness. “In the
context of Kerala society, identity politics is a double edged political
problem. Even while it is evident that many vested interests, including
academicians and religious and political organizations, exploit its theoretical
framework, one can never entirely abandon it. I believe that the questions
raised by identity studies are very significant and cannot be addressed with
just a class based analysis; the flipside however is when it is used for the
creation of idols, and as a quick-fix panacea for deep-seated problems. The
prevailing trend of synthetically creating characters to appease such
politically correct norms is a practice I condemn as a writer.”
According to Devadas, if one were to
extrapolate this stance on political correctness to the realm of insiders and
outsiders, one will have to question the ‘authenticity of the authenticity’
claimed by ‘pure insiders’. For validation, one needn’t look beyond the fact
that discussions of insider novels from Kochi do not feature works by women or
by Muslims who are a prominent presence in the city. “In any case, in literature,
what the traditional insider and the traditional outsider execute, at its core,
is the same process: that of translating into language a personal or
personalized experience. How, then, can one personal experience be privileged
over the other?”
Indeed, for those who do not care much
for the finality of an absolute answer, such questions, ancient and unsettled,
yet offering multiple, and equally vindicated paths for its resolution, are
what matter most. How does one understand authenticity in literature? Does that
authenticity matter one bit in the understanding of literature? Is the age of
the pure blooded insider done and dusted? Have exploitative forces of market
legitimized an outsider’s exotic gaze? Is it possible for a writer to possess a
gaze that is not exotic? How does one understand the dynamics of ethics in the
realm of creativity? Is ethics in fiction a question of style or of meaning?
How does one understand the politics of reading? What is the politics of a
manner of reading that tries to politicize everything that is being read?
Should a reader insist on ethical judgments of the text? Why shouldn’t a reader
insist on ethical judgements of the text? Should a reader search for answers?
Does reading matter at all?
***
