FIGURE 14.1 Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as Tahitian.
Source: Images courtesy of Vivan Sundaram.
Judith Brown
Yet, with the invocation of the foreign or of the desert as the true site of style, one has to wonder: can a discussion of style and modernism avoid the familiar tropes of Orientalism, with its distant lands, its mystery, its foreign tongues, its tantalizing darkness? Does a focus on the unknown and mysterious—those things we acknowledge as central to any account of style—depend upon the colonial imagination, relying on its habits of thought, using distant lands to stand in for that language we cannot know?
Style is, on its surface, self-evident yet difficult to define. It suggests temporal aptness: the right line at the right moment, whether in fashion or interior design (or in any number of other stylish things). But it also refers, of course, to modes or manners of writing. When we talk about style in writing, we approach an aesthetic category almost too familiar to contemplate yet at the same time strangely unfamiliar. It is the unfamiliar in style that I address in the following pages. The unfamiliar has been a hallmark in critical accounts of style, as when Gilles Deleuze calls it “the foreign language within language” (“He Stuttered,” 113). Style brings out the most foreign element of language: the foreign in Deleuze’s phrase is foreign to itself, pushing language to its utmost extreme and altering its rhythm. Style makes language strange; it defies the informational demands of language and speaks in another key altogether. If style is foreign to language, then the effects of style make the writer foreign to her own text. This is less the death of the author, one might say, than her emigration to new and unknown lands, at work in an unknown tongue.
That style is foreign may seem counterintuitive: isn’t style instead what makes writing familiar or recognizable? Surely we recognize a sentence by Virginia Woolf—its particular cadence, its dashes and exclamations—even if the particular work is new and unknown to us? Is style what is most familiar about the work of art, or is it what we can never understand about it? It’s a strange predicament, to find no stable ground on which to approach the knowability of style. Style itself thus makes strange our capacity to question, makes unfamiliar what we imagine the familiar to be. Perhaps this is why the idea of the foreign, the unknown, and the evasive clings to the concept.1 Jacques Rancière uses a geographical metaphor to capture this sense of the foreign as an unknown or distant land when he (citing Flaubert) defines it as “a work without substance: no longer the work as cathedral, but the work as desert” (Mute Speech, 115). It’s at first a perplexing metaphor, this turn to the desert—vast, figuratively (if not actually) empty, indifferent to human concern—in contrast to the cathedral, that monument to human ingenuity and culture. Why is the desert, without ornamentation or artifice, the appropriate figure for style, rather than the more obvious cathedral with its sublime heights, its carved stone, its stained glass? For Rancière and the French literary tradition he cites, style is empty and without boundary: it is the other language of language that turns away from content or substance (“style has no substance,” goes the adage). In fact, style, in its privileging of the surface, turns away from meaning itself and thus from any representational obligation. The desert comes to stand for uninterrupted surface or for the blank and otherworldly spaces that free rather than crowd the imagination. Further, the desert in this metaphor is not a repository for meaning like the cathedral, heavy as the latter is with belief and human striving, with ideology and history: in this way Rancière distinguishes style from the substantive or meaningful. The desert of style has much greater affinity with an imagined emptiness that cannot, like the soaring arches of a cathedral, be bent to a singular purpose.
I offer these examples not as definitive but as representative of a critical history that thinks about style through tropes of the unfamiliar. Style, in these and other critical accounts, seems to lift itself away from representation, from the real, or from history itself. Yet, with the invocation of the foreign or of the desert as the true site of style, one has to wonder: can a discussion of style and modernism avoid the familiar tropes of Orientalism, with its distant lands, its mystery, its foreign tongues, its tantalizing darkness? Does a focus on the unknown and mysterious—those things we acknowledge as central to any account of style—depend upon the colonial imagination, relying on its habits of thought, using distant lands to stand in for that language we cannot know? We might trace a lineage of style, as Deleuze and Rancière do, from Flaubert through Proust, writers who idealize the capacities of style to transform life into art. In what might be called the beginnings of modernism in the mid–nineteenth century, then, there was an “unprecedented and strategic emphasis on style” (Schlossman, The Orient of Style, 1) that signaled the transformation to what would become modernist aesthetics. An intensified interest in style suggested a fascination with the nonrepresentational capacities of language, the as-yet-unknown, and style became understood as a figure for the other in language.
Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Proust all turned to the Orient to figure this otherness in phrases such as “the poetic dazzle of the Orient” or “the Orient of style.”2 Perhaps the Orientalism of style isn’t surprising given the nineteenth-century European context of the discussion, yet this figure persists and offers a way to understand one of our basic (and thus most powerful) terms for talking about artistic expression. Critical history and colonial history intersect, and they form the network of relations through which we understand style today.
When we turn from Europe and consider works produced across the globe, does our critical understanding of style shift? Does style continue to invoke the foreign and unfamiliar? How does style speak in other contexts? I argue here that style’s foreign tongue continues to make strange the work of art and indeed offers a particularly relevant way of thinking about modernism as a global, transnational, or planetary movement, one that paradoxically incorporates a colonial history at the same time as it empties that history of its privileged meaning. Thinking critically about style inexorably delivers us into the unseen and inescapable quicksands of an Orientalist desert, as Western paradigms and colonial histories exert their centrifugal force. We can never be free from the ideological conditions of our reading, yet style offers us, I want to suggest, the possibility of an unfamiliar language, one potentially foreign to those conditions that structure our lives or our readings. Attending to style offers one way to avoid reiterating Western narratives of modernism: style is, after all, a manner of expression rather than an authoritative message. Indeed, it speaks without authority, without substance, without interest. Style in my argument enables a forgetting of the world, which is an essential, if unexpected, way of thinking transnationally.
How can that be? Style has always been transnational, is indeed intrinsically transnational. Nation-states, identities, and regulatory institutions—those ordering structures that orient and determine our experience of the world—are irrelevant to this other language without limit or border or rule or law. Style speaks most compellingly when the necessary (legal, ethical, economic, political) order in which we live our lives moves off the page and allows for something other to speak, something unfamiliar and not grounded in the world as we necessarily know it. To demonstrate what I mean, I’ll look at two exemplary figures as case studies of sorts—one a fiction writer, the other a painter—whose styles speak subtly and invoke something other, something that unsettles the familiar and demands a kind of forgetting. R. K. Narayan is known as a writer of the local and is often claimed to be the quintessential voice of India. Amrita Sher-Gil—flamboyant painter, cosmopolitan, polemicist—claims herself as India’s first modern artist. Both began their careers in the volatile years of late colonial India yet developed styles that smooth over the era’s political complexity. Their texts are marked by understatement and a general aesthetics of quiet, even passivity. Why are they exemplary? These figures make style their central concern, and they do so in order to find a language that has not been coopted by political discourse. That is, they seek an unimagined space without idealizing the work of art, as perhaps Flaubert or Proust did, but instead enabling the foreign or otherworldly to make itself known. Indeed, they thematize the larger operations of style itself: what I’ll call its blank gaze, its emptying capacity, and even what has been argued is its “nothing to say” (Barthes, Writing Degree Zero; Miller, Jane Austen; Leighton, On Form).
How might these figures resituate style and its critical elaboration as a fantasy of the Orient? How might they turn critical attention away from an Orientalist fantasy empowered by imperial history? Both navigate and elaborate in their works the paradoxes of style itself and more importantly demonstrate a way of thinking about style without political imposition or invisible ordering structures. This is not necessarily unique to these two particular figures, but I choose them for the encounters they stage between the known and unknown, for their reputations as major figures of early twentieth-century Indian arts, and because their work turns away from overt political content (that is, from art with instrumental desires) in favor of something that appears to be more passive. Indeed passivity is a central feature of their styles and becomes the sign of style itself.
Narayan, if you aren’t familiar with his name, was among the first generation of professional English-language writers in India. Over his long literary career (he died in 2001 in his mid-nineties) he published (among other things) fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories, nearly all of which take place in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi (you might compare it to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Hardy’s Wessex). Aware of the absence of Indian models of novel writing and equally aware of the colonial legacy that guided his tastes, Narayan set out to create a distinctly Indian landscape and cast of characters, and he would create his own uniquely ironic voice. Choosing to write in English, he called himself and those other writers of his generation “experimentalists” (“English in India,” 22) for taking up the English novel form and, with it, the English language.
Narayan’s novels—insistently gentle, almost uniformly quiet (one study is titled “R. K. Narayan, the Unobtrusive Novelist”)—have been consistently characterized as limpid, calm, unaffected, flat, and neutral. Makarand Paranjape argues that this is the strategy of his style: Narayan “solves the problem of representing India in English by crafting a style of artful plainness . . . a kind of deculturation, so that ‘Narayanese’ becomes a ‘basic’ language which may stand for itself or any other (Indian) language” (Another Canon, 42). He thus overcomes, Paranjape goes on to say, “the difficulty of containing, confining or reducing the multiculturalism and multilingualism of India [via] the restricted, simplified and flattened monolingualism of English.” It’s a fascinating idea: that by flattening a language, simplifying and paring it back to its most basic components, it might be “deculturated,” made more universal. Narayan does ease the reader’s entry into his writing with his directness of expression, the brevity of his sentences, and with an immersion into the rhythms and textures of Malgudi. The surprising result, however, given the bareness of expression, is one of dreaminess; the word “enchanted” is frequently used to describe the fictional landscape he creates. Perhaps Paranjape’s theory can account for the broad ways that English comes to speak this landscape, yet it doesn’t get at the elusive or indeterminate quality of Narayan’s writing, the dreaminess that his style evokes.
Narayan’s style is perpetually self-effacing and ironic: this is particularly visible and is especially interesting, I think, in his depiction of writers. Writers, in Narayan, don’t really write. They dream big dreams but then produce hackneyed poetry, or don’t finish their writing, or don’t even write at all (even in his self-representations, Narayan seems to emphasize all the ways he avoids the labor of writing). Perhaps it’s part self-effacement and part irony that lead Narayan repeatedly to depict the failed writer, or the foolish writer, or the wannabe writer who lacks talent or initiative or material. Self-effacement is understood by Narayan as central to the act of writing (and we might recognize this style as that of impersonality). He most explicitly stages the absence that style demands as a kind of event, even a traumatic one, in his autobiographical novel The English Teacher.
The novel’s protagonist, Krishna, is an ironically rendered, half-hearted teacher with huge and unrealized poetic ambition. The first half of the novel recounts the pleasures of his domestic life with his wife and child, his ineffectual attempts at writing, and his growing alienation from the aesthetic education that has formed him and that he is paid to espouse at the Albert Mission College. When his wife, Susila, becomes sick and dies of typhoid at the midpoint of the novel, the novel itself experiences a kind of break (sometimes it’s referred to as a broken-backed novel). Not only is Krishna engulfed in grief, but as he attempts to contact his wife in the spirit world, the novel’s terms of engagement shift. Krishna’s proud secular rationalism is tested, and the notion of writing is itself transfigured. Susila’s death alters the fundamental terms of the novel in its self-conscious rationalism and introduces a story about writing that speaks in another key altogether.
The link between Susila, death, and writing is made early in the novel. In a comic scene, Krishna complains that he has nothing to write about, so his wife suggests he model a poem on her. He agrees but writes down Wordsworth’s “She Was a Phantom of Delight” (“She was a Phantom of delight / When first she gleamed upon my sight; / A lovely Apparition, sent / To be a moment’s ornament,” etc.) and then chides her for her forgetfulness when she doesn’t recognize it from her English literary anthology (she was very impressed, thinking he’d written it on the spot). “Aren’t you ashamed to copy?” she asks. “No,” he replies. “Mine is entirely different. He had written about someone entirely different from my subject” (47). It’s a scene that raises questions about original and copy and situates those questions within the context of colonial India and its practice of aesthetic education. Krishna insists that his repetition of Wordsworth can never be Wordsworth; it introduces a new subject in a new context and thus absents or negates the poem’s very center. Reciting Wordsworth’s poem, Krishna transforms Susila, envisioning her as the phantom of writing. And this is what she’ll become.
When Susila dies, Krishna’s notion of writing too dies. The death occasions an epistemological break at the center of The English Teacher that radically destabilizes its grounds of knowing (something like Mrs. Ramsay’s death in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse). Krishna, overwhelmed with grief, meets a psychic who offers to put him in touch, through writing, with the spirit of his dead wife. You might imagine the scene: a psychic medium renders himself entirely passive, emptying his ego and removing himself from the exchange between grieving husband and dead wife as he scribbles out her messages in pencil. Note the absence of authorial agency here: “Letters appeared on the paper. The pencil quivered as if with life. It moved at a terrific speed across the paper; it looked as though my friend could not hold it in check. It scratched the paper and tore the lines up into shreds” (113). The pencil is the powerful agent (bringing to mind the Latin origin of the word “style,” the stylus or stilus), and the message seems made of pure energy, delivered with a kind of volatile force. The two men and the spirit wife are made passive in relation to the writing. Krishna must struggle to give up his secular beliefs, and even as he draws some solace from the encounters with his dead wife, his trust will be continually tested: “After a few moments, I asked, ‘Do you remember the name of our child?’ The pencil wrote: ‘Yes, Radha.’ This was disappointing. My child was Leela” (115).
How can a ghost be so forgetful? Rather than the omniscience of the spirit world, we have partial knowledge, weakly remembered and inaccurately expressed. Susila gets most of the facts wrong, and we’ll remember that Krishna had said to his wife earlier, “I should be ashamed to have your memory.” What is the significance of Susila’s forgetfulness? And what could it have to do with style? It certainly demands, as the pencil erratically scrawls its message, a kind of faith, a forgetting of reason, and a rejection of material fact. This might be likened to automatic writing (the kind we associate with early Gertrude Stein), except that the writing is working against the notion of the automatic, the learned message repeated from memory or drawn from an unconscious informed by repressed desires or former wounds. The forgetting of material facts, of historical evidence (such as the name of their daughter), is part of the process of writing in this scene. This forgetting is required if Krishna is to communicate with his wife. She is teaching Krishna to become the medium, to make himself passive, so as to find a direct mode of expression that is not simply a reproduction of something already learned.
Here, he learns to listen to something foreign (in the figure of his wife) and to reject the literalism that obscures his ability to communicate with her, as it has obscured his attempts at writing. In the brief sessions in which her voice is rendered in frantic pencil marks on the page, Susila is teaching Krishna how to write in a key tuned to pleasure, not to fact. Rather than standing in as the mere subject of the poem, she figures its very possibility. Krishna discovers a way to empty Wordsworth’s poem and to find a new, as-yet-unwritten place from which to write India. He learns by absenting himself, by giving himself over to style, as it were, to the otherness in language. Krishna begins the novel as a model of the self-disciplining rational subject, loyal to the clock and to his anthology of English literature. As the novel closes, he is a subject without occupation (he quits his job at the Albert Mission College), without responsibility (he has sent his daughter to live with his parents), and without borders, having successfully merged with the enabling phantom of his wife. This lesson of style turns on a negative principle, one that enables forgetting, unmaking, and detachment. The central event, then, in Narayan’s autobiographical novel is the turn away from realism, fact, or materiality and toward a phantom who offers us an unexpected way to theorize style as a passive encounter with the otherworldly or foreign.
The generally placid surface of Narayan’s fiction, its reticence on questions of empire, and its universalizing impulse, even as Narayan is seen as the quintessence of India, has led to charges of excessive niceness and passivity. And we can see Narayan’s passive impulse in The English Teacher. Surprisingly, given the pleasant tone and the quiet comedy of his work—more evident in his other novels—we also recognize the impulse toward negation, perhaps best exemplified in Narayan’s pervasive irony. Paul de Man might helpfully remind us here that irony turns on negation, on undoing, and on the gesture of turning away from one thing in order to suggest the shadow of another. Critics of Narayan’s bland likeability simply do not attend to these shadows that define his style. V. S. Naipaul, for instance, accuses Narayan of indifference when he hears the older writer say, “India will go on.” Annoyed by the very inactivity of this phrase, India will go on, Naipaul builds his case against Narayan’s writing: “Out of a superficial reading of the past, then, out of the sentimental conviction that India is eternal and forever revives, there comes not a fear of further defeat and destruction, but an indifference to it. India will somehow look after itself; the individual is freed of all responsibility” (India, 15). Narayan’s art, in this view, fails to live up to an ethical standard, one that employs protest and political rhetoric. The indifference of Narayan’s style, captured in the phrase “India will go on,” speaks of an understanding that goes beyond the political structure. This is not Gandhi’s passive resistance, then, but something other in its indifference.
What can we say about this charge of indifference or passivity? I’ve already noted the relative indifference of style to material reality, to substance, or to plot. Style in Narayan becomes a way of speaking in a new register and without the restrictions that might otherwise govern a life. Indifference contains no message, no preference. It refuses hierarchy. This is what frustrates Naipaul. The work that asks nothing, that makes no demands, is perhaps indifferent because it is not tied to political will. It does something different; it insists on a communication of the unfamiliar and the noninstrumental. And it communicates it best to the passive subject, as Susila will teach Krishna to be.
The principles of style as they emerge in Narayan’s work, then, may be understood as operative in style more generally: first, the impersonality of style, estranged from its author yet providing the work with a personality; second, the indifference of style to the identities or experiences of its subjects, even as it records lives lived within the framework of history; third, the language of reverie spoken by style, rather than realism, even as the work obeys the laws of representation; and, fourth, the unfamiliar or foreign in style that makes visible or audible the particularity of a text not necessarily reducible to time or place or ideology. Each principle requires a kind of forgetting, a nonrootedness in bounded spaces or subjectivities, a lifting away from the already-known.
If Narayan thematizes the alternative languages that writing might speak and the complicated pleasures that attend an encounter with the foreign, Amrita Sher-Gil may be said to revel in the sensual power of the painted image that speaks across time, nation, and identity. As an iconoclastic painter and rebel, Sher-Gil envisioned a life and an art without restriction. “I think all art,” she writes, “has come into being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the merely physical. How can one feel the beauty of a form, the intensity or the subtlety of a colour, the quality of a line, unless one is a sensualist of the eyes?” This hardly sounds indifferent. Sher-Gil defied all ruling conventionality and all restrictions that might impede her aesthetic vision, her sense of what exceeds the limits of the physical. Her writing is big, ambitious, sometimes bombastic, but in her paintings, her aesthetic is controlled and detached from emotion. Her portraits suggest the detachment of its subjects, a governing indifference. A note she wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru is telling (in many respects): “I like your face, it is sensitive, sensual and detached at the same time” (Letters, 421). She brings this quality of impassive detachment to her portraits and creates a kind of aesthetic of indifference: “I am always attracted to people . . . who don’t trail viscous threads of regret behind them” (419).
Conceived, as her father would say, in Lahore and born in Budapest, Sher-Gil stands, as one critic puts it, “at the cosmopolitan helm of modern Indian art” (Mathur, “A Retake,” 515). She was, another critic adds, “cosmopolitan by reflex, with the confidence that came from the aristocratic, artistic and intellectual milieu into which she was born” (Ananth, Amrita Sher-Gil, 13). She spent her childhood in Hungary, then India (her mother was Hungarian and her father Indian), and her artistic training would take her back to Europe, where she entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris at the age of sixteen. In Paris she engaged the aesthetic movements of the day, developing a taste for painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh, and then at twenty-one she decided to move back to India, whose people she would paint, almost exclusively, for the rest of her short life (she died, apparently of peritonitis, in Lahore at the age of twenty-eight).
Sher-Gil, a far more polemical figure than Narayan, explicitly wanted to write India in new, modern form. “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others,” she asserted in 1938. “India belongs only to me” (Letters, 491). Yet style, she discovers, involves a letting go: “I know . . . how difficult it is to surmount the barrier of the style one has adopted. And to ‘let oneself go’ once one has acquired the habit of severe & strict discipline is perhaps more difficult than to subordinate an unruly spirit to discipline” (475).
Perhaps Sher-Gil contemplates such a “letting go” in her 1934 Self-Portrait as Tahitian (figure 14.1), where the artist stands in the place of Gauguin’s models. Paul Gauguin is faintly viewed as a shadow, perhaps even as an effect of Sher-Gil. She incorporates her elder-sensualist, makes him an effect of her illumination: he blends into her body yet seems to shelter her, pagoda-like. One might read him as looming or as threatening to overpower, but his transparency, his sandwiching between the portrait of Japanese women and the artist herself as modern primitive shifts the French painter as towering authority. In fact, he’s empty: he’s a medium, a tonal ground, a transition, rather, connecting past and present, collapsing them into the promise of an artistic future. Sher-Gil layers aesthetic histories, from Japanese antiquity to contemporary Paris, yet centered on the colonial subject, the artist as Tahitian. The portrait thus hinges on a complex fantasy that involves forgetting as it empties its source texts and creates new power relations, by placing us within intimate proximity to the calm, voluptuous, and emphatically present model/artist who appears indifferent to our gaze. There’s much more to say about this painting, from its engagement with Orientalist or primitivist discourses, to its commentary on the power of influence, to its recognition of the deep representational history of the female nude. There is political content to be gleaned, to be sure, if one takes these categories into account, but Sher-Gil’s style self-consciously floats free of the past, a willed forgetting, then, as the artist envisions new languages of expression.
In India, Sher-Gil would find those new languages as she turned her attention to portraying the grey-blue melancholy of the nation, to reimagining her chosen home on large canvases where she pictured groups of ghostly people. What moved her, she wrote, “was the vision of winter in India—desolate, yet strangely beautiful—of endless tracks of luminous yellow-grey land of dark-bodied, sad-faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes, and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns” (Letters, 249–251). In Hill Women (figure 14.2) she presents us with such a ghostly group, standing in physical proximity but each figure remaining isolated, almost in seclusion, despite the touch of a hand and the reality of their shared material conditions. Blank gazes look before them, unseeing perhaps, and without will. Yashodhara Dalmia describes the painting as a “silhouette of women standing in grave silence reminiscent of tombstones . . . in effect an elegy to the living” (Amrita Sher-Gil, 75). Death intrudes into life in this portrait of austerity. This is a portrait, too, of survival, perhaps, or of life and death as permeable or interpenetrating conditions. We witness this portrait of shared fate that doesn’t reject representation as such but alters its terms, what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “pierc[ing] the veil of the real” (Provincializing Europe, 150). Sher-Gil discovers in her intensified form, color, and line a formal alternative to the real, a way of seeing that isn’t documentary. She had expressed frustration with the “futility” of many depictions of India that she claimed betrayed no “human understanding”; she opposes these renderings to her own, founded on a new style to express the desolate yet strangely beautiful.
The language Sher-Gil would work to develop in her paintings was one of possibility and paradox, the merging of incompatible truths. Structuring contradictions will be a hallmark of sorts of Sher-Gil’s work. Three Girls (figure 14.3) is a portrait of isolation, three figures suspended in time, their shadows on a dingy wall, no aesthetic history visibly supporting them or buoying them into their futures, as in Self-Portrait as Tahitian. There is no abstraction here. This is a painting that presents to us three figures, but its realism is altered, muted, made to speak a language of reverie rather than realism. Sher-Gil offers us visual simplicity in this picture of biding time, again, this winter in India. The women appear bored, perhaps, indifferent, listless; the painting is rich in its palette, suffused with color, even as it portrays a kind of lack, best illustrated by that open and vulnerable hand, an emblem perhaps of want, or of grace in the form of a mudra, the gesture of the hand that signifies multiply. Here we witness detachment, indifference, and impersonality. No hierarchy
governs this group, and no narrative is easily imposed. Style speaks as absence, something Sher-Gil was thinking about as she read Proust’s “amazing book”: “One has to be in a certain state of mind to be capable of enjoying it, a state of absolute calm with no preoccupations of any sort, not even interests outside it, a complete though receptive void . . . to enjoy the fantastically subtle & slow rhythm of Proust’s style” (Letters, 475).
Two Girls (1939, figure 14.4) will more completely evade narrative itself in its explicit turn toward the emptying language of style. Sher-Gil returns to the female nude form but removes the layers of irony that characterized her earlier Self-Portrait as Tahitian. The girls, one standing and one seated, are sculptural in their smooth planes and simplified lines. One is swathed in white sheets, her dark skin balanced by the fragment of an ancient sculpture we see at the left. The standing girl has empty blue space in place of her eyes—a vacant gaze, then, without focus or intent. The jeweled color often favored by Sher-Gil is drained from this canvas—what remains are the blended siennas and umbers of skin tone and earth. Is this the work as desert? Form and color are simplified, and there is a quality of detachment despite the girls’ physical relationship (one hand resting on a shoulder, indeed blending into the shoulder, the hip leaning in). The simple planes and lines of the portrait raise many questions; indeed questions here, rather than answers, demand the viewer’s imaginative attention. Despite the solid lines and smooth planes of this painting, certainty itself must be forgotten. Is this a portrait of indifference or desire? What is this relationship depicted? What do these girls share? What imaginary gratifications or symbolic desires frame their relationship in time or in space? Does the longing include that of racial equality? Sexual desire? Is this another kind of self-portrait? A picture of the divided self—Hungarian and Indian—posed with ancient tradition? Or a future, positioned next to a past? A refusal of temporality itself? This is, I would argue, a painting of possibility, of the very condition of possibility. The style of the painting—its blankness, its empty gaze, its quiet palette—indeed creates the grounds for questioning and resists any impulse to determine these girls.
So what can style do—or undo—for us or for the study of modernism conceived transnationally? For one, style as a methodological entry point offers an unlimited horizon not tied, at least in determining ways, to a historical moment, nation, or political framework. Freed from the important work of ideological critique, we can observe a text’s other languages, other loves, and other means of expression. Style might also deliver the difference that the transnational makes: the working with, alongside, and against the canon; the
trace of tradition or influence; and the unpredictable alchemy of aesthetic borrowings drifting free of history. If modernism continues to be defined as a primarily formal movement pushing against the limits of representation and aesthetic tradition, its transnational reconception brings new vocabularies to bear, new particularities, and new demands. One of these would be a critical accounting of those concepts like style that quietly, even invisibly guide our reading. This is another way to reiterate Susan Stanford Friedman’s assertion: “To simply read non-Western narratives is not enough; we need to think about their implications for narrative theory” (“Toward a Transnational Turn,” 24) and, I would add, for aesthetics more broadly.
In Sher-Gil, we inevitably get a sense of impersonality or indifference: the models look away, their gaze often only legible in contradictory terms. Sher-Gil’s art brings something new into the world that is neither mere representation nor revelation of the already there. Art thus alters the real by visualizing possibility through its other language of style. When the art critic Karl Khandalavala, Sher-Gil’s friend and champion, compares her work to the serene image of the ancient Buddha, he captures something of this gaze, something of the productively empty, and something of Sher-Gil’s legacy: “Miss Sher-Gil’s men and women are not beautiful in a conventional sense but her simplification of form has much of that purity and balance which the Gupta period sculptors brought to their dreaming Buddhas. Her figures also dream but with their eyes wide open” (“Introduction,” n.p.).
To think about style is necessarily to think beyond the boundaries of nation, identity, and history. To think about style in global modernism is thus to allow ahistorical musing, to confront the incomprehensible, to step away from meaning into a far more unstable realm. India will go on, these portraits seem to suggest indifferently. Style will always be embedded in discursive networks, will always be shaped by its critical moment, yet we should attend to its evasions, its alternative, even unlikely, visions. Let me return, by way of conclusion, to the closing lines of Narayan’s novel. Krishna has successfully learned to communicate with the spirit world by emptying himself, by making himself completely passive. As the novel ends, he has a vision of standing with his wife: the now reunited couple are “gazing on a slender, red streak over the eastern rim of the earth. A cool breeze lapped our faces. The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy—a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death” (The English Teacher, 184). In these lines, I would venture, we discover ourselves at the ground of global modernism. Its ground is a ghost, a ghost who necessarily forgets and whose forgetfulness will seize and disturb the process of writing itself. With the view of a red streak over the eastern rim of earth, Narayan establishes a distant, even planetary understanding of the lesson learned by the English teacher. Sher-Gil’s figures too dream, although their gazes give little away even as they open new and remarkable vistas of possibility. This, then, is the power of style, to take us to this window, to make us see and to make us hear—to make us sensible to—worlds not bound by our own.
Notes
1. Critics including Walkowitz (Cosmopolitan Style), Ngai (Our Aesthetic Categories), Leighton (On Form), and Miller (Jane Austen) link style to the mobile, the evasive, and the evacuative.
2. Edward Said writes that in Nerval and Flaubert, the Orient “was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility” (Orientalism, 181). Said, however, thinks about style as a mode of inhabiting authority, a “style of being”: “style is not only the power to symbolize such enormous generalities as Asia, the Orient, or the Arabs; it is also a form of displacement and incorporation by which one voice becomes a whole history, and—for the white Westerner, as reader or writer—the only kind of Orient it is possible to know” (243).
Works Cited
Ananth, Deepak. Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2007.
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