Can There Be Tragedy In a World That Is At Bottom Chaotic?

आज जुलै १० २०२१, जी ए कुलकर्णी यांची जयंती 

John Gray:
"...Even if the ancient Greek tragedians did not believe in the gods, they assumed a kind of order in the world; it was against this order that tragic heroes rebelled. But can there be tragedy in a world that is at bottom chaotic? This was the question posed by George Steiner in his seminal book The Death of Tragedy, first published in 1961..."

David Simon: 
“...to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The idea that… we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious… But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts… In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalised, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak....”

Artist: B E Kaplan, The New Yorker, 2018

My book is a painting: Marcel Proust@150...The Colouring of a Ghirlandaio

Eric Karpeles, "Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to 'In Search of Lost Time", 2008:

"...Like the labyrinthine galleries of the Louvre frequented by the young Marcel Proust and his friends. In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du tempsperdu) houses a vast repository of paintings. In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art from the trecento to the twentieth century, from primitivism to futurism, from Giotto to Leon Bakst. Whether plunging into Proust for the first or the fifth time, each reader encounters many esoteric and increasingly obscure pictorial references that keep testing his mettle. These can leave him nodding his head, with a smile frozen on his face just like the Princesse de Parme...."

Marcel Proust, 'Swann's Way' from "Remembrance of Things Past/ In Search of Lost Time", 1913-1927:

"...He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern original, whom it was not intended to represent...."

 "An Old Man and His Grandson", 1490 by Domenico Ghirlandaio

कापणीचे दिवस, भविष्य आणि केशकर्तन...R K Narayan, GA and Sadanand Rege on Barber

कोविड मुळे मी जवळजवळ मार्च २०२० पासून केस कापायला बाहेर गेलेलो नाही, माझा मुलगा माझे केस कापतो आहे. 

R K Narayan:

“....Loquacious as usual and with the sharp blade scraping the soap, the barber had asked, “Coming out, I suppose?” Raju rolled his eyes and remained silent. He felt irritated at the question, but did not like to show it with the fellow holding the knife. “Just coming out?” repeated the barber obstinately.

Raju felt it would be no use being angry with such a man. Here he was in the presence of experience. He asked, “How do you know?”

“I have spent twenty years shaving people here. Didn’t you observe that this was the first shop as you left the jail gate? Half the trick is to have your business in the right place. But that raises other people’s jealousies!” he said, waving off an army of jealous barbers.

“Don’t you attend to the inmates?”

“Not until they come out. It is my brother’s son who is on duty there. I don’t want to compete with him and I don’t want to enter the jail gates every day.”

“Not a bad place,” said Raju through the soap.

“Go back then,” said the barber and asked, “What was it? What did the police say?”

“Don’t talk of it,” snapped Raju and tried to maintain a sullen, forbidding silence for the rest of the shave.

But the barber was not to be cowed so easily. His lifelong contact with tough men had hardened him. He said, “Eighteen months or twenty-four? I can bet it’s one or the other.”

Raju felt admiration for the man. He was a master. It was no use losing one’s temper. “You are so wise and knowing. Why do you ask questions?”

The barber was pleased with the compliment. His fingers paused in their operations; he bent round to face Raju and say, “Just to get it out of you, that is all. It’s written on your face that you are a two-year sort, which means you are not a murderer....”

(The Guide, 1958 )

 
जी ए कुलकर्णी:
"... कुणीतरी ते विचारावे यासाठीच जणू न्हावी अधीर झालेला दिसला. तो उत्साहाने म्हणाला , "माणसे गेली आहेत शेतात ! हे कापणीचे दिवस नव्हेत का ? मीच तेवढा या ठिकाणी मागे राहिलो, कारण माझा धंदाच तसला पडला. कसलीही यातायात न करता माझे पीक वाढत राहते आणि कापणीच्या वेळी शेतेच माझ्या दारात येतात !" आणि यावर वेडेवाकडे दात दाखवत तो एकदम हसला..." 
['यात्रिक', १९७५ (सत्यकथा) /१९७७ (पिंगळावेळ)]

सौजन्य: जी ए कुलकर्णी आणि सदानंद रेगे यांच्या साहित्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स, वाङ्मय शोभा जुलै १९५३, बुकगंगा.कॉम

Nana: Zola Was Illustrating Manet!...कोण चित्रकार, कोण लेखक?

 Émile Zola, ‘Nana’, 1880: 

“…At this moment the clouds parted at the back of the stage, and Venus appeared. Nana, very tall and very plump for her eighteen years, in the white tunic of a goddess, and with her beautiful golden hair floating over her shoulders, walked towards the foot-lights with calm self-possession, smiling at the crowd before her. Her lips parted, and she commenced her great song:

 “When Venus takes an evening stroll—”

 At the second line, people exchanged glances of wonder. Was this a jest on the part of Bordenave, or a wager? Never had so false a voice and so poor a method been heard. The manager had spoken truly when he said that she had no more voice than a squirt. Nor did she know how to stand or move on the stage. She threw her arms forward and wriggled her body about in a manner that was considered scarcely proper and very ungraceful. The pit was beginning to murmur, in fact a few hisses were heard, when suddenly from the orchestra stalls a voice, resembling that of a young cock moulting, exclaimed aloud in a tone of intense conviction:

“She is stunning!”

The whole house looked to see who had uttered these words. It was the cherub, the youngster fresh from college, his lovely eyes strained wide open, his childish face all aglow with admiration of Nana. When he saw every one looking at him, he turned scarlet with shame at having unintentionally spoken so loud. Daguenet, who sat next him, looked at him with a smile, and the audience laughed aloud and thought no more of hissing, while the young gentlemen with white kid gloves also carried away by Nana’s curves, applauded with vehemence.

“So she is!” they cried. “Bravo!”

Nana, seeing every one laughing, laughed also, and this redoubled the gaiety. She was funny, all the same, this beautiful girl; and as she laughed, a love of a dimple appeared on her chin. She waited, not in the least embarrassed, but on the contrary quite at her ease and thoroughly at home with the audience, looking as though she herself were saying with a wink of her eye that she didn’t possess a ha’porth of talent, but it didn’t matter, she had something better than that. And after making a sign to the conductor, which meant, “Off you go, old boy!” she commenced her second verse:

 “At midnight, Venus passes by—”

 It was still the same grating voice, but this time it tickled the hearers in the right place, and succeeded now and again in eliciting an approving murmur. Nana’s smile was still on her red lips, and shone in her large light blue eyes. At certain lines, which were a trifle broad in meaning, her pink nostrils dilated and the colour rose to her cheeks. She continued to wriggle her body about, not knowing what else to do; but it was no longer considered unbecoming; on the contrary, every opera-glass was turned upon her. As she finished the verse her voice failed her entirely, and she saw that she could not go on. Without being in the least disturbed, she jerked her hip in a manner which indicated its plumpness beneath her scanty tunic, and, with her body bent forward, displaying her bare breast, she extended her arms. Applause burst forth from all parts of the house. She at once turned round, showing as she retired to the back of the stage the nape of a neck, the red hair on which looked like the fleece of an animal; and the applause became deafening….”

Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books, April 6 2017: 

"...Nana is the courtesan protagonist of Zola’s 1880 novel of the same name, and you might reasonably assume that Manet’s painting is, apart from anything else, one of the great book illustrations. But it is more interesting than this. Nana first appeared as a minor character in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877). Manet spotted her there, and painted his portrait of her. When Zola saw it, he realized that, yes indeed, she was worth a novel in her own right. So, far from Manet illustrating Zola, what actually happened was that Zola was illustrating Manet..."

  Édouard Manet, Nana, 1877

Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar...श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर@150

आज, जून २९ २०२१, श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकरांची १५०वी जयंती

दोन-तीन गोष्टी लिहाव्याश्या वाटतात...

त्यांची सर्व नाटक आता वाचायला भिकार वाटतात (पण रा ग गडकऱ्यांनी त्यातून बरेच उचलेले आहे!) पण त्यांच्या ताकतीचा विनोद (मराठी गद्यात) पुन्हा निर्माण झाला नाही. मी कधी कधी कल्पना करत असतो की आज कोल्हटकरांनी कशा कशा वर लिहलं असत... वेळ पुरला नसता त्यांना...

त्यांच्या पत्रांची दोन पुस्तके मी वाचली आहेत. त्यातून त्यांचे जे विलक्षण व्यक्तिमत्व डोळ्यासमोर उभ राहत ते मला एकीकडे हसवत असत आणि एकीकडे खिन्न करत. ती पत्र वाचून वाटत त्यांच्याशी जाऊन गप्पा माराव्यात...त्यांना आणखी बोलत करावं!

हा मनुष्य खूप दूरदर्शी होता. हरि नारायण आपटेंच्या 'पण लक्षात कोण घेतो?', १८९० कादंबरीचे परीक्षण लिहताना ते म्हणतात:

"रा. आपट्यांनी स्त्रियांच्या दुःखाची कहाणी सांगितली आहे तशी मागासलेल्या जातीच्या दुःखाची सांगितल्यास ती मिसेस स्टौच्या 'टॉम काकाची कोठडी' या कादंबरीच्या खालोखाल क्रांतिकारक होईल अशी खात्री वाटते. "

त्र्यंबक शंकर शेजवलकर , र. धों कर्वे अशा प्रचंड ताकतीच्या पण दुर्लक्षीत अशा व्यक्तींना त्यांनी नेहमी प्रोत्साहन दिल. 'समाजस्वास्थ्य' मध्ये आलेला एकमेव मृत्युलेख म्हणजे त्यांच्यावरचा!

पण आपण कोल्हटकरांना जवळ, जवळ विसरलो आहोत. एखाद्या भाषेत त्यांचे विनोदी लेख सुद्धा रंगभूमीवर आले असते... आज बाजारात त्यांचे (किंवा त्यांच्याबद्दलचे) एकच पुस्तक मिळते- 'सुदाम्याचे पोहे' आणि ते सुद्धा abridged....

 

 साभार : "एक सर्वमंगल क्षिप्रा", हरी विष्णू मोटे,१९८०