SOURCE: Mishra, D. S. “The Confessional Mode of Kamala Das: Romanticism and Realism.” Contemporary Indian English Poetry: A Revaluation, edited by Vallabh Vidyanagar, pp. 55-62. India: Sardar Patel University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Mishra situates Das's poetry in the confessional genre and discusses her attempts to mythologize her personal experiences.]

Kamala Das, a recognized feminist poet, writes “autobiographical poems” to “mythologize” her personal life. She expresses her strong feeling of love and admits her inability to realise it in the world of self-centred men. Obviously, her poetry is suffused in emotion. This emotion seems to be a subjective emotion, but it is not so. It is really the psychological consequences of poetic experience and knowledge. Her poetry, therefore, is not merely the confession of “the facts” of her life; it is also the expression of universal truths experienced by an individual soul that longs to be one with men and with the world.

How does Kamala Das “mythologize” her personal life? What are the conventions that govern the structure of her poems? Efforts are made to answer these questions in this chapter. In a sense, the structure of her poetry is “atectonic”, for it is not immediately discernible. It seems to flow and uncoil itself in a spontaneous, haphazard and rambling way as her moods dictate. But within her moods, there is an inborn “orderliness” or a visible structure. And this structure, I find, is the fusion of the conventions of Romanticism and of Realism. But what are the conventions of Romanticism?

Romantic poetry, we are told, has a determinate speaker in a specific setting at a particular moment of time. It uses a fluent vernacular which sometimes rises to a formal speech. It begins with the description of a landscape. An aspect of the landscape evokes the process of the poet's memory and mediation. Romantic poetry, thus, moves in a circle from present to past and back to the present, imitating the structure of the speaker's thought. This view of Romantic poetry is stressed by M. H. Abrams:

(The greater Romantic lyric presents) a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feelings which remains closely involved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision or resolves our emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.¹

This definition is generally applicable to the structure of “Composition”.² The poem opens with a determinate speaker who comes face to face with the sea:

Ultimately,
I have come face to face with the sea.
In the beginning
the sea was only the wind's
Ceaseless whisper in a shell,
But, lying beside my grandmother,
quite often I thought
that I could hear at night
the surf breaking on the shore,
The sea was only two miles away.
That was long ago.
Before the skin,
intent on survivals
learnt lessons of self-betrayal.

Certainly the use of “I” suggests the Romantic mode. This ‘I’ is none but Kamala Das herself who undergoes a highly personal experience, She is set against the sea, The setting of the sea is suitable to the subject of the poem which in brief, is certain ‘facts’ of the speaker's life that are responsible for the loss of her innocence. The decay of the “red house” and the death of the old woman help us understand this theme of the loss of innocence. The speaker clearly says that her “growth” is tragic because it forces her to replace “love with guilt”:

The tragedy of life
is not death but growth,
the child growing into adult
and, growing out of needs,
discovering
that the old have black-rimmed nails
and scalps that emanate
a sweet, mouldy smell.

There is a colloquy between the speaker and her husband. When she marries, she says, her husband tells her to have “freedom” as much as she wants. And she freely enjoys her freedom to the full. Yet she is not satisfied because she does not get selfless love to satiate her soul. So she stops having a longing for love. She says, she is content with only tenderness. But even tenderness is not easily available to her; she finds that friendship cannot endure for long. Naturally, she has to pose to have a passion to suit the occasion. So she is alone and she misses her grandmother who loved her very much.

This colloquy is in simple language. In fact, the speaker uses a fluent vernacular: “Freedom became my dancing shoe / how well I danced, / and danced without rest”. However, sometimes this vernacular rises to a formal speech: “I must let my mind striptease / I must extrude / autobiography”.

Why does Kamala Das confess what her husband said and what she did. She does so because she perhaps feels that it might cultivate an attitude of indifference in her. She comes to know that she has lived a life of “Involvements”: “and discovered / that both love and hate are involvements”. Now she wishes to be indifferent and “uninvolved”:

All I want now
is to take a long walk
into the sea
and live there, resting,
completely uninvolved.

But her longing for ‘rest’ is neither possible nor desirable. One has to move and grow due the flux of time. The desire for rest appears to be “a childish whim” and “a minor hunger” to the speaker. Now she feels that she must discover herself in others and be immortal:

Ultimately
          I will feed only the hunger
                    to feed other hungers,
                    that basic one.
                              To crumble,
                                        to dissolve
                                                  and to retain other things
                                                            the potent fragments
                                                            of oneself.
                                                                      The ultimate discovery will be
                                                                                that we are immortal.

But such a discovery seems to be a distant possibility for her. Meanwhile, she sees no escape from “cages of involvement”. So she sets her mind on her only “freedom to discompose”. This new awareness certainly prepares her to face the problems of life courageously.

Thus, the speaker does contemplate, she also gathers a few morals from the experiences of her life. She says that all husbands and wives should “obey each other's crazy demands” so that they can turn their home into “a merry dog-house”. Further, she advises us to “fall in love with an unsuitable person” to experience despair and meaninglessness of life. Finally, she wants us to accept the stark reality of life and to suffer consciously with a hope that one day we might discover “that we are immortal”.

The poem, it must be noted, begins in the present: the speaker comes face to face with the sea. She contemplates the scene and recalls her experiences of the past. Memory enables her to learn “few lessons” and to face the present with equanimity. Clearly, the poem swings between the present and the past and finally settles in the present. The structure of the poem, it may be said, imitates the structure of the speaker's contemplation as she struggles towards self-understanding.

Generically, “Composition” can be placed in the romantic tradition, and yet even a cursory reading of the poem may point to us that it is quite unlike such romantic poems as “Frost at Midnight” or “Ode to a Nightingale”. It has a factual documentation quite alien to the romantics. Moreover, it does not have the dense web of symbolic implication which is generally detected in romantic poetry. For example:

My First school-house
is now a brothel
and
the ladies sun themselves in the lawn
in the afternoons
With their greying hair,
newly washed
Left undyed.
Who can say, looking at them,
that they are toys
fit for the roaring nights?
There must be something symbolic here.
But I do not
remember what.

How, then, can we characterise the technique of “Composition”? It may be said that “Composition” also possesses the distinctive features of realistic poetry. Realism, it is noted, is concerned with giving a truthful impression of actuality as it appears to the normal human consciousness”.³ And realistic poetry must fulfil three requirements. First, it should describe normal situations and average characters in ordinary setting. Secondly, it should renounce the use of farfetched images and metaphors. Finally, it should reproduce actual speech and approximate prose rhythms. “Composition” is a realistic poem, for it meets all the three conditions. It narrates ordinary events in actual speech. The speaker herself admits the truth:

Only those who like to listen,
listen.
What I narrate are the ordinary
events of an
ordinary life.

In reality, the speaker confesses what her husband said when she married and what her grandmother talked about her house of “Four hundred years old”. Occasionally she records her impressions of the sea which has been two miles away from her grandmother's house. She avoids farfetched images as she narrates. But she does use metonymy as a stylistic device. The question remains to be asked: what is metonymy?

Metonymy, Roman Jacobson⁴ says, is a figure of speech based on the relations of contiguity. Jacobson argues that any verbal discourse has generally two poles of connections between words or word-groups. They are the relations of similarity and of contiguity. If, for example, the stimulus “hut” produces the response “poor little house”, the relationship is one of similarity. If, on the other hand, the response to stimulus “hut” is “poverty”, the link is one of contiguity. In metonymy, thus, the focus shifts from one term to closely related another term. Jacobson believes that metaphor and metonymy are related to romantic and realistic poetry respectively:

The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realised that it is the pre-dominance of metonymy which underlies and actually pre-determines the so-called “realist” trend. Following the path of contiguous relations, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the character to the setting in space and time.⁵

In “Composition”, Kamala Das metonymically stresses the loss of her innocence due to her growth in time. She describes the “surf” that breaks on the shore and the “red house” that crumbles. Furthermore, her decay and degeneration are metonymiolly indicated by the description of the old woman who died “lying for three months, paralyzed”. Finally, her encounter with sea is very significant. The sea, we notice, is the central imagery of the poem. It establishes a relationship between the present and the past and vice versa. Moreover, it is related to her ardent aspiration to be immortal. Conversely, it points to her endless strains and strifes:

                                                  Even
oft-repeated moves
of every scattered cell
will give no power
to escape
from cages of involvement.
I must linger on,
trapped in immortality,
my only freedom being
the freedom to
discompose.

“Composition” succeeds in reproducing the actual speech and in introducing the prose rhythms. Many critics are not happy with this characteristic; so they dismiss the poem by saying that it has incorrect language and loose form. But James Merrill asserts that ‘prose’ is the remarkable poetic style: “You hear a voice talking in prose, often a very delightful voice which can say all kinds of odd things. For me, to get something of that into poetry was a pleasure and even perhaps an object”.⁶ Surprisingly, Robert Lowell says the something in the “Symposium on “Skunk Hour”:

“I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert”, (p. 108). Therefore, the use of ‘prose’ In poetry is not a drawback; it is a distinctive poetic style Consciously adopted by Kamala to express her longings and dreams, her alienation and despair. For example,

I was busy growing,
I had then
no time at all for the sea.
But
there was off and on a seascape
in my dreams,
and the water
sloshing up
and sliding down.

Or

Those who thought my life precious
cried,
do not go there,
we shall have no peace
with you sleeping under that
tottering roof.

Or

To be frank,
I have failed.

To sum up, Kamala Das adopts a confessional mode which includes both romanticism and realism. Most of her poems including “Composition”, therefore, achieve a poetic realism which seems to be an outgrowth of romanticism. Her latter poetry, however, exhibits selective realism that presupposes a certain degree of idealisation, It employs enough of reality to evoke our sympathy; at the same time it idealises this reality to avoid painful sensations. “The House Builders”⁷, for example, introduces us to poor house builders who “Crawl up the cogged scaffoldings / Building houses for the alien rich”. These neglected house builders are very weak. On some days they sing, but their songs do not last for a long while. They are certainly not lucky enough to experience hero's happiness. Yet these “toymen of dust” are said to be the fathers of light. They have native grace and hence they can cast cool shadows and bestow vast shelters even on unbelievers.

Notes

1. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric”, From Sensibility to Romanticism ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford, 1965), pp. 527-528.

2. Kamala Das, “Composition”, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (Orient Longman Ltd, 1973), pp. 3-10.

3. ‘Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Franke J. Warnke and others, (Madras: Macmillan, rpt. 1975), p. 685.

4. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” in Roman Jacobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), p. 77.

5. Ibid., p. 78.

6. Contemporary Literature interview. p. 4.

7. Kamala Das, “The House Builders”, Collected Poems Vol. 1, p. 1.