Relinquishing, Forgetting, and Renouncing: Comments on and around Batuwangala Rahula’s Rankaraňḍ uva and Gum

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses and historicizes two Sinhala novels by the Sri Lankan writer, Ven. Batuwangala Rahula: Rankaraňḍuva and Gum.. As works influenced by both global literary genres (for example, magic realism) and more specific aesthetic traditions (such as Buddhist aesthetics), the novels can be read as local and contingent expressions of a more general historical impulse – one of relinquishing, actively forgetting and moving forward in domains such as literature, criticism, and political imagination, resisting the end of history declared by late capitalism. I claim that the novels – especially Rankaraňḍuva – play on the possibility of being “neither realism nor not-realism,” an aesthetic form derived from a Buddhistic double-negative logic in order to un-inherit magic realism; that is, to move “beyond” the genre and interrogate its limits, while retaining traces of it. I offer a speculative reading of the novels, synthesizing content, form and aesthetic, offering a historical interpretation that reads the renouncing of genre in tandem with two theoretical and philosophical moves present within the contemporary critical landscape: Ananda Abeysekara’s un-inheriting, modeled on Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting, and Meillassoux’s post-critical calls to relinquish the transcendental.