The Ring of Recollection: Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande by Nancy Ellen Batty (review)

Abstract

Nancy Ellen Batty. The Ring of Recollection: Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. xlii, 305. $95.00 USD. Nancy Ellen Batty's The Ring of Recollection brings welcome, sustained attention to bear on the work of a prolific and important contemporary Indian writer. As Batty notes in introduction, the few critics outside India who have written on Shashi Deshpande commonly note the neglect of work in other regions, particularly North America. I will not rehearse this lament, since Batty shifts its terms adroitly. Rather than recuperate Deshpande against the grain of a postcolonial practice indifferent to writing such as hers--usually described as realist, too narrowly situated in social context, or old-fashioned in its feminism--Batty presents anew. She asks if represented differently ... Deshpande's work might appeal to a wider audience, even to readers in the so-called Western world (xix; emphasis in original). Batty first places Deshpande in the context of other parochial writers with whom Deshpande claims affiliation--Hardy, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Dickens, and Mrs. Gaskell, among others--and notes the potential of novels to resituate the south Indian subject and milieu for Western readers familiar with the works of those writers (xxxv). She counters the easy identification of Deshpande as a realist writer, instead identifying literary modernism as the other register in which Deshpande writes (xxxv). This aspect of Batty's argument is insufficiently developed in readings of Deshpande's novels: to note breaks with realist narrative frames in some of Deshpande's work is not enough to bolster the claim that her literary technique ... has more in common with the experiments of early modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner (xxxvi). This claim risks setting up misleading expectations of Deshpande for the new readership Batty would like to capture. This is not the case, however, with the central, sustained claim of Batty's argument, which seeks to establish Deshpande as a gothic writer. Batty fully convinces me that the lineaments of gothic fiction are to be found everywhere in Deshpande's novels. Batty contends that Deshpande's novels turn on the uneasy transmission and inheritance of intergenerational secrets or, following the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, crypts, particularly among women. Batty demonstrates the centrality of narratives of familial haunting in Deshpande's fiction from earliest novels on--she presents detailed readings of Deshpande's first eight novels and ends with a brief discussion of Moving On (2004)--and locates the ruptures and excesses of plotting and character development that have been noted by a number of Indian critics within a larger gothic poetics. Her reading of the role that specific family secrets play not only in the determination of character but also in the generation of narrative itself in Deshpande's novels is illuminating and persuasive (27). It ties Deshpande's body of work together more specifically than the label women's fiction, which Deshpande herself resists as limiting. Batty's use of psychoanalytic theory to explicate what she terms cryptomimesis in Deshpandes fiction provides a coherent theoretical frame for enterprise (19). …