Mahesh Paudyal
The author of well-received comical works like Coming from Behind, Peeping Kalooki Nights and The Act of Love, Howard Jacobson bagged year’s Booker Prize for his work The Finkler Question a years ago. For it, he had beaten contenders including Peter Carey, who had won the prize twice in the past, and was eying the same for the third time for his Parrot and Oliver in America.
Like many other award-winning works, Finkler Question too came into discussion after the award. Before it, probably, it was counted as just another work by the author of comic fictions, seldom counted as serious. Now, Jacobson is drawing world’s attention.
Against the conventional style patent to Jacobson, The Finkler Question is not what readers generally expect from this author. In it, juxtaposed with a light humour characteristic of Jacobson, a serious existential question is at play, and it demands a highly contemplative scrutiny. The author poses serious inquiries about the past, and draws connections with the present, laying bare the underlying paradoxes and contradictions. His approach in it seems to me, an application of Adorno’s ‘negative theology’, that is partly satirical, but corrective in the core. The Finkler Question is a question about the very essence of life amidst hardship. It is a quest for meaning, when both the present and past fail to cater any memorable worth to life, understood in its conventional sense. Above it, the question the author raises in a rhetorical way is an existential one, whose answers are no answers proper, but other questions imminent in the offing.
Two of its central characters – Julian Teslove and Sam Finkler – are schooldays friends. Treslove is a radio producer, and Finkler a highly qualified author, and a television personality. Their relation in the surface doesn’t appear to be special or intimate; yet some mysterious forces of attraction keep them binding. They meet off and on, and share experiences of life. What is strange in their relation is that they lead diagrammatically different modes of life, and their viewpoints contradict at a number of points. Libor Sevick, the third major character and their teacher, too is brought into their company more often than never. Sam and Libor are Jews, and Teslov an outsider in their company, closely following their lives, and wishing that he was himself a Jew. This wish, at times develops into a type of envy, because Teslove at times is bent on thinking that they suffer less because they are Jews. Sevick is a man of wider world view, and his thinking about the academic operations and pedagogical culture is quite comprehensive, and projects beyond the basics of examination, and beyond the question of passing and failing. His contemplations on these issues pertain to higher order thinking, that revolve around refining life, and discovering a whole person within an individual.
Each of these characters is dogged by a frustrating failure in family relations. Libor and Sam have recently lost their wives, and Treslove has been a failure in marriage for the third time, his last wife leaving him for no serious reason.
Amid this hotchpotch, they meet at Libor’s apartment, one evening in London. The apartment is grand, and stands in its full grandeur more like the antithesis of Libor’s own life, marked more by failures, than by the successes suggested by the radiance of his superficialities. Their meeting that evening carefully transcends the painful present and retires to that innocent and free past, when they had no cares to dog them, and had enough time to stand and stare at the beauty of life. That was a time of freedom – away from the imperatives of love and marriage, of wives and children, of family and responsibility. They were free birds, flying at their will, far beyond the ugly frontiers of the practical world, away to the horizons of freedom. There was no love and no lost, no devastation and no separation. Neither were they concerned much with security, nor with the question of losing anything – for, they had accumulated little. The lesser one owns the fewer are the worries for security, when it comes to getting robbed or being targeted for wealth. They were happy too, because that was a time of pure innocence, and their happiness was ultimate and seldom teleological. They had no goals to achieve, and no will to fulfill. They just lived life, and enjoyed the same to the fullest. In fact, they had no point to regret for or mourn at, then.
Much of the talking that evening is geared by Sam and Labor, while Treslove listens with interest, and shares their pain. As Keats says, their ‘fancy cannot cheat for long,’ and their ugly present resurrects from its momentary nap, and pours over their nostalgic past once again, exposing the ugly fangs of the present. Treslove has tears for his friends, in whose tales, he finds his own reflections.
After the informal meeting ends, Treslove walks out, sad and forlorn. In fact, his contemplations are of the present time, rendered almost worthless by hardships that come not in terms of one or two, but in battalion. Late at night, as he is walking homeward, he stops outside the shop of an old violin dealer, where he is attacked. An otherwise already robbed man, Treslove is forced to excavate deeper connotation of this attack, and through it, the meaning at large, of human life and existence. In the later part of the novel, he is a completely different man, transmuted by the macabre hailstorm of life.
Reading between the lines, The Finkler Question scrutinizes the nemesis of being a Jew, and the doom one bears merely for being born as a member of that community in highly racial Europe and the West, that makes hollow claims of being the savior of human rights and equality around the world. Treslove at some point appears envious of his two other companions – Sam and Labor, simply on the ground that they suffered less than him. The question of Jewish nationality comes up to be even more pertinent, because the author falls back upon his own horrifying experiences of being a Jew outside Israel during 2009 at the time of Operation Cast Lead, in a highly racial and non-cooperative air in England.
Though Jacobson has maintained his informal, comical style in this novel too, he sounds more and more like Anton Chekhov here. Like Chekhov, he makes his characters laugh at their own hardship, and philosophize their own existence. The characters seem to listen to the stories of others, and yet, they are more engaged by the conundrum of their own perplexed realities. Like Becket, Jacobson makes unhappiness quite funny, and at the same time quite grave. This way, he has philosophized melancholy, in the guise of comics. Probably, Jacobson has explored the best part of this authorial insight, here in this novel.
[Paudyal is a faculty at the Central Department of English, TU]