James Goonewardene in Times of the Apocalypse

• In terms of craftsmanship, Goonewardene is not the best writer
• Goonewardene was by no means a lone champion in promoting life turned away from the centre
• Goonewardene uses set-pieces that urge the reader to take the subject of ecology and minimalism seriously

Drawing on Carl Muller in an earlier note necessitates us to step a bit further back for a misunderstood writer’s sake: James Goonewardene who, with Punyakanti Wijenaike and Raja

Proctor, spearheaded the Sri Lankan English novel after independence. Writing a series of novels and short stories, Goonewardene regularly published from the 1968 to the early-1990s. However, in a 2002 interview given to Minoli Salgado, Jean Arasanayagam had claimed Goonewardene, in 1997 and aged 76, to have died a “broken man”. It is a line that has haunted me – The sadness of a writer who is the icon of a generation where Sri Lankan English creativity was not widespread; where by publishing work such as A Quiet place (1968), The Call of the Kirala (1972), The Awakening of Dr. Keerthi and Other Stories (1976), An Asian Gambit (1984) and One Mad Bid for Freedom (1990), Goonewardene persisted even while his critics challenged him for producing romantic and exotic renditions of idyllic village landscapes. 

Nor is James Goonewardene any longer taught in the university. Other than being a necessary footnote in an introductory lecture, Goonewardene’s short, but instructive bibliography has now been effectively made a thing of the past. Sadly, very soon, Goonewardene’s fate will be shared by his peer Punyakante Wijenaike – who, even at the present, continues to hold a minor interest in the external degree – and, more poignantly by Lakdas Wikkramasinha who is Sri Lanka’s best poet in the English language. While Wijenaike’s fate will be settled by a more fashionable female writer, Wikkramasinha’s exile – when it finally happens – will be executed by academics of my generation: the intolerant first-classes of a gendered academy. 

   
Goonewardene’s being an endorsement of romantic stereotypes of rural settings is a tragic trivialization. The charge comes largely as a response to his portrayal of the village in A Quiet Place and The Call of the Kirala. In my early-twenties, I myself have been guilty of this rather narrow view of James Goonewardene’s work which – even at worst – offers wider scope. Its unlearning came slow, took time, and not without an understanding of Goonewardene’s greater purpose, sense of ecology, and philosophy of life. In a paper I wrote several years ago, I proposed what we often misunderstand as a tendency in Goonewardene to romanticise and to render to the exotic to be a serious proposition to revise our lifestyle; a lifestyle – like his metropolitan protagonists who abandon the city for a life in the country – where one decisively turned away from capitalism and fevered consumption. Presented as a prototype, the alternative was a toned down life of contentment that was minimalist and free of burden and anxiety. In terms of craftsmanship, Goonewardene is not the best writer. But, notwithstanding, A Quiet Place and The Call of the Kirala frame the possibility of an ecological consciousness and a life of minimalism as alternatives to a race in the city. 

Writing in the 1960s, Goonewardene was by no means a lone champion in promoting life turned away from the centre. His contemporaries in the Sinhalese literature who towed a line born out of a comparable life philosophy include K. Jayathilaka and Mahagama Sekara. Jayathilaka (whose overall assessment as a writer would have been of the highest class if not for the work of his declining years after Rajapakse Walauva in 1980), in novels like Charitha Thunak, Pithamaha, and Kalo Ayan-the, throughout the 1960s and early-1970s, draw a universe turned away from the city (or, competitive society), built on community values, domestic economies, strong village-level bonds, and traditional values. Mahagama Sekara’s Thunman Handiya, at many levels, complements the life order and value system Jaythilaka positively endorses. In a strict comparison between Jayathilaka and Goonewardene, while the writing concerns of the former peters out in other directions in subsequent decades, even as late as 1990, when his One Mad Bid for Freedom is published, Goonewardene uses set-pieces that urge the reader to take the subject of ecology and minimalism seriously. In the defense of the critic, perhaps these cues were missed because the discussion of literary work in Sri Lanka is often dominated by frames based on social, political, and gender paradigms. Climate, nature, and ecology – if at all – are points of entry that are still in the making in our local classroom. 

Goonewardene is not the only writer we have cut short as a result of our own myopia and skewed preferences. Recent books that encourage us to reimagine ecology include Radika Philip’s Reyna’s Prophecy (2013) and Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s The King and the Assassin (2014). Discussions on Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) – in spite of the diversity of views it has spurned on social and political upheaval – rarely, if at all, include ecological themes. The literature classroom of the new decade has a role in reconsidering these neglected, unconsidered channels for deep and meaningful academic discussion. Endangered by total annihilation, the decade afoot calls for timely resurrection. James Goonewardene yet has a role to play.