Transcending Banality: Reconfiguring Narrative Aesthetics in The Legends of Khasak

Abstract

Postcolonial writers often maintain an incredulous and questioning stance against the grand, spectacular narratives of the Empire and hence tend to resist them. As an alternative, they seek to foreground the mundane and the banal in their works. Challenging the dominant western literary discourses that privilege spectacle and action, postcolonial writers reconfigure the ordinary and the quotidian into a narrative force. In literary compositions, quotidian particularities have been discerned widely as ‘non cathartic affects’ as they engender boredom in the mind of readers. But, postcolonial novelists from the Indian subcontinent, subverting the claims of Eurocentric aesthetic conventions, employ banal details in their literary compositions, with a view to capturing the lived realities of the people. Postcolonial writers' fascination for the quotidian, in turn, metamorphoses into an act of ‘writing back to the centre’. The seemingly trivial, thus, assumes centrality in the works of these writers. This paper attempts to examine how The Legends of Khasak, by the renowned Malayalam novelist O. V. Vijayan, demonstrates a novel aesthetic of banality by underscoring the salience of the mundane and the banal. Foregrounding the quotidian, the novel reimagines fictional narratives both as a means of resistance and a site of innovation. The paper argues that the novel subverts readerly expectation regarding fictional narratives - that they should preoccupy themselves with spectacular events and grand episodes to be interesting - and furnishes a novel aesthetic of banality.