3 - The Self and the World: Narayan's Memoirs, Travelogues and Guide Books

Summary

This chapter will deal with Narayan's non-fictional narratives, and concentrate on his style of writing memoirs, travel accounts and guide books. The three texts that would be discussed are My Days, The Emerald Route and My Dateless Diary. Between them we see much of R. K. Narayan himself and his relation to the world around him. In other words there is both the ‘paysage interieur’ and the openness to the other – both the inner and the outer, the personal and the public. This combination of memoir and confession makes for autobiography. We have already seen how deeply autobiographical a writer Narayan is and a study of these three texts will only underscore the profoundly personal nature of Narayan's writings. The three texts taken for analysis tell us not only a great deal about Narayan as a persona behind the writing but also about writing itself. The books are as much about writing as they are about the self in the act of writing. We see then, generic disruption, an openness to experiment with traditional forms, a deliberate teasing mix of fact and fiction, confession and memoir, reality and myth. Above all, even when he is supposed to be dealing with fact we see the admixture of fiction. Narayan, as S. Krishnan pointed out with reference to Grandmother's Tales, writes ‘faction’. We can apply the term to all three texts studied in this chapter.