Saho – Nostalgic Camaraderie, Atemporal Order, and a Prefab Cultural Landscape

Reviewed
by prof. Ari Ariyaratne

Saho (the Comrade) is a novel that deserves better attention from sophisticated readers. It is written by Ariyarathna Athugala, a Sri Lankan academic who has shown his talents and skills previously as a prolific writer and a playwright.

A group of college students, living in an unspecified college campus in Sri Lanka, is central to this novel. The dramatis personae are Tharu, Sandu, Hiru, and Ratu. Sandu has freshly graduated from college and secured a dubious probationary college teaching position, which would not be likely to last more than the time duration of an academic year. Nearing graduation, her friends face an equally uncertain future. Their unsettled prospects notwithstanding, the main characters in this novel are inclined to become entangled in the themes common to their age groups in a college campus environment, such as romance, ambition, and the generally lukewarm reception to authority, control, and convention.

Hence Saho is a work fitting well with the genre of novels known in the West as college novels. Sometimes known as academic or campus novels, this genre often appeals to its niche audience, consisting of high schoolers, college students, and the likes. Aligning with the popular trope that college is the happiest four years of one’s life, at times, some college novels (and the movies based on such novels) have been successful in grabbing readers’ attention beyond their traditional constituency.

Prefab Cultural Landscape and Atemporal Order

The story unravels in a prefab cultural landscape. The author carefully confines his chosen characters and their activities mostly into several places in the college campus, such as the playground, the cafeteria, the classrooms, the library, undergraduate dormitories, and private boarding houses.

Moreover, this made-beforehand landscape and those who inhabit in it exist without relation to time, as if they live in an eternal present. Atemporal order is accentuated due to another reason. The names of most characters in this novel bear cosmic connotations, and as a result the reader feels galactic. More to the point, the main characters express their this-worldly feelings, thoughts, and actions while alluding to Other-Worldly or extraterrestrial vastness simultaneously. For instance, they see some lecturers’ conduct in this college campus as akin to that of extraterrestrial beings (p. 26). Moreover, they jokingly point out that a thinly made stringhopper is worthy for nothing but to use as the protective viewing of a solar eclipse! (p. 79). Likewise, Rathu, a main character in the novel, insinuates the following: Hiru’s sunrays have boosted Saho’s morality, Sandu’s moonlight has awakened his desire, and Tharu’s rock-throwing (after appearing on the scene like a comet rose from the distant sky) has brought a tragic end to Saho’s life (p. 65).

Nostalgic Camaraderie

Although the main characters share the commonality of being relatable to each other as young adults facing similar predicaments in a college campus environment, they also impart profound dissimilarities. For instance, Sandu can spew lines from classical English literature in her class sessions while others in the group reacting cluelessly as if the linguistic barrier is something insurmountable. Similarly, Hiru proves in the end that she can hang out with her friends while concealing her complicit life. By the same token, Rathu can mingle with his friends while insinuating their responsibility for Saho’s death simultaneously. The strongest commonality they all share, without a doubt, is nostalgic camaraderie.

Let me describe succinctly what nostalgia does. Nostalgia essentially crushes the surface of an atemporal order and a prefab cultural landscape, and it does so by resurrecting time and place. It sets up a frame of meaning within which positing a “once was” in relation to “now” is possible. Nostalgia is a crucial narrative function of language that orders incidents temporally while dramatizing them in the mode of “things that happened,” that “could happen,” and that “are happening now.” In this sense, to narrate a story is to place oneself in an event and a setting, and to relate something to someone. In other words, nostalgia makes it possible to create a relational interpretive space in which meanings have straight social antecedents.

It is to this interpretive space the author brings in the competing memories of camaraderie, a core concept of mutual trust, friendship, and unity. The strength of Athugala’s novel rests on his adroit depiction of Saho, the deceased protagonist of the narrative through competing nostalgic memories. At the novelist’s hand, Saho has become an interpretive space where competing memories of camaraderie are presented, negotiated, contested, and fiercely fought out. His immanent and pervasive presence is made manifest in such a way that the reader begins to feel Saho’s living presence.

Novel to Film Adaptation

Let me end this brief note on Professor Athugala’s novel by adding a word on its transition to a film. “I first wrote the screenplay,” says the author in the preface of the book, inferring that it was the film project that he had in mind at first, and on his way of getting that job accomplished, the novel came into being later. If one sets aside the familiar query which came early, the chicken or the egg, one cannot help but remember that many college novels in the West have become college films later.

Let me give just one example. German writer Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat or ‘Professor Filth’ was one of the earliest predecessors to the genre of college novel. The movie, adapted from the above book by the German director Josef von Sternberg, was Der Blaue Engel or ‘The Blue Angel’ (1930). The film was the first feature-length German full talkie. It presented the tragic transformation of a respectable professor (played by Emil Jennings) to a cabaret clown and his descent into madness. While bringing Marlene Dietrich (who played the role of Lola-Lola, the cabaret dancer and singer) international fame, the film also introduced another distinguishable trait in the genre of college film and its sister categories, the film of teenage romance and melodrama, and the coming-of-age film. That hallmark was the film’s musical score and the songs which could sensationalize the audience. As mentioned by film historians, when Marlene Dietrich was singing “Falling in Love Again” in this movie, Western filmgoers at the time have embraced not only the playful, flirtatious, and self-consciously seductive character of cabaret girl and the nutty professor, but also the musical score that immensely helped Dietrich to deliver it.

Although the college film genre was introduced to Sri Lankan cinema by the veteran film director Sugathapala Senerath Yapa with his Hanthane Kathawa or ‘Story at Hanthana’ in 1968, this category never became a well-established movie genre. Subsequently, Yapa’s film spawned a trove of trivial imitations and cheap parodies in many Sri Lankan films, however.

Only a few films that can be genuinely considered college films arose subsequently. Wasantha Obeyesekere’s 2002 film Salelu Warama or ‘The Web of Love’ and Asoka Handagama’s Ege Esa Aga or ‘Let Her Cry’ (2016) were two of such distinctive college films.

Several teenage romantic melodrama films also followed. One of the earliest movies in this category was Ranjith Lal’s Nim Walalla or ‘Horizontal Line’ (1970). Moreover, Lester James Peris’s Golu Hadawatha or ‘Silent Heart’ (which was based upon Karunasena Jayalath’s novel bearing the same title) was screened in 1972. Furthermore, the plot of Sumithra Peris’s film Gehenu Lamai or ‘Girls’ was adapted from Karunasena Jayalath’s novel, and it was released for Sri Lankan film audience in 1978. In addition, Sunesh Dissanayake Bandara’s 2004 film Adaraneeya Wassanaya or ‘Romantic Rainy Season’ was elicited from Upul Shantha Sannasgala’s novel titled ‘Wassana Sihinaya’. Just as their Western counterparts, the musical score and some of the songs in these movies could sensationalize their Sri Lankan niche audiences.

In line with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that it invokes in the beginning (in Chapter 2), Athugala’s novel unfolds to become a college novel with an allegoric flavor. Even though the action of the novel takes place in a realistic space, the characters inhabiting that space seem to act almost like the dramatis personae in an allegory. When one reads an allegory in the form of a novel, the narrative itself acts as a moral lesson or message. In an allegoric work, concrete things such as characters, setting, and objects are likely to represent deeper meanings. Therefore, when adapting a novel with an allegoric tinge to a film, it generates a fertile ground for a cinematic metaphor to germinate and thrive.

Allegory and Cinematic Metaphor

Let me give an example of how great filmmakers combine realism with a parable of life. Let us focus on the Japanese New Wave film Woman in the Dunes (1964). This was the film characterized by the American film critic Roger Ebert as “a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down” (Chicago Sun-Times, February 2, 1998). In this black-and-white film adapted from the novel penned by Kobo Abe in 1962, the director (Hiroshi Teshigahara), the writer of the screenplay (Kobo Abe), the cinematographer (Hiroshi Segawa), and the composer of music (Toru Takemitsu) fruitfully collaborate to construct one of the most powerful cinematic metaphors that I have ever seen.

The metaphor is sand, literally, and cinematographically! In this part existential art film, the protagonist is an amateur entomologist-cum-schoolteacher who goes to a place full of dunes in the Japanese countryside. He misses the last bus to go back to the city. Lured by a group of villagers, the man decides to spend the night at a house in the dunes with a young widow living there. The man observes that the woman is busy shoveling sand until the wee hours of the night. In the morning, he also notices that she is sleeping with her bear naked, sand-covered, and widely exposed body in the only room in this shack they are both supposed to share for sleeping. “Are you shoveling to survive or surviving to shovel?” visibly stunned, the man (Eiji Okada) asks, and the woman’s (Kyoko Kishida) answer is the following: “If we stop shoveling, the house will get buried. If we get buried, the house next door is in danger.” Before he knows it, he is entrapped in a tomb-like shack at the bottom of a sandpit to become a laborer for shoveling sand and to become the widow’s lover!

The villagers periodically lowered from above to the sandpit supplies and the water required for their meager existence. In his prolonged struggle to get out from the sandpit, the introspective scientist discovers how to get water from the dune. Sand, which covers people with many problems slowly, leads them eventually to life-giving water, he realizes. Understanding this symbiotic relationship between sand and water gives meaning and purpose to life, he perceives further. So, the amateur entomologist gives up his long resolve of getting out of the sandpit, abandoning the woman, heading back to the city, and embracing his old self. Eventually, he gets out of the sandpit from a rope ladder lowered by the villagers. Yet the man decides to accept his new identity and family and gazes at the dunes studded expansive landscape dispassionately.

Saho is a promising college novel that warrants heeding of the refined reader.