Outlook Anniversary Issue: The Artifice Of Reality

To my mind, one of the most vital aspects of creativity is the ability to unravel the relationship between a character and their world: their language, politics, lineage and era. The writer’s task is not one of mere placement; I do not “place” a character into a setting. Instead, the character is born of their location and time, intrinsically bound to their environment from the moment of conception. Understanding this innate, simultaneous emergence is an essential act of creation. I verify this bond by subjecting my characters to various pressures, stretching them to see how truthful my initial understanding truly is. I test to see if the character and their world are, in fact, inseparable. In this way, the work of fiction becomes an exploration of how these external forces shape the internal self. The writing process evolves into a continuous trial where the character is tested against shifting political tides and social upheavals, while new figures are introduced as counterweights and complements. It is through these confrontations that the character’s internal reality is finally stripped bare, revealing an inner truth that makes the work feel both resonant and contemporary.

I want to explore these ideas further by looking at three of my favourite books. In each, I will show how the author truly understands the bond between their characters and the world they inhabit. You can see that the lives described in these stories aren’t just “placed” in a setting; they belong there. By looking at these examples, we can see how the specific time and place actually create the person the character becomes.

Every time I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I am astonished by the way the home is woven into the narrative. The novella opens with the news of Ilyich’s death and a description of his colleagues visiting the home. The details of his life only unfold in flashback while his corpse lies present within the house itself. Therefore, it is impossible for the reader to consider his life in isolation from the ultimate reality of his death and the setting that contains it. This approach validates the story’s core premise: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” What setting could more perfectly encapsulate the tragedy of a simple and ordinary life than the bourgeois home he struggled so hard to acquire and furnish? As the ordinary details of his life deepen, the atmosphere of the house becomes increasingly foregrounded.

The precipitating incident, Ilyich’s fall while decorating his new residence, provides the thematic link between his material ambition and his physical decline. As his illness progresses, the master of the house slowly begins to contract, withdrawing inward into the hollow of his own mind. His physical space diminishes accordingly, and his life becomes tragically confined to his room. The room is transformed from a domestic space into a private crucible for his suffering. As Ilyich’s death approaches, this room begins to function as a visual metaphor for his coffin. Because these profound realities are fully realised only within these walls, the house and the chamber itself transition from mere setting into an integral component of the story’s existential experience.

Kuvempu’s Kannada novel, Malegalalli Madumagalu (Bride in the Hills; translated by Vanamala Viswanatha), achieves a rare synthesis: the Malenadu forest and the narrative become a singular entity. The novel immediately plunges into action, charting the journey of Gutti, a Dalit man, who sets out to win his beloved. The opening pages detail Gutti’s travel, accompanied by his dog, Huliya, toward a distant settlement. As this trek winds through the dense jungle, we are introduced to a host of new individuals and their distinct temperaments. The inner lives of these characters are revealed through their varied reactions to the challenging situations the forest presents. Kuvempu does more than just depict the forest in subtle detail; he breathes vital life into it by conveying the deep respect it commands in the human-nature relationship and the necessity of strictly adhering to its rules.

The novel’s sheer artistic scale is evident in the fact that Gutti’s round trip alone consumes a quarter of the text, approximately two hundred pages. One of the work’s most remarkable passages occurs when Gutti and his beloved Timmi are escaping through the forest late at night. A large herd of wild bison appears before them, their eyes glittering in the darkness. In that precise moment, a tiger unleashes a deafening roar, and the massive herd vanishes in swift, surging waves, like a sudden storm. Characters drift in and out of the dense forest, appearing and vanishing like fleeting shadows. A pervasive sense of being watched, the feeling of something or someone lurking just beyond sight, clings to the work. This subtle tension lends the entire experience a haunting beauty and an air of profound mystery.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s memoir, In My Father’s Court, brings to life the people of Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. Singer’s father was a Rabbi, and to the Jewish community there, he was the one who settled arguments and offered guidance. The smooth flow of life in this community depended entirely on their shared faith and their absolute trust in the Rabbi’s fairness. The “court” was actually just a room in Singer’s childhood home. In this simple room, all the politics, social struggles, and religious tensions of Krochmalna Street came to light. The joys and sorrows of every family on the street were tied to that small room. It was as if the space itself was sacred, and people felt they could reveal their deepest secrets there without any hesitation. Singer witnessed all of this as a child and wrote about it years later as a grown man. This work is a rare achievement where the narrator uses the sophisticated language of an adult to capture the pure, innocent eyes of a child. This is possible only because Singer looks at this court with a sense of holiness and objectivity. From the perspective of that one room, which acted like the community’s conscience, we see the full range of human life: marriage, divorce, love, jealousy and betrayal. By the time Singer wrote these stories, Krochmalna Street had been completely destroyed. Even the language he wrote in, Yiddish, was fading away. Because of this, his writing is filled with a deep sense of loss for a world where people truly believed in a fair and simple system of justice.

Looking back at these three works, can we really say these locations were “real”? Was the house from where we see Ivan Ilyich’s life come alive real? Was Kuvempu’s Malnad forest real, or was Singer’s father’s court real? If we look for them on a map, we might find a version of them, but in literature, there is actually nothing “real” in the physical sense. The most persistent illusion surrounding art is the demand for reality. This is the reason I find myself baffled by the relentless questioning: “Is this real?” or “Did this happen to you?” This obsessive drive to find the tangible, verifiable truth is not a quest for reality. It is, more accurately, a proxy for understanding the mystery of the creative process. People look for facts because the actual process of turning a memory or an idea into a living, breathing world is much harder to explain. In the end, a place in a story is true not because it exists on a map, but because it is the only place that specific character could have ever been born in.

This article appeared as ‘The Artifice of Reality” in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘ Party is Elsewhere ’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics

Vivek Shanbhag is the author of ten works of fiction and three plays in Kannada. Ghachar Ghochar, the first of his novels to be published in English, was translated into more than 20 languages. He is the co-translator of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s book, ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj’, into English. Shanbhag is a visiting professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana