Imitative Fallacy?

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

Have you read it? At 560 pages in print, it is no lightweight beach reading, and especially also given the content which I summarize from Goodreads:

“Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. . . . relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration.”

Tremendous. Simply that. Goodreads continues with “In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. . . .”

I couldn’t agree more about the ferocious compassion, the patient working on the reader’s empathy and understanding of lives far distant from that of most readers of such work, but last but not least, the writing itself. Primarily, the taut and flawless command of the tone and flavor the interior monologue of a character like Demon—knocked about, under-educated, wounded, yet wise.

It’s the “wise” that gets you, that catches in your throat like a sob.

Nobody beats Barbara Kingsolver in penetrating swoop into the depths of character and crisis. But over and above all else, I want to ensure we notice the transformation, or alchemization, of what is often called the “imitative fallacy,” which means a character presented as speaking in a diction and register true to the real-life subject the character represents, such as a child in fiction having a voice or interior monologue like that of a real child in the real version of the fictional setting.

Supposed to be a rather shoddy thing to do in fiction.

For example, think of a four-year-old’s story told in the diction and register of a four-year-old. Not done, right?

Wrong. Done! By Kingsolver in Demon Copperhead, and to such amazing effect that the life and consciousness of Demon Copperhead becomes alive and unforgettable for a reader.

And this is no unethical appropriation of another person’s difference to make a book sell, something that as a Brown Girl I am very wary of and sensitive to.

No, this is genuine insight, interpenetration, and compassionate authenticity. I quote Demon himself, from fairly early in the novel: “My thinking here is to put everything in the order of how it happened, give or take certain intervals of a young man skunked out of his skull box, some dots duly connected. But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.”

And not grammatical, and not manicured, and yet absolutely bull’s-eye. This is how a real Demon Copperhead, with a Demon Copperhead’s life, is talking and thinking. And putting these thoughts in any other register or style would have let half of that flavor and that passion leak out. So thank you, Barbara Kingsolver, to tell that “imitative fallacy” thing to go sit where it belongs, recognizing the fallacy to be . . . Itself!

I wrote this today as part of my jottings and reflections on the writer’s craft. Incidentally—or possibly not—this “Imitative Fallacy” topic has interested me awhile because in my current novel, tentatively titled Homeland Blues, I have my South Asian characters whose “English,” in their monologues and voices, would not be “standard” in real life.

Many postcolonial fiction writers deal with this issue, of course, Salman Rushdie, notably, in Midnight’s Children simply hopped and skipped over the issue by letting his Indian characters speak English “imitatively,” i.e., as they would in real life if they did speak English, complete with pidgin and idiom:

“Baap-re-baap, such so bad things: at Gwalior they’ve seen the ghost of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have bene seen many-headed like Ravana, doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger I am good Christian woman, baba. . . . ”

And,

“Padma laughs, ’Just tell what happened, Mister! What is so surprising aif a baby does not make conversations?’”

And so forth.

For a long time I mulled this over. Does a working-class illegal alien South Asian woman in America think or speak in grammatically correct and complete standard English sentences? And does another South Asian woman of a higher class but similar cultural background speak and think like a native-born American? And if not, should I be “writing” their voices as if they do, or risk the “Imitative Fallacy?”

I decided, in the end, that I should risk it.

So my working-class South Asian woman in Homeland Blues speaks and thinks like this:

“The girls at Mario’s Mexican looking you over shoulders in beginning and going phusur-phusur each other’s ear for one week, but then something changing. Maybe is knowing you, even if Indian from India, not going chhee-chhee about them, maybe not going to. Maybe the leopard look your eyes sometimes gets when some chutiya say or do something rude or worser in kitchen or restaurant is what they are seeing. And also seeing you smoking alone outside, standing like cowboy with back to cinderblock wall minus hat, they are relaxing, maybe. They are coming over, first one then another one, and bit by bit not anymore looking over shoulders and going phusur-phusur.”

And my upper middle-class South Asian housewife who hasn’t quite assimilated yet has this to say:

“She was living in a sewer. Color was one thing. She was almost totally okay with that, no one could say she was racist anymore. But this . . . no. Mad or what? No. How even touch anything in the house after this? He might even have a disease. The disease. He might have AIDS. And then he could give the disease to her, couldn’t he? Even knowing after a feverish internet search that AIDS was pretty hard to get, her body didn’t listen.”

Because that’s the interior monologue, the free indirect style version, the close third person authentic perspective of the model minority South Asian housewife, possibly, complete with Indian “idiom” like “Mad or what?” a thing only urban South Asians say.

Well, that’s it for now, but I’d love to know what you think about the Imitative Fallacy, or Demon Copperhead, or anything else . . . . Let me know if you get a chance with a comment.

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The itty bitties:

Folks, I was born and raised in India and have called the United States my second continent for the last thirty-odd years. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve generally turned to books for the answers to life’s questions, big or small (that includes philosophy and recipes). My first novel Love’s Garden was published in October 2020. Some nice people have said some nice things about it (Buzzfeed; Medium.com; Foreword Reviews; Goodreads). I’m currently working on Homeland Blues, my second novel, about love, colorism, racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America.

My short stories have been published or will be in in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), the Gardan Anthology of the Craigardan Artists Residency, Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bangalore Review, PANK, OyeDrum, and more. I’ve attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center residency, the VONA residency, Centrum Writer’s Residency, and others. I was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women’s Literary Award (2019), and received Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021.

In a related avatar, I’m Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA and teach and write about English literature, South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies, Colonial Discourse Analysis, Gender Theory, Film Studies, and Critical Theory. I founded and directed (2007-2017) the South Asia Working Group of the Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M University, and rom 2012 -2014 directed the Graduate Studies program of the English department at Texas A&M University. I’ve published three academic monographs and many articles on film, world literature, feminism and visual culture, colonial and postcolonial discourse analyses of literature from the eighteenth century onwards, gender in South Asia, and travel writing. The latest of these is Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). I’ve received grants and fellowships from the Huntington Library Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Regional Worlds Program of the Globalization Project (Ford Foundation) at the Chicago Humanities Institute, and the Lilly Foundation.

I also play at Youtube; Amazon; Author’s Guild; Twitter; Instagram; Facebook; Blog; LinkedIn; Goodreads; and Nandini’s Writing, Treehugging and Reading Outfit

I was sighted at these spots recently:

Invited Featured Speaker at the Washington DC South Asian Literary Festival; 60-minute reading, and Q&A on my novelLove’ Garden; Moderator Dr. Betty Joseph, Professor of English, Rice University, April 16, 2022

Moderator and Commentator, Featured Speaker Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reading from The Last Queen, at the Washington DC South Asia Literary Festival; April 17, 2022

Featured Panelist on “Shapes of History” panel, 3rd Tasveer South Asian LitFest (TSAL), part of Tasveer Festival: Watch, Read, Talk; October 1st-24th, 2021; also available here with a ticket or pass; October 19th, 2021, 9 pm CST

Featured Reading of Love’s Garden, Bright Hill Press Reading, July 8, 2021

Invited Reading at Lit Balm: an Interactive Livestream Reading Series, February 27, 2021

Invited Workshop and Reading with a focus on Love’s Garden at Dev Samaj College for Women, Panjab University, India, February 2, 2021

Featured Reading from Love’s Garden in the Hidden Timber Book Reading Series, January 24, 2021

Reading from Love’s Garden at Readings on the Pike, December 10, 2020, 7-8 PM EST

Reading at the KGB Bar, New York City, Nov 15, 2020, 7-9 PM EST

Reading at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Nov 13, 6-7 PM CST

Book Launch at Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX, Oct 27, 2020, 7–8 PM CST

Cambridge Writers Workshop and IEE Benefit Reading, July 24, 8-9 PM:

Podcasts: Desi Books Episode 21

Interviews: Nandini Bhattacharya speaks on “Tell Me Your Story” Digital Conversation, April 10, 2021, 8 am CDT, on MONEY/MOOLAH/THAT THING THAT THEY SAY MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND, and Colonialism, Gender and Writing; Oyedrum; Lois Lane Investigates; Tupelo Quarterly; Critical Flame