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Theme and inaction in Raja Rao's the serpent and the

rope
a
Perry D. Westbrook
a
State University of New York , Albany
Published online: 18 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Perry D. Westbrook (1975) Theme and inaction in Raja Rao's the serpent and the rope, World Literature
Written in English, 14:2, 385-398, DOI: 10.1080/17449857508588357

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 THEME AND INACTION IN RAJA RAO'S
THE SERPENT AND THE ROPE

In this essay I wish to deal with Raja Rao's The Serpent and
the Rope entirely in relation to its philosophical premises. The style,
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the technique, the linguistic significance, and the mythological dimen-

sions of this remarkable novel have been treated extensively and thor-
oughly inbooks and articles by Indian scholars.* But one important a s -
pect of the novel has thur far gone relatively unexplored: I refer to the
problems in regard to plot and characterization that are posed by Raja
Rao's Vedantic philosophy. A philosophical, or metaphysical (to use
Raja Rao's adjective), novel in which the characters and their actions
are not somehow or other in harmony with its philosophy would, of
course, be a dismal failure. The Serpent and the Rope is not a failure,
but a brilliant success by an overwhelming preponderance of critical
opinion. How content and philosophy havebeen fusedwill be my subject,
and in dealing with it I propose to offer comparisons and contrasts with
two other great philosophical novels—Thomas Mann's Per Zauberberg
and Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. books which
Raja Rao admired, though of course their metaphysics are for the most
part quite different from his.

The Serpent and the Rope is not simply metaphysical; its met-
aphysics so dominate it as to exclude almost all action. Yet this dearth
of action, far from being an aesthetic flaw, is necessitated by the au-
thor's theme—that is, by the particular metaphysics that he proposes to
set forth. Written in the first person, the novel reveals not only the
narrator's thoughts, feelings, and mystical transports, but also postu-
lates the outer world and the people in it as emanations, indeed crea-
tions, of his mind. "You create the world, and so you get attached to
the world. "2

Any novel written from the first person point of view, of

course, must reflect its narrator's mind and set forth his interpretation
and personal vision of the world outside him; and many such novels are
fully as subjective as Raja Rao's. In none, however, that I know of has
 386

the narrator been so thoroughly a Vedantin—that is a monistic (RajaRao

prefers the word non-dualistic) idealist, for whom all phenomena are
appearances or unrealities periphery to the Brahmanic One, the only real
reality, which resides deep within our selves.

Yet RajaRao—or his narrator the brahmin Ramaswamy—does

not by any means deny significance to these appearances. Illusory though
they may be, they do bear a relationship to ultimate Truth or Reality.
At least this seems to be Raja Rao's view, and he makes it his task (not
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an easy one) to demonstrate this relationship. "My main interest," he

has written, "is in showing the complexity of the human condition (that
is, the reality of man is beyond his person), and in showing the symbolic
construct of any human expression. All words are hierarchic symbols,
almost mathematical in precision, on and of the unknown. "•* Words,
even abstract ones, are of course symbols either of ideas or of objects,
events, or conditions, and hence the whole outer world may be taken as
symbolic of the "unknown," and since our experience of the world is in-
ner, "the sacred is nothing but the symbol seen as the I," to quote from
The Serpent and the Rope" (p. 58). The idea that the seeming realities
of the outer world are metaphors of God, or of God as mind or spirit, is
an age-old one, not confined to Vedanta but present in the thought of Pla-
to and familiar to American readers of such "Transcendentalists" as
Emerson and Whitman. 4

In The Serpent and the Rope Raja Rao's method has been to
record the trans mutation (within the mind of his narrator)of appearances
into Reality or Truth. A useful comparison, as to technique at least,
might be made with Thomas Mann's Per Zauberberg. Though Mann does
not employ a first person narrator, his central figure, Hans Castorp,
serves the same function as Raja Rao's Ramaswamy, for in Per Zauber-
berg the setting and the events of the novel are presented as Hans ex-
perienced them and as theyare hermetically transformed within his con-
sciousness into spiritual values and perceptions. Not being a Vedantin,
however, Hans is not under the necessity of denying the reality of the
outer circumstances of his life on the mountain, and this makes Mann's
job easier—but not more worthwhile—than Raja Rao's; for Mann can
utilize all the conventional props of fiction, such as conflict, action,
suspense, and setting, without having to categorize them as illusions.

Yet, despite these differences, there are notable similarities

in the material and the events in Mann's and Raja Rao's novels—paral-
 387

lels which point to similarities in the insights of the two authors rather
than to any conscious imitation by Raja Rao. Thus the protagonist of
each book suffers from tuberculosis, a disease which heightens its vic-
tim's intellectual and emotional sensitivities (Raja Rao refers to "the
ecstasy of fever" [p. 3631. Furthermore, both are exiled from their fa-
miliar surroundings and are subject to influences entirely different from
those in their highly conventional previous lives. As for their experi-
ences, both become involved in erotic adventures, both give utterance to
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paeans to women—Hans's quite physical in its terms, 5 Ramaswamy's,

spiritual (pp. 350-53). ^ Both are witnesses to supernatural or occult
occurrences and react to them with distaste and shame.'' Both have
fleeting visions of a supremebliss thatshould be humanity's loton earth 8
and (for Ramaswamy) in eternity; both are brought in close contact with
a wide variety of contrasting characters—frenetic intellectuals, sensu-
alists, bourgeois.

These are more than surface or merely coincidental resem-

blances. They are of a piece with the material of many bildungsromans
—the genre in which Mann's novel belongs and to which Raja Rao's may
be tentatively assigned. But to return to a consideration of the special
problems that the Vedantin Rajo Rao faces, it must be remembered that
among Western readers and critics it is axiomatic that action and con-
flict are indispensable to fiction but that Raja Rao's philosophy denies
the reality of conflict and action, which he must therefore strive to de-
emphasize—an effort in which he is quite successful. Referring to the
Mahabharata, Raja Rao is quoted as having said: "All you see is seem-
ing otherness. Ultimately nothing has happened or will happen and,
therefore, life is just a Ilia, a play. " 9

II

It is noteworthy and amusing that almost without exception

Western reviewers, desperate to find the conflict that they think no novel
may or should lack, have almost automatically concluded that the chief
concern of The Serpent and the Rope is that hackneyed and jejune war-
horse, the "East-West confrontation." No conclusion could be further
from the truth; and nothing could be more unflattering to the novelist.
To begin with, Raja Rao was and is as much a Westerner by education
and place of residence as he is an Indian, and in this Westernness his
protagonist Ramaswamy resembles him. Secondly, Ramaswamy's
French wife, Madeleine, with whom one would expect his Indianness,
 388

however diluted, would arouse conflict, becomes a vigorous Buddhist

and in thought and life style emerges as more Indian than Ramaswamy
himself. Finally, and most important, a major purpose inRamaswamy's
intellectual and academic pursuits is to demonstrate the unity of all man-
kind and the resemblances of all cultures to one another rather than to
emphasize their differences. Symbolically, Ramaswamy's scholarly
research is directed to establishing a unity rather than a duality as r e -
gards East and West. Hence he finds that the Cathars, on whom he is
writing his dissertation, had their spiritual origins in Buddhism and
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Hinduism.10 Similarly, he concludes (quite correctly) that Nestorian

Christianity was also profoundly influenced by Eastern religions. In-
deed, setting aside influences altogether, he sees in the mainstream of
Judeo-Christianity a likeness (deriving from roots in all-engrossing
Truth) to Hinduism, and he quotes (p. 356) Psalm 122 as evidence:

Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem: Jeru-

salem is built as a city that is at unity in itself.
O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper
that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls and plenteousness within
thy palaces.

The idea of Jerusalem being at unity would appeal to a Vedan-

tin, for the city of God must be a unity and a universality. Benares, the
Holy City of the Hindus, is everywhere: in Jerusalem, in Paris, in Lon-
don, but above all it is in the human heart (p. 48). Likewise, all rivers
—the Thames, the Cam, the Rhone, the Seine, and even the Mediterra-
nean Sea—are the Holy River Ganges (pp. 381, 383). Mountains any-
where—the Alps, Mt. St. Victoire, the Pyrenees—share with the Hima-
layas the tenantry of the Gods. India herself is but a condition of the
human heart and mind, scattered among the continents, rather than a
boundaried geographical location: India is not a country, "India is a
metaphysic," Ramaswamy avows (p. 374). These specific symbols—
Benares, the Ganges, Mt. Kailas, and India—arebasic in meaning to the
Brahmin and Vedantin; but as he sees them repeated wherever he goes,
he does not consider them unique to India in what they represent. Ra-
maswamy carries India within him along with the Indian symbols. "In-
dia is the kingdom of God, and is within one" (p. 387), and "India makes
everything and everywhere an India" (p. 135),

Since the aim of The Serpent and the Rope is not to chronicle
r

389

a confrontation, a conflict, but to point to the common spiritual ground

upon which all people and their cultures rest, and to de-emphasize, in-
deed to reject, the illusion of diversity, the novel, by its own thematic
imperatives, must avoid conventual plotting, in which two opposing
forces are placed in a struggle that intensifies to a climax and then
drops off to a denouement in which one or the other of the forces pre-
vails. In fact the less plot of this sort the better in a novel that cele-
brates a spiritual reality in relation to which all temporal or material
things are but shadows, illusions, maya. What conflict there is in this
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novel is that which is implied in the title—the possibility of mistaking a

rope (reality) for a serpent (illusion). Students of American literature
will recall that no successful novel was produced by Transcendentalism
and that the only serious attempt at one, Sylvester Judd's Margaret, has
been almost unanimously judged a failure. Transcendentalism, like
non-dualistic Vedantism, addresses itself to unity, harmony rather than
to diversity and discord, and thus its literary expression has been in
essays and poetry.

in
Raja Rao, realizing the incompatibility between his philosophy
and conventional Western forms of fiction, has made the statement that
"the Indian novelcan only be epic inform and metaphysical in nature."H
Always recalling that Raja Rao has defined India as a state of mind, in-
deed almost as a philosophy, unconfined by national frontiers, we may
assume that by his statement he means the novel based onVedantic pre-
mises; and we can be even more certain that by the word "epic" he is
referring to the long, discursive Indian epics rather than the more
closely knit ones of the West.

In the Indian epic—to some extent in all epics—action is pre-

sented as episode; and in the Indian epic action is somewhat neutralized
by being transmuted into metaphysical or religious Truth. Thus in the
Mahabharata the Baghavad-Gita is actually a philosophical discourse de-
livered on a battlefield and largely supplanting—for the sophisticated
reader at least—the battle as a focus of interest. There is not even a
philosophical debate, but instead a lengthy treatise from the mouth of
Krishna in answer to the misgivings of Arjuna, about to fight his kins-
men. Indeed by the time Krishna finishes proclaiming the indestructi-
bility of the universal spirit in which human beings share, the battle
seems pointless. Arjuna has abandoned his sense of personal stake in
 390

its outcome and has overcome his disinclination to kill, since only un-
real bodies are involved. In short, action has been reduced to inaction.
As Raja Rao has said, "action is taken for granted as Lila [aplay] though
the play may be as serious as the Mahabarata War. "^ In short, action
has been transformed to inaction in the light of Krishna's teachings. The
battle, though it rages for days, becomes a matter of diminished im-
portance and interest. Once the reality of death has been eliminated, a
battle loses most of its significance.
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Ramaswamy in The Serpent and the Rope repeatedly states his

disbelief in death, asserting that "to believe in death is to commit sui-
cide" (p. 382), and thus he excludes one of the main sources of narrative
suspense. Ramaswamy's own sickness, at times severe, causes him,
and hence the reader, no especial worry. Whether his bodily existence
continues or not seems a matter of little moment; he submits to various
therapeutic regimens and to surgery with the same detachment that
Krishna recommends Arjuna adopt in the waging of war. In contrast,
one should consider the suspense generated in Per Zauberberg as char-
acters examine their fever charts and x-rays for indications of the pos-
sible approach of death. Furthermore, Ramaswamy seems quite unaf-
fected by the deaths of his father and of his two sons; indeed when he
hears of the death of the second soon after birth he is "happy" and a s -
serts that "the world is a happy place for anyone to live in: look at the
ants . . . " (p. 283). Death and the approach of death are events that
Raja Rao reduces to non-events.

IV

As mentioned before, Ramaswamy's and Madeleine's marriage

could be expected to be a rich source of tension, for it ends in divorce
after a long period of slow dissolution. But there are no scenes of mar-
ital conflict, no harsh or excited words. Ramaswamy's extended ab-
sences in India—absences that Indian couples quite regularly take in their
stride—do not contribute to the break-up of the union. Nothing that Ra-
maswamy does and nothing, really, that Madeleine does, or does not do,
may be citedas a cause of dissension. There are periods of sexual pas-
sion in the marriage and periods of abstinence; neither seems of crucial
importance. There is a profoundly based companionship between them
at first, which fulfills itself in secret games of make-believe, such as
pretending that a rock in their front yard is a bull (a Nandi) and another
rock on a nearby hill is an elephant. Moreover, Ramaswamy is on the
 391

friendliest terms with Madeleine's painfully bourgeois relatives, and

they with him. Yet the marriage gradually dissolves as Madeleine drifts
farther and farther into Buddhism. But the symptoms and stages of dis-
solution are not dramatic or traumatic; all that happens is that Rama-
swamy absents himself for longer periods in India or on his research
trips to England and Paris, till on his last return home he appears to his
wife as a ghost from another world. The ending of the union, signalized
by Ramaswamy's visit to an advocate in a shabby section of Paris, is
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anticlimactical rather than tragic. The event, indeed, is meaningless

since it legalizes a separation long since in existence.

There is one aspect of this marriage, however, that might

conceivably be construed as supportive of the otherwise untenable a s -
sumption that Raja Rao is engaging in a presentation of the "East-West
confrontation." Ramaswamy believes, apparently on Vedantic grounds,
that "the God of woman must be the God of her man" (p. I l l ) and that
"to be a woman is . . . to be absorbed by a man" (p. 185), just as man
needs a woman for full realization of his Self ("for ever and always does
one fall in love but with oneself," pp. 354-55). Also, according to Ra-
maswamy, "no woman who's a woman can choose her own destiny"
(p. 289). Yet men need women because women make men "know the
world" and show them that "the world is oneself seen as the other. Un-
ion is proof that the Truth is non-dual" (p. 168). Madeleine does not
concur with these views but shares the Western belief that a man or
woman must find true being, or reality, individually and independently.
The truly Indian woman, in other words, identifies with Brahman through
her husband, who in turn is dependent upon her for full realization of
self. The Western woman, like the Western man, recognizes no such
interdependence of the sexes but searches directly, without a mediator,
for the divinity within her. Thus Madeleine is drawn to Buddhism—not
to her husband's Hinduism, note—as a result of her own most individual
impulses and intuition; thus she drifts out of her husband's orbit and the
spiritual fulfillment of each is thwarted. Madeleine in her adoption of
Buddhism independently of her husband was mistakenly seeing the rope
(truth) as a serpent (delusion; in this case the fact that her religion was
purely a private matter). Interestingly, when Madeleine kisses Rama-
swamy on one of his returns from India, it felt to her "like kissing a
serpent or the body of death" (p. 57). As a means of salvation her mar-
riage was already dead to her.
 392

Thus in a strictly spiritual sense, from Ramaswamy's view-

point, he and Madeleine have never been truly married. Ramaswamy's
real marriage is to Savithri, whom he weds symbolically in London but
with whom he experiences no physical love whatsoever. Ironically Sa-
vithri, a student at Cambridge University, is more "Western" on a su-
perficial level than Madeleine, since she fancies jazz and is interested
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in Communism; yet she concurs intuitively in the Hindu (as interpreted

by Ramaswamy) notion that woman finds her destiny only through man,
and thus in spirit she unites herself with Ramaswamy, who then urges
her to abide by her dharma and go through with her arranged marriage
to the mediocre Pratap. Yet this totally platonic affair provides both
participants with a spiritual fulfillment unattainable in their legal mar-
riages. It is significant that the last meeting of the two is in London—
at Ramaswamy's hospital bed—at the time of Queen Elizabeth's corona-
tion, for if a man is a woman's path to Brahman, a woman is "that which
reminds man of that which he is. . . . Woman is kingdom, solitude,
time. . . . She is the daughter of the earth, the queen, and it is to her
that elephant and horse, camel, deer, cow and peacock bow that she reign
over us, as in some medieval Book of Hours where she is clad in the
blue of the sky . . . " (pp. 350-51). What a queen is to her subjects, to
all humanity, Savithri is to Ramaswamy. "Woman is the duality made
for her own pools of mirroring and she crowns herself to show that man
is not of this kingdom. Man cannot even die. . . . The coronation is the
adieu of man to the earth" (p. 351).

So much for Ramaswamy's spiritual union with Savithri, who

follows his advice and eventually marries Pratap. His relinquishing of
her causes him only a minimum of pain or regret, and his feelings to-
ward Pratap are not in the least marked by jealousy. There is no con-
ventional triangle here, with the usual accompanying tensions, disap-
pointments, and triumphs. Nor is there any element of sacrifice or of
generosity in Ramaswamy's consigning Savithri to the man who in a con-
ventional novel would be considered his rival. Rather than a sacrifice,
a fulfillment, for both lovers, has resulted.

VI

At the end of the novel the recently divorced Ramaswamy is

sitting in the apartment of his former wife's cousin, Cathy Khuschber-
 393

tieff, chanting Sanskrit verses to the cousin's child and drinking hot
chocolate. He has decided to put himself under the guidance of a guru
inTravancore, South India—a step comparable perhaps to a Western in-
tellectual's placing himself in the hands of a psychoanalyst, since in each
case one to some extent surrenders his own spiritual or mental autono-
my. Thus Ramaswamy's mood at the end is one of painless submission.
The guru, he seems to believe, will show him the path from his present
not unpleasant passivity to the profound inner peace that comes with a
full realization that the Self is the only reality—that seeming (the ser-
pent) must not be mistaken for reality (the rope).
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Thus with Ramaswamy, who does not believe in death and who
views the universe and all that is in it as a unity, life is almost free of
the tensions usually considered indispensable for successful novels. But,
one may ask, what about the other characters, the non-Vedantins, like
Madeleine, Georges Khuschbertieff, even Ramaswamy's sister Seroja?
Are not these persons' lives afflicted with inner tensions and outer con-
flicts? The answer is that they are, to a limited extent. Madeleine does
struggle hard to be a good Buddhist. Her self-imposed asceticism—
fasting, prolonged meditations, and the like—makes severe demands
upon her, which she triumphantly meets, demands from which the Brah-
min Ramaswamy, aside from his habitual and effortless vegetarianism,
considers himself free. Indeed, Madeleine's compulsion to humiliate
the flesh, to struggle against it, constitutes the sole major difference
between her and her all-accepting husband.

It is one of the curious features of this novel that so many of

the characters have been touched in some measure by the attitude of
non-attachment of the narrator, perhaps by contact with him but more
likely by the very nature of their beings as created by Raja Rao. Made-
leine is the most notable exception, but Georges Khuschbertieff, who
marries Madeleine's cousin Cathy, is also an exception, especially in
regard to his spiritual life. Georges is the son of a devout Russian Or-
thodox, a follower of Berdaiev, but he has been converted to Roman Ca-
tholicism, a faith in which he does not seem completely at ease. At any
rate, adherence to it costs him some struggle. Of him Ramaswamy
comments: "like Shatov, Georges could have said 'I must, I mustbe-
. lieve in God,'" even if "impious man be made to go through hellfire so
that God might be, and in the image Georges had given the supreme be-
ing" (p. 70). Indeed this outburst of Shatov in Dostoyevsky's The Pos-
sessed impressed Raja Rao sufficiently for him to use it as a motto for
 394

his nouvelle Comrade Kirillov, written in English but thus far published
only in French translation. l a Georges and Shatov fight inner battles to
retain their faith. Dostoyevsky1 s own refusal to abandon his faith—held
in the face of the onslaughts of European rationalism—is expressed in
Shatov's frantic avowal, and thus Shatov's need to believe in God is Dos-
toyevskian. It is significant that Georges lends Ramaswamy Berdaiev's
book on Dostoyevsky, in which Ramaswamy reads: Tuer Dieu, c'est en
meme temps tuer l'homme. . . . NiDieu nedevore I'homme, ni l'homme
nedisparait en Dieu;il reste lui-meme jusqu'a la fin et pour la consom-
mation des siecles. C'est ici que Dostoievsky se montre Chretien au
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sens le plus profond du mot" (p. 81). At the end of the quotation Rama-
swamy comments: "How I wish I could tell Madeleine [still a Christian]
I have begun to worship her God" (p. 81).

Yet this beginning has no fulfillment, though Ramaswamy

makes numerous favorable remarks concerning Catholic Christianity.
The struggle to believe is Madeleine's (inher Buddhism) and Georges's,
and with Georges the struggle apparently subsides after he is. happily
married. The fact is that there is much of Alyosha Karamazov, as well
as of Shatov, in Georges. By contrast Ramaswamy's adherence to Hin-
duism costs him little effort, though he has been touched by Georges's
zeal. Ramaswamy's case has been foreshadowed in Raja Rao's writing
by the agonizing of Comrade Kirillov (a nickname), who toys with nu-
merous Western ideologies—most notably Communism, which he never
entirely abandons—but who never totally loses his Hinduism, of which
he observes many of the practices upon his return to India.

VH

At this point an interesting and productive comparison may

and should be made between The Serpent and the Rope and Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov, which Raja Rao thinks "maybe the greatest
novel of the Western world in the last two hundred years. . . . Anything
by Dostoyevsky inspires me because he was so essentially religious; by
religious I mean seeking connections between the concrete and the ab-
stract. "14 Both novels, of course, are philosophical or metaphysical,
as well as religious. But Dostoyevsky's, unlike Raja Rao's, is replete
with action and conflict. Yet Alyosha Karamazov—a passive character
—has much in common with Ramaswamy. Dedicated to the religious
life, he has placed himself under the staritz (elder) Father Zossima,
who is like an Indian guru ("one who shows you the way to Truth," as
 395

Ramaswamy puts it, p. 180). Also, Alyosha's religion is the traditional

Orthodoxy of his country, and he holds to his faith despite the inroads of
European science and "reason" into the Russian mind—much as Rama-
swamy champions Hinduism against Westernizing currents in India. But
Alyosha's faith is firmer, calmer, less desperate than Shatov's, just as
Ramaswamy's is more confidently and solidly grounded than the vacil-
lating Comrade Kirillov's. 1 5

In The Brothers Karamazov, however, all the characters ex-

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cept Father Zossima and Alyosha are in the grip of fierce spiritual and
intellectual conflict, and even Alyosha has a moment of religious doubt.
Alyosha's involvement in these struggles is mainlyas amediator restor-
ing the spiritual equilibrium of his kinsfolk. In a sense his role, like
Ramaswamy's, is inactive: he listens to Ivan's Legend of the Grand In-
quisitor and to the imprisoned Dmitri's indignant diatribes against his
lawyer, who wishes to prove him insane and thus deprive him of his hu-
manity. But at no time does Alyosha engage in more than the mildest
controversy with those whom he is trying to show the way to truth. As
with Ramaswamy, his presence more than his words and actions exerts
a pacifying, healing influence. Or rather, again as with Ramaswamy,
the traditional spiritual truth which he embodies and which emanates
from him is a restorative, redemptive force. Without Alyosha's pres-
ence (more than his efforts) utter ruin would have been the lot of the
Karamozovs and their women. The most remarkable working of this in-
fluence is on the schoolboys, whom Alyosha transforms from vindictive
little beasts to love-motivated human beings. Less decisive, but very
effective is his influence on Dmitri, Ivan, Katerina, and Grusherika.

To repeat, The Serpent and the Rope records no such con-

scious exertions on the part of Ramaswamy, but his inactive presence
is a major force in the lives of his family and close friends, whose trou-
bles and conflicts fall far short of Karamazov intensity. Dostoyevsky
was, of course, writing as a Christian who dualistically postulates the
existence of evil as opposed to good, a Devil in conflict with God. Raja
Rao, on the other hand, is writing as a Vedantin who non-dualistically
rejects as illusion (the serpent) the distinction between good and evil; in
Ramaswamy's musings, "Evil is a superstition, the name of a shadow"
(p. 112). The philosophical and religious premises of each novelist have
determined the nature of the content of his novel—whether it was to be
freighted with action and conflict or imbued with a spirit of passive ac-
ceptance and non-attachment. In each case the author has proceeded
 396

appropriately to his premises. In The Brothers Karamazov events are

predominant in carrying plot; in The Serpent and the Rope recurrent
symbols—the stuff of intellectual reality—are the foundation of the nov-
el, in which the sequence of events is intentionally shattered by flash-
backs and foreshortening, since time too is an illusion and the mind cre-
ates from its store of symbols a constantly renewed present not to be
differentiated from a past or a future.

Raja Rao's was the more difficult task—at least from a tradi-
tional Western point of view—and consequently his performance may
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seem more brilliantly successful than Dostoyevsky's. Raja Rao has ac-
complished what perhaps no other writer in the English language has
done so well: he has dramatized the life of a character whose profoundly
rooted philosophy excludes suspense, plot, and conflict from the cate-
gory of realities and hence rules them out of the novel recording that
life. This is a major achievement and a unique contribution to contem-
porary world literature. That this book with universality and unity as its
themes should be written in English—the closest we have to a world
language in our era—is appropriate, indeed almost inevitable.

NOTES

1 See, for example, M. S. Naik, Raja Rao (New York, 1972);

C D . Narasimiah, Raja Rao; A Critical Study of His Work (London and
Delhi, 1972); Ahmed Ali, "Illusion and Reality: the Art and Philosophy
of Raja Rao," Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 5 (July, 1968),
pp. 16-28.
2
The Serpent and the Rope (New York, 1963), p. 316. All ref-
erences to this novel are to the American edition (the English one ap-
peared in 1960). Page numbers of quotations will be given henceforth in
parentheses within the text.

3 James Vinson, ed., Contemporary Novelists (London, 1972),

p. 1042.
4
Thus in "Nature" (in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, New York, 1964) Emerson refers to "that Appearance we call the
World" (p. 26), and he states that "it is not words only thatare emblem-
atic [i. e., of spiritual realities]" (p. 15); and Whitman in his Preface to
 397

the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (in James E. Miller, ed., Complete
Poetry and Selected Prose, Boston, 1959) writes that it is the poet's
function to indicate to his readers "the path between reality and their
souls" (p. 415), reality in this case meaning the phenomenal world which
to most persons is the only real one but which to Whitman as to Emerson
was "appearance."
5
Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] (Berlin, 1924), pp. 449-
51. The description, spoken in French by Hans Castorp, includes for the
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most part features of the human body common to either sex, but Hans
clearly has in mind, and in view, the body of his paramour for a night,
Frau Chauchat.
6
In an earlier chapter of The Serpent and the Rope, Raja Rao
(or Ramaswamy) states: "To worship woman is to redeem the world"
(P. 172).

7 Reference is to the spiritualistic séance in Per Zauberberg

(pp. 856-93), at the end of which the spirit of Hans's deadcousin Joachim
is materialized, eliciting from Hans a whispered "Verzeih" ("forgive");
and to Raja Rao's description of Madeleine's miraculous powers, among
them the evoking of spirits or "gods," about which Ramaswamy says to
the reader: ". . . you must forgive and believe me, when I say it—I felt
the presence of others playing with us" (p. 321). Madeleine's miracles
are, of course, the "serpent" (unreality) of the novel's title. Hence Ra-
maswamy's apology.

8 Hans's dream, which begins in beauty but ends in terror, is

in the chapter titled "Schnee" ("Snow") and includes a vision of an Arca-
dian or Mediterranean civilization (pp. 640-43). Hans on awakening ex-
claims to himself: "Die grosse Seele, von der du nur ein Teilchen,
traumt wohl mal durch dich. . . (p. 646; "the great soul of which you
are a small part probably dreams through you"). Ramaswamy, in a
London hospital, has a waking vision of all peoples united in joy on the
occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an event which to him
seems to symbolize the apotheosis of humanity (pp. 352-56).
9
S.V.V., "Raja Rao Face to Face," The Illustrated Weekly of
India, 5 January 1964, p. 45.

10Forexample, Ramaswamy states: "Mystar, my unique star,

 398

was the theory that somewhere in the land between Persia, Turkey and
Bulgaria . . . I was certain to find a direct proof of India's link with the
Cathar heresy" (p. 342).

11 See Natwar Singh, reviewing The Serpent and the Rope in The
Saturday Review of Literature, 16 March 1973, pp. 88-89. In his Fore-
word to Kanthapura (New York, 1963; London, 1938), Raja Rao compares
his narrative styleto thatof the Puranas, which M. K. Naik (in Raja Rao,
New York, 1972) describes as a "blend of narration, description, phil-
osophical reflection, and religious teaching" (p. 65)—a description that
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would fit The Serpent and the Rope.

l 2 "Raja Rao Face to Face," p. 45.

13
ComradeKirillov appeared in La Chatte et Shakespeare (suivi
de Camarade Kirillov), trans. Georges Fradier (Paris: Caiman-Levy,
1965).
14
In a letter to the author written in October, 1974.
15
It might be said that in Comrade Kirillov (the title of the
original English manuscript) the discordance of The Possessed is ech-
oed, while in The Serpent and the Rope are heard the healing harmonies
that Alyosha's faith infuses into The Brothers Karamazov, eventually
reducing to equilibrium the violence of that novel.

Perry D. Westbrook
State University of New York
at Albany