2 - Reticence: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy

Summary

[V]irtue must have the quality of aiming at the intermediate.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, c. 340 BC

The consequences of acting in passion are always bad for an individual; but they are infinitely worse for a nation.

Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Let the People Decide,’ 1952

According to Roland Barthes, every literary narrative is structured around a series of textual enigmas, and it is the narrative’s hermeneutic code that is ultimately responsible for their formulation and resolution. Under the category of the hermeneutic, Barthes argues, we may ‘list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed’ (S/Z 19). The significance of this particular code lies in its control over the pace and duration of the narrative – something it achieves by creating a number of ‘dilatory morphemes’ whose purpose it is to defer, for as long as necessary, the moment of full disclosure. Or as Barthes himself writes,

[T]he hermeneutic code has a function, the one we … attribute to the poetic code: just as rhyme (notably) structures the poem according to the expectation and desire for recurrence, so the hermeneutic terms structure the enigma according to the expectation and desire for its solution. The dynamics of the text … is thus paradoxical: it is a static dynamics: the problem is to maintain the enigma in the initial void of its answer; whereas the sentences quicken the story's ‘unfolding’ and cannot help but move the story along, the hermeneutic code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse; its structure is essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of language with an organized set of stoppages: between question and answer there is a whole dilatory area whose emblem might be named ‘reticence,’ the rhetorical figure which interrupts the sentence, suspends it, turns it aside. (S/Z 75)

In Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), the narrative's central enigma is stated, quite clearly, in the opening sentence (if not in the title itself). ‘You too will marry a boy I choose’ (3), Mrs Rupa Mehra says firmly to her younger daughter.