The Lie of
Solitude: Fabrication, Silence, and the Narrative Performance of Selfhood in
Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain
Md Imran Ali,
Ph.D. Research Scholar,
Department of English,
Raiganj University,
Abstract: Anita
Desai’s Fire on the Mountain
(1977) has been read as a meditation on female solitude, post-Independence
disillusionment, and the psychological costs of duty. This article proposes a
different orientation: that the novel stages an inquiry into the performativity
of selfhood through narrative fabrication. Nanda Kaul’s compulsive
storytelling—the invented Tibetan adventures, the phantom menagerie, the
fiction of conjugal happiness, does not merely reveal repression but
constitutes her very being. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative
identity and Susan Sontag’s aesthetics of silence, this article argues that
Desai’s novel explores the violence inherent in both speech and its refusal.
Carignano, the hill station retreat, functions less as haven than as stage, a
liminal space where colonial inheritance and postcolonial subjectivity collide
in the construction of an untenable selfhood. The presence of Raka, the
great-granddaughter who refuses to be audience, exposes the fraudulence of
these fabrications by demonstrating an alternative mode of being: one oriented
toward destruction rather than narrative consolation. The novel’s catastrophic
conclusion: Ila Das’s rape and murder, the revelation of Nanda Kaul’s lies,
Raka’s arson, marks not catharsis but the collapse of narrative’s capacity to
sustain the self. Fire on the Mountain
emerges as a devastating critique of the stories we tell to survive, and of the
violence we do when we stop believing them.
Keywords: narrative identity, performativity of selfhood,
aesthetics of silence, postcolonial fiction, Anita Desai
Few novels declare their subject so
candidly in their title and then proceed to withhold it with such rigour. Anita
Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (1977), winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award
and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, promises conflagration but delivers,
for most of its length, an austere quiet, a prose of pines and cicadas, of
afternoons measured in the slow traverse of sunlight across a veranda floor.
The fire, when it comes, arrives in the novel’s last sentence. What precedes it
is not solitude, though solitude is what the novel appears to be about, but
something far more unsettling: a sustained confrontation between the desire for
silence and the compulsion to narrate, a confrontation whose stakes extend well
beyond the domestic setting of Kasauli.“She asked to be left to the pines and
cicadas alone” (Desai 3). So, Nanda Kaul, widow of a Vice-Chancellor,
articulates the wish that has brought her to Carignano, the old colonial house
on the ridge. She wants nothing and no one. She wishes “to be a tree, no more
and no less” (Desai 4). The reader might reasonably expect the novel to honour
this aspiration, to deliver something spare, silent, a prose poem of absence.
What we get is the opposite. Fire on the Mountain is dense with speech,
saturated with story: the colonial history of Carignano and its parade of
eccentric, violent inhabitants; Nanda Kaul’s memories of her crowded past; the
elaborate fictions she spins for her great-granddaughter Raka. There is Ila
Das, the childhood friend whose shrill voice and grotesque suffering culminate
in rape and murder. There is Raka herself, who carries unspoken narratives of
domestic violence. Silence, in this novel, is performed. It is not achieved. My
argument in this article is that the tension between Nanda Kaul’s stated desire
for silence and her compulsive narration constitutes the novel’s central
problematic. Her fabrications, which the final pages expose as lies, reveal the
novel’s investment in what Paul Ricoeur calls “narrative identity”: the
construction of selfhood through the mediation of the narrative function (Oneself
114). But Desai does not merely illustrate Ricoeur’s thesis. She subjects it to
a devastating critique. If narrative constitutes the self, what follows when
narrative fails, when the stories are revealed as fabrication, the audience
refuses to listen, the teller can no longer believe? The novel’s answer is
fire. This reading departs from the critical tendency to approach the novel
through feminist thematics, the suffering of Indian women, the burden of
domestic duty, the solitude of widowhood (Bande; Jain). These themes are
undeniably present, yet such readings risk subordinating the novel’s formal and
philosophical sophistication to its content. My approach owes more to recent
work on the phenomenology of narrative form and fictional interest. It “offers
a phenomenological exploration of the interest(s) of fiction tout court,
and of the fundamental formal mechanisms through which fictional interest is
made” (Connors 618). I am interested less in what the novel says about Indian
women than in what it does with narrative itself, how it deploys the act of
narration as both theme and problem, how its tripartite structure enacts the
accretion and collapse of fabricated selfhood.
Fabricated Selves: Carignano, Memory, and
Narrative Identity
Before
Nanda Kaul can establish her own constructed identity, the novel gives us the
house’s history, or, rather, its histories, for Carignano has passed through
many hands. Built in 1843 by a Colonel Macdougall for his sickly English wife,
the house has sheltered a pastor whose wife attempted daily to murder him, the
governess Miss Appleby with her famous temper, Miss Jane Shrewsbury who “poked
a fork into her cook’s neck” (Desai 9), and, finally, “suddenly it was all
over. It was 1947” (Desai 9). The maiden ladies are “packed onto the last boats
and shipped back to England—virginity intact, honour saved, natives kept at
bay” (Desai 9). Carignano goes “native” with Nanda Kaul’s arrival. This
colonial genealogy of suppressed violence is not decorative period detail. It
is premonition. Carignano functions not as shelter but as stage, a liminal
space haunted by its own past and marked by what can be identified as the
colonial hill station’s function as a space of denial. Sara Suleri in her book The
Rhetoric of English India argued that:
The sequestering capacity of the picturesque thus calls
to be read both as a denial of the violence with which Anglo-India lived daily
and as a discourse of difficulty in its own right: its opacities serve as a
corollary to Burke’s perception of colonial terror, adding to the rhetoric of
English India fresh refinements of fear (82).
Neither fully Indian nor authentically English, the house
mirrors Nanda Kaul’s own displacement. She is neither the Vice-Chancellor’s
wife she once performed nor the solitary ascetic she wishes to become. Yet what
she perceives when she looks at Carignano is “its barrenness” (Desai 4). She
reads the house as tabula rasa, available for self-fashioning: “It seemed so
exactly right as a house for her” (Desai 5). This perception inverts what
Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, theorizes as intimate inhabitation,
where lived space becomes a site of inner expansion: "Immensity is within
ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and
caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone" (184).Nanda
Kaul does not seek cosmos; she seeks void. Her Carignano is not Bachelard’s
shelter for daydreaming but a stage for the fabrication of emptiness, and this
perception is itself a fabrication, a wilful not-seeing, a denial that the
novel will, in time, expose. The most elaborate of Nanda Kaul’s fabrications
emerge in her stories to Raka. Their centerpiece is her father’s Tibetan
adventures:
He
travelled all over Tibet, had the strangest experiences. He spent nights in
tiger-infested bamboo forests where the people used to burn green bamboos that
would burst at the joints with such loud explosions as to frighten off wild
animals for miles. He joined in their famous archery competitions… He went
hunting with them, sometimes with falcons and sometimes with packs of dogs that
were as large as asses, for musk deer whose musk is sold to traders for silver.
(Desai 83-84)
The narrative accumulates wonders: crocodile hunts,
sorcerers who turn day into night, the Potala at Lhasa. It is convincing,
atmospheric, redolent of Orientalist adventure literature. And it is a lie: “It
was all a lie, all. She had lied to Raka, lied about everything. Her father had
never been to Tibet—he had bought the little Buddha from a travelling pedlar.
They had not had bears and leopards in their home, nothing but overfed dogs and
bad-tempered parrots” (Desai 145).
Paul
Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity illuminates what is at stake. For
Ricoeur, personal identity is constituted through “the identity of the story
that makes the identity of the character” (Oneself148). The self is not
given but achieved, produced through the labour of narration. Nanda Kaul’s
fabrications exemplify this process in extremes. Her actual history, the
loveless marriage, the husband’s lifelong affair with Miss David, the children
“alien to her nature” (Desai 145), has become unbearable. She constructs an
alternative narrative. But this narrative does not merely compensate for a
deficient reality; it constitutes the self she wishes to be. “All those graces
and glories with which she had tried to captivate Raka were only a fabrication:
they helped her to sleep at night, they were tranquillizers, pills” (Desai
145).The analogy to tranquillizers is precise. Medication suppresses; it does
not cure. Nanda Kaul’s fabrications cover over pain without resolving it. When
the covering is stripped away, by grief, by violence, nothing remains. Herein
lies the normative dimension that Ricoeur’s model, taken descriptively, tends
to obscure: some narratives are lies, the selves they constitute are fraudulent,
and the fraudulence, sooner or later, announces itself. The consequences are
catastrophic.
The Refusal of Audience: Raka and the
Aesthetics of Silence
If
narrative requires an audience, and in Ricoeur’s formulation it does require
one, then Nanda Kaul’s fabrications require Raka. The great-granddaughter
arrives to recuperate from typhoid while her mother attempts another
reconciliation with her brutal husband. Raka is, nominally, the audience the
stories have been waiting for. She refuses the role. From her first appearance,
“like one of those dark crickets that leap up in fright but do not sing” (Desai
39), she is characterised not by opposition but by imperviousness. When Nanda
Kaul offers the Tibetan tales, Raka “squirm[s], look[s] over her shoulder at
the window” (Desai 97).The irony is acidly precise. Nanda Kaul, who came to
Carignano to be left alone, who resented the very arrival of this child, cannot
stop narrating. The stories that were to fill, to constitute, a selfhood
emptied by disappointment have nowhere to go. Raka’s refusal is not active
rejection but something more devastating: sheer unavailability. She “ignored
her so calmly, so totally that it made Nanda Kaul breathless” (Desai 47). The
audience that narrative identity requires has absented herself. Susan Sontag’s
“The Aesthetics of Silence” provides a framework here. Sontag argues that
modern art increasingly aspires to silence, not as absence of content but as a
positive mode of expression, a refusal of the conventional transactions of
meaning. Silence becomes “a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision”
(Sontag 16). Raka embodies this aspiration in human form. Her silence is “a
gift for disappearing—suddenly, silently” (Desai 45). She is drawn not to
Carignano’s ordered garden but to the ravine, to its “splotches of blood…
yellow stains oozing through paper… bones and the mealy ashes of bones” (Desai
48). Nanda Kaul recognises in the child, with mingled admiration and
resentment, the condition she herself aspires to but cannot achieve: “Seeing
Raka bend her head to study a pine cone in her fist… Nanda Kaul saw that she
was the finished, perfected model of what Nanda Kaul herself was merely a
brave, flawed experiment” (Desai 47). Raka’s solitude is authentic; Nanda
Kaul’s is performance. Raka was “born to it, simply” (Desai 48); Nanda Kaul
“was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of duty and obligation” (Desai
48). In Ricoeurian terms, Nanda Kaul’s fabrications attempt to impose idem,
a stable, glorious identity, on an ipse ravaged by disappointment. Raka,
by contrast, appears to need no such construction. She simply is. Yet Raka
carries her own history, however repressed. The novel’s most disturbing passage
reveals the source of her silence:
Somewhere behind them, behind it all, was her father,
home from a party, stumbling and crashing through the curtains of night, his
mouth opening to let out a flood of rotten stench, beating at her mother with
hammers and fists of abuse—harsh, filthy abuse that made Raka cower under her
bedclothes and wet the mattress in fright. (Desai 71)
Raka’s preference for destruction, her fascination with
fire and bones and the debris of the ravine, is no Edenic innocence. It is the
aftermath of violence, the orientation of one for whom home has already burned.
Her silence, then, may be less transcendence than trauma. Not the purity of
silence but its scar.
The Grotesque Double and the Violence of
Withdrawal
Between
Nanda Kaul’s stately fictions and Raka’s traumatised silence, Ila Das occupies
a third position, one that Desai renders with unsettling ambivalence. She is
the grotesque double, the mirror that distorts and reveals. Her voice is
“shrill and strident as no other voice ever was” (Desai 20), “like a long nail
frantically scratching at a glass pane” (Desai 21). Yet she shares Nanda Kaul’s
history precisely. They played together as children, entered adulthood
together, watched their families scatter and fail. Where Nanda Kaul married a
Vice-Chancellor and retreated into aesthetic solitude, Ila Das descended into
welfare work for a pittance, and now lives in “the crumbling hut of mud and
thatch… to search on the empty shelf for a scrap of food” (Desai 141).The
contrast illuminates the role of contingency in the construction of selfhood.
Nanda Kaul’s fabrications are possible only because of her material security.
She can afford to retreat, to aestheticise, to narrate. Ila Das has neither
house nor leisure. Her stories are not fabrications but desperate reports from
the front lines of existence. When she visits Carignano for tea, she stumbles
on the wound that Nanda Kaul’s fabrications have been designed to conceal: the
memory of Miss David, the mathematics mistress with whom Nanda Kaul’s husband
conducted his lifelong affair. The conversation pivots from performance to
something rawer. Ila Das recounts her battles with the priest and Preet Singh,
her failed attempts to prevent child marriage. These are not fabrications. They
are the truth that will kill her. Her murder, she is strangled and raped by
Preet Singh on the footpath back to her village, is the novel’s most violent
event and its structural hinge. It precipitates Nanda Kaul’s final collapse:
“She had lied to Raka, lied about everything” (Desai 145). What disturbs, and
what the novel insists upon, is its refusal to sentimentalise Ila Das. She is
not a martyr. She is grotesque. This refusal participates in what Sianne Ngai
calls the aesthetics of “ugly feelings,” affects that resist the cathartic
satisfactions of tragedy. In this sense, the novel produces what Ngai terms stuplimity:
“Inducing a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single,
major blow to the imagination, stuplimity paradoxically forces the reader to go
on in spite of its equal enticement to readers give up” (Ngai 272). We pity Ila
Das, but we also cringe. Sympathy would domesticate her suffering, would render
it bearable and thus, in the end, ignorable. The grotesque insists on our
attention precisely because it cannot be assimilated. Nanda Kaul’s failure to
protect Ila Das is not incidental but thematic. It exemplifies what I would
call the violence of withdrawal, the harm done not by action but by its
refusal. “There had never been anyone more doomed, more menaced than she”
(Desai 133), Nanda Kaul reflects, while she watches Ila Das depart. She ought
to have protected her. She did not. The pursuit of fabricated solitude demands
distance from those whose reality might expose the lie. To acknowledge Ila Das
fully, to invite her to stay, to share Carignano’s shelter, would be to admit
the contingency that separates their fates. And Nanda Kaul cannot permit that
admission.
Fire and the Failure of Catharsis
Fire
appears throughout the novel in three distinct registers: as natural disaster,
as instrument of colonial industry, and as Raka’s obsession. Forest fires recur
annually in the Simla Hills. The Pasteur Institute disgorges smoke and animal
remains into the ravine. Raka is drawn to flames, magnetised, compelled. The
novel builds this imagery across all three parts, and the accumulation suggests
a Romantic trope of apocalypse as liberation, destruction as the precondition
of rebirth. Raka’s fantasy is explicit: fire to wipe it all away, to reduce the
world to the condition of the “charred trunks” (Desai 56) and “mealy ashes of
bones” (Desai 48) that already litter the ravine. But Fire on the Mountain
refuses catharsis. This is the novel’s most radical gesture. The fire that Raka
sets, “Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire. Look, Nani—look—the forest is
on fire” (Desai 145), occurs in the same moment as Nanda Kaul’s psychological
collapse and the revelation of Ila Das’s murder. The final image, Nanda Kaul
“with her head hanging, the black telephone hanging, the long wire dangling”
(Desai 145), is one of desolation. Not transcendence. Down in the ravine, “the
flames spat and crackled around the dry wood and through the dry grass, and
black smoke spiralled up over the mountain” (Desai 145). There is no renewal
here. The novel simply stops.
Aristotelian
catharsis depends on the purgation of pity and fear through their aesthetic
expression. Tragedy elevates suffering; it renders it meaningful. Desai’s novel
refuses this elevation. Ila Das is not a tragic hero; she is a pitiable victim
of misogynist violence. Nanda Kaul is not brought to self-knowledge; she is
broken. Raka is not transformed; she sets fire to the world and watches. Sontag
notes that “the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something
dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness” (11). Desai’s novel offers
neither fullness nor enrichment. It offers destruction without renewal,
conclusion without resolution. The novel thus reverses the Ricoeurian formula. As
Paul Ricoeur suggests, “it is to this enigma of the speculation on time that
the poetic act of emplotment replies”(Time and Narrative 1; 21-22).Where
Ricoeur suggests that narrative enables the self to achieve coherence, Desai
implies that narrative may also enable the self to evade coherence, to
fabricate, to suppress, to deceive. The “emplotment” that Ricoeur celebrates
becomes, in Desai’s hands, a technology of self-deception. When circumstances
strip the deception away, the self it constituted collapses. If Nanda Kaul
represents the violence of fabrication, and Ila Das the violence done to those
who cannot fabricate, then Raka represents the violence that remains when all
fabrication fails. The child who refused to be captivated by stories burns the
world down. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Fire on the Mountain offers
not a thesis about narrative identity but a warning. The stories we tell to
survive may well be the stories that destroy us. And when they fail, when the
violence we have excluded returns, when the audience refuses, when the truth
can no longer be suppressed, what remains is fire. There is nothing else:
“Look, Nani—look—the forest is on fire” (Desai 145).
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994.
Bande, Usha. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflict. Prestige Books, 1988.
Connors, Clare. “‘Out of Interest’: Klara and the Sun and the Interests of Fiction.” Textual Practice, vol. 38, no. 4, 2024, pp. 614-32.
Desai, Anita. Fire on the Mountain. Allied Publishers, 1990.
Jain, Jasbir. Stairs to the Attic: The Novels of Anita Desai. Printwell, 1987.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey, U of Chicago P, 1992.
—. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1, U of Chicago P, 1984.
Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Styles of Radical Will, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, pp. 3-34.
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. U of Chicago P, 1992.