Thai Novel

the white shadow
a novel by Daen-aran Saengthong [Saneh Sangsuk]
translated from the Thai by
Marcel Barang


Source : http://www.thaifiction.com/

there is a sound coming from inside the brain-pan of my head, coming out from the distant horizon in the brain-pan of my head and floating down over the parched midfield full of ruined fragments at the forefront of the brain-pan of my head. this sound is a faint rasping entreating voice. this voice says you have to do it. this voice says dawn is still far away, thus you must do it. this voice sometimes trails away, but sometimes it is clear and it grows increasingly clear during the night, because during the night i can't sleep, because during the night my mind is restless and jumbled, because it is during the night that i am fully awake. thus i have already decided to confess. i have no choice. maybe you don't understand, but if you were me you'd understand. it's most necessary that i do it. this voice talks relentlessly, refusing to yield. time passes and passes and passes still. i don't know what to do with time. time is limited. i don't know how much time i've got left in this world. i am weak. i've already decided to confess. it's dusk already, darkness is here again. it's dark and quiet and cold. darkness and quiet have come quickly but cold is always here, more or less biting, and now it's biting and the further into the night the further it'll bite. here it's dusk already, past eight pm already. there's no electricity and i had to light a lamp.
In an isolated house near a small town in the hills of Northern Thailand, the unnamed narrator addresses himself to a woman named Kangsadarn as if he were already dead. No, this is no ghost story, just a muddled brain at work. "i am playing at being dead and everything i say i say as a dead man and i'm imagining what, if the people i have known in life were to come to my funeral, i'd say to each and everyone. why do i have to do this? because it's necessary." The narrator has been living alone for three months in order to write. He apologizes to Kangsadarn, whom he really loves, for ditching her in favour of another woman he didn't love, after the suicide of yet another woman "not even six months ago and i was fully involved in her death". (The story of the latter two women is to be told in the third, unpublished volume of the trilogy.)
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it's dark, quiet and cold. there's only the buzz of insects and a thin film of mist in the sky. tomorrow will be a beautiful day. tonight will be one more night you'll spend lying quietly or sitting quietly or reclining quietly or sipping coffee quietly. you won't read won't write won't listen to music. the bitter strong coffee will keep you wide awake. you never can sleep at night. maybe the woman who just left, the woman with whom you just slept, will come to you in the morning. she's pretty and neat and friendly and strong. she wears jeans and canvas shoes and a man's shirt and her hair is cut short but she's a woman of great charm. [...] sometimes she comes in the evening as a lonely woman dressed businesslike like a man almost every time, but she is lonely and cunningly hides cheerfulness in that loneliness of hers. sometimes the woman suggests the two of you go out and have dinner in town but you never go. sometimes in the evening the woman helps with the cooking and keeps you company while you eat, but she has never stayed the night. she must have slept with men before, but you've never asked. maybe she's slept with her lover many many times, but you've never asked. [...] but in any case she is a woman who's got charm. she knows what such and such expression on your face when you look at her means and you know what such and such expression on her face when she looks at you means. she knows what such and such gesture of yours means, she knows what such and such sentence of yours means and you know what such and such sentence of hers means, but you and her only sleep together as all men and women are wont to sleep together under compelling circumstances. three months — that was rather fast. but not so fast actually. with some women you've been faster than this and with some men she has probably been faster than this too. you and her don't talk about the future or about love. there's no commitment and just as well. [...] not far from here there's a meadow. every morning you go out for a stroll, your eyes dark red from the lack of sleep. you look for the couple of robins. you want to hear the song of the couple of robins. [...] sometimes you look for shoots in the bamboo groves. sometimes you find a big-mouthed fish flapping frantically in a drying puddle by the rice-field dyke and you grab it and go and release it in the stream. the fish writhes in your clasped hand, a little life writhes in your clasped hand, your hand is soiled with mud, the fish is soiled with mud, but life isn't soiled by mud. nothing can soil real life, even if it's the life of a murderer or of a prostitute. life is pure. to destroy life is to destroy purity. sometimes as you stroll by a snake springs up and rears its head ready to strike. what kind of snake it is you don't know. it's angry and you are scared. you utter words of apology even though you are still scared and awkward in the dumbness of your fright, sorry sorry, and you slowly back out. maybe it's a poisonous snake, that's what you always think and it gives a thrilling flavour to your fear. a poisonous snake... the life of a poisonous snake... it probably doesn't want to have anything to do with you either. there are snakes all over, mostly russel's pits. when a russel's pit bites you you gradually go to sleep gradually feel pleasantly drowsy and in great pain and gradually die pleasantly and in great pain. but there aren't only russel's pits, but also sunray snakes and pukri snakes and cobras, or so the locals say, and you have to be careful wherever you go at night. the fields here are not large; some have been turned into longan orchards, into rows of tobacco or sweet tamarind plants or into irrigated patches on which garlic is grown. sometimes as you walk back to the house, the woman is waiting for you. she has brought you white roses. fragrant fragrant roses fragrant woman. such a sweet strong fragrance. red roses are more beautiful than white roses but don't smell as sweet. there are other women more beautiful than this woman but they don't smell as sweet. the woman makes coffee or prepares simple dishes and asks about this and about that asks about the past asks about the future. sometimes she tells you something and sometimes she softly laughs. the woman laughs. the laugh comes from her life as a woman. you sit there quietly drinking coffee quietly and looking up outside see flowers in bloom, butterflies flying boisterously beyond the porch and you hear the robins sing. there is warm sunlight flowing in through the window and the babble and giggles of the woman, a young female hardly past her teens. the cold season, the season of love, the season when flowers are in bloom and women are pretty. she puts the house in order, arranges flowers in a vase and sometimes sings old love songs from bygone days and in this late morning of the cold season the sunlight is mild, the sky turns increasingly sky blue as the mist drifts away and the wind starts blowing and there are the songs of the robins in the deserted orchard and swarms of butterflies and dragonflies flying hither and thither, but you only sit amid this flurry of colours and sounds sliding by as if you were just emerging from a dream. sometimes the woman doesn't quite want to go back, she says it's her day off and she feels lonely. she asks you to go for a stroll and sometimes you do but sometimes not. she likes to read and sometimes she reads out to you. she reads the song of solomon, she reads hojoki, she reads the little prince, she reads gitanjali, she reads a portrait of the artist as a young man. she reads slowly as if reading to herself. the air is clean and brisk, the world quiet when the songs of the birds stop to leave spaces of silence, brisk and clean but you have no vigour.

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In the first sixty pages, the author artfully produces a literary mist of memory which spans the whole lifetime of the narrator, who is 28 by then. The nameless man has just returned from his home village, where he hadn't set foot in for fourteen or fifteen years. He has briefly spoken with his father. "he's aged so much. i'd like him to die. he's an old monk. i used to hate him. if mum was alive, i'd like her to die too." His mother (who had once "hoped to take care of [his] fate by aborting") killed herself after her husband confronted her lover. Her husband (the narrator's father) went mad with grief before he joined the monk-hood. (So much, we guess, for the contents of Book I.) After this hazy introduction, the rest of the novel runs roughly chronologically, with occasional returns to the night during which the narrator "confesses" his past — from 8pm to 1am.
He is 17 when he finds himself in a military camp in the deep South, under the custody of Daen, a friend of his father and a soldier, who will leave for military missions in war-time Vietnam and Laos. The young student discovers pornographic literature, then the brothels. When one year later Daen moves with him to a border camp, he is joined by a friend of his, San, who brings along his sister, Nartaya. Nartaya, sweet 17, wants to be a nurse or a nun. The narrator is smitten and cautiously courts her until one night he creeps up to her room and she becomes his. The more he sleeps with her, however, the more disillusioned he becomes. When Nartaya reveals she is four months' pregnant, he drags her to a filthy quack. They haggle over the fee and are supposed to come back for the operation the following Sunday, but Nartaya adamantly refuses to go and threatens to kill herself. Nonetheless, the abortion will take place. Complications ensue and Nartaya takes to bed while the young cad is only too happy to ditch her as he enters "varsity" in Bangkok. Despite an exchange of correspondence, and Nartaya's last-ditch attempt to meet him in Bangkok, "in early september, you received a note from daen saying that nartaya was dead. she died at home. [...] it meant you were safe. the meek die first. [...] you got drunk to drown your guilt." Similarly, when about a year later, Daen writes that he has had an accident then stops writing but keeps sending money, the young man never bothers to write back.
At university, he strikes up a friendship with Nart, after they meet over a chess game. He is fascinated by the handsome, cultured, supremely intelligent senior student, who is a radical Marxist turned vegetarian and pioneer environmentalist. But he neglects Nart when he starts dating Darreit, the daughter of a provincial "influential person". Darreit is a determined woman, a Japan-crazy, compulsive buyer who gives herself to whatever or whoever she fancies. They start living together and it isn't long before her uncle turns up and orders her to go back home. She ignores the demand and a few weeks later, her father and his underlings rough up the young man. After a couple of months, the couple are back together — "you were happy she was happy obladi oblada". During the floods of the following month, the narrator is stabbed in the stomach as he is about to reach home. Nart foots his hospital bill, and the narrator will do his best to reimburse him out of the small monthly allowance he receives from Daen and his earnings from sundry part-time jobs. But the friendship sours. "one january night, i woke up a panther and knifed you in the neck ... an absurd event." The two young men progressively become estranged, and soon Nart leaves university to work in a Japanese advertising agency.
it's strange, thinking back about you and me. where did we come from? have you been back home at all? each of us has his own painful wounds and must take care of his own painful wounds. so many people in bangkok. an average of 3,000 inhabitants per square kilometre — and that's an old statistic, it must be more by now. cheap friendships. cheap loves. we met, became close, almost to the point we could be called friends. you did come to my help in my hour of need. and then we became estranged because of the panther in my dream one night and because of a certain amount of money between us. i hope your face will fade away like the faces of the strangers i meet in buses movie houses trade centres and bars, but for now it's still here and it torments me. gone are the sea, the mountains and the rivers, gone the dusky nights of cold moonlight and flower scents drifting from the jungle. only cast-off skins are left of the young men who used to enjoy the real meaning of life by talking to each other, comparing each other's experience, exchanging books, playing music and singing together. what remains in the big city is throngs of male and female youngsters with eyes hungry for sex, money and work, prestige and lust — preys and predators all. the world has changed through the power of economic dictators. the warriors of finance and the foot soldiers are roaming around in search of a place to belong. thai society trying to adjust to modern times. thai society trying to adjust to the west. how wretchedly lonesome it is to look at the future. hope, if there is any, rests with the five-year-olds. you and i are part of these changes. we both have gone our separate ways unawares. you sold yourself to japan because you had no choice. some three years later i sold myself to america because i had no choice either. money is important, very important when we have little and vital when we have none. money is the stuff of life, and it was money that turned us into strangers.

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During this second year in university, after a long, frustrating "friendship", the narrator seduces yet another student, Kangsadarn, "an orchard girl [whose] mother sells sweets" upcountry. "how many years have we known each other? seven years? eight years? i met you for the first time seven years ago and i met you for the last time three months ago. [...] we were lovers for three years, and there were two separate periods: before you slept with me; after you slept with me." Once they have slept together, Kangsadarn, like Nartaya, is subjugated. "we were lovers. you loved me and i loved my own love. [...] even though i was once utterly fed up with you and waited for the opportunity to flee away [...] kangsadarn, i miss you."
are you mad at me for sleeping with your friend? i should have behaved better, i know. it wasn't right. i behaved like a womanizer. no, no, i know. there's no more morals. morals have been raped and torn to shreds. i'm not a moral person, in fact i'm a dedicated destroyer of morals, but there's no more morals anyway. everything that happened was just too much, it was too much to bear. you can do whatever you want and i can do whatever i want. as a man i have the advantage and i don't give a damn about anything anymore. enough with the shame that comes from committing a sexual sin! i'd like to be a great rapist. i remember you saying that love is of the gods but sex is of the beasts. a great rapist who's at all romantic is able to transform a rape into a hot bouncy imaginative copulation. all great rapists are romantic rapists. all great rapists are great lovers. and what is the best definition of a great lover? a man who refuses to sleep with a woman three times in a row. is three times not enough? seven times, then? nine times? the playboys of rome, nero and caligula — the caligula in camus's play (you told me you'd bring the book for me to read but never did). one could easily write a thick volume about the sexual decadence of the romans, the sexual decadence of the greeks, the sexual decadence of the chinese of the indians of the thai, the sexual decadence of each nation and of each culture. is it all that certain that sexual decadence is the index of the disintegration of each nation and culture? why is the way man copulates so complicated and different compared with that of other mammals or living beings? why do we refer to sexually aroused animals as being in heat and to our own sexual urges as love or desire? how is it that of all the primates the homo sapiens is the species with the biggest sexual organ and the only one able to reproduce all year round? is this some kind of reward from nature? are bulls, male buffaloes and male elephants sexually aroused when they look at the mouths eyes breasts haunches of their females? the females of all mammals have udders for the sole purpose of feeding their young but the udders of the females of the human race are also used as nodes of sexuality. o vain man, you would be better off putting your life-bestowing organ into a burning oven than into the yoni of the female; you would be better off putting your life-bestowing organ into the mouth of a poisonous snake than into the yoni of the female. thus did the buddha reprimand mendicants enjoying sexual congress. i know nothing much about the buddhist religion, but the buddha's great. i know very well he's great. i admire him as a great man, but i don't really like monks. maybe i'd like them a little better if they produced anything with their hands. gandhi scrupulously respected the brahmanic vows of celibacy. gandhi is another great man i admire and he's as great as the buddha. he restrained himself to the very end. the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, william blake said. sex seen through the eyes of a saint is something disgusting, clearly the doing of beasts, but it is such a sweet pleasurable thing providing indescribable elation and happiness. i have experienced happiness in many forms and many times, but if i try to assess the size, volume and quality of these experiences, it turns out that the most pleasurable have been sleeping with women, not following the precepts or enjoying marijuana morphine heroin philosophy arts music literature and all that goddamn jazz. before he went on his spiritual quest, how many women did the buddha sleep with?
For all her haughty, elder-sister airs, Kangsadarn is a woman with a dark secret. Four years earlier, she was raped by her music teacher, a fantastically gifted violin player but hopeless drunkard whose outrageous behaviour gets him expelled from school and leads him into further disasters. His private life is a shambles. He has incessant quarrels with the wife he picked up from the gutter. She leaves him regularly for flings with any stud ambling by; he hunts for her; they make up — until the next time. Her seven-year-old daughter is not even his.

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you still went to school and met him once a week during the music class, and it was in mid-term during that hour that your friends sitting in the front rows closest to the blackboard began to complain of the smell of alcohol that wafted from all of his orifices and pores from his every movement from his very stillness from his every word from his very silence and from each breath he took, and it was a most offensive smell to the noses of the children. during that period he had started to drink in earnest, ruthlessly and methodically, and people saw him staggering about in the streets at night, totally unable to control himself and yelling he'd kill his wife as soon as he could lay his hands on her for all the unbearable miseries she was inflicting on him. he insulted her roundly but, even though his wrath sounded extreme, nobody paid any attention because everybody knew he spoke like this every time his wife left him. it was only the very first time she had fled from him that his thirst for revenge had truly inspired fear and everybody had thought he'd actually kill her, but when it happened again and again, his threats became meaningless, so much so that some even challenged him to kill her once and for all. besides, he still smoked almost non-stop, which was really distressing for those children who were allergic to smoke, especially the girls, as it made them feel so dizzy and nauseous they had to ask for permission to go and wash their faces outside, and for some it was only an excuse because they actually went out to vomit. on sultry days devoid of the faintest breeze or when a hot wind was blowing, the stench of alcohol and tobacco hovered over the whole room and the more-than-thirty children sat erect and still in this tense stuffy atmosphere and listened to the blurred rambling and prodding of his faint raucous voice as he derided at length the stupid mistakes made by one and all, and for the more-than-thirty children his voice was the voice of authority.
On the day of his forced resignation from school, the music teacher rapes Kangsadarn. After a short phase of denial, she becomes resigned to the situation and when he turns up at her house, she agrees to sleep with him again. "He turned out to have absolute power over you ... but in some ways he was your slave also." Three days later, the wife comes back. The couple quarrel. He kills the child, kills his wife but is prevented from killing himself when people burst into the room and drag him to prison. During the reconstruction of the murder, he is savagely beaten by the crowd of "normal decent" onlookers — and hangs himself in jail the next day. This ends the novel, but for another page and a half opening the way for a further volume and leaving the reader on tenterhooks.
fifty past midnight already. let me rest a while. let me drink a cup of coffee. [...] dawn is still a long way off. maybe tomorrow morning i'll leave this place for good with the strength of a sinner that will never abate, to carve myself a new domain in the land of the barbarians, to be a pirate, to be a slave runner, to be the judas iscariot of the twenty-first century, to be the ivan the terrible of the twenty-first century, to be a merciless destroyer of civilisation. goodbye kangsadarn sakarwarat. may lady-ism be destroyed and all men of evil will unite.

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The Thai literary scene and market being what they are, it is understandable that the author chose to publish first, at great financial risk to himself, what he believes to be the most palatable or least objectionable of the three volumes of his White shadow trilogy. It happens to be the second, which implies that the other two are too shocking for Thai sensibilities. Thai readers are going to be hard-pressed to cope with the unheard-of audacity in form and contents of this one anyway. From a literary point of view, however, the decision was a mistake, because taken independently the novel lacks internal coherence in structure, though not in substance or style. Nevertheless, it contains enough elements to perceive the higher unity of the whole trilogy and, unless the other two books are dismally inferior in writing, we must accept that we are dealing with a major literary work - and not just in the Thai language. This is why I had no qualms, a fortnight only after the publication of just this one volume, in including it in the present selection, whatever reaction, or lack thereof, it would generate locally.
[PS - 1999: The novel sold just over 1,000 copies, not nearly enough for the author-publisher to break even. Listed among seven contesting titles for the 1994 SEA Write Award, it was taken off the list under pressure from on high. The author has been submitted to insults and threats on his life. He now lives in seclusion and dire poverty upcountry. MB.]
Such is the power of subjugation of the extraordinary world created by Daen-aran Saengthong [real name: Saneh Sangsuk] that, after plodding through more than four hundred compact pages of deliberately, obsessively repetitive prose (repetitive both in the phrasing of each sentence and in the recurrence of topics and themes and characters and situations), the weary reader is still eager to find out what's in the other two volumes. This novel has been written like a sailing boat plies the high seas, relentlessly pitching and rolling, now gently now wildly, now racing now still, and only true lovers of the sea of letters will stay aboard to enjoy the dozens of truly poetic or otherwise gripping pages of the cruise and stand the dozen or so pages that shouldn't be there.
Foreign readers long accustomed to the oddities of experimental writing may not bat an eyelid at the "modern" techniques employed here à la James Joyce, à la Claude Simon — block text, changes in subjects ('I' or 'you' or 'we' for the narrator; 'you' for the narrator or some other protagonist, etc), complete absence of dialogue, stringing of words, elision of verbs, etc — but Thai readers, even the better read, may find the going rough, as hardly anything like this has ever been written in the vernacular. An even fiercer reaction is to be expected due to the strong language used. "i know how to use the language in a beautiful way when i want to," the writer-narrator says without boasting, "except that i don't understand why the hell i should use the language that way." Besides, the iconoclastic author spares no local taboo, parades his "anti-conformist views" and "extremist outlook" on all kinds of social and political issues (less criticizing than deriding and ridiculing a hypocritical, sycophantic society) and praises at great length what he has the delicacy to call "fornication" as a way to demystify love — or that part of love he understands, at any rate: the part below the belt. To him, love is merely an indecent verbal wrapping around raw lust or, at best, a dangerous elation that begs to be betrayed and destroyed. "i'm a dedicated destroyer of morals."
To top it all, the narrator, around whom the whole work revolves, is not particularly likeable. He is immature, self-centred, arrogant, spiteful, deliberately and sometimes childishly provocative; holding nothing sacred, he is left with nothing to worship but lost causes and past hopes; but whether one approves of him morally is beside the point: as a literary character, despite his anonymity, he is well-rounded and memorable.
Memorable and well-rounded too are the three female protagonists, Nartaya, Darreit and Kangsadarn; and even more so the (also unnamed) music teacher, who is actually so outstanding that he steals the light from the narrator in the last quarter of the story, upsetting the balance of the tale. In contrast, Nart, the narrator's friend, doesn't quite come through and his relationship with the narrator is the least satisfactory of all, perhaps because, as many clues throughout the book suggest, Nart is to be one of the main protagonists in a major showdown over a woman in the final volume.

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The narrator's world is a world of fornication, abortions, suicides and other violent or forlorn deaths, betrayals and irrational gestures. The narrator himself is on a quest for the female grail, that is to say in search of lost innocence. (The "white shadow" of the title represents "inaccessible purity", according to the author - regrettably, the meaning is nowhere evident in this part of the trilogy.) He craves the warmth and affection he was denied in childhood, and finds them for a while in his friendship with Nart, only to betray it; in his long-lasting relationship with Kangsadarn, whose goodness astonishes him; and in the company of the easygoing "woman who just left". He is the typical obsessive seducer, who hurries to conquer a woman only to regret that she surrendered so soon, as the fun is in the approach to the quarry (a time of innocence and mystery and exaltation) rather than in the consumption of sex, which, after a while, becomes tedious. Even with Kangsadarn, the longest lasting of his conquests, he is bored to the point of resuming his hunt for the sake of the hunt.
He is also deliberately, violently, outrageously sexist: men have the advantage over women and naturally take advantage of them; once a woman has been "conquered" by whatever means including rape, she "belongs" to the conqueror. This notion, which is prevalent in Thai society, is held not only by him but also by Nartaya (to his dismay!) and by Kangsadarn, who acknowledges first her rapist, the music teacher, then her quasi-rapist, the narrator, as her owners. (Incidentally, it is hard to believe that a woman like Kangsadarn, who has gone through such a traumatic experience as rape, would accept to stay alone in a bedroom with a male friend day after day, even with all her elder-sister defence systems up.) Darreit, on the other hand, doesn't share this sexist approach; she "behaves almost like a man", making her own choices, and the narrator is puzzled: he doesn't understand her; she doesn't fit his patterns of thought. He feels exploited by her. A further irony is that he despises his conquests (somehow, they are all "goddam stoooopid", though their main wrong is simply to have been seduced) yet he is subjugated in turn by Nart's cultural and intellectual superiority. Even at the emotional level, it seems, Thai society is vertically stratified. The narrator inaccurately calls himself a "fascist" (to Kangsadarn: "there's inequality in love. i'm a fascist, you are a slave. [...] i'm a fascist. all women love fascists. who said that?"). Others would say he is a male chauvinist pig. Politically, he is an inchoate anarchist: 'i don't give a damn about marx, lenin, mao or zhou. [...] if i have any inclination to politics, it's because i read about the 14 october and 6 october events. [...] politics is one of the things i'm least interested in, especially active politics." The only politics he craves and understands is the politics of f—fornication.
The other main theme — death, present in the titles of three of the fourteen chapters — is handled somewhat awkwardly. What is supposed to be a reflection on death turns out to be more of a game with death. During that night of total recall and total confession, what is at stake for the narrator is his suicide, which, as a quote from Le mythe de Sisyphe states, is the only fundamental philosophical question. Yet, because he starts by claiming to be dead, only to add that he isn't, the narrator seems to be toying with a concept like a child with a doll rather than indulging in high-stake metaphysics.
There are other weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, such as refusing to name some places yet mentioning the names or pen names of existing personalities of the writer's generation presented as friends of the narrator. This, among other indications, betrays the intensely autobiographical nature of the novel, as do some overly lengthy developments in which the author either gets carried away by his topic as he wants to make some obscure point or merely records events of his own life (such as numerous trips upcountry) which, for having happened, are not presented in a way that adds anything to the novel.
But this is mere dross as any ocean carries. And the pilot is young.
The End.