All we have are imperfect, conflicting cultural scripts, hinting at the terrifying “unpredictability” of the Real 💜

Today’s Newspapers in English

#newspaperinlearning #litforlife

How to Separate the Narrative from the Story!

‘Doing’ Literary Theory through the Daily Newspaper

8th February 2026

Well, three news reports on the same story, have been ‘presented’ to the reader in today’s three reputed Newspapers in English, namely, The New Indian Express, The Hindu, and The Times of India.

Or rather, three distinct “narratives” of the same “story” - have been presented.

While the core story - a driver died after his truck fell into the sea at Chennai Port - remains constant, the “truth” of how and why it happened shifts dramatically depending on which report (narrative) we read.

We find that, each of the three reports differ significantly, in their ‘narrative’ style to the story!

The New Indian Express specifically states that, the container was transporting solar panels; returning to Tirunelveli, and also mentions the legal specifics like BNS Sections 281 & 106 (1).

The Hindu mentions that, it was a pick-up a container; meant for Thoothukudi.

The Times of India states that, the truck unloaded a container; entered a restricted/unauthorised area, and claims that workers “warned him not to proceed.”

The New Indian Express presents the narrative frame from a labour perspective or a working-class perspective! By citing “fatigue” and his “return journey,” it paints a picture of an overworked driver. Also, it is the only report to cite the specific new criminal laws (BNS), and it also cites the police, as sources.

The Hindu presents the narrative from a bureaucratic perspective. It is quite concise and detached in its tone. Notably, it contains a significant factual discrepancy regarding the day (Thursday vs. Saturday), suggesting it may have been based on preliminary or unverified inputs., and doesn’t quote or cite its sources as well.

The Times of India presents a ‘dramatic’ narrative from the corporate perspective! It uses terms like “freak accident” and details much on the “cabin detaching.” It also introduces a “blame the victim” narrative by stating he entered a “restricted area” despite warnings, which contradicts the “fatigue/wrong turn” narrative of the Indian Express. It also cites port authorities as its sources.

So why-oh-why do they carry such different / differing views of the same news story?

In literary theory and in journalism, there is no single, objective view from nowhere schema!

So what then is a narrative? 

In literary theory in general, and in narratology in particular, the term narrative represents two distinct layers of a text - the distinction between content (what happened) and form (how it is communicated).

The story refers to the raw material of the events in their chronological sequence. It is the timeline of actions as they presumably happened in the fictional reality, irrespective of how the author chooses to reveal them. 

The narrative is the specific way the author or creator chooses to present the events to the audience. This includes the ordering of time (flashbacks, flash-forwards), the point of view, the medium (text, film, oral), and the pacing. The structure is often non-linear or artistic!

Coming back - 

Variations in the narrative might have occurred due to several factors -

The Indian Express musta spoken to police officers filing the FIR (hence the BNS codes). ToI likely spoke to port workers or eyewitnesses on the ground (hence the detail about the cabin detaching and workers warning him). The Hindu likely relied on a preliminary press release or a brief police update!

Added, usually, it is the Editor who finally takes the call on what is “newsworthy,” and how it has to be presented to the readers.

Hence, while, ToI prioritises the “freak” nature of the accident to grab attention, Indian Express prioritises on the “fatigue” angle, perhaps to highlight labour conditions. The Hindu probably doesn’t seem to prioritise anything here. 😊

Now let’s try and look at the presentation / representation from the viewpoint of literary theory - 

Well, post-structuralists argue that a text (or news report) does not have a fixed meaning or truth. The “signified” (the actual accident) is obscured by the “signifier” (the words used to describe it).

The fact that the driver is 35 in one report and 36 in another, or that the accident happened on Thursday in one and Saturday in another, destabilises the reader’s trust in the ‘truthfulness’ or the ‘reality’ of the presentation.

The “texts” given here to the reader prove that we cannot access the absolute reality of the accident, only “versions” of it. That’s because none of us saw the accident. We only see the “texts”. Therefore, for the public, the texts are the reality. The original event has dissolved, replaced by these three competing simulacra.

Jean Baudrillard in his seminal text titled, Simulacra and Simulation (1981) argues that in the postmodern world, the representation of reality replaces reality itself, which he terms the Simulacrum. And the state of existence where this substitution is complete - where we can no longer distinguish between the reality and the representation - is what he calls Hyperreality.

The news report simulates a “truth” to hide the fact that there is no single truth to be found. In essence, then, when the Simulacra (the news reports) become more real to us than the physical event itself, we are living in Hyperreality.

Three distinct “realities” now exist in the public imagination. Did he die because he was tired? Or because his truck broke? Or because he went where he shouldn’t have?

All three are now “true” in the datasphere.

The New Indian Express has written a legal/human interest story. The Hindu has come up with an administrative report, while The Times of India has got a sensationalist feature.

This collection of reports is a perfect example of how media does not just reflect reality - it rather “constructs” reality for us!

Now, and finally at that, let’s do one last theoretical “work” on the “texts”😊

Let’s for a moment try and connect the three news reports to Catherine Belsey’s lovely book titled, Culture and the Real (2005).

Belsey’s work focuses heavily on the Lacanian concept of The Real - that which is outside language, unrepresentable, and traumatic.

To Belsey, culture (including news reports, language, and art) exists to shield us from the Real, or to try and make sense of it, even though the Real always resists symbolisation.

To Belsey then - interpreting Lacan, as a Lacanian devotee herself – the Real is the raw, unmediated, traumatic event itself - the physical moment the truck hit the water, the metal crushing, the water entering the lungs, the cessation of life. This is the trauma that cannot be fully expressed in words. It is absolute, terrifying, and resists meaning.

However, culture (journalism, language, literature) tries to “paper” or “text” the horror of the Real by turning it into a story we can understand by means of language.

The news reports turn the traumatic Real into a narrative.

That’s hence Belsey argues that, culture works to tame the real. By naming the driver (Muthu Marriappan), giving his age (36), and citing the law (BNS 281), the newspapers are trying to bring the terrifying chaos of death into the orderly world of language.

Belsey argues that culture always fails to fully capture the Real. There is always a “gap” or a “lack” (Reminded of the Lacanian ‘lack’, here, anybody?) 😊 where language falls short.

When we observe carefully, we can also notice how the reports contradict each other.

Was it Thursday or Saturday?

Was he 35 or 36?

Did the cabin detach or did he take a wrong turn?

These contradictions, to Belsey, are the fissures where the Symbolic order fails. The “truth” of the accident escapes the journalists. They cannot pin it down. This “slippage” of meaning (where the signifiers don’t match the signified) is exactly what Belsey and post-structuralists highlight.

The “Real” of the man’s death is absent; all we have are imperfect, conflicting cultural scripts, hinting at the terrifying “unpredictability” of the Real. That’s hence Peter Barry in his Beginning Theory would have us believe that, ‘reality is relative!’

To sum it up then, the three news reports are in fact cultural mechanisms attempting to “symbolise” through “language” a traumatic event (The Real). However, their contradictions and variations prove Belsey’s argument that, Culture can never fully grasp the Real. The “truth” of the driver’s death is lost in the gap between the three different stories, leaving us only with “culture” (text), not reality.

What, then, is culture? 😉 

'Importance of a Literary Sensibility for Life and Living' ❤️

Law, Literature, Life | Ruminations

#newspaper #literarydelights

Students of literature are particularly interested in judgments or remarks in which the honourable judges embellish their observations with literary allusions!

I chanced upon one such observation by Justice Jayachandran, Madras High Court, in today’s ‘The New Indian Express’.

Today's The New Indian Express, 01st June 2024

Quoting from the news report -

The Madras High Court has quashed a case pending in a local court, registered against a man under the Pocso Act, for the alleged assault of a minor girl, whom he married later.

Equating their relationship to the story of Romeo and Juliet, the court said a lenient view on the law has to be taken.

“It is the case of Romeo and Juliet, which has ended in marriage and the enlargement of the family by the birth of a child,”

said Justice G Jayachandran in an order.

He raised the question of whether the judicial system should strictly comply with the law in this case or deal with with the humanitarian aspects of it. “Unfortunately, the Pocso Act is silent,” the judge noted.

Furthermore, powers conferred under Section 482 of CrPC has to be used for quashing the case against the husband in such cases; or else, the girl may be made ‘vulnerable to exploitation’.

The order was passed on the petition filed by the man, against whom an FIR was registered in 2018 for aggravated penetrative sexual assault, based on a complaint filed by the girl’s mother.

The case was taken on file by the mahila court in Allikulam in 2022. In the meantime, the man and the girl, who by then had become majors, married in 2020 and had a child. The girl had told the court that she married him of her own volition and they were leading a happy life.

In yet another judgement delivered quite recently, Additional Sessions Judge Anuj Aggarwal began his verdict with a quote from Swami Vivekananda, that says –

‘Thoughts live; they travel far!’

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.”

The judge also quoted from British poet John Milton, on the fundamental right of “freedom of speech and expression,” -

“Give me the liberty to know, to argue freely, and to utter according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Well, Literature and Law are called twin sisters. However, while literature focusses mainly on creativity, the law abides by rationality!

Added, while literature serves to humanise society by imparting values, the law seeks to regulate society by prescribing law codes that govern society.

One reason why legal professionals make it a point to read literature exhaustively, just to make sure that they can comprehend the human psyche in all its variety, and connect it with everyday life and living, and to drink deep of ‘God’s plenty’ in the entire gamut of literature.

In this regard, it would be apt to recommend a very interesting book written by Richard A. Posner titled, Law and Literature. The book has been hailed as ‘The most clear, acute account of the intersection of law and literature’.

Posner is a judge of the U.S. Court Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

In this highly valued 1988 book, Posner observes that,

Law and literature are related to each other in interesting ways. Innumerable literary works, many of great distinction, take law for a theme, and feature a trial (Eumenides, The Merchant of Venice, Billy Budd, The Trial, The Stranger), abuse of judicial authority (Measure for Measure), conflicting jurisprudential theories (Antigone, King Lear), the practice of law (Bleak House), crime and punishment (Paradise Lost, Oliver Twist), the relation of law to vengeance (Oresteia, Hamlet), even specific fields of law, such as contract (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), inheritance (Felix Holt, The Woman in White), and intellectual property (William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own).

These examples could be multiplied manyfold. (Anyone who doubts this claim should glance at Irving Browne, Law and Lawyers in Literature [1883].)

Moreover, law is a rhetorical discipline, and the judicial opinions of some of the greatest judges, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, have literary merit and repay literary analysis. Opinions and briefs are like stories; they have a narrative structure.

A literary sensibility may enable judges to write better opinions and lawyers to present their cases more effectively. 

And the literary critic’s close attention to text has parallels in the judge’s and the lawyer’s close attention to their authoritative texts - contracts, statutes, and constitutions. The law even regulates literature, under such rubrics as copyright infringement.

Some law professors, moreover, have tried to make legal scholarship itself literary by incorporating narrative, memoir, anecdote, and fiction into their scholarship, and others have claimed that the study of literature in general—literature not limited to works that take law for a subject - can humanize the practice of law and the outlook of judges,

says Posner.

And as eminent critic Scupin Richard rightly avers,

Law governs lives! Literature transforms lives!

'One book that narrates the entire history of humankind?'

Why do I Write History?

Marudhan | On H. G. Wells

A lovely article from today’s The Hindu Tamil, translated in parts, for the benefit of a wider literary reading audience.

Well, Marudhan writes such intense, insightful and impactful short literary treatises, and I’ve always enjoyed reading his writing!

So here goes an excerpt from his take on H. G. Wells –

Here we go -

Why do I Write History?

Marudhan | trans: this blogger

‘I just simply won’t say that I write because I have the required qualification and talent!’.

And well, again, ideally, it would be really nice to say that I write because of my near and dear, known and unknown who come flocking up to me and ask me to write!

But that’s not true!!!

Again, I can never say,

‘Well, folks, you see, I’ve done a lot of extensive research all by myself and I’ve discovered a lot of truths. Only I could write that’.

Then, why? Why on earth do I write history?

You all know very well that I write stories.

If someone asks, ‘Do you know H. G. Wells’, pat would come the reply, ‘It’s that guy who wrote the Time Machine, right?’

How would you like it, if you had a time machine that transports you to the ‘time’ you loved, much like we have vehicles to transport us to the ‘places’ we loved?

From this imaginative enterprise of mine, was born the ‘Time Machine’.

My very first novel!

To write with such a beautiful blend of the real and the unreal has been my full-time work!

However,

History is quite the opposite you see!

It’s NOT imagination!

History can NEVER tolerate even a wee bit of its fragrance even! No way!

That’s because history is a record of what on earth happened, and how on earth it happened!

Sitting under the shades of a lovely tree, and stretching out your legs cozily, you may write down an entire novel quite breezily!

In contrast, however,

history will never make you sit quiet even for a moment!

Even to write one line, or one word, or just one ‘full stop’, you have to strain a long walk all the way to the library!

There, straining your hands for hours, you should then fret and pore and flip through the pages of literally hundreds of books!

Is this claim factually right?

Does it have evidence to support its claim?

Have researchers vouched to this claim?

Is the year, the date and the day correctly stated?

Every detail should be verified for its authenticity at least a thousand times over!

A litterateur who writes on a time machine can never write on history, as much a historian can never write on a time machine!

But…

Anyone can read anything!

I’ve loved all things that fascinated me, right from science to history.

One day, when I was reading in like fashion, I got an idea!

Well, we’ve got a history for Greece!

A historical account for Egypt!

India, Turkey, Rome, England, France et al have their own historical records as well!

But how good and how pleasant, how nice and how lovely would it be, if there’s one book –

One book that narrates the entire history of humankind?

It should start right from the very beginning of the creation of the world!

How life happened, how humans appeared, how the early human dwelt in caves, how they drew cave paintings, how they indulged themselves in hunting, farming, building houses, how they created religions, built cities, battled nations, developed civilisations etc.

Well, again, how good and how pleasant, how nice and how lovely would it be, if all these things were sequentially narrated, in such descriptive language, in such a simple style, in the course of just one book!

To fulfil this desire of mine, I requested the history teachers known to me, to write one such book. They were agitated.

‘How do you expect me to write such a book’, asked a historian.

‘But, it’s only to you that I can rightfully ask? Ain’t it?’ I replied.

‘Look buddy, I have studied and researched on America. How do you expect me to write on the entire history of humankind?’ he replied.

Another remarked, ‘I can write on Greek history, alone, if you so desire!’

‘I can write on the Rise of Rome, and another historian could write on the Fall of Rome, if you so desire… But that would take us around 25 years’, he remarked.

……

It was then, that I came to a conclusion!

Why can’t I write my own history the way I write my own stories?

Let the researchers write for other researchers.

A layperson such as me, why can’t I write for fellow laypersons like unto myself?

I need not be anxious of committing any faultlines in my narration, since I’m a novice, a newbie myself!

I need not be agitated on what others would comment on my work.

Hence, with boundless passion, resolve and excitement, I AM GOING TO WRITE…

I’m ready to learn. Using that as my only qualification, I begin to write this book now. You may count this book as a historical account written by a student, if you so want to!

You may also count it as a painting done by a kid, if you so want to!

But...

When, it’s only the lay people who make history, why can’t a lay person write the same history?

Marudhan may be contacted at marudhan@gmail.com

'Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away'

28 January 2000 | Reflections

Some Philosophy! Some Coffee!  ☕

Memories from diaries! 😍

While going through my past [and personal] diary jottings of almost around two decades ago, down the lovely little lane of nostalgia, I couldn’t help connecting my recollections with Astrid Erll’s famous take on ‘Memories’ - which goes thus - 

… memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting.

From my personal diary jottings, 28 January 2000

A bevy of lovely friends, classmates, batchmates, teachers – they all find mention in this particular day’s jottings – along with a host of events / incidents that made this day memorable for me and we!

Both individually and collectively!

Well, now, take a moment to just imagine catching up with your school friends or college mates one fine day, over a cup of coffee!

Or again,

Just imagine getting back for a grand alumni get-together, after say, 25 years or 30 years, where you gather together in the same school premises where you had studied!

What would you do?

I guess, you won’t be that interested in discussing a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates with your lovely friends of the good ol’ days, as much as you’d be interested in recollecting those snatches from memory that ‘take your breath away’, ain’t you?

The cute bunkings you did, when you wanted to play cricket or football with your classmates in the playground, or the evening tea time with pals that were filled with myriad delightful, ‘sweet-nothings’ of a conversation, that went on and on and on...

or 😊

during exam time, when you all came together, (like those cricketers in international cricket, making a circle before starting on a game, just to boost the confidence levels of their team mates, or to discuss on ‘specific strategies’ for the game) in one great grand circle, and indulged yourself in the sensational phenomenon called, ‘combined studies’, where even the most playfullest of the lot would sit, as good as could be, not batting an eyelid, in utmost concentration, dedication and devotion to the subject being discussed – a concentration that escaped a hundred lectures given by those towering scholarly professors! 🥰

Well, as Sartre rightly points out,

One does not possess one’s past as one possesses a thing!

However, you can bring it back from memory, through recollections of specific memorable events!

That’s because there’s a magic in recollection!

A charm in recollection!

An inexpressible, indescribable delight in recollection!

As Maya Angelou says,

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Yes! Those charming moments that ‘took our breath away’ in days past!

That’s hence, to Erll, Astrid Erll,

… memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting.

How beautiful, ain’t it?

And Astrid Erll, adds up to say,

Since forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception,

memory studies seeks to ‘reconstruct’ the ‘intellectual history of forgetting’, and emphasize the social, historical, and ethical significance of forgetting and related aspects, such as amnesia, oblivion, silence, and forgiving.

Now comes the most important part to Erll, that connects with my diary jottings -

Well, moving on to Cultural Memory, she quotes Halbwachs when she says -

Individual memory has to go hand in hand with cultural memory!

Quite fascinating an insight, ain’t it?

When for the first time Halbwachs came up with this hypothesis, his contemporaries and critics alike, were not favourably disposed to accept these validations from their friend!

Interestingly, it was Halbwachs and Warburg who were the first to give the phenomenon of cultural memory a name (‘collective’ and ‘social’ memory, respectively).

A student of Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim, Halbwachs wrote three texts in which he developed his concept of mémoire collective and which today occupy a central place in the study of cultural memory.

Halbwachs’s theory, which sees even the most personal memory as a - mémoire collective - a collective phenomenon,

provoked significant protest, not least from his colleagues at the University of Strasbourg, Charles Blondel and Marc Bloch.

The latter accused Halbwachs, and the Durkheim School in general, of an unacceptable collectivization of individual psychological phenomena.

Stirred by this criticism, Halbwachs began elaborating his concept of collective memory in a second book.

For more than 15 years he worked on the text The Collective Memory, where again he emphasises on the importance of individual memory to Cultural Memory, because, of the default dependence of individual memory on the range of social structures to which he/she belongs!

So individual memory has to go hand in hand with cultural memory, says Halbwachs.

That means, there are collective elements in individual memory that makes it collective memory or shared memory or cultural memory!

It could be a cup of coffee at your favourite bistro, with your friends, it could be a delightful book that you bought at your favourite book shop with your friends, it could be those delightful long trips that you made with your bevy of friends – be it on train journeys, local autos or even by the grand bicycle on ‘double pedal’ modes!

Coming back, hence,

Much more fundamental for Halbwachs, however, is the fact that it is through interaction and communication with our fellow humans that we acquire knowledge about dates and facts, collective concepts of time and space, and ways of thinking and experiencing.

Because we participate in a collective symbolic order, we can discern, interpret and remember past events.

It is only through individual acts of memory that the collective memory can be observed, since ‘each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory’.

Every individual belongs to several social groups: family, religious community, colleagues, and so on.

Each person thus has at his or her disposal a supply of different, group-specific experiences and thought systems.

Thus, what Halbwachs seems to suggest is that while memory is no purely individual phenomenon, but must be seen in its fundamentally collective dimension, it is the combination of various group allegiances and the resultant frameworks for remembering that are the actual individual element which distinguishes one person from another.

Repeating Erll yet again,

It is only through individual acts of memory that the collective memory can be observed, since ‘each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory’.

How true, Halbwachs proves!

'The paparazzi would spit on her (Princess Diana) to get her reaction for it!...'

25 January 1994 | Ruminations

Diary, Diana, & Dinamani

#memoriesfromdiaries

News of the day - from my personal diary entry - 25 January 1994

Presentiments are strange things! 

These are the opening lines to Chapter 21, in Jane Eyre.

And yes! Presentiments galore great all through the novel!

Earlier, in Chapter 14, she says,

…my tenderest feelings are about to receive a shock: such is my presentiment.

In Chapter 25 again, Jane remarks -

I set out; I walked fast, but not far: quarter of a mile, I heard the tramp of hoofs; a horseman came on, full gallop; a dog ran by his side.

Away with evil presentiment!

Yet again, for the last time, in Chapter 27, Jane quips –

On a stile in Hay Lane I saw a quiet little figure sitting by itself.

I passed it as negligently as I did the pollard willow opposite to it: I had no presentiment of what it would be to me; 

The Cambridge Dictionary defines presentiment as –

a feeling that something, especially something unpleasant, is going to happen.

Going down memory lane, and looking back in wistful nostalgia at my past diary entries, I now realise how true this word proved so true for Princess Diana – dubbed the ‘most hunted person of the modern age’.

One reason why her elder son Prince William is allergic to any media coverage of him or his family members.

Picture courtesy: Newsweek

What he once said in her interview, could really move our hearts.

He said that the paparazzi would spit on her (Princess Diana) to get her reaction for it!

How shameful an act!

William adds,

If you are the Princess of Wales and you're a mother, I don’t believe being chased by 30 guys on motorbikes who block your path, who spit at you to get a reaction from you… and make a woman cry in public to get a photograph, I don't believe that is appropriate.

Most of the time his mother cried, because of press intrusion into her private life,

he adds.

Right from the time when news of her engagement to Prince Charles was confirmed, Diana was followed by the paparazzi, until the time they hunted her down to her death!

In a memoir titled, Dicing With Di: The Amazing Adventures of Britain’s Royal Chasers, Harvey and his paparazzi partner Saunders, recollect on how they hunted Diana for those sensational ‘million dollar’ clicks of the Princess in March 1994.

Mark Saunders and Glenn Harvey were sipping coffee in Kensington, west London.

The pair had spent the day attempting to photograph the most famous woman in the world, without success.

Then Harvey’s cell rang; Princess Diana had been spotted!

Seconds later both of them were in hot pursuit of the Princess, through red lights, driving down the wrong side of a traffic island and accelerating in front of trucks, until the Princess began turning into the entrance of Kensington Palace.

Harvey – leaping out from the vehicle, camera in hand, and dives across the bonnet of the car, firing his camera at the Audi as it disappeared from sight.

“Please, please, let that picture be sharp,” he prays.

It was. Harvey’s photograph of Diana was then sold to the British tabloid News of the World in an exclusive deal, for a fortune!

Well, Diana ‘screams at’ photographer (as I’ve jotted down in my diary), was something that she had to do on a regular basis, day after day after day, all through her life, to avoid the hunting photographers, up until that dreaded day, just three years later, when she was finally hunted down by the same paparazzi!

Again, this act of ‘screaming at photographers’ could possibly be a premonition or a presentiment on the part of the Princess!

Comparing Diana’s predicament with Jane’s – on the topic of presentiment, premonition and foreboding – could yield a range of literary insights and interpolations!

Well, coming back,

Quite coincidentally, in today’s Dinamani, a famous Tamil daily newspaper from the Indian Express group, there is a very thought-provoking article on a similar topic!

The writer Mr. K. V. K. Perumal, a Retired Central Govt Officer, has highlighted on the immense harm caused by the media in damaging people and their reputation by their unverified, inauthentic ‘representations’.

The article is titled, ‘Can a blessing become a curse?’

Says he -

Some people never understand the intensity of pain and mental torture they cause to the people on whom they write and gossip!  Those who find joy in the grief of others are also, in a way, mentally ill patients!

Indeed, freedom of press and power bring along with it a great sense of responsibility!

As the popular adage goes -

The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins!

How true!

with inputs from dailymaildotuk and & newsweekdotcom (picture)