Rohit Manchanda’s recent novel ‘The Enclave’ (Harper Collins 2024) is perennially wedded to poetry. The novelist’s poetic exuberance renders beauty to fleeting and random moments of empirical reality as the protagonist Maya registers her poetic rapture in unravelling the nature of a fractured or fragmented existence in a world of repression and inhibition. Poetry stems from Maya’s lyrical gift coupled with her observational acuity. In her keen sensibility to poetry, multiple sensory perceptions come into play, mitigating and healing her inner dissonance. Manchanda’s style of evocative poetry conjures up Coleridge’s creed of imagination in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria: ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’, and ‘the sense of novelty and freshness’. Poetry emerges in this novel from the ‘shifting levels of consciousness’ [Herbert Read].

 

The novel envisions a timeless world -  a world of imagination, a world of transcendence to animate the unknowable, a world that redeems the uncharted realm, and a world of poetic indulgence. Poetry seems to lie at the center of Maya’s empirical experience and her flight into a timeless world that beckons her to the world of poetry. Maya’s journey from the diurnal world to a timeless world is inescapably poetic. Manchanda’s technical virtuosity captures poetry that overwhelms Maya. Maya, lost in her commitment to seeking a timeless world, discovers poetry and the incantatory beauty of cadenced words. Maya is moored in seeking the inscapes of her lyrical interiority and a world where the trappings of humanity are not stripped away.

 

The Enclave chronicles the protagonist Maya’s search for poetic truth. Imagination supplements Maya’s faith in self-seeking truth or self-knowledge. She seeks a belief in the sense of wonder in nature, nature in multiple shades and hues. The association of imagination with the emotion of wonder gains ground in the face of an uncompromising creed of urban materialism that is too forbidding for Maya to seek her Arcadian world, her rural paradise. The utilitarian attitude to neo-liberalism, which demands acquiescence in the ideology of a materialistic world, poses a threat to Maya’s desire for a timeless world. However, Maya is unstoppable in her strivings.

 

The act of seeking to envision an Arcadian ideal prods Maya to confront rational materialism and cling to her sense of wonder that finds expression in her poetic exuberance. Manchanda like the Romantics, invests Maya’s experience with transcendental meanings as her life takes a shift from the world of dissonance to her cherished world of placid oneness, from an overbearing presence of a capitalistic world to a breathing presence of an imaginative world.

 

Maya’s registers her exasperation early on in the novel where she is caught between the sense of intrigue through Nature imagery and the world of capitalistic compliance. Manchanda uses the juxtaposition of time and nature in Maya’s sense of disorientation. The budding poet in Maya is fascinated by the rain, ‘the cobwebby rain’ and the oxymoronic ‘fresh corpses of leaves, twigs, sprigs’ following the storm. Her poetic sensibility captures the aftermath of the less menacing storm as the sky ‘hangs low, fleecy as a kitsch ceiling’. What is not lost on her is ‘the wavy mirror the wetted tarmac makes’, her ‘kitten heels tap out a brisk tattoo’,  ‘a gibbous moon’ on the tarmac, and ‘the armadas of ragged cloudlets’- she offers a string of images that evokes a sense of fracture further augmented in the expression ‘she herself will be in about an hour’s time, yielding herself up to another’s will.’ The intrigue evoked through nature peters out in a sense of submission, induced by an institution of control that leaves Maya in simmering discontent: ‘Caved in yet again. Spineless as ever. How much longer can this go on, how far…?’ This rhetorical question is the point of departure for Maya to unearth herself, her freedom, her passion, and her self-knowledge. Poetry becomes her medium to lend urgency to her epistemic quest.

 

Her epistemic quest pines for a firm grip on life, a life that accords meaning to her life. The cityscape becomes for Maya her agonised inspiration to discover her inner subjectivity that nurtures both her poetry and pathos. Maya’s journey is an enduring synthesis between the diurnal breeding ‘adequation’ and the symbolic intent flowering into ‘correspondence’ to borrow words from the eminent critic Sherman Paul in For Love of the World. What lurks beneath Maya’s epistemic quest is the fear of uncertainty, an ideological offshoot of materialism. Maya’s journey begins when she identifies a throbbing possibility to read her rich-textured subjectivity in the natural world.

 

In the novel, Maya’s trip to Florence in chapter ‘A blitz of the senses’ shows an ongoing negotiation with the artistic masterpieces evoking a heightened sense of imagination. Manchanda weaves a rich intertextual tapestry of wonder when the poet-persona Maya feels edified in her awe-inspiring moments as she alludes to Vladimir Nabokov, Michelangelo, Henry Holiday, and Sahir Ludhianvi. Moreover, the Tuscan countryside with ‘its sweetly calming quilt work of field and vineyard, grove and hamlet, church steeple’ provokes Maya’s inflamed desire for the Arcadian world, a timeless world of wonder in poetic enchantment.

 

The poetic rapture is lost in the immersive experience of ekphrastic revelation as the wonder-struck Maya finds herself in one of Florence’s tucked-away alleys. She relives the wonder of the ‘immortal of diction and imagery’. She feels transported conjuring up Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. She arrests the sense of ineffability in her confession of boundless elation: ‘…inhaling lungfuls of air infused with Dantean genius, her toes curling inside her plimsolls; to have gasped at the enormity, and no less the gorgeousness, of some of the proto-editions of the Commedia on display’. Maya finds it ‘a pilgrimage of sorts’ Amidst this soulfulness, Maya is haunted by Bob Dylan’s foreboding sense of emptiness as she walks a tightrope between abundance and barrenness. 

 

Maya, in her search for poetic truth, comes increasingly in conflict with a world of dissonance. She realizes the deterrence to the ground-swell of imagination. Her sense of distaste and neurosis is evident in her perceptive responsiveness to the cramped cityscape against her imagined poetic space alive to the fullness of life. Maya’s poetic persona is pitted against the persona of an archetypal city reeling under its burdens: ‘…its enslavement of politics, the gargantuan of its babudom, the boorishness of its civic spaces.’ Her exasperated confession is an expression of her inner torment and existential angst in the chapter ‘A Mother’s Prayer’: ‘Afterlife or not, blithe or wretched, all she knows is that in this mortal frame she feels all washed up. Hard pressed to find breathing space, what to speak of cogitation, interiority.’

 

In the final chapters of the novel, Maya is more assertive in putting forth her poetic awakening. In the chapter ‘Another Planet’, the poet in Maya crafts language receptive to olfactory imagery. She captures the elusive beauty of ‘floating sensibility’. Her dogged determination to launch her poetic persona is evident as she claims: ‘Hack off the mooring ropes, launch off into the uncharted, fetch up at ports unknown’. It recalls the Socratic epigram: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Towards the end of the novel, Maya gains more visibility to recalibrate her life with the sole purpose of yielding to poetic redemption and registering her self-knowledge, living life on her own terms. Readers can visualise Maya’s awakened existence where she waits for the ‘divine madness’(Plato) to descend generously on her. Maya’s spirited conviction to her striving for a timeless world calls to mind the telling lines in T.S.Eliot’s Marina :

 

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.