“The English Teacher” by R. K. Narayan (post 2): Protagonist seemingly contacts deceased wife’s spirit via a medium’s automatic writing

“In 1939, [the author’s] wife, Rajam, died of typhoid. Narayan was devastated…he wrote: ‘I have described…my experience of her sickness and death in The English Teacher so fully…More than any other book, The English Teacher is autobiographical in content, very little part of it being fiction…The toll that typhoid took and all the desolation that followed, with a child to look after, and the psychic adjustments, are based on my own experience' ” (1, Introduction, p. x).

In the novel, after the tragic death from typhoid fever of his beloved wife, Susila, the protagonist narrator, Krishna, copes by continuing teaching, but also assuming full responsibility as a single parent for the care of Leela, their preschool daughter. However, he is still grief-stricken.

Unexpectedly, Krishna meets a man who claims to have made contact with Susila’s spirit through automatic writing: The medium holds a pencil over paper, and Susila’s spirit allegedly expresses herself through words, which the medium’s hand is compelled to write.

Séances, mediums, and automatic writing have a long history (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). And as I’ve discussed in past posts (search “automatic writing”), the spirits being contacted are probably the medium’s creatively produced alternate personalities, a process which may be psychologically similar to the way that novelists produce narrators and characters, and this may be why novelists sometimes feel that they are writing from dictation.

1. R. K. Narayan. Swami and Friends [1935], The Bachelor of Arts [1937], The Dark Room [1938], The English Teacher [1945, pp. 421-609]. Introduction by Alexander McCall Smith, pp. vii-xvi. New York, Everyman’s Library/Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 2006.

2. Wikipedia. Séance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ance

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediumship

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing

5. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Automatic_writing

6. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/psychic-writer-helps-people-connect-with-the-dead