Eclectic Representations E

Eclectic Representations Vol.
2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 1
July 2012
Vol. 2, Issue 1
ISSN 2231 430X
Eclectic Representations
A BIANNUAL SCHOLARLY JOURNAL OF CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS IN LITERATURES FROM ACROSS THE WORLD
PG & Research Department of English

Madras Christian College (Autonomous) Tambaram, Chennai 600 059 Email: eclecticamcc@gmail.com
2 | Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 ECLECTIC REPRESENTATIONS (English)
July 2012
Department of English, Madras Christian College (Autonomous) Chennai
ISSN 2231 430X
Published by PG & Research Department of English Madras Christian College (Autonomous) Tambaram, Chennai 600 059, India. Tel: 22390675 Fax: 22394352
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Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 3
A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. - JOSEPH CONRAD
4 | Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012
And if any man thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. I CORINTHIANS 8:2
Table of Contents
July 2012
PREFACE
Vol.2, Issue 1
ISSN 2231 430X
1. The Portrait of a City: Lawrence Osbornes Bangkok Days Alexander J. Klemm 2. Postmodern Politics of Representation: Other Voices In Angela Carters Fiction Vrinda R. Chanth 3. Judith Rodriguez and Feminism N. Bindu 4. Portrayal of the Zeitgeist of Rural Life in Kamala Markandayas Nectar in a Sieve Jayanthi Rajendran & Ruchika Kathuria
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5. Issues in Diasporic Literature: A Synoptic View

Stanley Mohandoss Stephen 6. From Grace to Grief: A Study of Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown P. J. Jeyashree 7. The Psychoanalysis of A Mothers Self-fulfillment in D. H. Lawrences Sons and Lovers C. Yesupatham 8. Identity in Partition Literature: A Redefining Perspective C. Monsingh Daniel 9. Three Kings (1999): An Orientalist Representation Morsal Shaif Haidarah 71
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10. New Aestheticism: An Angel against Theory as Hermeneutics of Suspicion M. Elangovan
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11. Womanhood beyond the Devi Syndrome: A Critical Analysis of Deepa Mehtas Fire Shweta Kushal & Evangeline Manickam 12. Creating a Dialogic Space: A Bakhtinian Reading of Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things Jubimol, K. G 13. Sleeping Beauty as a Gendered Icon Libin K. Kurian 14. Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines: A Delusion of Consciousness David Abraham Albert 15. Narrative Time in Nayantara Sahgals Storm in Chandigarh J. Baby Eliammal Aims and Scope of Eclectic Representations Call for Papers Subscription Order Form Editorial Board
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Preface
Eclectic Representations, echoes the yardsticks of the Department of English, Madras Christian College, in investigating the design, purpose, meaning, modes of production and reception, and the uses made of literary texts. The research articles presented in this issue bring out these investigations by closely examining texts in themselves and by bringing to the texts knowledge of relevant literary, historical, philosophical, and biographical contexts. Texts are examined for their complicity in the construction of social norms and for their attempts to oppose or undermine such norms. Alexander J. Klemm offers a kaleidoscopic reflection on the identity of Thailands capital and its expatriate residents, through an analysis of Lawrence Osbornes Bangkok Days. The novels portrayal of the city and its approach to urban loneliness, the interplay between East and West, as well as the city as a stage, chaos and mystery, is also discussed in the paper. N. Bindu analyses Judith Rodriguez, as a poet with an Australian voice, alongside her views on gender prejudice in her home turf. Rodriguezs castigation of the patriarchal society, which offers no consolation but only intensifies the pain with passing time, and her rebellious standpoint, coupled with her reeking self-confidence are highlighted through a feminist reading of her poems. Jayanthi Rajendran & Ruchika Kathuria dwell on the portrayal of the zeitgeist of rural life in Kamala Markandayas most famous work Nectar in a Sieve. The notion that post-independence Indian English fiction portrays how the country, especially rural India still despairs even after the achievement of independence and how the golden age that should have descended on the soil is nothing but a myth, is explicated through an analysis of the hot button issues in the novel. Stanley Mohandoss Stephen researches on some of the important concepts in Diasporic literature like identity, home, past, etc, and analyses the creation of new identities, cultural hybridity, acquiring spaces for growth, resolving cultural conflicts, and forging a new culture either composite or plural. Vrinda R. Chanth investigates Angela Carters tryst with Otherness as a compelling object of representation in the Western social, cul-
tural, and political milieu. The subversion of stereotypes-- which cast people and societies marginal to the West in an immutable otherness-in the works of Carter are also examined to bring out the underlying politics of power. P. J. Jeyashree analyses the transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist, which is the most impressive achievement of the book, through a critique of absolutism. Yesupatham attempts to delineate the idea of self-fulfillment embodied in Sons and Lovers, through the representative character David Herbert Lawrence, who presents the practical mundane and prosaic life style of the middle-class in England, echoing the entire aspects of human personality. Morsal Shaif Haidarah interprets Three Kings (1999) in the light of Edward Saids theory of Orientalism, and portrays how the Orient remains absent and silent in the process of orientalisation. Monsingh Daniel focusses on the fact that identity has always been in a state of change and that it is redefined depending on the scenario that a person finds himself in. He also attempts to probe the concept of Indian identity as it exists today is in itself a construct that has drastically altered itself over the course of Indian history. M. Elangovan analyses the reliability of theory as an illusion. The aesthetic mode of text is linked with a three way connection where the operation, the medium and the effect of texts are functionally engaged. Arguing that the ontological basis of a literary text is based on its ability to change fragmentism into a kind of holism, the paper proposes that, the aesthetic consideration should be more important than theoretical considerations, in the evaluation of a text. Shweta Kushal & Evangeline Manickam attempt to study Fire as a quintessential rebellion against the dominant discourses that construct femininity in Indian culture. It further delineates the manner in which the narrative overthrows the rhetoric of the ideal woman, promoted through legends such as the Devi Sita myth in the Ramayana, and prioritises desire as the base of womanhood. Through this attempt, the paper argues that the narrative advocates self-expression that is not only non-conformist in nature but also exposes the controlling nature of societal norms. Jubimol evaluates how Roy has attempted to subvert conventions of traditional narrative, dismantle hierarchy and exhibit the postmodern accent of dialogic narration where meaning is constructed through an interaction of the multiple systems, discourses, ideologies and voices within the artistic entirety of the texts. She also subverts the preset norms of patriarchal/casteist/colonialist/capitalist hegemony through the framework of a fierce socio-cultural and political criticism of the Indian society using Bakhtinian Poetics.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 9 Libin Kurian attempts to bring out a rereading of the feminine qualities of the character Sleeping Beauty in the fairytale Sleeping Beauty so as to expose female traits that go along with the character and its characteristic response. David Abraham Albert examines the psychological turmoil undergone by the major characters in Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines with regard to the problem of belonging. The paper also studies the role played by memories and their impact on the characters in order to foreground the deep psychological pressures which lurk within the characters. J. Baby Eliammmal analyses the concept of narrative time formulated by Genette, which helps to unearth the master craftsmanship of Sahgal by rereading her novel Storm in Chandigarh. First and foremost, we thank our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for graciously helping us to bring out the third issue of this scholarly literary Journal. Great is His faithfulness towards us. We would like to place on record the unstinted support and guidance of our Head of the Department, Dr. S. Stephen Jebanesan, who has always been very supportive of the numerous research initiatives of the Department. The Editorial Board wishes to sincerely thank our Principal & Secretary Dr. R. W. Alexander Jesudasan for his constant motivation and encouragement in all the academic endeavours of the Department. Moreover, we gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help and support of our Bursar & Treasurer Mr. C. Sundaraj, whose invaluable help was instrumental in this third issue seeing the light of day. We sincerely thank Ms. C. S. Chitra, Assistant Professor of English, for her help with proofreading and typographic accuracy of the manuscripts, with the MLA Handbook as the touchstone. We thank Ms. Priyanka, I MA English Literature, for her effective proofreading of the typescripts. The Department is indebted to the scholarly members of the Editorial Board for their constant suggestions and ideas for the improvement of the Journal. We express our heartfelt thanks to Mr. D. Mohandass of M/s. Bhaghavan Printers for the excellent typesetting, layout and vibrant cover design of the journal. We dedicate this journal to our students, past and present, who have always been a source of strength, inspiration and joy to the Department.
Editors
The Portrait of a City: Lawrence Osbornes Bangkok Days

- Alexander J. Klemm* Abstract: The novel Bangkok Days (2009) by Lawrence Osborne offers reflections on the identity of Thailands capital and its expatriate residents. The novel taps into Westerners imagination and misconceptions of Asia and their fascination with Bangkok. Through a semi-fictional narrative where personal experiences of a wandering narrator, subjective impressions and historical facts merge, the novel attempts to disentangle many of Bangkoks apparent complexities and enigmas. This paper seeks to analyze Bangkok Days portrayal of the city and its approach to central themes which include urban loneliness, the interplay between East and West, as well as the city as a stage, chaos and mystery. The objective is to arrive at an in-depth understanding of these concepts and Osbornes portrait of Bangkok. Key words: Bangkok, Thailand, city, representation, East-West dichotomy The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Wishnu. (Bangkoks full name) THE PORTRAYAL OF CITIES IN NOVELS has a longstanding tradition in British and continental literature. In Southeast Asia, Bangkok stands out as a city that has inspired many authors, among them Lawrence Osborne,1 who wrote Bangkok Days (2009).2 This novel engages with the question What is Bangkok? and in doing so draws a literary portrait of Bangkok this article intends to explore. The semi- fictional Bangkok Days is told from the first-person point-of-view by an unnamed, * Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, Graduate School of English
Assumption University, Bangkok, Thailand Email: alexander.j.klemm@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
middle-aged American, presumably Osbornes alter ego. Usually at night, the narrator roams through the city in order observe, absorb and describe it for the benefit of the reader. The title Bangkok Days is a direct reference to George Orwells Burmese Days (1934), which deals with the struggles of a culturally sensitive Briton in Burma and is a harsh critique of western colonialism in Asia. Osbornes novel also scolds the West through central themes such as urban loneliness and an East-West dichotomy that favors Asia over Europe and the U.S., however, its criticism is not as sharp as Orwells.
This article seeks to analyze Bangkok Days in order to gain insight into its central ideas and approach to city portrayal. The theoretical background of the discussion is based on studies of city representation in literature, in particular on Robert Alters Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel and Mary Ann Caws (ed.) City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film. Key statements, the authors writing strategies, references to Thai culture, and Western notions about Bangkok are examined.
The study is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the city as a locus of western imagination and literary inspiration, the concept of cityness and the fragmentary perception of cities, the literary phenomenon of the Bangkok Novel, and the narrator as a roaming city flneur. It also gives a brief overview of Bangkok Days, its structure and writing strategy. The second part focuses on the motif of urban loneliness, the lives of expatriates in Bangkok, and personal reinvention in a city that is likened to a stage. This is followed by the third part, which analyzes the notions of a city as a labyrinth or chaos, Bangkok as a city of enigmatic allure based on a semi-divine and rather mythical origin,
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 13 as well as the significance of language in relation to Bangkoks beginning days. The last part examines Bangkok Days central claim of an East-West dichotomy that plays out in Bangkok, city comparisons, westerners struggles to ever fully grasp the intricacies of Thai culture, as well as the connection between cityness, corporality and physical attraction within the Bangkok context.
Western Imagination and the Bangkok Novel Choosing cities as story settings has a longstanding tradition in Western literature. According to Robert Alter, the city is a breeding ground for fantasy and fragmentary perception (42). When a city is selected it becomes the location of the imagination because the author endeavors to capture the experience of the urban environment. Therefore, a writer may try to comprehend a city through descriptions that are based on characters observations and responses. While the metropolis may be the catalyst of an authors fantasy, it cannot be grasped in its entirety, neither through a novel, nor by a visual medium, because it is too complex to ever be perceived or represented in its totality. The characters actively engage with the urban scenery, absorb and process it in order to create coherence in what are essentially fragmented impressions. Such coherence is arrived at by a sense of organization through implications and cause-effect connections.
Bangkok is a global city that has kindled the imagination of Western writers since colonial times, when Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, George Orwell and others roamed through South and Southeast Asia, capturing their impressions in travel and adventure tales, which were based on and have permanently solidified the Western fascination with Asian countries, cities and cultures. Due to this in-
terest in things Asian, the number of fictional and semi-fictional texts that engage with Bangkok has flourished in recent years. Seasoned and new authors have been contributing to the wave of novel set in Thailands capital. Bangkok appears to be the western focal point of urban imagination in the context of Southeast Asia because other Southeast Asian capitals draw significantly less attention from international authors. Through the titles of these novels, the word Bangkok itself has become a marketing strategy, which is, one may speak of the Bangkok Novel as a field of literature that has grown in the last ten to twenty years. Most of these novels are written by American and British authors. Crime and suspense are the most prominent genres, championed by John Burdett and Christopher G. Moore. Other genres include erotica, science fiction, fantasy, prison tales, ghost stories, autobiographies, and studies of Bangkoks history and Thai culture. The typical Bangkok novels take the city as a backdrop of gritty stories because Bangkok has a reputation of vice, crime, corruption and conflict. The novels describe the city from western perspectives and offer western definitions of it. In essence, they seek to understand and represent Bangkok with western readers as the target group.3
In a discussion of the crime-novel Bangkok Eight (John Burdett 2003), Lin Neumann explains Bangkoks potential to inspire the imagination and its function as a location of an ever evolving coexistence of East and West:
Krung Thep [Thai name of Bangkok], the city of angels as the Thais call it, is complex and compelling. Few places on Earth can boast of such a mix of cultures and temptations in one place. It is true that anything goes, for a
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 15 price. The clash and co-existence of Westerners in great numbers with their patient Thai hosts (and hostesses) make this fertile ground for the imagination, a crossroads of greed, lust and vibrant energy. (Neumann)
The canon of the Bangkok novels offers a comprehensive view of how Western authors experience Bangkok, and how it shapes and directs the imagination of the city-ness (Caws 1), whereby cityness describes particular human forms of urban existence.4 The novels rely on specific motifs and ways of expressing cityness through fiction. Some of them work with stereotypes, clichs, exaggerations and misrepresentations of Bangkok; others attempt to offer truthful portrayals of it.5
Osbornes Bangkok Days is different because it attempts to avoid the clichs of the common Bangkok novel. It seeks to offer a valid reading of the city, yet such a reading is rather difficult, as Ross King states:
There are difficulties in understanding reading Bangkok. It is, at least to the Western eye, a city of chaos, a landscape of incoherent collisions and blurring overlays. It is a city of sharp contrasts, collisions and inconsistencies (juxtapositions), also a space of screens, overlays and surfaces (superimpositions). (1)
Bangkok Days tries to understand the city by reading its surface structures, and then by reflecting on cityness, urban identity, and coexistence in an urban environment. The definition of Bangkok is arrived at, then, through descriptions, authorial comments, and an overlap of fictional and autobiographical features. The narrative includes historical facts
and relates personal experiences to recent events in a constantly evolving environment.
Several chapter titles imply key ideas, e.g., Men Without Women hints at gender conflicts, East/West suggests a key opposition and encompassing concept, and The British Club not only points at a strong AngloEuropean presence in Bangkok, but also harks back to the European Club in Orwells Burmese Days. Moreover, by introducing the novel with the Buddhist proverb: All lust is grief (Osborne 3), the author sets oppositions and juxtapositions as essential narrative strategies. He also uses descriptions and definitions of the city, compares Bangkok with other metropolises, and taps into discourses of East vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, companionship vs. loneliness, and the coexistence of Thais and foreigners. The proverb also establishes the novels ambivalent mood of longing for what is unattainable and sadness for what is lost forever.
The novel is written from a western point-of-view with a male, firstperson narrator. In the course of exploring the city on foot, he passes through numerous city spaces. Strangers enter and exit his life at random, which suggests an urban existence governed by interruptions, discontinuity and unpredictability. An episodic format reinforces this sense of fragile relations. The narrator explores the city on foot, rendering him as a city wanderer reminiscent of the flneur figure in classical 19th and 20th century English and French literature: The flneur is the idling pedestrian, the curious, perhaps disinterested, purposeless observer of teeming urban variety, the spectator connoisseur (Alter 9). He is driven by curiosity, does not succumb to fatigue, and is a literary means of observation. For Osbornes narrator-flneur, being in constant
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 17 communication with his urban environment is a necessary end in itself: To walk for the sake of walking the most aimless thing of all (Osborne 10). He takes pleasure in gradual discovery and increased insights of city spaces and tackles many of Bangkoks apparent complexities. He compares his nocturnal strolls to sances (160), wanderings of spiritual quality, and his accidental companion McGinnis bases his motivation to live in Bangkok on the need to walk in urban spaces that are fresher than those in the U.S. or Europe (11). The flneur embraces repetition and wanders without guiding aids: I made this walk every day, because it was at hand, easy to do, and because I could do it without getting lost, without fumbling for maps (41). The narrator often compares his life in Bangkok with that in Western cities, preferring the first because he feels safe in the city even though it remains incomprehensible or because of it. His movements represent human life within an urban space-time continuum. He wanders at night to experience a pleasurable sense of disorientation, challenging his western-centric preconceptions. Smells, sights and sounds of the city refresh his memories which he shares with the reader.
Loneliness on the City Stage The chapter title The Night Walker refers to Osbornes flneur who roams through Bangkok at night. He says: I was a night walker. It is a loneliness which has been chosen and indeed calculated (3). Not only does this statement establish him as a city wanderer, it also sets urban solitude as a central motif. It is inevitable in any metropolis and is often viewed with disdain, e.g. by Alter who writes of the savagery of isolation in the urban crowd (Alter 25). This wanderer, however, embraces loneliness and muses:
I began to enjoy it. It was the feeling of interconnectedness, and the first realization that loneliness was not the right word to describe the farangs [Thai for foreigner] isolation in Bangkok. The farang is in reality not alone because Buddhists themselves seem not to believe in loneliness. (Osborne 67)
This passage connects loneliness, the western foreigner, and Buddhism. All three ideas are put in relation to the definition of Bangkok. In an interview, Osborne explains the repeated reference to loneliness as follows: We are living in an age of loneliness, which is maybe even the principal reason behind this book. To write about loneliness in the urban landscape (qtd. in Bures). He also considers the lack of social engagement and the presence of solitude as major motifs in Bangkok Days. Thus, the novel suggests that Bangkok welcomes its foreign drifters, yet, as Osborne claims in the interview, loneliness is a human condition that drives men to seek the companionship of escorts. This links loneliness to cityness and prostitution. According to Osborne, Bangkok is a city of contradictions: while it allows for physicality on a more intensive level than Western cities, feelings of isolation always remain (ibid).
In her discussion of Burdetts Bangkok Eight, Neumann observes that Bangkok is the setting of many formulaic and mediocre novels that are based on western clichs and misrepresent Bangkok:
Set a random number of Westerners down amid the steamy weirdness of the bars, the over-abundance of cheap sex and the smilingly enigmatic Thai people, and an alarming number of them decide to give hard-boiled
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 19 fiction a try. The city should be a natural. Its weird and wonderful, slightly dangerous and amusingly hypocritical in all the right places. I suspect, however, that the real appeal for many would-be Raymond Chandlers of Bangkok is a desire not so much to immortalize the city's many charms and sinister corners as to capture their own peculiar love for its rampant strangeness. (Neumann)
While Bangkok Eights representation of Bangkok is an intentional exaggeration, Bangkok Days also relies on a western point-of-view but tries to be more balanced. The motif of loneliness is emphasized through the minor characters. The narrator has only acquaintances because the high pace of the city does not allow true friendships. He associates with older Caucasian expatriates: the Englishman McGinnis, a Spaniard named Helix, Dennis, who is a retiree from Australia, the German Friedrich Fritzy Furnau, a French bar-buddy named Lionel, and a Scot named Farlo. International crossroads is named as one of the elements of Bangkok Fiction and thus defined: As an open city, Bangkok attracts individuals from a vast number of countries, many of whom elect to stay. It is a city of local, national and international intrigue, where todays alliances are often built on rocky foundations (Bangkok Fiction). The lives of these eccentric men intersect in Bangkok Days, but their connections are non-committal. They have endured disappointments and rejections before they left their homes to find solace in Asia. While they serve as examples of urban loneliness and occasionally accompany the narrator on his journeys of discovery, their somber opinions about life in Bangkok complement his. Describing Bangkok as a magnet for outcasts and the emotionally scarred, he concludes that Bangkok is where
some people go when they feel that they can no longer be loved, when they give up (Osborne 6), calling it an international city of the wounded (114), and describing it as a haven for those who have only a little money.
According to Molesworth, it is possible to equate the city with a theater where staging life is an end to itself (qtd. in Caws 13-14). In this sense, the narrator describes Bangkok as a stage of western reinvention that allows one to adopt a new identity. He implies that some westerners are compelled to leave their own culture and to reinvent themselves elsewhere. For example, he considers Anna Leonowens, the English governess of King Rama IV on whose memoirs the controversial film Anna and the King (dir. Andy Tennant, 1999) is based as one of the first westerners to seek a new identity in Thailand. The voluntary exile seeks obscurity and human touch. While the feeling of anonymity is intense (Osborne 155), the city allows for relentless quest for intimacy (99). The sense of urban anonymity is omnipresent: But the privacy of strangers was the premise of being farang [a foreigner] in Bangkok, the guarantee of being left alone (86).
The narrator suggests that the city attracts many Westerners who are going through an identity crisis and do not want to be bothered by obligations or other residents. They go through an adjustment process of three phases.
The first one is that of the newcomer who is led by his own stereo types about Bangkok and Thailand. The second phase marks a time of intensive travelling between ones home country and Bangkok. The character McGinnis says to the narrator, Youre in the back-and-forth
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 21 phase. I went back and forth for years before I settled down here. [] You go back and forth between East and West and pretty soon you have no idea who [] you are anymore (107). This suggests that the expatriate struggles to keep a solid personal identity. In the third phase, he needs to feel welcomed when returning to Bangkok and adapts to his new home.
Bangkok as Chaos and Mystery Cities are complex constructs where humans coexist and interact in equally complex relations. Therefore, novels tend to describe them as places of confusion, as labyrinths and chaos. In Caws words, the city is a labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors (2). According to Faris, they are fictional urban labyrinths symbolic or iconic [they] duplicate mans experience of the city as diachronic wandering and synchronic mapping (qtd. in Caws 38). And Joseph describes the city as a chaotic urban landscape (qtd. in Caws 46), whereby the chaos, is a mirror for the incomprehensible universe (44) in which we experience the city as terrifying disconnectedness of objects (52). A literary text may come to terms with the urban labyrinth by creating confused characters, making the city the setting of a complicated story, portraying it as a fragmented place, or giving the text itself a labyrinthine character. The explorations of the flneur are then a means of bringing order into an urban system that overwhelms the human mind.
King explains the notion of Bangkok as a chaos as follows:
The key characteristic of Bangkok is chaos. That chaos is produced by three processes. First, the ever-present vis-
ual chaos is mostly a consequence of juxtapositions of the dissimilar and even the incompatible. Western cities mostly will take quite draconian measures to avoid clashes and jarring notes by land use zoning and development controls, or else they will endeavour to hide them. Not so Bangkok. Unlikely juxtapositions are accordingly one clue to understanding the confusion before the tourists eye or the scholars analysis. Second, superimpositions also in part account for a confused world. There are activities piled on activities, screens on screens; the search for understanding must accordingly turn to what it is that the screens would mask. What is really going on? What is it that might be hidden beneath the layers that seem to make up the visual cacophony? Third, chaos needs to be seen as a medium for resilience and survival, more rarely also for resistance. The very art of manoeurving through chaos is the definition of vitality and resilience for millions who go through it on a daily basis (Shahrokhi, 2007, citing Deeb, 2006). A reading of Bangkoks chaos is therefore an exercise in understanding chaoss function in peoples everyday life. (12)
This is precisely what Bangkok Days does. It engages with the notion of Bangkok as chaos and labyrinth but avoids portraying it as overtly confusing. Like an archaeologist Osbornes flneur digs through Bangkoks various layers to disentangle the chaos and to uncover the true essence of the city. The novel itself deals with chaos on multiple levels. First of all, the episodic structure of the novel implies a sense of
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 23 discontinuity. Secondly, while comparisons between Bangkok and a labyrinth are limited, it emphasizes the citys fragmentary nature. On his walks, the narrator points out the chaotic masses of telephone cables (Osborne 13), the hustling and bustling, and calls Bangkok a pandemonious city (5), i.e. tumultuous, lawless.6 Thirdly, the adjusting expatriate finds it hard to apply European expectations of topography to Bangkok: The citys infuriating topography isnt a rational system at all, it isnt European, it isnt anything one can seize (13). The comparison of Bangkoks cityscape with that of European cities implies that Bangkok lacks coherence. Therefore, the novel implies that Bangkok resists notions and definitions based on eurocentric views of law and order, and posits that Bangkok should have been built differently in order to cope with the tropical climate. For example, the character Dennis bemoans the lack of city planning, claiming that Bangkok is said to be the hottest metropolis of all, that its labyrinthine structure and the mass of concrete, steel and glass have made living in it difficult (33).
While a city is often portrayed as chaos or a labyrinth in order to highlight the impossibility of fully comprehending it, it may also be represented as an entity born of myth and mystery, again to express its elusiveness. Lehan, calling this the mystic nature of the city (30), states: Ancient myth gives way to mystery in the modern city (20). Bangkok Days uses these notions of myths that have become mysticisms when it presents Bangkok as a historic city with enigmatic symbols and obscure texts: They say Bangkok is not a city but a collection of ten thousand villages. But each one is as dense, as impossible to decipher as your average city (Osborne 140). The centrally located neighborhood and street named Thong Lor is one of these former villages that has been incorporated by the city, yet according to the novel it holds an
enigmatic attraction: Thong Lor is the most mysterious of Bangkok streets. Even its green traffic signs, which you see all over the city written in English, are here more cryptic (142). Moreover, the Chao Phraya River, formerly Bangkoks main water-street of commerce, is symbolic not only of the citys birth, but also of the flow of the writers thoughts. It is a path for the flneurs excursions. The river and the historic town of Thonburi are directly linked to the citys birth: Thonburi, on the left bank of the river, is where Bangkok began (27).
The suggested presence of mystery in the city extends to the Thai language, which becomes significant in Bangkoks original name because it is quoted, translated and commented on by the narrator:
Krungthep Mahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathani Buriromudomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amonphiman Awatansathit Sakkathattiya Witsanu Kamprasit. It is mostly a Thai pronunciation of a blend of Sanskrit and Pali, the ancient languages of India, and it means: The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Wishnu. So Bangkok was built by Vishnu. [] The Thai kings are incarnations of Vishnu. This means that they are virtual gods, that they partake of the mystery of godhead. (33-34)
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 25 It is quite common practice for novels set in Bangkok to give its full name. The narrator of Bangkok Days follows this convention and links the name to language, religion, the monarchy, myth and creation, thereby invoking a glorious birth interlinking the city with gods, kings, land, beauty, and history. Based on the passage above, Bangkok is not only the city of angels, it is also a city of gods. Lehan states, The city of man must relate to the City of God as the body relates to the soul (22). This reinforces the notion of the city as a divine creation.
Finally, the narrators accounts are enriched with many Thai words closely followed by their translations. This approach marks him as an authority whose expertise on things Thai the reader is asked to trust. On a metaphoric level, the fragments of Thai language serve to demonstrate that foreigners absorb, process and reproduce the language only in small parts at best, which also points out correctly that expatriates struggle to ever master Thai beyond the basics and that it becomes a mysterious door that a Westerner can open only with great effort. Bangkok is thus portrayed as a locus of western attraction based on incomprehension:
Westerners choose Bangkok as a place to live precisely because they can never understand it, for even the Thai script, that variation of written Sanskrit, is impossible to master. Its this ignorance which comforts the farang. However conversant in Thai culture, he will never get close to the bottom of it.7 (Osborne 49)
East-West Dichotomy The narrator uses many comparisons in order to comment on streets,
buildings and landmarks. He compares Bangkok with western cities such as Perth (22), London (41), Paris (42) and New York (178), considers Bangkok to be more innocent than Miami or Las Vegas (174) despite the corruption, and relates it to other cities of the present and the past, e.g.:
Dennis often said to me that Bangkok reminded him of an ancient Roman city, at least as we imagine them to have been. Cities of polytheistic lust. Nothing he added, could be further removed from the cities of Anglophonia, which were based not on a love of pleasure but on a worship of power. (222)
Such comparisons construct an East-West dichotomy with Bangkok at its center, favoring the East, demeaning the West.9 Bangkok is portrayed as an Eastern city with Indian roots: I was beginning to see that it certainly applied to Dennis himself, who was interested in the East, and who liked Bangkok because she was partly Hindu, a piece of India (31). Of course, the concept of the East as a comprehensive entity is inevitably flawed; there is neither an adequate definition of the East; not of the West, for that matter. Comparisons between East and West fall short of effectively representing either one. The narrator opposes the western practice of mystifying Asia and admits: I hate it when people talk about the wisdom of the East (55). Nevertheless, he employs contrasts between East and West to praise the former and to criticize the latter, attesting the Western world a failure in understanding that in a globalized world Asia is completely self-sufficient.8
In order to develop the theme of the East-West dichotomy, the novel
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 27 engages with Thai culture to some extent, yet it does not intend to be a cultural guide about the intricacies of Thainess. It refers to culturally significant events, such as the daily playing of the National Anthem (77), touches on concepts of the human body, beauty (90), libido (104), the Thai laugh (197), and homosexuality (247), and comments on Thai drinking habits, the strength of the female workforce, and the countrys literary tradition (233). The insights, thus, gained support the representation of Bangkok as a hybrid of tradition and modernity, as do explanations of Thailands history, which the narrator often connects to western influences; e.g. he discusses the British colonial influence on Siam and the remnants of colonialism here Bangkok Days approaches Burmese Days in spirit and the anglophonization of the Thai upper class: The elite here is Westernized, Anglophone, confident in itself and Asia (138).
Culture is then connected to other issues. The narrator implements the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy and implies an interconnectedness of religion, sexuality, globalization and business in the urban space: Hadnt Buddhist Bangkok quietly accepted its role as the provider of sexual services to the rest of the planet? In a global economy it was inevitable that some place would. But what did that tell you about the rest of the world? (15). He delves into discourses of animism and folktales as the popular ghost story of Mae Nak is elaborated (153-60), and various ghosts, such as a phi pop, a phi kraseu, and a phi am, are explained (125-36). He relates superstition directly to the city Animism swirls through the citys undergrowth, feeding it from below (159), and posits that the belief in the uncanny is a driving force behind the citys rapid transformation through demolition and reconstruction.
The narrator calls Bangkok, the slutty Cinderella of South Asian cities (67-68) because of its lax approach to prostitution, and defines it through its corporality when he calls it a city which is so casual about the body (87). The characterization of the city via the human body is expanded through the assumption that Bangkok attracts Westerners because of a culture of physicality as opposed to an isolation of the individual in western cities; thus, the narrator observes:
He [McGinnis] added that what Bangkok offered to the aging human was a culture of complete physicality. It was tactile, humans pressing against each other in healing heat: the massage, the bath, the foot therapy, the handjob, you name it. The physical isolation and sterility of Western life, its physical boredom, was unimaginable. (22)
Again, the juxtaposition between life in the West and in Bangkok favors the latter. The assumed casualty about physical touch raises the foreign mans hope for erotic adventures, which presumably is a primary incentive for many men to come to Bangkok in the first place.
The narrator continues to link cityness and corporality to the EastWest theme as he discusses the citys sex trade business and questions the role of the participants. He claims that when a suitor pays a prostitute, the lines between victim and culprit become blurred (25) and that women are equal players in this trade as they constantly assess men according to their wealth (51). He considers the transaction between suitor and prostitute as a business deal (101), and discusses foreigners perceptions of and relationships with Thai women. His conclusions are
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 29 that old men want to feel alive, and that Thai women use ample eyecontact to flirt with Western men. This eye-play is at the core of the citys erotic juggling of East and West (Osborne 24). Within the EastWest encounter, sex comes to play an amusing role:
In sex, the comedy of misunderstanding between East and West is what arouses Western men so much. [] Intentionally or otherwise, however, the East-West encounter is nearly always redeemed by being slightly comical, but its not a comedy which has any vicious intent. (62)
The narrator suggests that foreign men in Bangkok soon take the omnipresence of beautiful women for granted (149), and maintains that older men, as they feel a loss of visibility (150) due to their age, seek the attention of young Thai women and escorts out of frustration because only money and youth get recognized (15). The attention they receive, even though it is bought, restores their visibility and pride. The narrator wonders, however, whether this urban environment of easy availability of female companionship and sexual favors is a ground for human corruption. Toward the end of the novel he wonders:
I wanted to know how many of these night ladies he [McGinnis] had slept with during his interminable, irresolvable sojourn in the City of Angels. [] If Bangkok was a place where men could behave without strictures, how high would their promiscuity soar? (252)
Conclusion Osbornes Bangkok Days, like many other novels that belong to the
modern literary movement referred to as the Bangkok Novel and Bangkok Fiction, engages with Thailands capital on many different levels in order to draw a comprehensive portrait of the city. However, while many Bangkok novels evolve around crime, suspense, clichs and exaggerations, Bangkok Days takes a more contemplative approach. The narrator takes on the role of a flneur who roams the streets at night, absorbs the sign of cityness around him, describes and comments on them.
The study of the novel, themes and writing approach has shown that the portrait of Bangkok is constructed around comparisons, contrasts, observations and comments. It is also based on various notions, such as loneliness being a major sentiment of the western city dwellers and drifters, and the city being like a stage where identities are reinvented and renegotiated. Bangkok Days engages with the perception of the city as chaos, a labyrinth and mystery, but rather than discarding or supporting these stereotypical views of the postmodern metropolis, it uses them to draw Bangkok as a city of complex coexistence, cultural wealth and ideological conflicts. The novels overall theme, then, is a dichotomy between East and West, whereby the narrator favors the former and often takes a critical stance toward the latter. Nevertheless, this preference is that of the narrator and may not entirely reflect that of Osborne, as Bangkok Days is keen to remain objective for the most part.
There is much opportunity to continue this analysis beyond Bangkok Days. For example, an important issue that needs to be explored is whether the repeated misrepresentations of Bangkok in western literature point to a form of Neocolonialism. Secondly, the narrator claims that while westerners often struggle to understand Thai people and
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 31 Thai culture, Thai people understand Westerners very well (Osborne 54). Since this claim is not substantiated or explored in detail, it would be interesting to give more thought to this intercultural issue. Thirdly, this article has focused on how Bangkok is represented in Bangkok Days. Thus, a comparative study, e.g. between Bangkok Days and aforementioned Burmese Days, Bangkok Eight or a different Bangkok novel could shed new light on themes such as the East-West dichotomy or an effective portrayal of an Asian city in literature. Finally, Bangkok Days often compares Bangkok to western cities, but it falls short of comparing it to other flourishing Asian cities. A detailed study on the effects, advantages, drawbacks and limitations of city comparisons in literary texts may therefore prove to be useful.
Notes (1) Lawrence Osbornes personal website, he hails from England,
studied modern languages at Cambridge University and Harvard University, and wrote his first novel, Ania Malina (1986), in Paris. Since the early 1990s he spends much of his time in New York, yet his work as a journalist and author takes him to many countries. His articles have appeared in U.S. publications. While Bangkok Days is his seventh and most recent novel, his two forthcoming novels will be published in 2013. (web) (2) There are two English language editions of Bangkok Days. They
follow the same pagination. The cover of the North Point Press edition (2009) shows a grayish street map of Bangkok superimposed by the silhouette of a young Thai woman. The cover proclaims: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, but this is not a subtitle. The Vintage Books edition (2010) shows various hand-drawn impressions and sights of Bangkok.
Both covers mark Bangkok as the main topic. The Italian translation of Bangkok Days was nominated for the Premio Napoli award 2010. (3) Available titles of Bangkok novels include Bangkok Eight, Bang-
kok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunted, A Woman of Bangkok, Bangkok Bob, Bangkok Noir, Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye, Bangkok Dick, Welcome to Hell One Mans Fight for Life inside the Bangkok Hilton, Bangkok Babylon, Bangkok Vanishing, Memoirs of a Bangkok Warrior, Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse, Tone Deaf in Bangkok, Sleepless in Bangkok, and many more. (4) The term cityness has been vaguely defined by Saskia Sassen:
Urban agglomerations are very often seen as lacking the features, quality and sense of what we think of as cities. Yet, urbanity is perhaps too charged a term, charged with a Western sense of cosmopolitanism of what public space is or should be. Instead, cityness suggests the possibility that there are kinds of urbanity that do not fit with this very large body of urbanism developed in the West. In fact that may be part of history in the making and we do not have a language for it yet. So cityness in a way is an instrument to capture something that might easily get lost. Public space and cosmopolitanism are foundational elements of any city. They have however, been constructed in deeply Western ways. In my work on global cities, for instance, I address this issue through the notion of non-cosmopolitan forms of the global, of globality and vernacular cosmopolitanism. But as the Urban Age moves from one city to another, from New York to Shanghai, this becomes a critical question. In Shanghai, many interventions seem to be destabilising these very Western concepts. For example architect QinYu Ma argues that the Chinese city does not need public space because it makes public spaces that we might think of as private; bus shelters at night become a public space where people set up their tables to play cards.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 33 Clearly the notion of public space as we have developed it out of a Western European context might not help us read a city such as Shanghai, or perhaps even Mexico City, in ways that are very useful. (5) Instead of Bangkok Novel, the term Bangkok Fiction has also
been used to refer to this literary movement: The still-emerging genre of Bangkok Fiction contains common elements that define its look and feel, including heroism of anti-heroes, the increasingly thin line between innocence and vice, and the often-necessary relationship between honesty and corruption. Some of the more common elements of the genre might include: - The city of Bangkok as character: hot dirty, polluted, with the old and new flourishing and decaying side-by-side. Action often occurs in oases defined by air-conditioning, fans, and shade, where cold beer and Mekhong whiskey-and coke meld the sacred and profane. (Bangkok Fiction) (6) In the chaotic urban environment, cars, traffic and traffic jams be-
come symbols of the need for efficiency, scarcity of free space, and the collapse of mobility. Bangkok is particularly hampered by these problems. Alter states: There could scarcely be a better situation for illustrating the breakdown of community in the modern metropolis, its systemic dysfunction, than a traffic jam (19). However, unlike many Bangkok novels, Bangkok Days intentionally avoids references to the traffic anarchy. (7) The study of calligraphy, the impression of an enigmatic allure
of a foreign language, the sense of solitude, the immersion in Asian arts and crafts, the superficial engagement with Thai culture, and the struggles to penetrate it deeply are presented as typical joys of the Bangkok expatriate.
(8)
The novels only comparison to an Asian city comes near the
end: Looking out my window, I was struck by how much like Bangkok Macau was becoming (245). Comparing Bangkok with other Asian metropolises would have drawn the focus away from the East-West dichotomy. (9) On the other hand, he says that Thais understand Westerners
very well (54), but does not substantiate this claim.
Works Cited Alter, Robert. Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Print. Bangkok Fiction: Defining a Literary Genre. Thai Oasis. Web. 0 May 2012. <www.thaioasis.com/literature/bkkbangkokfiction.php> Bures, Frank. Interview with Lawrence Osborne: Bangkok Days. Worldhum.com, 27 May 2009. Web. 30 May 2012. < http:// www. worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/interview-withlawrence-osborne- bangkok- days-20090430>. Caws, Mary Ann, ed. City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film. Pennsylvania, USA: Gordon and Breach Science Publish ers S.A, 1991. Print. King, Ross. Reading Bangkok. Singapore: National University of Singa pore Press, 2011. Print. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural Histo ry. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998. Print. Neumann, Lin. An Antidote to the Bad Bangkok Novel: Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. Asia Times Online 2 Aug. 2003. Web. 30 May 2012. <www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/ EH02Ae02.html> Osborne Lawrence. Bangkok Days. London: Vintage Books, 2010. Print. Osborne Lawrence. Bangkok Days. Farrar Straus Giroux: North Point Press, 2009. Print. OsboLawrence. Personal website. Web. 30 May 2012. <www.lawrenceosborne.net> Sassen, Saskia. Cityness in the Urban Age. Urban Age. 2005. Web. 30 May 2012.
Postmodern Politics of Representation: Other Voices in Angela Carters Fiction

-Vrinda R. Chanth*
Abstract: Representation, cast as an object between the real and the spectator or aligned with notions of authenticity, representation or reproduction, carries multiple meanings and diverse possibilities. Any engagement with the concept and practice of representation, in general, and the representation of difference, in particular, is inextricably linked to the concept of the Other-identified as different as against the same, as something Other than it-self or as a part of what defines or constitutes the self. This paper investigates Angela Carter and her tryst with Otherness as a compelling object of representation in the Western social, cultural, and political milieu. The subversion of stereotypes-- which cast people and societies marginal to the West in an immutable otherness-- in the works of Carter will be examined to bring out the underlying politics of power. Carters works can be best described as an explication of the primordial fear of Other at the heart of colonial discourses and the role played by racially fashioned social relations in multicultural societies. Key Words: Representation, Otherness, Colonial discourses, Stereotypes, Subversion AS STUART HALL RIGHTLY AVERS, Representation is a complex business and specially when dealing with difference, it engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilizes fears and anxieties in the viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain in simple common-sense way(226).
* Research Scholar (PhD), Department of English The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad Email: vrindarc@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
Cast as an object which stands between the real and the spectator it carries multiple meanings and diverse possibilities. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Hall focuses on the politics of representation where meaning is seen as being produced by human beings, participants in a culture, who have the power to make things-- i.e. people or objects with no inherent meaning-- mean or signify something (19). For Hall, meanings are created and reified by the interactive play of language and systems of knowledge production. What logically follows is that representation constructs knowledge. Here, representation is thought of as relationship, as process, as the relay mechanism in the exchanges of power, value and publicity (Mitchell 420).
Representation or representation, understood as the production of meaning through language, discourse and image, occupies a vital position in the postmodern world characterised by simulation. Any engagement with the concept and practice of representation, in general, and the representation of difference, in particular, is inextricably linked to the concept of the Other. The concept of Other-- identified as different as against same, as something Other than self or as a part of what defines or constitutes self.
How to understand the Other as a subject with his/her own experience? How to talk or think about the Other in a meaningful way when the existence and nature of its experience cannot be verified? -- are questions which by now are conferred the status of conundrums and have elicited as many opinions as there are philosophers.
Postcolonial theory as a method of reading, interpreting and critiquing the cultural practices of colonialism, designed to expose the nex-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 37 us of race, underscore the colonial representation and documentation of natives as the inferior Other-- the subjects of the coloniser. The process of Other-ing and the underlying politics of representation gained currency in the field of postcolonial studies with Edward Saids Orientalism which was an attempt at demystifying the process of constructing the Other. He argued that the construction of the Orient as the Other became the basis and rationale for colonial oppression and served to strengthen the identity of Western civilisation. Gayatri Spivak in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? dwelt on how representations are linked to socioeconomic, gendered, cultural, historical, institutional and geographic positioning.
The empire as a masculine adventure leading to double colonization of women has been a subject of feminist studies as early as nineteen eighties. Trapped by both patriarchy and colonialism which attempts to penetrate the feminine spaces and legislate on the colonisers sexuality, the women become objects onto which the unconscious fears, desires and fantasies of the coloniser gets projected and they are perpetually ensnared in an immutable otherness. These desires -- which are not said and... cannot be said (Belsey 76) -- according to Lacan, are located in the unconscious and are related to a lack. They represent an original object forever lost after the Oedipal crisis (Belsey 52) and woman is denied an existence outside the performance of the role of object of desire of male fantasies is relegated to the status of a projection and is doomed to be an exhibit.
The works of Angela Carter, a postmodern British woman writer, represent a preoccupation with viability of systems of representation, an interrogation of the ontological bases of connection between narra-
tive and subjectivity, an exploration of the ways in which narrative mediates and constructs history and the displacement of the real by simulacra. Carter, for most part, seems to be on a quest for a reason as to why Otherness is so compelling an object of representation in the Western social, cultural, and political milieu.
The exploration of the discursive formations, the repertoires, regimes of representation(Hall 234) which are drawn on in the representation of Other in the West as explicated in the works of Carter will be examined so as to address the question of relationship between the representation of Other and the politics of power involved in the process of Other-ing.
In Shadow Dance, alternatively titled Honeybuzzard, Angela Carter writes about the counter-culture that emerged in the nineteen sixties. The story revolves around Morris and Honeybuzzard, two junk collectors-- Morris, a junk addict(75) and Honeybuzzard whose interest in junk is described as a detached, amused interest (64)-- and Ghislaine, a girl who is loved, scarred and finally murdered in a blasphemous ritual by Honey. Other important characters involve Morriss wife Edna and Emily-- the new lover of Honey. Carters subversion of the stereotypes involved in the representation of the Other lies in her narrative strategy which presents the marginalised and victimised Other as the principal characters in her works. Her heroes are two junk collectors occupying the fringes of the society. One of her heroines, a once beautiful Ghislaine, is presented with an open scar across her face-- a victim of Honeys knife and sadistic impulses, another is the perpetually ill Edna and Emily, a catholic who celebrates her sexuality is the third. The
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 39 victimization of women, which permeates the story, lays emphasis on the gendered Other that is at work.
Similarly, in Carters third novel Several Perceptions (SP), Joseph, old Sunny, Blossom, Mrs Boulder and Viv are characters who do not inhabit the main stream of the society. Joseph works in a hospital and his job is to clean the dying and to lay out the dead whereas his friend Viv lives on allowance for the unemployed, that is, as a parasite on the state (35). Mrs Boulders is Vivs Mother and is a prostitute whereas old Sunny is a musician of yester-years who pretends to be playing an imaginary violin and Blossom is physically challenged. Carter weaves her tale with incidents from the life of these marginalised characters and her tale is as an explication of the constant displacement of the center by the margin that is at work in postmodern works of fiction.
In The Passion of New Eve (PNE) Carter traces the journey of Evelyn, a young English man, fascinated by Hollywood actress Tristessa, labelled as [t]he most beautiful woman in the world (PNE 5). It begins in London, moves to New York and then to the deserts of Colorado where he is captured and taken to Beulah by a mysterious all-female sect. In Beulah, a place where contraries are equally true, in a complicated mix of mythology and technology (PNE 48) Evelyn is unceremoniously raped, castrated, and turned by means of plastic surgery to his own diminutive, Eve, the shortened form of Evelyn(PNE 71) . Evelyns transformation to Eve, his/her capture by the one-eyed and one-legged poet Zero, also obsessed with Tristessa, and Eves initiation into his harem and their meeting with Tristessa form the rest of the story.
Evelyns transformation into Eve the perfect specimen of womanhood (PNE 68), Mothers attempt at the feminisation of father time (PNE 67), the capture of Eve by Zero and his abuse of Eve, as Bran Nicol rightly points out, demonstrates how gender performance involves a complex relationship between substance and image (146). According to him, each of the characters represents different gender stereotypes-Zero as the Alpha Male, Mother as Phallic Mother, and so on. The novel primarily engages with the issue of construction of gender identities and how feminine identity is nothing but another social fiction that governs our lives.
In accordance with the postmodernist claim that speaking of identity of the authentic woman carries within it the risk of naturalizing one group of womens experience as normative, Carter explores the experience of women of different races, colour and social set up. The narrative begins with Tristessathe Hollywood icon, moves on to Leilah-- a woman of colour whom the narrator meets in the drab and ugly city of New York, then to the women in Beulah and finally through the members in Zeros harem traces its way back to Tristessa.
Carters parody of the notion of woman as an object of beauty fancied by the male imagination reaches its zenith in the characterization Tristessaa female impersonatorpresented as every mans perfect woman. Eve says:
That was why he had been the perfect mans woman! He had made himself the shrine of his own desires... If a woman is indeed beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most completely the secret aspirations of man, no
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 41 wonder Tristessa had been able to become the most beautiful woman in the world, an unbegotten woman who made no concessions to humanity. (PNE 129)
Through the gender-transgressive figure of Eve/lyn and the transvestite Tristessa, Carter accents the fluidity of gender roles and the idea of gender as performance.
Though it is the gendered Other which figures predominantly in the novel, the racial Other is also weaved in through Leilah, a woman of colour:
She [Leilah] was black as the source of shadow and her skin was matt, lustreless and far too soft, so that she seemed to melt in my embraces . . . . Her sex palpitated under my fingers like a wet, terrified cat yet she was voracious, insatiable, though coldly so, as if driven by a drier, more cerebral need than a sexual one, as if forced to the act again and again by, perhaps, an exacerbated, never-to-be-satisfied curiosity. And, almost, a vindictiveness yet a vindictiveness directed towards herself, as though, each time she submitted herself, not to me, but to a craving she despised, or else to a loathed but imperiously demanding ritual, as if this, this exorcism by sensuality, was what her sensuality needed to make it real. (PNE 18)
Here, Evelyns words construct and validate Leilahs sexuality-- it is his story and not hers. Interlaced with this is the notion of black women
as inherently primitive, sexually available, menacing and dangerous. Carter at one fell swoop undermines the double victimisation of women of colour and the social construction of sexuality.
In Black Venus, which narrates the story of Charles Baudelaire and his mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval, Angela Carter engages with the racial, exotic, and gendered Other. She juxtaposes the poetic colonisation of Duval, her relegation to the status of a muse and the European colonization of other peoples and other parts of the world (Day 154).1 Carter is in consensus with postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak who argues that the act of representing the Other has significant resonances within the context of colonisation for the asymmetries of representation enacted as well as reproduced the asymmetries of power in the world.
This constructedness of representation is at the core of Angela Carters works. For instance, Carter explicitly states the connection of sexuality and gender with the images of black men and women in the lines, Did you . . . see old ma Boulders beau, black as your hat, blacker? . . . Big black bugger!... What a size! Of course, women go for niggers on account of their choppers, its well known, what a size!(SP 142). She tries to bring out how a world obsessed with black mans sexuality fixates him at the level of his genitals. As Fanon states, One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis (170).
For Carter, the representation of racial sexual Other is part of a larger scheme developed at the height of European empire to create a cultural divide between the colonisers and the colonised. In Black Venus, she
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 43 subverts the stereotypical representation of black body as an icon of sexuality in Western discourse. The image of black Venus, as Sandra Ponzanesi accurately argues in the essay Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices:
... allegorically rendered and vindicated the position of the white male colonizers expanding their authority and property over the virgin soil of the imperial territory, of which the black Venus is the quintessential emblem of the other, both in racial and in sexual terms. The appropriation and subjugation of the female exotic body was sustained by a meticulously constructed racial grammar in which the Other was represented as infantile, irrational and prey to primordial sexual lust, and consequently as mysterious and inherently subversive. The representation of local women as black Venuses by Western colonizers was strongly eroticised and often overtly pornographic, though often disguised as ethnographical work aimed at classifying and categorising the different races of the empire. (166)
Likewise, Denean Sharpley Whiting in her book Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive narratives in French avers that black women historically evoked desire and primal fear in French men and this resulted in repulsion, attraction and anxiety which gave rise to the narrative of Black Venus. She traces the pedigree of black Venus to the letters written by French religious scholar Abelard to his beloved Heloise between 1119 and 1143.2 He wrote, ... it so happens that the skin of black women, less agreeable to the gaze, is softer to touch and
the pleasures one derives from their love are more delicious and delightful.3 According to Whiting, these letters mark the beginning of a sexualized narrative projected onto black women and they achieved currency among France's nineteenth-century male literary cadre.
Carter uses the trope of black Venus to expound the scripting of black feminine body in colonial narrative. The dark Venus narrative expresses the contaminated and highly asymmetrical relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Carters black Venus, as in other narratives on black Venus, was a woman of immense height...divinely tall, the colour and texture of suede . . . [b]ut vivacity and exuberance were never [her] . . . qualities (Black Venus 3). She constantly coughs and grumbles and is full of resentment. On days . . . nipped by frost and sulking she looked more like an old crow with rusty feathers in a miserable huddle (2). The constructed nature of the narrative as well as the story of a people (the colonised) robbed of their history comes through in the lines:
[n]obody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1842) is precisely logged . . . Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no consequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian ocean, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays d origine of less importance than it would have been had she been a wine.) . . . She had been deprived of history, she was the
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 45 pure child of the colony. The white, imperious had fathered her. (Black Venus 7-8)
Carter presents Jeanne Duval as robbed of her tongue-- an act symbolic of colonisation of space of representation and as an abode of unlimited sexuality, more or less stupid and above all willing. She spoke:
. . .as though her tongue had been cut out and another one sewn in that did not fit well...Jeanne...did not understand her lovers poetry...his eloquence denied her tongue. It made her dumb...an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: correction, good for only one thing. . . . (Black Venus 9)
The ideological construct of black women as penetrated, silenced, possessed, and as static, frozen and fixed eternally (Said, 208) is brought to the fore in the aforementioned description by Carter.
More than exposing the inherent politics of representation in racialised and gendered narratives, it is in its subversion Carter takes delight. Black Venus subverts the representations of black Venus, which for centuries have petrified colonial women in their essentialized and fixed otherness. She brings out how the white male gaze desires to unveil the female body, in that, her Baudelaire liked to have her [Jeanne] make a spectacle of herself, to provide a sumptuous feast for his bright eyes that were always bigger than his belly(Carter 9). As Fanon argued, the white male gaze fixes the black woman in her place, steadies her, in order to decode and comfortably recode her into its own system of representation (Fanon 110-11). Carter takes the narrative of Black
Venus based on which the male European writers and artists constructed an image of black females as beautiful, docile and sexually available and as embodying the most archaic and untameable drives of nature and subverts it to bring out how the [b]lack females... [are] perpetually ensnared, imprisoned in an essence of themselves created from without (Whiting 10). In the process, she exposes how representations of Other in the Western discourse cast people and societies marginal to the West as crystallized in immutable otherness. Consequently,
Carters investigation of the Western obsession with Other and the stereotypes involved can be best described as a journey back to the collective unconscious fantasy and the primordial fear of the Other that at the heart of colonial discourses and these offer invaluable insights into the causal relationship between colonial legacies and subsequent processes of ethnic and gender relations in multicultural societies.
Notes:
1. As quoted in The Fiction of Angela Carter edited by Sarah Gamble. It is a compilation and analysis of the essential criticism on Angela Carter and was first published in 2001.
2. The compilation of letters were titled Les Lettres compltes d'Ablard et d'Hloe and is translated as The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was considered to be one of the greatest thinkers of 12th century and Heloise was a well-educated woman and a great beauty of her times. She was tutored by Abelard and they became lovers.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 47 3. As Quoted by Whiting in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. p1. Here, Whiting traces the evolution of the of Black Venus narrative in the context of French colonies.
Works Cited
Belsey, Catherine. Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Print. Carter, Angela. Black Venus.Black Venus. London: Vintage, 1996. 1-14. Print. ---. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 2008. Print. ---. Several Perceptions. London: Heinemann, 1968. Print. ---. Shadow Dance. London: Heinemann, 1968. Print. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. UK: Pluto, 1986. Print. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Fiction of Angela Carter. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1994. Print. Nicol, Bran. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Delhi: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Ponzanesi, Sandra. Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices. Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory. Ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
Sage, Lorna, ed. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela
Carter. London: Virago, 1994. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. Sharpley-Whiting, Deanne T. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. USA: Duke UP, 1999. Print.
Judith Rodriguez and Feminism

N. Bindu*
Abstract: Gender prejudice has always been a strong impediment to good reading and response. In Australia, women writers remain conscious of gender disparities and this awareness has only strengthened their perceptions and stance. This paper proposes to analyse Judith Rodriguez, as a poet with an Australian voice, and her views on gender prejudice in her home turf. Her castigation of the patriarchal society, which offers no consolation but only intensifies the pain with passing time, and her rebellious standpoint, coupled with her reeking selfconfidence are highlighted through a feminist reading of her poems. This paper also intends to analyse the representation of womans position in Australian society, where her role is relegated to her home and hearth, trampled by the conservative laws and her lurking hunger for freedom and expression. Key words: gender prejudice, feminism, identity JUDITH RODRIGUEZ, THE MAINSTREAM AUSTRALIAN woman poet accuses critics who believe domesticity is a mundane material. She asserts, I would defend the idea that the domestic scene is really the only scene of any importance because most of us live our lives there (Mccredden 151). Gender prejudice has always been a strong impediment to good reading and response. In Australia, women writers remain conscious of gender disparities and this awareness has only strengthened their perceptions and stance.
The shortsightedness of male intellectualism had hampered the speedy recognition of womens creative exploits in the literary feat. The voice of feminism in the 1970s reduced the intensity of this prejudice
* Assistant Professor of English, S.S. Arts College, Tiruttani, Tamil Nadu Email: binult@yahoo.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
as poets like Judith Rodriguez published their poetry along male writers. Judith Green alias Judith Rodriguez, was born in Perth, Western Australia in the year 1936. She grew up in Brisbane, Queensland and now lives in Melbourne.
Ann Rosalind Jones remarks, Lacanian theory reserves the I position for men (Mills 48). Therefore, language offers only a negative position for women. In the short-lined poem Epigram, Judith Rodriguez highlights the stress borne by women artists due to this prevailing differential treatment. The poem begins with the imagery of the poet settled on her bed with a host of manuscripts neatly laid beside her: On the bed, in a line beside me:/ Manuscripts. No way to sleep.
In one of her interviews, she expounds on the difficulty of meeting deadlines. Sleep is kept at bay to fulfill the task of meeting deadlines: So I read a poem of contempt/ For women who sleep with manuscripts.
The lines remind the preconceived patriarchal notion that women are not laborious enough in their literary pursuits and hence fall short of men in quality writing. To counter this thought the poet launches into a distinct attack through a confident and mature sidelining of the male self-assumed importance: (Seems to think hed top them in interest)/Hes got top marks in my book/Not for sex or a sermon, but shelving (The House by Water: New and Selected Poems 165) .
The choice of the word shelving drives home the position occupied by the man on Rodriguezs mental plane. The misconceptions propagated by patriarchal notions had affected Judith Rodriguez as she reveals to Jenny Digby:
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 51 Ive had that awful feeling. It was with James McCauley at Quadrant. I kept sending him poems wouldnt publish them. Finally when I got one published-the only one that was-it was published on the back of a poem by Philip Martin that had the same title. So I always felt I never really got McCauley. (Digby 159)
Women poetry was not received with the same kind of enthusiasm as that of male poetry. This is reflected in Reply from the Editor (a rejection slip):
What magic combination will please you? W.A.Poet My one sight of combinations Shocked me to laughter; even to be warm, not that-
and whether its meant as pure maths or pack-rape, what compliment, or pleasure-I ask you.
Youll make the words rise. In combinations? Its the singular roused Nakedness can sound me, can wound me. (Witch Heart 17)
A poets creativity enfolds ideas that are expressions of individual responses and freedom. To then contain women writings to fall in line
with the expectations of male critics is mocked at by Judith Rodriguez. There is anger and disappointment at the irrational critical evaluation. Luce Irigaray describes womens writing as beyond mans understanding and coherence. It is inaudible for him who listens with readymade grids, a code prepared in advance (Irigaray 103).
Rodriguez provokes readers to multiple perceptions as she conceived the poem An old bag, printed Cynthia. The poem revolves around a bag sighted on the ground. The name Cynthia on the bag elicits queries: Look! a cowed shape. Did it hit the ground with guile?/ Or chance-wise, simply drop in from on high?/ Is it waiting for a handwholl oblige?
A string of questions oscillate between the deliberate dumping of the bag to a chanced falling off. The last stanza sympathizes with the woman, her predicament and instances forced upon her by a patriarchal society.You wouldnt want to stop her in full flight/ or blame her, finding what the bride of time/ unfolds from wedding- skirts, for all the trying-/ unfolds, hurts from and hides, time after time (The House by Water: New and Selected Poems 68).
The poem can be viewed as a castigation of the patriarchal society, which offers no consolation but only intensifies the pain with passing time. The colour of the bag being red symbolizes danger and also denotes a survivor, an unfaltering swimmer in the ocean of failures. Lacanians idea of woman as lack is derided by Helene Cixous who described women as plenitude converting shortcomings as virtues (Mills 48). On this plane of thought Judith Rodriguez offers an appro-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 53 priate dose of insight into a womans psyche and the possibilities that life had in store for her.
In Nu-plastik Fanfare Red, the poets rebellious standpoint comes to light. The poem was an outcome of the poets visit to Chiswick House, London. The eighteenth century house was painted in vivid colours of red, green and blue. The wide range of flashy hues left Rodriguez reflecting on the preferable dull colours chosen by Australians back home. She was inspired to paint her room red:
I declare myself: I am painting my room red. Because they havent any flat red suitable for interiors, because their acres of colour-card are snowy with daylight only, because it will look like Danger! Explosives,
But the joy did not last long for her father and her spouse had a different plan altogether. For they felt it would depreciate the value of the house. Rodriguez had to ultimately give in:
this is a fight. I sought the conditions, hell! And no resale value, Dad; clich too. Well too bad.
She then trails down the lanes of Greek mythology to assert her resolute stand:
Its satisfying to note this mix is right for pottery. Good glad shock of seeing that red figure vases are. My inward amphora! (The House by Water: New and Selected Poems 103)
The ancient Greek and Roman jar with two handles asserts the strong streaks of feminism as the unacceptable becomes the acceptable for Judith Rodriguez. Behind the lines, lies a powerful individuality, intensely self- opinionated:
The title poem, Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red, surprised me with its conviction; despite an addiction to tinkering, I knew it was right to free verse, the stronger for a couple of jeers and some jaunt the experience of using my real voice as the vehicle of the poem felt good in itself; . (Meanjin 47; 317)
The critic Lyn McCredden read the above poem as a fanfare which declares nothing in the end but its own willed victory in the face of failure (Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 18, no.2, 1997: 139). The poem is an act of rebellion to conventional views and the proclamation to the Australian world that Rodriguezs comfort zone lie not in the parame-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 55 ters set by patriarchy. A different voice undeniably unsettles normalcy. Judith Rodriguez achieves this satisfaction.
The room does get the red hue when in the poem Centipede she ridicules male critics in the background of this explosive colour:
Sat in my room with a centipede, Ive no idea when hell come out; from the spine of which book, from the entrails of which chair, But hes there.
The centipedes entry could be perceived as a male critic. The poet succumbs to his multiple head in procession for she looked up his Latin and habits to measure up to set standards of writing. This probably is induced by that abominable fall/that is fear.
Though the fear of rejection is a part of a literary endeavour, the critic is also given his due in the last stanza by the poet:A fingers length of segments rustling/ with centipede intent, stirs in my head:/dark jewel, he has always festered there./ I scan my wall (The House by Water: New and Selected Poems 115).
The reeking self-confidence establishes Judith Rodriguez as a poet with a mind of her own who is aware of her literary quality and not deterred by the gnashing of critics. She goes on with her job of writing not as a mode of escapism but with an awareness of a warrior opposing and ultimately being heard.
Rodriguez in her interview with Peter Haddow exclaims:
I dont find criticism puts me off, I find that a challenge as far as I am concerned. I can never believe in the people who say, oh somebody will tell me that something is wrong here and then I will have to give up writing. They just dont want to write. (Famous Reporter 8: 89)
A womans position in an Australian society, be she a poet or a politician, is aptly highlighted in the poem Nasturtia, written between 1978-1982. Her foremost role is relegated to her home and hearth. In Her Lookout Rodriguez ruminates on the shocking gender prejudice:
Nasturtium peering through the glass watches the rootless people pass from pose to pace from room to roam their dream of gardens. Stay-at-home Nasturtium trampled in her place Wonders at the human race. (The House by Water: New and Selected Poems 241)
The six-lined verse gains voice and intensity through the silent observation of the rooted flower as it perceives the Australian patriarchys rootless mobility. The Australian woman is trampled by the conservative laws and the lurking hunger for expression and freedom surfaces in the lines. The capped energy of a woman, held tight by the reins of patriarchy is sounded again in At Home, beloved : She walks the house in her mind disaster/ she tries the doors mutters horror/ she shouts
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 57 murder/ murder she howls murder murder wreck (The House by water: New and Selected Poems 46).
Judith Rodriguez does focus on gender differences and defends the treatment of subjects by women as varied and inspiring. The poet at one stage of her writing wrote as a woman and brought to the forefront the varied aspects of women writing while being the editor for Penguin Australia. Her identity as a woman has always been to her a matter of pride for the many poems conceived at this stage of her poetic growth are of par excellence.
As Joyce Carol Oates states: If there is a distinctly female voice if there is a distinctly male voice surely this is symptomatic of inferior art? Of course the serious artistic voice is one of individual style and it is sexless (Mills 47). Judith Rodriguez, true to this observation, moves away from being a gender poet to a genderless poet in her later stages to become a poet with an Australian voice.
Works Cited
Irigaray, Luce. This sex which is not one. Ed. C.Porter. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. 103. Print. Mills, Sara. Feminist Stylistics. 1998. New York: Routeledge, 1995. 47-48. Print. ---. The House by Water: New and Selected Poems. (1992) St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. Print. ---. Witch Heart. Melbourne: Sisters Publishing, 1982. Print. ---. Archimedes Platform, Images of Poetry, Woman
Writing. Meanjin 47. 2 (Winter 1988): 317. Print. Rodriguez, Judith. An Interview with Judith Rodriguez. Interview by Lyn McCredden. Australian Literary Studies 18. 2(1997): 151. Print. Rodriguez, Judith. Bathing in a Great Sea of Wonderful Words. A Womans Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets. Interview by Jenny Digby. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. 15473. Print. Rodriguez, Judith. Interview by Peter Haddow. Famous Reporter 8 (Nov. 1993): 85-99. Print.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 59 Portrayal of the Zeitgeist of Rural Life in Kamala Markandayas Nectar in a Sieve - Jayanthi Rajendran & Ruchika Kathuria* Abstract: If the pre-independence Indian fiction was a literature of protest, of dissent, owing to the omnipresent patriotic zeal, the post-independence Indian English fiction portrays how the country, especially rural India still despairs even after the achievement of independence and how the golden age that should have descended on the soil is nothing but a myth. The present paper dwells on the portrayal of the zeitgeist of rural life in Kamala Markandayas most famous work Nectar in a Sieve. The novel projects a period of transition and change in outlook and aspirations of a nation reborn out of the throes of slavery and serfdom. Through a rich tapestry of characters, we get an insight into the dismay and disillusionment of millions of Indians living a wretched life in villages, subjected to economic constraints and orthodox social obligations. Often called a modern writer of traditional fiction, Kamala Markandaya in her novel presents a mosaic of hot button issues that represent the spirit of the times and the traditional lan vital of rural India. Keywords: zeitgeist, transition, change, social realism THE JOURNEY OF INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION from pre- independence times up till now has been quite enterprising. It has struggled to portray its own social realities while trying simultaneously to remain allegiant to its western counterparts view of the comprehensive generic nature of fiction. The pre-independence Indian English fiction, needless to say, depicts the patriotic fervour of the age. Novelists like M.R.Anand, Raja Rao, R.K.Narayan of the Heroic Age
1
as K.R.S. Iyengar calls the
pre-independence times, advocated the cause of nationalism and patriotic feeling, either directly or subtly in their writings. Consequently, the li* Assistant Professors, Department of English [SFS] Madras Christian College (Autonomous), Chennai Email: jayanthiphd@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
terature that came into being at that time voiced protest, dissent, unrest and remonstrance. Thus, literature is a reflection of the society, in other words, it reflects the culture of that society.
However, with the attainment of independence in 1947 dawned a new era of hope, growth, and development, supposedly a golden age. Unfortunately, this was all so utopian. As the British departed, the traditional villain of the pre-independence novels came to be replaced by new villainous problems in society like the disintegration of joint families, rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, unjust distribution of wealth, religious superstitions, social and communal prejudices etc. Such loftier issues as Indian culture or modern education system also find mention in novels that were penned in postindependence India. In this respect, it can be said that such works are like a mirror that reflect the inside-outside of the age in toto.
Among the famous Indian novelists writing in English in the postindependence period, Kamala Markandaya is undoubtedly one such writer who nurtured beautifully the tradition of social realism established earlier on a firm footing by M.R.Anand, Raja Rao and continued by Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgaonkar and Khushwant Singh. The women writers who came after these writers began to write on the sensibility of Indian women. Kamala Markandaya is one of the early novelists to portray the strength and weakness of Indian women characters and most of her women are protagonists in her novel. Markandaya started writing in an age when the country was grappling with the problems of starvation, poverty, exploitation of poor farmers at the hands of rich landlords, and onslaught of industrialisation on the peaceful life of village peasants. As H.M.Williams observes:
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 61 .Markandaya and Desai are thus typical of the decades of the nineteen fifties and sixties, in exploring the anguish of the human and personal in modern society, dominated by processes, machines and speed- by the tyranny of the impersonal. 2
Her acquaintance with South Indian villages and the plight of the villagers living there, before marriage and her marriage to an Englishman later enabled her to portray a realistic picture of East and West. However, it is more the Indian traditions and culture that enamour her more and thats what she writes about in her novels.
The present paper takes up the study of Markandayas most successful novel Nectar in a Sieve, published in 1954. The novelist here successfully catches the Zeitgeist of rural life in a small South-Indian village. The subtitle of the novel- A Novel of Rural India lays stress on rural setting and its characters, and it is through the characters that the novelist presents a drama of life rather than a dream of ideologies3. It was an age of transition and the corresponding changes in almost every sphere political, economical, socio-cultural and intellectual, and the mood associated with that era have been discussed in a manner that enables us to savour the flavour of the spirit of the times. Nectar in a Sieve is a fervent cry of protest against social injustice, hunger and degradation.
The novel depicts the story of a simple peasant couple - Rukmani and Nathan from South India and their seven children. The name of the village is not told which, according to some critics, lends a general sort of vagueness to the plot. However, the unnamed village becomes the microcosm of rural India in the post-independence era. Rukmani or
Ruku as she is called by other characters in the novel is the protagonist and the narrator. With no money for a dowry and little in the way of looks, she is married at a tender age of twelve to a poor tenant farmer Nathan. Her marriage at such a young age brings to notice the prevailing evils of the time - birth of a girl child as a curse, child marriage and dowry system. Like a disciplined daughter, she accepts her lot submissively. She has been conditioned to resign herself to her husbands will and never call him by his name - the basic traits of a patriarchal society where women are treated as adjuncts to their husbands:
It was my husband who woke me my husband, whom I will call Nathan, for that was his name, although in all the years of our marriage I never called him that, for it is not meet for a woman to address her husband except as husband. (Nectar 6)
Soon she settles well into married life with help from other village women, chief among them being Kali, Janaki and Kunthi. Nathan also proves to be a gentle companion from the start. He assures his wife that some day they may be able to buy a house such as your fathers (Nectar 6). Life continues well for Rukmani who spends time learning how to read and write or honing her skills in the garden or helping her husband at times tilling the land. Soon the couple is blessed with a baby girl but Rukmani is disappointed for what woman wants a girl for her first-born? (Nectar 16). They call their daughter Irawaddy after one of the great rivers of Asia, for of all things water was most precious to us (Nectar 17). The couple still craves for a son and their wish does come true when finally after a long wait of seven years, Rukmani gives birth to their first son- Arjun. It is with the intervention of Doctor Kennington
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 63 or Kenny that she is able to have five healthy sons in quick succession and the last son Kuti is born much later. The amity between Rukmani and Doctor Kenny doesnt create havoc in their marital life. The author actually juxtaposes these two characters as representatives of Oriental and Western cultures and traditions respectively. Rukmani stands for the traditional Indian attitude to suffering enshrined in contentment and complacency. But Kenny represents the Western ideas like liberalism, progressivism and protest. At one juncture, he asks Rukmani scornfully, do you think spiritual grace comes from being in want, or from suffering? What thoughts have you when your belly is empty or your body is sick? Tell me they are noble ones and I will call you a liar (Nectar 116).
Rukmani is fast to reply because her inherited beliefs and superstitions are difficult to challenge: Yet our priests fast, and inflict on themselves severe punishments, and we are taught to bear our sorrows in silence, and all this is so that the soul may be cleansed (Nectar 116). The novelist gives a graphic and realistic picture of the values, beliefs and mores that govern the lives of rural folk and to which they are tied with inextricable bondage and they live for it and die for it.
Rukmani and Nathan have been facing economic hardships and with more mouths to feed, she realizes it is likely to lead to financial imbalances in the family. She admits it herself, With six children to feed we could no longer afford to eat all the vegetables we grew (Nectar 25).
The tragic picture of hunger is pointed out by the novelist when we realise how at one point in the story Rukmani has to divide rice into twenty-four small portions to feed the entire family.
The abrupt arrival of a tannery in the village is rather ominous as it will disrupt the social fabric of the village. The evils of industrialisation are likely to grow rapidly. The mutations that an industrial culture brings in its wake affect the mores and manners of an existing lifestyle that continued to remain untouched over centuries. The tannery is symbolic of a world of immorality, greed and corruption trying to intrude into a world that represents morality, happiness and purity. As Rukmani points out, Now it is all noise and crowds everywhere, and rude young hooligans idling in the street and dirty bazaars and uncouth behaviour, and no man thinks of another but schemes only for his money (Nectar 48).
Rukmani is the most disappointed and unhappy soul but Nathan tells her Bend like the grass that you do not break (Nectar 30). Rukmani realizes that she has other matters to prioritize Irawaddys marriage being at the top which soon materialises. However, soon after their daughters wedding, the family faces severe crisis. To sustain the family, the two eldest sons-Arjun and Thambi are compelled to join the tannery though working there is not something honourable. Both of them help the family with their income from the factory but the changing ethos are too much for them to bear, emotionally as well as physically as they feel uprooted from the familiar ambience. The other village women have happily accepted the changes that have recently occurred in the village but Rukmani is still nostalgic of old times and ponders:
So they were reconciled and threw the past away with both hands that they might be the readier to grasp the present, while I stood by in pain, envying such easy reconciliation and clutching in my own two hands the
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 65 memory of the past, and accounting it a treasure. (Nectar 31 - 32)
The family has to undergo another shocking blow when Irawaddy returns home after five years of her marriage for so far she has not been able to produce any child which makes her barren. The son-in-law unhesitatingly tells Rukmani: You gave me your daughter in marriage. I have brought her back to you. She is a barren woman (Nectar 52).
Like her mother she is not ready to compromise with her fate and suffer silently. On the contrary she chooses to free herself from exploitative forces and returns to her parents. She tells her mother: At least there is no more fear, no more necessity for lies and concealment (Nectar 52).
With her return the familys resources grow even thinner. Drought and famine add further to the already existing woes of the family. Soon the workers in the tannery become restless and demand more wages. Consequently, with no work in the village Arjun and Thambi are forced to leave for Ceylon. Rukmanis son Raja has already become a victim of the conflict in the tannery. The loss of Raja is too much to bear but Rukmani takes it all complacently and stoically for her belief is:
To those who live by the land there must always come times of hardship, of fear and of hunger, even as there are years of plenty. This is one of the truths of our existence as those who live by the land know: that sometimes we eat and sometimes we starve.In our life there is no margin for misfortune. (Nectar 136-37)
Another blow is borne by the family when Irawaddy takes to prostitution to save her youngest brother Kuti who falls sick and succumbs to hunger and starvation. Hunger leads to human degradation as it does in the case of Rukmanis daughter. To her nothing matters before hunger-be it honour, morality or even God. Having taken to prostitution, Irawaddy gives birth to an illegitimate son, an albino. The plight of such poor rural folk acquaints us with the social and economic exploitation that these people fall an easy prey to.
Rukmani and Nathan are severely hit when Nathan is evicted from the land he has been cultivating for the last thirty years. It is like losing the nectar of their life. Rukmani, true to her stoic character understands that tannery alone cannot be blamed for every misfortune they suffered:
Tannery or not, the land might have been taken from us. It had never belonged to us, we had never prospered to the extent where we could buy, and Nathan, himself the son of a landless man, had inherited nothing. And whatever extraneous influence the tannery may have exercised, the calamities of the land belong to it alone, born of wind and rain and weather, immensities not to be tempered by man or his creations. (Nectar 136)
The couple, now old and weak, have no other choice but to migrate to the city to be with their third son Murugan. They try to locate him at the doctors house where he is supposedly believed to be working as servant. To their disappointment no one knows where Murugan has gone. They come to know from his wife Ammu that he has deserted her. They are absolute aliens in the city and end up as stone breakers in
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 67 a quarry. There is still no end to their misery. Life in the city repels Nathan. He admits, This is not my home, I can never live here (Nectar 181).
The couple longs to go back to their village and enlist the help of an orphan leper beggar boy Puli. Whatever their earnings, they would entrust it to Puli. However, Nathan tired of the hardships falls sick. It is the last phase of the journey of his life. Rukmani faces the worst tragedy of her life when Nathan dies, putting an end to a life wherein lady luck never smiled at him. She finally returns to her village with Puli only to reunite with her son Selvam and daughter Irawaddy. The future is not all so bleak for her for she can always try to recover the nectar (the land) that she lost through a sieve: I looked about me at the land and it was life to my starving spirit (Nectar 192).
Kamala Markandaya while trying to capture the Zeitgeist of rural life, deals with the trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows, hopes and expectations of the peasants in a very authentic and convincing manner. It is, therefore very natural if rural ethos and rural value systems hog the limelight. The sophisticated appeal of the novel lies in its interest in the nature and quality of conflict and in the matching stances of theme and style. The never ending conflict between tradition and modernity is artistically assimilated in the plot, characterization and atmosphere of the novel. It is replete with overtones of sadness, pathos and tragedy of a joint Hindu family. While the nectar for the couple Rukmani and Nathan lies essentially in the land which they dont own, for their sons Arjun and Thambi, it lies somewhere in the distant land of Ceylon. Rukmani, with concern, asks them, What is it that calls you? Is it gold? (Nectar 70), to which Arjun replies, It is an important part of living.
(Nectar 70). The novelist here chooses to display a harsh reality of life bordering on the conflict between tradition and modernity.
Kamala Markandayas greatest strength lies in blending realism of the Indian arcadia with a perfect innovative description of the same. Idealization is what repels her while she objectively portrays the hot button issues that rural India in transition confronts. As Kai Nicholson quotes:
. Except for Mrs. Markandaya, none of the novelists mentioned have contributed anything towards the rural society and its problems in novel form. In A Handful of Rice and Nectar in a Sieve she has, with pointed clarity, portrayed life in its most gruesome and degrading form, undoubtedly her realism is purposeful and her intention is to awaken polite society to the real problems. 4
In capturing the spirit of the times, the vision that she enshrines in the novel is typically Indian though the medium remains essentially English. Her description of Indian rustic life goes on smoothly, characterized by fluidity and the purity of running water. The language is poetic at times, especially when Rukmani is visualizing her past, making it all very nostalgic and poetic. As Uma Parameswaran puts it:
Markandayas strength as a novelist comes from her sensitive creation of individual characters and situations which are simultaneously representative of a larger collective; her prose style is mellifluous and controlled. 5
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 69 Kamala Markandayas fiction may not be holistic in being philosophically too profound or fabulatively too innovative, her mettle lies in making an attempt to articulate the philosophical and sociological directions in her novels, which also achieve a classic stature and universal appeal because of the cultural perspective inherent therein. Nectar in a Sieve manifests it beautifully as it portrays not only the Zeitgeist of rural life in India but also seems to carry a peculiar contemporary relevance which makes it all the more appealing.
Works Cited
Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1985. 248. Print. Williams, H.M. Indo-Anglian Literature 1800 1970: A Survey. Madras: Orient Longman, 1976. 83. Print. Wali, Sham Kumari. Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve: A Stylistic Study. Jaipur, India: Printwell Publishers, 1987. 29. Print. Nicholson, Kai. A Presentation of Social Problems in the IndoAnglian & Anglo-Indian Novel. Bombay: Jaico, 1972. 120. Print. Parameswaran, Uma. A Pioneer Who Influenced All of Us. www.outlookindia.com. Web.
Works Consulted:
Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009. Print. Srivastava, Ramesh. The Novels of Kamala Markandaya: A Critical Study. Amristar: Gurunanak University Publication, 1998.
Print. Joseph, Margaret P. Bibliography. Kamala Markandaya. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1980. Print. Bhatnagar, A.K. Kamala Markandaya: A Thematic Study. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1995. Print. Bhatnagar, A.K. Kamala Markandaya: A Critical Spectrum. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2002. Print. Banerjee, Niroj. Bibliography. Kamala Markandaya: A Study. Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1990. Print. Rao, Susheela N. A Bibliography of Kamala Markandaya. World Literature Written in English, 1981. Print. Prasad, Madhusudan. Bibliography. Perspectives on Kamala Markandaya. Ghaziabad (Delhi): Vimal Prakashan, 1984. Print. Jha, Rekha. Bibliography. The Novels of Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1990. Print. Krishnaswamy, S. The Woman in Indian Fiction in English. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1984. Print.
Issues in Diasporic Literature: A Synoptic View

- Stanley Mohandoss Stephen* Abstract: Being diasporic is a matter of personal choice, wherein the journey of life becomes an exploration of an individuals sense of self and a quest for the liberation of the human spirit. As such, this article researches on some of the important concepts in Diasporic literature like identity, home, past, etc, and analyses the creation of new identities, cultural hybridity, acquiring spaces for growth, resolving cultural conflicts, and forging a new culture either composite or plural. Key words: Identity, Diasporic literature, Home, Past, Self We are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogramme promising a job or space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer. We are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines []. (Jasmine 100101)
THESE ARE THE VOICES OF THE IMMIGRANTS whose lives have been chronicled in diasporic literature. As Melwin Ember, et al., in their Encyclopedia of Diasporas point out, the word diaspora comes from the Greek word meaning to scatter and to sow, and originally referred to the dispersal and settlement of Jews outside of Palestine following the Babylonian exile (586 B.C.) (Encyclopedia of Diasporas xiii). The term diaspora now refers to displaced communities which have been dislocated from their homeland through migration or immigration or exile.
* Head, PG & Research Department of English The American College (Autonomous), Madurai Email: stanley_mohan@yahoo.com
2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
or immigration or exile. Diaspora is dislocation from a geographical location of origin and relocation in another territory or country. Another historical reference is the Black African Diaspora which began in the sixteenth century with slave trade. West Africans were taken from their native land through the infamous Middle Passage and scattered in the New World North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Since that time, the phrase Middle Passage has become a metaphor to refer to such forced displacements. These diasporas have been followed by numerous fractured diasporas like the migration of Blacks living in North America from the south to the north and across the western hemisphere. Diaspora in the fast changing world refers to the hordes of displaced persons and communities moving across the globe. The first diasporic dislocation in the history of mankind is evidenced in Satans forced displacement from Heaven to Hell, and Miltons Paradise Lost is the first piece of diasporic literature. Recall the longing lines of Satan in Paradise Lost - Book I, Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,/Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat/That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom/For that celestial light? Consequently, dislocation of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is also diasporic in content.
Since being diasporic is a matter of personal choice, the journey of life becomes an exploration of an individuals sense of self and a quest for the liberation of the human spirit. The possibilities are diverse and varied as there are individuals. Characters in diasporic literature provide a key to unravel the quest of the diasporans. The awareness that their dislocation is final, characterizes the perpetual gaze of the diasporans towards the homeland. They relate to the country of origin and their immigrant status in different ways. Ultimately, it is creating ones
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 73 own cultural space in the adopted homeland that matters. In other words, diaspora is all about creating new identities, achieving cultural hybridity, acquiring spaces for growth, resolving cultural conflicts, and forging a new culture either composite or plural. Diasporic traversals interrogate the rigidity of identity.
By virtue of its authenticity and appeal, diasporic literature has become a genre in itself. It invariably deals with themes like: Nostalgia for a home that exists only in memory, Failed quests and thwarted dreams, conditions of dislocations and loneliness, utter loss of a support system and futile attempts to forge a new system, identity crisis, painful quest for lost self, intergenerational conflict between the expatriate firstgeneration parents and the assimilated second-generation children, marital conflicts, as spouses adapt to the new culture differently, misreading of cultural codes, experience of racism in all its manifestation, attempts at conjuring up sustaining myths and symbols of the past. Therefore, diasporic literature addresses issues like identity, culture, hybridity, nationality, home, homelessness, mimicry, and binarisms like self/other, insider/outsider, and margin/centre.
Identity is an important issue in diasporic literature. Stuart Hall contends that identity should not be thought of as an accomplished fact, but should be seen as a production which is never complete. This view problematises the authenticity of the term cultural identity. Hall says:
There are at least two different ways of thinking about cultural identity. The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective one true self, hiding inside the many other, more
superficial or artificially imposed selves, which people with shared history and ancestry hold in common. [] Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of becoming as well as of being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. (223-25)
Cultural identity is not a fixed essence nor is it some universal spirit within us. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make a final return. At the same time it is not a figment of imagination. Instead, cultural identity is the point of identification which is not an essence but a positioning (Hall 226). Diasporic identities constantly produce and reproduce themselves through transformation and difference.
The word hybrid has biological and botanical origins. In Latin it means the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. In the nineteenth century, hybridity was used to refer to a physiological phenomenon. In the twentieth century the cultural meaning has been reactivated. In language, the term hybridity delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be double-voiced, double-accented and double-styled. Hybridity describes the condition of the languages fundamental ability to be simultaneously the same but different. Hybridity also opens diasporic subjectivity to a liminal, dialogic space wherein identity is negotiated (Mannur and Braziel 5). Thus diasporans
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 75 experience double identifi-cation that constitutes hybrid forms of identity which are separate from the essential form of cultural identity with its affiliations to the constructions of nation or homeland. In other words, diaspora concepts shift from essentialist notions of homeland, national or ethnic identity, probe multiple belongings and address the conditions that allow people to inhabit more than one national space. In such a diasporic context, the United States which is a land of immigrants, finds itself not as a melting point but as another diasporic switching point (Appadurai 1996: 171). The diasporans in their journey through space deterritorialise and reterritorialise the blurring boundaries of nations.
Homi Bhabha considers hybridity the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses its univocal grip on meaning and finds itself open to the trace of the language of the other, enabling the critic to trace complex movements of disarming alterity (Olterity)(the quality of being the other) in the colonial text (Bhabha 1995: 154). Bhabha defines hybridity as a problematic of colonial representation [] that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of authority (156). Hybridity describes a process in which the single voice of colonial authority undermines the operation of colonial power by inscribing and disclosing the trace of the other so that it reveals itself as double-voiced. In his interview to Jonathan Rutherford, Bhabha has extended his notion of hybridity to include forms of counter-authority, a Third Space which intervenes to effect the hybrid moment of political change. While hybridity denotes a fusion, it also describes a dialectical articulation. This doubled-hybridity has been distinguished as a model that can be used to account for the form of syn-
cretism (fusion of opposing systems or beliefs) that characterizes all postcolonial literatures and cultures. Hybridity works simultaneously in two ways. It creates new spaces, structures, and scenes and at the same time intervenes as a form of subversion, translation, transformation. In other words, hybridization involves fusion, the creation of a new form. At its simplest, hybridity implies a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things, grafting a vine or a rose on to a different rootstock, making the difference into sameness. Hybridization can also consist of the forcing of a single entity into two or more parts, a severing of a single object into two, turning sameness into difference. Hybridity thus, converts difference into sameness, and sameness into difference. It is a breaking and a joining at the same time and in the same place. It is also difference and sameness in an apparently impossible simultaneity. Hybridity is a key term in the sense it suggests the impossibility of essentialism.
Home/Homeland is another issue of relevance. There are multiple versions of the same reality. What we mean by Indian is different for the first generation settlers and second generation Indian-Americans. The first generation diasporans fall back on their idealised version of India as a way of dealing with the crisis of fragmentation. It indicates a psychological projection of their own needs and has little to do with the reality. Bharati Mukherjees novels emphasize the need to reinvent and redefine the notion of home/homeland and the notion of identity from an immigrants perspective. The term home/homeland has the immediate connotation of a natal territory or space that takes love, warmth and security for granted. Though home basically implies a specific geographical locale, in the context of immigrant experience, because of the need to belong in the immediate reality, its parameters are
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 77 enlarged. Uma Parameswaran, a writer of the Indian Diaspora settled in Canada exhorts, Your Home is where your feet are and may your heart be there too.
Salim in V.S. Naipauls A Bend in the River says, I was homesick, had been homesick for months. But home was hardly a place I could return to. Home was something in my head. It was something I had lost (107). In the context of blurring boundaries and interweaving of time and space, home/homeland can be a part of the mental topography and not just physical landscape. Home can be the creation of the mind, a piece of imagination. Viney Kirpal claims in The Third World Novel of Expatriation that the expatriates quest for Home is not a quest for some spot in geography, since he carries his country with him, but a quest for an indefinable need (73).
Past is another issue. As Salman Rushdie says, Its my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time (Rushdie 9), Past, particularly romanticized past, is very often the refuge of an uprooted exile. Tara likes to go back in time and space to nurture her nostalgia. As long as one clutches the souvenirs of an ever-retreating past, he or she will never belong anywhere (Darkness 2). Meena Alexander, an expatriate writer from India in her essay Transit Lounge wonders, In Manhattan, I am a fissured thing, a body crossed by fault lines. Where is my past? What is my past to me, here, now at the edge of Broadway? Is America, a place without memory? (182). But Meena Alexander wants to convert her nostalgic past into a durable and usable past. She says, I want to find a way that we can make a durable and usable past that is not just nostalgic but exists in the present. The present for me is the present of multiple anchorag-
es (127). If the past is cut off from the present, with no reference or relevance to present, it will become a heavy load that an immigrant has to carry both in India and America. In Mukherjees fiction, there is a call to end futile engagements with the past. There is an exhortation to build a home where our feet are (Parameswaran 30).
The terms immigrant and expatriate in general refer to persons who live outside their own country either by choice or otherwise. However, in diasporic literature, these two terms assume distinct connotations. The immigrant willingly transforms herself/himself to fit in and absorb the best in the host culture. The immigrant experience, therefore, becomes a transformative process of the self and its relation to society. The expatriate on the other hand is more a reluctant entrant into the new culture and finds it hard to let go a familiar way of life.
Despite the joy of liberation from stifling cultural mores, assimilation into the adopted culture, and reclamation of the lost self, diasporic literature is obsessed with the stories of homelessness and exilic state of mind. However, the epiphanic side of an immigrants story is the ability to transform the host country/culture as Bharati Mukherjee claims:
As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I and the hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants like me are minute-by-minute transforming America (Mukherjee 1996: 34).
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 79 Works Cited
Alexander, Meena. Transit Lounge. Fault Lines. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 1993. Print. ---. A Durable Past. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections of PostColonial Experience. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Print. Bhaba, Homi. Home and US: Re-defining Identity in South Asian Diaspora through the Writings of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Meena Alexander. The Diasporic Imagination, Asian American Writing. Vol.2. Ed. Somdatta Mandal. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2000. Print. ---. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Ember, Melvin, et al., ed. Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures around the World. Vol.1. New York: Springer, 2005. Print. Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. Identity, Community Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wihsart Ltd., 1990. Print. Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1990. Print. ---. Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties. Journal of Modern Literature 20.1 (sum. 1996): 29-34. Print. Parameswaran, Uma. Home is Where Your Feet are, and May Your Heart be there too! Writers of Indian Diaspora: Theory and Practice. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1998. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 1991. Print. Rutherford, Jonathan. A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference. Identity, Community Culture, and Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence &
Wihsart Ltd., 1990. Print. ---. Third Space. Identity, Community Culture, and Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wihsart Ltd., 1990. Print. Stephen, Stanley M. Bharati Mukherjee: A Study in Immigrant Sensibility. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2010. Print.
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From Grace to Grief: A Study of Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown
- P. J. Jeyashree*
Abstract: Absolutism takes a heavy toll everywhere. The plight of hybrid societies anywhere in the world, be it New Delhi or Kashmir or New York or Los Angeles, is not different. Kashmir has become a place internationally known for acts of terrorism. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), Salman Rushdie turns to the one remaining thread of his complex cultural inheritance that he has not yet given substantial novelistic treatment: the state of Kashmir. Rushdie in his novel has tried to dramatize how people accustomed to living with multiple truth and identities are locked in ideological conflict with political and religious zealots insisting on their one absolute truth. He traces Shalimars journey from high - wire circus act to ruthless killer with links to radical Islamic groups, exploring the now universal question of why people turn to religious violence. This paper analyses the transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist, which is the most impressive achievement of the book, through a critique of absolutism. Shalimar in the novel, moves from Kashmir to terrorist camps and to the privileged world of Los Angeles, motivated by shades of love, curiosity, burning vengeance and blind religious faith. Key words: Shalimar the Clown, religious fanaticism, terrorism
SURPRISINGLY THE INCREASING TENDENCIES IN SOCIETIES is towards replacing scientific rationalism with supernatural ritualism. Religious fundamentalism is becoming a menace trying to thwart the religious tenets of love, peace and goodwill among men and women. Love and brotherhood are becoming rarer virtues in a world where * Assistant Professor of English, KCG College of Technology, Karapakkam, Chennai
Email: pjjeyashree@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
inclusive ideals are being violently uprooted and replaced by teachings of exclusivist tenets. Closely associated with this attitude is the concept of majority and minority which breeds hatred and violence. Religious fanatics who are intolerant of other faiths have begun to wield considerable power in many parts of the world. Religious zealots who are interested only in a ritualistic religion but lacking in piety very often take recourse to violence in the name of protecting their faith. This conflict is more visible in hybrid societies.
Salman Rushdie, the author taken for discussion reveals in his novels the pulls and pressures that a multicultural country like India is subjected to. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), Salman Rushdie turns to the one remaining thread of his complex cultural inheritance that he has not yet given substantial novelistic treatment: the state of Kashmir. Kashmir, the homeland of Rushdies maternal grandfather and one-time favourite location for Rushdies family holidays, had appeared only as a shadowy original for the valley of K in the childrens fantasy Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), and as the point of departure for Aadam Asiz, cast out of paradise after losing his faith in Midnights Children (1981). Rushdie introduces the complex subject of Kashmir in his novel Shalimar the Clown. Rushdies quest as:
an expatriate, in some form or the other, makes him look back naturally upon the Indian subcontinent of his birth and belonging with nostalgia. [. . . ]. As his dreaming is born out of the desire for belonging to the entire subcontinent, he seeks to find his roots in the mythical past, untainted by the politico - historical and cultural urgencies of the times. (Rao 162)
Rushdie describes how the paradise of Kashmir has been partitioned, impoverished, and made violent. Pankaj Mishra says,
Murder and terrorism now stalk the valleys and mountains of a land once so famous for its peacefulness (6 Oct.2005).
Salman Rushdie traces Shalimars journey from high - wire circus act to ruthless killer with links to radical Islamic groups, exploring the now universal question of why people turn to religious violence. Rushdie tries to explain:
[. . .] how individuals motivation for joining groups such as Al - Qaeda was often complex than people in the west believed. In his case, Shalimar starts out as a perfectly nice boy who was driven towards violence by embittered love as much as by history. (The Hindu 2 Sep. 2005)
The transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is the most impressive achievement of the book. Shalimar in the novel, moves from Kashmir to terrorist camps and to the privileged world of
Los Angeles, motivated by shades of love, curiosity, burning vengeance and blind religious faith.
Rushdies best selling work is ultimately more than a very old fashioned revenge saga. The focus of the novel is extremism. The novel opens with the assassination in Los Angeles of Maximilian Ophuls, former American Ambassador to India, who is a polygot cosmopolitan, a raconteur, scholar, traveller and adventurer, by his driver Shalimar, an international terrorist, born and trained in Kashmir. The act takes place in the proximity of Maximilians illegitimate daughter, India who was Kashmira. Maxs daughter finds out that the motive behind her fathers murder is far more personal and frightening than it first appeared.
Shalimar the Clown is the story of Kashmirs fall from grace to grief (cited in Suroor 2 Oct. 2005) The scene shifts back after the murder of Maximilian Ophuls to the little Kashmiri village of Pachigam, where the fourteen year old Shalimar fell deeply in love with Boonyi, a Hindu girl. They were both born in 1947, the same year Pakistan and India were carved from the British Raj and Kashmir a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giants teeth began its tragic decline from an ecumenical paradise to a sectarian hell. The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story (57), says Shalimar in a love - struck reverie. In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred. This was how things had to be. This was Kashmir(57).
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 85 Nevertheless, when their relationship is exposed, it is a test of the villagers tolerance. Shalimars father argues:
There is no Hindu - Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri two Pachigami youngsters wish to marry, thats all. A love match is acceptable to both families and so a marriage there will be; both Hindu and Muslim customs will be observed. (110)
Rushdie stresses the point that Kashmirs problems stem not from inherent Hindu - Muslim antipathy, but from a Hindu - Muslim antipathy that has been brought into being by political processes and historical facts. The implication that Kashmir, before the 1940s, was a paradaisical zone of tolerance and harmony, in which the only conflict resulted from squabbles over cooking pots, seems stretched. Yet Kashmirs religious problems did not take
frightening dimensions till 1947, and a village elder could proudly say, in Kashmir, our stories sit side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes (71).
The harmony and peace people enjoyed in Kashmir is suddenly disturbed. Trouble slithers into this paradise from all sides. Muslim radicals, epitomized by a mullah literally made of iron, preach a doctrine of strict separation that quickly slides into acts of terror, not just against the Hindu residents but against Muslims who try to live in peace with them. On the other side stands an Indian colonel who justifies increasingly brutal measures of civil control with bureaucratic language: The legal position was that the Indian mil-
itary presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law(96). Ideologues and zealots enter the fray and disrupt the delicate process of harmonious living. Muslim rebels and Indian soldiers the two devils tormenting the valley - have ground the village of Pachigam to dust. As Marco Roth puts it, descriptions of violence and atrocity are one of Rushdies strengths as a novelist (9 Sep. 2005). Rushdie narrates the story of Anees Noman, Shalimars brother who becomes the leader of JKLF militant group. He helps Pachigam in the battle against LeP militants. After that incident, he is captured alive by the security forces. He is tortured in secret chambers of Badami Bagh, those rooms which had never existed, did not exist and would never exist, and from which nobody ever heard a scream, no matter how loud it was (307). He is killed and his body is brought back to his house by an army officer. Visible marks of torture can be seen all over his body. His hands that were so deft, that had whittled and shaped so much are missing.
Western interests in Kashmir is represented by the European born, Jewish - American Ambassador to Kashmir, Maximilian
Ophuls, who in his younger days fought against the Nazis, but who lately has become a secret negotiator for American interests around the globe. Kashmir issue has become very complicated and consequently it has become a hotbed of terrorism. Max Ophuls,
sees a newly married Boonyi perform the role of Anarkali and determines to make her his mistress. A flattered Boonyi leaves her husband and moves to Delhi, where she becomes pregnant and delivers a daughter. Abandoned by Ophuls, Boonyi returns to
Kashmir. Shalimar has warned Boonyi, the very first night they made love, Dont you leave me now, or Ill never forgive you,
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 87 and Ill have my revenge, Ill kill you and if you have any children by another man Ill kill the children also (61). Later learning about her infidelity, Shalimar sharpens his favourite knife and heads south with murder in his mind. Shalimar, a member of his brothers financial team is a man newly awakened to rage and ready for extreme measures to threaten, slash and burn. He has learnt how to walk across a rope and fall over like an idiot and make a few bored people laugh. Now his colleagues notice that his style of performance has changed. Shalimar wants to be a part of the holy war. His anger at Boonyis betrayal coupled with religious fervour changes Shalimar the clown into an international terrorist. Shalimar, whose name means abode of joy(14) becomes an abode of terror. Shalimars craving for private revenge acquires wider
dimensions when he joins the terrorist group and undergoes religious indoctrination. In the camp, there are weekly seminars, real time training exercises in high - speed guerilla strikes across the line of control. There is a bomb factory and above all prayers are
conducted regularly. The only book permitted at the site, except training manuals is the Holy Quran. Maulana Bulbul Fakh is his guide to weaponry. Shalimar has his own goals in life and would not give them up. He says, I am ready to kill but I am not ready to stop being myself, he repeated many times in his heart. I will kill readily but I will not give myself up (271).
At forty, Shalimar has become battle hardened, and no longer needs to ask himself what murder might be like. He is assigned to kill a godless man, a writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the west (274). Shalimar has a silencer fitted pistol. Inspite of that he kills him slashing his throat with
his knife. May be Rushdie is satirising the art of beheading practised by Islamic terrorists. The man who smelled of musk tells Shalimar, For a man like you, a complete fucking crazy asshole, there will always be plenty of work(275). In his forty fourth year Shalimar kills Boonyi cutting off her head with his knife, his favourite weapon. Whenever Shalimar hears the name of the American Ambassador, a tiger leaps inside and caging it again is hard. He
travels to Los Angeles and becomes the driver of Max, with nothing but vengeance in his heart. He does not want to gun him down. His weapon of choice has always been the knife. He slits open Maxs throat in front of his daughters apartment. Shalimar is sentenced to death, but he escapes from prison. His next target is Kashmira, who is now twenty - four years old. During nights when he closes his eyes, he could no longer clearly see his familys faces. He saw only Kashmira, all the rest was blood (390). Kashmira has heard about the jail break. Moments later she is made aware of an intruder in her bedroom. When Shalimar tries to kill her, Kashmira outsmarts him and kills him with her bow, her favourite weapon.
Absolutism takes a heavy toll everywhere. As Arun Purie has written in his editorial to India Today, Terrorism is now truly a global phenomenon (25 July 2005). The plight of hybrid societies anywhere in the world, be it New Delhi or Kashmir or New York or Los Angeles, is not different. Kashmir has become a place internationally known for acts of terrorism. Max in the novel compares the beautiful Kashmir to the Garden of Eden. He further broods over the similarities between Adams fall, followed by his expulsion from the Garden of Eden and
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 89 the loss of Kashmir the earthly paradise. Maxs ranting about fanaticism and bombs are significant:
He lamented the drowning of blue-eyed women and the murder of their golden children. He railed against the coming of cruel flames to a distant city made of wood. He spoke too of the tragedy of the pandits, the Brahmins of Kashmir, who were being driven from their homeland by the assassins of Islam. The rapes of young girls, the fathers set alight, burning like beacons prophesying doom. (28)
The tender feelings which united the Kashmiris in good old days have merely become an illusion:
May be Kashmiriyat was an illusion. May be all those children learning one anothers stories in the panchayat room in winter, all those children becoming a single family, were an illusion []. May be tyranny, forced conversions, temple smashing, iconoclasm, persecution and genocide were the norms and peaceful coexistence was an illusion. (239)
Religious extremism which causes conflict in society is also responsible for the ideological divide that separates followers of the same religion. Hardliners like Lashkar-e-Pak militants compel women to
cover their heads. Firdaus Noman who is an enlightened moderate asks her son angrily, How can a womans face be the enemy of Islam? (301). Anees, her son explains, For those idiots its all about sex, maej,
excuse me. They think it is a scientific fact that a womans hair emits rays that arouse men to deeds of sexual depravity (301). The militants kill the women whose heads are uncovered.
Between 1947 and 1989, thousands of Kashmiri Pandits had left the valley to escape the oppression let loose by the Muslim majority. Kashmiri Pandits were forced to flee their native Kashmir valley after a combination of violence and explicit threats by Islamic terrorists aided and inspired by Pakistan. Kashmir has been the bone of contention between India and Pakistan for more than fifty years. It is the sole cause for the worsening India-Pakistan relations. Shalimar the Clown, gives realistic details of the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule, and the murder of Pandits in Tangmarg. Posters demanding all pandits to leave Kashmir, appear on the road. The panic stricken Hindus fleeing for their lives carry their gods with them. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul says to Boonyi, We are no longer protagonists, only agonists (295). There is arson and looting of residential and commercial property belonging to pandits and destruction of temples and The exodus of the pandits of Kashmir had begun (295). Almost the entire pandit population of Kashmir, flees from their homes and heads south to the refugee camps where they would rot, like bitter fallen apples, like the unloved, undead dead they had become (296). Rushdie himself craves for his lost imaginary homeland and comments:
one such suspicious generalization may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. We must also do so in the knowledge [] that
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 91 our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; []. (Rana 83)
Rushdies Kashmir is no more a place where people of different faiths walk hand in hand. Kashmir, Gods own country has fallen from grace. Kashmir is now a valley in flames and a theatre of terrorism: one of the great unifying Muslim causes (Cowley Sep. 2005; 23-25). The agony of the Kashmiri due to terrorism is brought out realistically in the novel by the questionnaire:
Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old mans nose? Who broke that young girls heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his financee? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped
those parents? Who killed the lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that
woman again?
Who raped that woman again? Who
raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped the dead woman again? (308)
The picture of the earthly paradise lost to religious extremism and military brutality has echoes around the world today (The Hindu 2 Sep.2005). The unparalled paradise on earth (76) becomes paradise lost and is declared as disturbed area (290). Salman Rushdie brings out the horrors of terrorism with all its intensity. American imperialism, partition, religious fanaticism, state terrorism and betrayal have contributed to the most tragic happenings in the novel. The major characters of this novel are murdered, Kashmir undergoes ethnic cleansing, rapes and massacres, racial riots erupt in Los Angeles, and a convict, abruptly introduced in the last pages, is executed at San Quentin prison from which Shalimar, in a cinematic climax, escapes only to be shot dead by an arrow shot by his step-daughter, India. As Rushdie writes, Everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else. Executions, police brutality, explosions, riots: Los Angeles was beginning to look like wartime Strasbourg : like Kashmir (355). The story of Shalimar the Clown is universally relevant. California, India, France, Britain, Pakistan, Algeria, The Philippines. It takes place over fifty years, and features Osama bin Laden, Heinrich Himmler, Rodney King and Lord Lucas too (Tait 6 Oct. 2005).
In Shalimar the Clown, the ambition remains unchecked. It is a post 9/11 novel, which aims to describe the mind of a terrorist, as well as one of the most intractable territorial disputes in recent history: Kashmir (Tait 6 Oct. 2005). But that isnt all, as Rushdie makes clear in an editorial style insert about globalization:
Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories
flowed into one anothers were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm. (37) Rushdies voice in Shalimar the Clown is prodigious, exuberant, angry and nostalgic in turn (Sipahimalini Sep-Oct. 2005). It is clear from Rushdies emphasis that he wants the novel to yield a particular truth about Kashmir and the world. Kashmir illustrates most vividly how the Muslim crazies of today intoxicated on the absolutism of the pure aim to destroy innocently hybrid societies (Mishra 6 Oct. 2005).
Rushdie has tried to dramatize how people accustomed to living with multiple truth and identities are locked in ideological conflict with political and religious zealots insisting on their one absolute truth. On examination, however, this conflict between hybridity and fundamentalism appears to be a form of intellectual mystification, very useful to politicians. Among the general public obscurantism and absolutism, only breed mutual suspicion. Fissiparous tendencies and hate campaigns are threatening peaceful coexistence. The saner voice of moderates gets stifled. Rushdie in his novel replay scenes of massacres, torture, suicide attacks, and beheadings familiar to us from our television screens. The obvious exhortation is for global understanding and wisdom.
Works Cited
Cowley, Jason. From here to Kashmir. Guardian Weekly Sep. 2005: 23-25. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. Massacre in Arcadia. New York Review of Books 6 Oct. 2005: 8-11. Print. Purie, Aroon. From the Editor-in-Chief. India Today 25 July 2005: 5. Print. Rao, Madhusudhana. For the Time Being: An Assessment. Salman Rushdies Fiction : A Study. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1992. 154- 69. Print. Rana, Randeep. Magical Realism and Self-Reflexivity:or History Dehistoricised. Profaning the sacred: Salman Rushdie. Delhi: S.S. Publishers, 2005: 148-99. Print. Ram, N. ed. The latest on offer from Salman Rushdie. The Hindu 2 Sep. 2005: 22. Print. Roth, Marco. Give the people what they want. Times Literary Supplement 9 Sept. 2005: 19-20. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown. Suffolk: William Clowes Ltd., 2005. Print. Sipahimalini, Sanjay. Walking the tightrope. Biblio: A review of Books Sep-Oct. 2005: 4. Print. Suroor, Hasan. The return of Salman Rushdie. The Hindu 2 Oct. 2005: 1. Print. Tait, Theo. Flame-Broiled Whopper. London Review of Books 6 Oct. 2005: 17-18. Print.
The Psychoanalysis of a Mothers Self-fulfillment in D. H. Lawrences Sons and Lovers

- C. Yesupatham* Abstract: The Most modern critics of this twenty first century periodically concentrate on their attention to the implication and psychological senses of Sons and Lovers. However, Lawrences exploration of human beings search of self-fulfillment has been infrequently discovered. The typical mother of the style demonstrated to identify the consciousness of the mothers self-fulfillment with the auxilium of trinomial expression of Id, Ego and Superego. Therefore, this article attempts to analyze the idea of self-fulfillment embodied in Sons and Lovers. David Herbert Lawrence presents the practical mundane and prosaic life style of the middle-class in England which resembles the entire aspects of human personality. Key words: Psychoanalysis, Exploration, Consciousness, Mother, Search of self-fulfillment, Trinomial expression, Id, Ego, Superego D.H.LAWRENCES SONS AND LOVERS ever since it was published in 1913, was constantly reviewed in the most influential English literary mediums of Lawrences day. But the author was not fully accepted during his lifetime. After Lawrences death in 1930, only a few novelists and critics gave him some just and proper assessments. In the 1950s, however, with the help of many biographical books about Lawrence, readers began to appreciate his works. Among the Lawrence critics in that decade, the most influential one was F. R. Leavis (Sagar 53). He placed Lawrence with Austen, George Eliot, and Conrad which he called the great tradition of the English novel. From then on, much is
* Research Scholar, PhD., University of Madras, Chennai Email: yspatham@yahoo.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
made on his romanticism and realism, his attachment to nature, his metaphysics, his aesthetics of felt life, his analysis of the relations between men and women, his symbolism, mythology, psychology and so on (C.G.Jung 89).
However, most of the critics focus on their attention towards the implication of psychological meanings of Sons and Lovers. And Lawrences exploration of human beings self-fulfillment has been rarely explored. Therefore, this thesis attempts to analyze his idea of self-fulfillment embodied in Sons and Lovers.
Gertrude is one of the main characters in the novel. She is the wife of Walter Morel and Pauls mother. On the whole, the marriage of Morel and Gertrude is tragic. They fall in love with each other almost at first sight when they meet at a dance party. Gertrude, a girl from a middleclass family, lovely and well-educated, is full of dreams and aspirations, whereas, Walter Morel, a miner, is handsome, passionate and energetic. Gertrude is attracted by his warm physical nature and he is impressed by her refined speech and manner. These two people live in the same society, geographically close to each other, but each of them inhabits a world which is unknown to the other.
The psychological attraction of Gertrude and Morel feel showing their responding to each other as to a fascinating, exciting and strange world. Their feelings are determined by their backgrounds with the deep buried consciousness of their existence; the attraction and delusions exist among social classes, not between these two particular individuals. Additionally, strong physical and sexual attraction between these two totally different couple satisfied their momentary yearning.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 97 Within a year they get married. However, neither has Gertrude imagined that her love for and her marriage to Morel will mean poverty, struggle and the loss of middle-class enjoyments and comforts, nor has Morel foreseen his wifes dissatisfaction with him and the oncoming fierce quarrels soon after their marriage:
Their sweet and happy union only lasts for the first six months. After getting the cardinal fulfillment in her early marriage, sometimes she herself wearied of love-talk; she tried to open her heart seriously to him about what she feels in the perspectives of her total fulfillment deep within her heart. She saw him listening deferentially, but without understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of phobia. That is husband phobia. Sometimes she was restless of an evening: it was not enough for him just to be near her, she realized. She was glad when he set himself to little jobs. (Sons and Lovers 20)
If everything goes well, perhaps Gertrude will bear her spiritual blankness. However, when she gets the truth that the house they live in is rented and the furniture they use is still unpaid, and her husband has told her he had a good bit of money left over, her honest soul is deeply hurt.
According to the modern psychologist Sir Sigmund Freud, the persons attitude, behaviour, personality and expression are based on the trinomial concept of Id, Ego, and Superego (Graham 34). One source for this assumption was the observation of posthypnotic suggestion,
which seemed to imply that past experiences, surviving outside of consciousness as latent memories, could be activated by a signal from the environment and could then influence behaviour even though the hypnotized person was unaware of the reasons for his behaviour. Although its beginnings were based in studies of psychopathology, psychoanalysis became a more general perspective on normal personality development and functioning. The field of investigation began with case studies of so-called neurotic conditions, which included hysteria, obsessivecompulsive disorders, and phobic conditions.
Although she does not speak too much about her husbands cheating, her manner has changed towards him, and something in her proud, honorable soul had crystallized out hard as a rock (129). In the novel, two years ago, at Christmas, they got to know each other. When Christmas came one year later, they got married. This Christmas she would bear him a child. After she gives a birth of the child, Gertrude is severely ill; Morel was good to her, as good as gold (Daniel 76). At this point of time she experiences the complete satisfaction and fulfillments but she feels lonely, miles away from him, and his presences only makes it more intense. She begins to despise him and takes much care of the child. He also begins to neglect her, the novelty of his own home having gone. Here, the Ego plays the vital role among them who are ready to combine with their hearts of love.
Lawrence criticizes pure sensual love. He calls it almost sinister, terrifying beauty (102). He emphasizes that sensual love is only half of love, which cannot produce a whole, creative being. Gertrudes puritanical aversion to drinking and dancing is exactly the opposite of the high-spirited, easy-going Morels delight in such earthly pleasures. Her
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 99 bourgeois detestation of debts and deficits is foreign to her more relaxed, lower class husband. The poverty, spiritual emptiness, heavy labor and illiteracy of the surroundings smash the happy dream of Gertrude. A fearful bloody battle between husband and wife begins. Conflicts between them gradually take the place of love, which step by step turn into family violence, and finally into a matrimonial tragedy.
The Morels union is based on a sexual fascination, with no understanding of each other. The Morels have different class ideologies. Gertrude (Mrs. Morel) comes from a middle-class family whose philosophy of life, hopes and aspirations are a great deal different from those of Walter Morel who is from the working class, and who refuses to have everything done to satisfy his wifes petty bourgeois desires. Therefore, her effort to reform her husband is destined to be a failure. Taken as an example of the scene of Walters cutting Williams hair in the first chapter, the scene presents what can be considered to be one of the major conflicts in the Morels marriage.
By cutting the hair of his one-year-old son William, Walter attempts to assert his authority, as he thinks his wife is pampering the child and making him effeminate. It is also a battle between husband and wife, based on their different social values which express about the egocentric attitudes towards each other. They differ in their own needs and demands on their children. And another scene: Williams white coat and hat with its ostrich feather and his twining wisps of hair embody Gertrudes middle-class fantasy, which is nurtured by her family origin and is ridiculously inappropriate to the rough domesticity of a miners cottage, with the great fire burning, the breakfast roughly laid,
and tile newspaper on the hearthrug. These details awaken Mrs. Morel to the object realities of her situation.
Williams cropped head is a brutal expression of her marital disillusionment and the clash of values and expectations between Mr. and Mrs. Morel. In terms of education, the Morels are quite different. Walter, who left school at the age of ten to work in the mine, is barely literate and can only spell out painfully the headlines and see no value whatsoever in the reading of books. All his early sufferings make his to be harsh towards his wife. He can merely speak in Derbyshire dialect. However, his wife is well-educated. His expressions are purely related to the environmental condition which he had to hail from. D.H.Lawrence typically demonstrates the aspects of genuine intimacy within one self which are exposed with the language of Mr. Walter Morel and his wife.
Gertrude was a former teacher for pupils. She is also an ardent reader of novels and a speaker of Queens English. She also joins the Women Guilds, where the women are supposed to discuss the benefits to be derived from co-operation, and other social questions. Sometimes she reads a paper, sometimes she sits writing in her rapid fashion, thinking, referring to books, and writing again (Sons and Lovers 68).
Furthermore, even Walter Morel is even less educated than his children. As a result, he cannot communicate with Gertrude and his children. The short dialogue between father and son in Chapter IV shows that Walter Morel is excluded from the intellectual life of the family. The home is dominated by the mothers values and the father has no place there. When we look at the details it is evident that the whole
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 101 family is now against the father, for the every word of the second sentence obviously does not include Walter Morel. When the mother suggests her son that youd better tell, her tone indicates that the father is not much interested in his sons study and never asks about it initiatively and Pauls answers are brief and unhelpful. And all the questions Walter puts to Paul in the dialogue only indicates that Morel can only think of prizes and rewards in terms of money; culture and learning are alien to him.
Mrs. Morel is a Puritan, who perceives her father as a representative of all men devoutly religious to the point of abstaining from all forms of sensuous experience. She strictly believes in the Protestant ethos of selfdenial, sexual repression, impersonal work, disciplined aspiration, guilt, and yearning for conversion-escape. But her industrially victimized coal-miner husband lives a life antithetical to that of his moralistic, chapel- going Congregational wife. He has no use for his wifes religion, preferring the pub to chapel, and fails to understand either Gertrudes ambitious ideas or Pauls arts.
Socially, as a contradiction of possibilities, Gertrude becomes alien to her husband. She can only relate to Morel subjectively, trying to change him into her own image. But, unlike his wife, Morel never dreams of clawing his way into middle-class, nor does he envision a different future for his children. Little beyond Bestwood attracts him, and little within Bestwood repels him. Different vision of life between husband and wife leads to their dissensions of emotion.
Economically, the Morels are in oppressive poverty. More often than not, Gertrude has to use their hard-earned funds with meticulous care
in order to keep the wolf out of the door, because Walter is not able to earn enough money to support the whole family, even if he stops drinking and gives his wife all the money he has earned. However, he does not feel specially pinched with poverty as his wife does. Economic problems greatly add to Gertrudes dissatisfaction with her husband, and later helps lead to greater emotional crisis.
Eventually, Morel is reduced only to the bread- winner upon whom the family depends. The inhuman modern industrial civilization is also a factor which results in the Morels tragic marriage. It is the heavy mining work that turns the smart Walter into a miner, scarred, deformed, exhausted and inhuman. The dehumanizing mining work constitutes the main reason for his addiction to drinking and for his wifebeating.
In a word, Gertrude and Walter do not share with each other in ideology, aesthetics, economic motivations, manners, language, moral views or political interests. All these aspects are the individuals performance of the consciousness and motivational attitude of the egocentric assumption. The marriage of the Morels is ruined by the great differences between them that are both social and personal conflicts. Under such circumstances, their marriage being a battle and a tragedy is unavoidable. Thus, Morel falls gradually a victim to the industrial civilization and his proud, petty, bourgeois wife. Eventually, the small tenderness and the residual passion between them drift apart.
When Morel is desperately sick with inflammation of the brain, Gertrude is utterly taken up with nursing him, she is more tolerant of him, and he depends on her almost like a child, and is rather happy. Neither
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 103 knows that she is more tolerant because she loves him less. Mrs. Morels emotions, however, are slowly, inexorably shifting from her husband to her children. Henceforward Morel was more or less a husk. And he half acquiesced, as so many men do, yielding their place to their children (Sons and Lovers 62). But sometimes both of them made effort to come back somewhat to the old relationship of the first months of their marriage, anyhow Morels soul would reach out in its blind way to her and find her gone. He feels a sort of emptiness, almost like a vacuum in his soul, because her thoughts always turn to her sons.
In the Foreword of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence says: The woman must find another man and he another woman; if the law does not permit it, then he will destroy himself, perhaps with drinking, and she may turn to a sonand his wife in her despair shall hope for sons, that she may have her lover in her hour (2). William is the eldest son of the family. Mrs. Morel initially pours all her passion into fostering Williams aspirations and ambitions. Just as the headline of Chapter III indicates, she takes him on after the casting off of her husband. She refuses to let him down the pit and has him take the road which leads from the local co-op office to a job in London.
His material advancement alters his social status. William mixes with his betters and superiors and becomes engaged to Louisa Western, a girl with social pretensions. As a matter of fact, he is realizing his mothers dreams and expectations when she dresses him up as a middle-class baby in Chapter I of the novel. What Lawrence goes on to reveal is the cruel contradiction hidden behind Mrs. Morels ambition? On the one hand, she wishes her sons to achieve high social status and personal fulfillment in the wider world, and on the other hand, she still
wishes them to live with her and not go away. This contradictory state of mind of her causes great pain and suffering to both mother and sons.
Williams gradual disillusionment with his fiance, who, as he tells his mother, is keenly after some things, but is in no way a substitute for the family ties he has loosened, begins to tell (Daniel 32). His death is due to his pneumonia as well as his overwork, but another factor is perhaps the split in him caused by his mothers disapproval of his girl friend, whom she looks upon as a frivolous good-time girl. From his early childhood his mother has urged him on with her typical nonconformist fusion of worldly success and righteousness. He is his mothers unwitting sacrifice. Williams brief life, his blighted youth, has a wider significance: it emphasizes the danger, pain and cost of upward mobility and social emancipation, and of excessive mother-love. And Williams tragic life and fruitless love with his fiance prefigure those of Pauls.
Soon after Williams death, Paul (the second son) becomes desperately ill with pneumonia, which puts Mrs. Morel on the verge of losing her second son. Having nursed him through the crisis, Mrs. Morel transfers to him all the intense love and all the ambitious hopes she has had for William. Therefore, at the age of sixteen, at the crucial moment in his life when he finishes school and begins to work, and when he is given a push towards independence by his mother,
Paul meets his first girlfriend, but Gertrude tightens her emotional grip on him almost to strangulation. On him rests the responsibility for compensating her for her matrimonial failure as well as her suffering. Like William, Paul is tied to his mothers apron strings.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 105 Besides, Paul has had a special tie with his mother from his early childhood. He toddled after his mother like her shadow, and her treatment of Paul was different from that of the other children (Sons and Lovers 64). Oddly enough, in the family the sons all hate and are jealous of the father. Paul hates his father to such an extent that he even prays to God for his fathers death. When he is taken ill, his fathers presence seems to aggravate all his impatience. He loved to sleep with his mother.... The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other knits the sleep. Whilst she, always a bad sleeper, lull later on into a profound sleep that seemed to give her faith (SL 87). What is more, everything Paul does is for his mother.
In Chapter V, when Mr. Morel is hospitalized after an accident, the 14-year-old Paul repeatedly says to his mother with joy that he is the man in the house; and when they learn that the father is discharged from hospital after recovery, the mother and the son cannot help regretting his coming back home.
Pauls ambition is to earn quietly thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near his home, and then, when his father dies, to have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out as he likes, and live happily ever after (SL113). His Oedipal complex for his mother fails to dwindle even after he grows up on account of his mothers unbalanced possessive love. Throughout the novel, he shows his animosity towards his poor father and his tenderness to his mother; his relationship with his mother is the most important factor in his life.
In Chapter V, when the son is bidden to call upon Thomas Jordan, manufacturer of Surgical Appliances, Lawrence gives the reader a very
particular and loving detail of Mrs. Morels old gloves and worn purse as she searches for the fare money. A whole life of sacrifice and selfdenial is summed up in this image. Paul is deeply touched by it because he has witnessed his mothers struggle with adversity, and this feeling of his has helped bond them together. Pauls care for his mothers feelings is shown in the way he hides his apprehensions from her while she, on her part, is all vivacity and enthusiasm, like a young girl. Appropriate for a young adolescent, he finds trouble exposing a close, private relationship with his mother in public. In her general uncomplicated excitement Mrs. Morel appears, if anything, younger than her son.
This passage shows the most positive side of Mrs. Morel, who tries every way to urge her son on. It captures her ambition for Paul youre lucky, my boyand also her unabashed zest for life. Here we are shown a mothers love for her son at its triumphant best. Yet when we reexamine the passage, we feel file relationship is rather too tense -Lawrence here describes about Mrs. Morel as gay, like a sweetheart (Sagar 45). This is not merely a mother-son relationship; it seems to be a relationship between lovers. This intimate relationship may be a joy to the mother, but it is unwholesome to the son, as we can perceive in Pauls subsequent development in his life.
On the one side, the mother, passionately devoted to her sons, wanting to live for and through them; on the other, the sons, equally devoted to their mother, but anxious, too, like all healthy young growing men, to live for and through themselves. Its this conflict between these diametrically opposed needs of mother and sons leads to Pauls split of his soul. The abnormal love from the mother deprives Paul from his
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 107 independent personality and mental health. In a letter to Garnett, Lawrence says:
A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers-first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother-urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they cant love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. As soon as the young men come into contact with women there is a split. William gives his sex to a friable, and his mother holds his soul. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soulfights his mother.
Hard working, thrifty, uncomplaining, and most important possessing exceptional intelligence and strength of will, Gertrude makes the most of the difficult situation in which she finds herself. She devotes herself passionately to her children, especially to her sons, seeing to it that they have every advantage she can give them, making the most of every talent with which they are endowed, relentlessly driving them onward and upward, out of the mire in which they find themselves, into a higher class, a better life.
Here is one point where Gertruds personal will becomes the familial and the social in an external way, and where she urges her sons to succeed in order to make them acquire the recognition of her ideal class.
Gertrud has gone wrong herself through a mistaken marriage (Barbara 56). The fear that her sons will do the same leads her into a double bind. Her jealousy, her fear of losing the two sons in whom she has invested her own fulfillment in them , and does not want them to fail in life. That wish reinforces the prudent vigilance of the parent who has to enforce the morality of the tribe if only to stop the children making the mistake she has made. In urging of her sons toward success, and her intense and passionate devotion to her sons, Gertrude achieved her fulfillment making them succeed. However, she fails to establish them, as a mother should, as self-sufficient and independent individuals capable of living their own lives and loving their own lovers without constant reference to her judgments and feelings. In this sense we might say that Gertrude suffers as severely from a kind of Jocasta Complex (Graham 79) as Paul and William suffer from Oedipus complexes. We sense that she is somehow corrupting them with her love. Gertrude is an intense young woman, capable, of true sexual passion, of the real, real flame of feeling through another person (Brown 67). But when her relationship with her husband for whatever reasons failed to ripen into a permanent bond of love, her passionate nature shifted and fixed on her sons as objects of a most intense passion. In this rather morbid fixation, Gertrude partially created yet partially destroyed their talents and their hopes. Lawrence once pointed out that, The leader-cum-follower relationship is a bore. And the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, betweenmen and women, not the one up and down, lead on, I follow, ich dien (I serve) sort of business. (Barbara 34)
The relationship of the Morels is not based on equal position. In Morels family, the wife (Gertrude) controls the family, she advocates sense
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 109 and social recognition and success, conversely, the husband depends on emotion and enjoy the life, when Gertrude fails to reform his husband to fit her bourgeois ideal, the split of flesh and soul between husband and wife leads her turn to her sons as therapy, through them she wants to realize her own ambition, through them she wants to compensate her failure in marriage and get the recognition of the society. Unfortunately, the conflict between husband and wifethe conflict between sense and emotionreflects on the childrens split of their human nature. The tragedy of Morels marriage has already predicted the tragedy of their sons.
Works Cited
Black, Michael. D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. Cambridge University Press, 1992. 99. Print. Black, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Print. Brown, Keith. Rethinking Lawrence, Milton. Keynes: Open University Press 1990. Print. Burns, Aidan. Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980. Print. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence. New York: A Division of Hippocrene Books, INC, 1983. Print. Jung, C. G. Freud and Psychoanalysis. (Bollingen Series) Publisher: Bollingen Foundation, 1985. Print. Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. 1913. Ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print. Mensch, Barbara. D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Print.
Montgomery, Robert E. The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art. Cambridge: CUP, 1994 Print. Niven, Alastair. D. H. Lawrence: The Novels. Cambridge: CUP, 1978. Print. Nixon, Cornelia. Lawrences Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print. Sagar, Keith. The Art of D H Lawrence. Cambridge: CUP, 1966. Print. Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1986. Print. Tony, Pinkney. D. H. Lawrence. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Print.
Identity in Partition Literature: A Redefining Perspective

- C. Monsingh Daniel* Abstract: The post-independence era of India has laboured with the problem of defining its identity. Any attempt to narrow it down to a conclusion leads to a paradoxical duality of existence wherein the person is torn between two different cultural systems- the Ancestral, which dates back to the time of the Indian Monarchs, and the relatively new concept of Nationhood. In addition to this complexity, drastic changes in the sociopolitical arena like the partition incident lead people to an identity crisis and the individual feels absolutely lost in his quest for self-definition. In such situations we are brought about to question the validity of identity as a stable criteria for defining ones existence. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the fact that identity has always been in a state of change and that it is redefined depending on the scenario that a person finds himself in. It will also focus on how the Indian identity as it exists today is in itself a construct that has drastically altered itself over the course of Indian history. Key words: Partition Literature, Indian identity, Identity crisis, metamorphosis of identity ONE OF THE MOST COMMON EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS that people ask has to do with the search for identity- Where do I belong? On a broader scale, this quest leads to defining what one would belong to, the examples of which could vary from personal inclinations to nativistic principles. For instance, there are modes of existence that are borne out of native customs and traditions. There are instances of multicultural communities where different cultures tend to merge to form a hybrid identity. In todays trend, emulating western culture has led to a * Assistant Professor of English
Madras Christian College (Autonomous), Chennai Email: cmdmcc_epiphany@yahoo.co.in 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
new westernized identity.
When we look at the concept of nationhood, the identity that it provides to the citizens of India has always been a topic of discussion. It is true that the identity of a unified India has segregated into the very postmodern trend of celebrating multiplicity of cultures. However, the problem of defining the Indian identity goes back to the time when multiple region-based identities were subsumed under the larger identity of a unified nation. In addition to this transformation, there is also the welcome change that the country underwent when India went from dominated colony to free republic.
In all these instances, we can see that the change is gradual and longdrawn. This allows many people to come to terms with the change and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. Nevertheless, there are times when the shift is so drastic and sudden that people do not have time to cope with the alteration and hence they find themselves lost in their search for identity. One of the best examples in Indian history for such a situation would be the partition of India and Pakistan. Partition literature vividly portrays the turmoil in the minds of its characters who try to make sense of the chaos that they have been plunged into, a majority of which has to do with the fact that they no longer have a stable regional identity that makes them feel welcome in their own homelands.
One primary reason for the massive effect that partition had on the populace was that native communities that had lived in the same region generation after generation were suddenly pulled into the quarrels of religious fanatics, something that they never bothered to be a part of until the policy of splitting the country on the basis of religious differ-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 113 ences was implemented. According to reports, twelve million people were displaced in the partition incident due to the fact that the policy of dividing the country on the basis of religion destroyed the validity of the native identity and thereby removing the security that people had in their ancestral surroundings. It is no surprise that this chaos led to a death toll that is to this day uncertain, ranging from two hundred thousand to one million.
As a case study, we shall look into two novels that dealt with the horrors of the partition incident, namely Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa which is also titled Cracking India and Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. Apart from dealing with the problems that people faced in trying to stay alive in the midst of fanatics in a killing frenzy, these novels show how people react to the shift in identity. The reactions vary from disillusionment to murderous rage.
We shall begin with discussing evidences from the novel Ice-CandyMan. The bewilderment of being allotted a new identity by a diplomatic policy is best expressed in the novel by the utterance of the protagonist Lenny, I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that (Sidhwa 140). The utterance reveals the abnormality of categorizing regions on the basis of religion and casually uprooting native identities rendering them obsolete. No one realizes the serious necessity of those native identities in maintaining order in a region. In another case prior to partition, Lenny witnesses the unusual fervour in the assertion of religious identity, It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves- and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols (Sidhwa 93).
In a way, this act is evidence of people coming to terms with the anticipated uprooting of their ancestral identities and that they are trying to assert themselves by focussing on their religious identities. Regardless of such assertions, it is a fact that their allegiance to their land is much more deep-rooted than religious preference, how can they abandon their ancestors graves, every inch of land they own, their other kin? How will they ever hold up their heads again? (Sidhwa 109).
It is necessary to consider the effect of the partition incident on the natives. They can be subdivided into two categories. The first type would be those who do not feel compelled to leave their lands since they belong to the religion of the newly formed nation that their region is annexed to. This does not mean that their lives remain unaltered. When they looked forward to the arrival of relatives on trains from the other side of the border but instead found mutilated remains, they are driven into a wild rage that focusses its attention on members of the other religion, which in itself makes no sense because neither is typecasting a person on the basis of his religious preference a stable mode of identification nor is that person responsible for the atrocities committed across the border by people who happened to kill in the name of the same religion that he practices. Here is an example of Ice-Candy-Mans shift in his perception of a person of the other religion after he has witnessed the arrival of mutilated remains on the train, his glance once again flits over Sher Singh (Sidhwa 149).
The following examples are to show how people from the same region have come to look at each other as enemies: Ice-Candy-Man has acquired an unpleasant swagger and a strange way of looking at Hari and Moti (Sidhwa 154). I lobbed grenades through the windows of
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 115 Hindus and Sikhs Id known all my life! I hated their guts (Sidhwa 156).
We must now look at the second type of natives who feel like aliens in their own land. This is due to the fact that they practise a religious belief that is incompatible with the religious bias of the nation to which their native lands have been annexed to. In the case of the novel IceCandy-Man, we see characters native to Lahore with Hindu and Sikh religious preferences having their lives threatened by their own neighbours. In order to survive, they are forced to leave their homeland for the safety of the new nation across the border. For instance, the Government House gardener utters the heavy-hearted decision that they must leave Lahore since the partition incident has turned a friend against his friend, When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go (Sidhwa 157).
Some characters opt for conversion into another religion to avert the oncoming slaughter. This is an example of how religious preferences are not as deep rooted as ones adherence to ones native region. However, there are examples of violent reactions like the attack of the Sikh gathering in chapter Sixteenth. Regardless of being outnumbered, they are willing to fight to the death for their land.
The refugees from the other side of the border are good examples of the confused population that are trying to cope with the fact that they have left their homelands and are trying to make sense out of the new place that they have come to accommodate. Some of them try to join religious fanatics to lash out at those of the other religion for all the horrors that they have had to witness on their journey: The refugees are
clamouring for revenge!(Sidhwa 156). The other refugees who occupy vacant houses feel afraid, grief-stricken and out of place in the new land:
Months pass before we see our new neighbours. Frightened, dispossessed, they are coping with grief over dead kin and kidnapped womenfolk. Grateful for the roof over their heads and the shelter of walls, our neighbours dwell in shadowed interiors, quietly going about the business of surviving, terrified of being again evicted. (Sidhwa 176)
These are examples from Bapsi Sidhwas novel that portray the effect of a native identity being rooted out by a political decision. In the novel Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh shows the reaction of natives towards the politicians in Delhi who are planning to split the Nation: What do the Gandhi-caps, in Delhi know about the Punjab? (Singh 21).
The line suggests that people living in the capital could never understand the dynamics of ancestral homelands that have existed for centuries like Punjab. In relation to this quote it is necessary to consider the words of Yasmin Khan, the author of The Great Partition, By the spring months of 1947 negotiations had left provincial politicians and their followers far behind. The final settlement outran popular will in these localities (Khan 88).
This section suggests that the plan to divide India did not involve regional establishments and that the valuable inputs of natives of the
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 117 respective regions would have allowed the political leaders of the country to make an informed decision, even if it meant not going ahead with partition.
In another part of the novel, we can identify a situation similar to what we see in Bapsi Sidhwas novel. When it is suggested that the Muslim tenants would have to leave Mano Majra for the safety of Pakistan, Imam Baksh, an elderly Muslim tenant is shown to break down into tears over the predicament that they face,What have we to do with Pakistan? We were born here. So were our ancestors. We have lived amongst you as brothers (Singh 126). A little later, when the Muslim tenants decide to leave the village, Imam Baksh adds another comment,All right if we have to go, we better pack up our bedding and belongings. It will take us more than one night to clear out of homes it has taken our fathers and grandfathers hundreds of years to make (Singh 127). This comment exhibits the same level of dedication that a person has for his native land as did the example from Ice-Candy-Man. In order to understand the dynamics of identity, we need to look into literary theory where the concept of identityhas been under scrutiny for decades. Hans Bertens notices the basic problem with identity as he finds it both in the thoughts of Lacan and Homi Bhabha, As in Lacan, identity is inherently unstable (Bertens 207). This statement suggests that identity is prone to change. The significance of this fact is that when an individual seeks an identity, the pursuit aims at finding it and consequently provides the seeker with a sense of fulfillment, satisfaction and closure. The assumption is that the hunt is over. However, when we consider the instability of identity as projected by literary theorists, the search for stability and the comfort in belonging that an identity presumably has to provide turns out to be a futile pursuit since
it is paradoxical to expect stability in existence from something that alters according to the changing scenario:
However, since the social and personal configuration in which we find ourselves at a given point will inevitably change, identity is not something fixed and stable, it is a process that will never lead to completion. Identity not only is subject to constant change, it can also never be coherent. (Bertens 162)
Thus, it is safe to say that we need to redefine our perspective of identity as a stable entity and come to terms with its inconstant nature. In relation to partition literature, we should infer that policies that might tamper with the natural balance of regional identities, affiliations and sensibilities need to be reconsidered in the light of the fact that the partition incident uprooted native identities and plunged millions of Indian lives into chaos and destruction. This is one truth that partition literature, with its careful study of the psyche of the native, has to teach us. Works Cited Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007. Print. Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy-Man. New Delhi: Penguin, 1988. Print. Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Time Books International, 1989. Print.
Three Kings (1999): An Orientalist Representation

- Morsal Shaif Haidarah* Abstract: Many critics argue that the film, Three Kings (1999), satirizes war. They consider this film as anti-war film. Hagopian (1999) points out that war is hell, but in David O Russells picaresque action comedy-drama, its also hellacious (n. page). Ram Samudrala points out that Three Kings is an effective anti-war film. (Samudralan.page). Michael Frakes points out that that the film addresses mans brutal motivation in war and force us to question the United States involvement in the Persian Gulf (Frankesn.pag) Many other critics point out that the four soldiers go to war against the wish of the American army who do not want the war because of the peace treaty signed between the Iraqi and the American government. In fact, any interpretation of Three Kings (1999) has to be in the light of Edward Saids theory of Orientalism. When applying this theory, the interpretation of the film will change totally. It shows how the film is a pro-war film rather than an anti-war film. It shows how the film provides a complex portrayal of Arabs. It exposes the real face of the Orientalists and their cunning ways of introducing the Orient. The European Orient is seen as exotic and backward. The Orient is conceived as uncivilized humans in need for western attention and reconstruction. In fact the film shows that because the Orient is under Western control, the Orientalist starts Orientalizing it. In the process of orientalization, the Orient remains absent and silent. Key words: Orientalism, imperialism, representation THE FILM, THREE KINGS (1999) was produced in 1999, nine years after the end of Gulf War and four years before the invasion of Iraq. It was directed by David O. Russell staring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze. This film fails to raise the question of
Research Scholar, PhD., Presidency College, Chennai Email: m_haidarah@yahoo.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
why Americans should involve in war rather than it approves the need of the war to continue and attain goals that are beyond what the Americans claim to come for, the liberation of Kuwait to the liberation of Iraq from the tyranny of a despotic ruler, Saddam.
Three Kings is one of Hollywoods anticipatory films that show how Hollywood is a tool in the hands of the politicians to carry out their propaganda. Hollywood films, as part of popular culture, are the most famous and influential films in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. It influences millions of people in the world. American policymakers exploit this industry to pave the way to their colonial tendency in different parts of the world.
Hollywood conveys a partial image of the people who are the future target of the American marines. They are shown as different people who are deviant to American values. Archie Gates (George Clooney) is used to convey this message. At the beginning of the film, he raises questions like, what did we accomplish here? Just tell me what we did? The questions suggest that the American mission that they come for is uncompleted. Then, the film goes on to validate these questions. Gates goes to Iraq.
The Americans, in the film, are welcomed by the Iraqis who think that they come to save them from the miserable conditions that they live in under the control of Saddams army. Troy raises a question as to why the Iraqis fight each other, it is only Gate who explains that, Bush told the people to rise up against Saddam. They thought they would have our support. They dont, know theyre getting slaughtered. Here, Gates criticizes Bush who inspired the Iraqis to stand against
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 121 Saddam during First Gulf War and then signed a peace treaty that will result in the loss of thousands of Iraqis in the hands of the dictator Saddam. Moreover, only after four years of the production of this film the Americans invade Iraq and topple Saddam. Therefore, considering the film as anti-war film is not accurate. The film promotes war and the Iraqis are introduced as helpless and unableto remove Saddam without the help of America. Besides, before producing the film, Russel made an 18 month journey investigating the after math of First Gulf War. After the investigation, he argues that:
When I started investigating the war I only knew the official story that we went to the Middle East and kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But when I looked at it more closely, I saw that Hussein was left in power and George Bush encouraged the Iraqi civilians to rise up against Hussein and said, Well help you do it. And the people did rise up, and we didnt support themand they got massacred by their own army. [] I thought that this would be an interesting backdrop for a story about a band of soldiers who go into this surreal, corrupted Iraqi atmosphere after the war. They think Iraq is littered with the cell phones, luxury cars and booty stolen from rich Kuwait, and they want to steal something for themselves. But situation and that completely they suddenly find a their humanity
confronts
demands
that they re-think what theyre doing
and who they are. [] Almost everything in the film is true. Saddam did steal all the gold from Kuwait and it was missing for a long time. When he had to return it,
some was missing. Many American soldiers in Iraq didnt get to take part in the war there, yet they were called heroes. And many American soldiers were dissatisfied about leaving Saddam in power and seeing him beat up his own people. (qtd. in Mller-Hartmann 5)
Therefore, Russel, who after investigating the achievements of the Americans army during the First Gulf War, finds that they have not achieved their main goal, ie, removing Saddam from power. Therefore, after eight years of the war, in this film, he sends four soldiers to show the worsening conditions of the Iraqis due to as the consequence of the unfinished war in Iraq. This indicates that the film recommends another war to finish what the previous wars could not.
Hence, the films can be considered as part of American popular culture that talks about the Arabs from the western point of view. The Orientalist mind, that the Other who is uncivilized and barbaric and is in need of the self who is civilized and value human life, is meticulously explained throughout the film. Said (1978) points out that the unbroken, all-embracing Western tutelage of an Oriental country leads the West to see themselves as providing for, directing, and sometimes even forcing Egypt's rise from Oriental neglect to its present lonely eminence(35).
In fact, Saids question, How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world?(Said 1978: 15), can include movies as Orientalist works that have the same political vision of the list made in Saids question. Films
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 123 about Arabs also feed on the contrast between the Orient and the Orientalist, the familiar and the strange and the Self and the Other. Three Kings, for example, emphasizes on the duty of the country of freedom, America, to make the other country free too. The view that the Other is in need for American guidance supports the United States political and military intervention in the Middle East.
The film opens in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War. American soldiers celebrate their victory. But had they toppled Saddam, their happiness would have been complete. The Americans check the Iraqi prisoners. They remove their cloths leaving them naked. During the check, Vig finds a rolled piece of paper in the ass of one of the Iraq prisoners. Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), and Private Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) take this map to a tent and attempt to figure out its content. When they are in the tent, Sergeant Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) comes. They hide the map from him, but he already knows that they got a map. They find that the paper is a secret Iraqi map, which divulges the location of a bunker where Iraq has stored stolen gold and treasure from Kuwait. Though there is peace accord signed between the allies and the Iraqi government, they decide to get this gold for themselves. This might result in war between them and the Iraqi soldiers. When they reach Iraq, the Iraqis - men, women and children- are very happy that the American had come to help them. The four Americans find that the Iraqi army persecutes its people.
The Americans find the gold in one of the bunkers. During their search, they find the leader of the uprising against Saddam. They free him. When they come out of the bunkers an additional Iraqi army is sent to the scene. The Iraqi army is not ready to fight the Americans.
But instead they help them to transfer the gold from the bunkers to the van. The Americans get the gold and are about to leave. The Iraqi civilians appeal to the American not to leave. The wife of the Iraqi uprising leader shouts, do not leave, they want to kill us. This irritates one of the Iraqi soldiers who shoots her dead in front of her little girl and helpless husband. The American soldiers have to choose whether to take the gold and run or to help the Iraqis.
The Americans choose to help the Iraqis. They leave the gold and expose their lives to danger in order to satisfy their conscience. They dismount the vans and kill the Iraqi leader and take the Iraqis with them. The Iraqi army bombs them with tear gas. After the incident a small Iraqi girl and a boy run among the mines, but Troy runs after them and saves them; however, the Iraqi army kidnaps him. Sergeant Major Archie Gates asks the help of the leader of the uprising to free their man, but he refuses asking their share of the gold. Gates agrees. Amir Abdullah tells Gates that they took him to a bunker full of republican guard. Then they discuss how they can solve this problem. Amir tells Gates that these guards are afraid only of Saddam. This idea is very useful. It helps them to rescue Troy. They will get good cars and go to these guards as Saddam`s convoy. A car will go before them to tell the republican guards that Saddam comes to kill them because of allowing the Americans to take the gold. This plan succeeds. When they reach there, the republican guards escape believing that Saddam comes to kill them. The Americans free Troy and accompany the Iraqis to cross the Iraqi border to Iran.
The British vision, exemplified by Lawrence, is of the mainstream Orient, of peoples, political organizations, and movements guided and
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 125 held in check by the White Man's expert tutelage; the Orient is "our" Orient, "our" people, "our" dominions. (Said, 1978: 245)
T.E. Lawrence mentioned in the above quotation was an officer British Army. He worked for the British Museum excavating among the Hittite ruins in Iraq. He spent years in the desert developing a familiar knowledge and affection towards the Bedouin tribes in the Arabian Desert. In 1916, the Arabs regarded the participation of the Ottoman Empire in World War I as a chance to rebel and chase the Turks from their land. Grabbing this chance to tease the Turks, the British lent funding to the Arabs through shipments of arms and money, especially when they were defeated by the Turks in Gallipoli. This defeat exposed the Suez Channel to a possible attack. The revolt sizzled however and was by 1916 in danger of collapsing. The British realized that the Arabs need their guidance Lawrence was sent to bring order and direction to the Arab cause. The experience transformed the thoughtful Lawrence into one of the most colourful military figures of the war. For two years, Lawrence and his band of Arab irregulars attacked Turkish strongholds, severed communications, destroyed railways and supported the British regular army in the drive north to Damascus.
The need for Lawrence-like western savior is highly accentuated in the film, Three King (1999). Without Lawrence of Arabia, the barbaric and self-divided Arabs would not have the capability to liberate themselves from the Turks. In the same way, without the American the Iraqis would not have cross the borders and escape the tyranny of Saddams Army. In the film, when the American soldiers reach the bunkers where the gold is possibly hidden, the Iraqis women, men and children shout, they came to save us from Saddam. Iraqi women and children
kiss Vig's feet. He replies, We are here for your protection and safety. Even the soldier says that he loves the United States of freedom LinaKhatib (2006), points out that the penetration of Others land by the Americans can be seen as enlightenment, as the start of civilization and the end of primitiveness (27). She points out that the film, Three kings suggests that the mere presence of the Americans in Iraq brings with it new hope (ibid 27). In fact, the mere presence of the Americans in Iraq also encourages the people to revolt against the soldiers and even cast stones at them.
The primitiveness of the Iraqis is highlighted by comparing the Iraqis to animals. They fight with each other. The authority blows the milk because they want the people to starve. They even eat the food of each other. When the American soldiers give the Iraqis some food and water, one of the American soldiers notices that whatever they give to the children and woman, the men quarrel with them and take it for themselves. This enmity and forest like living in Iraq surprises the American soldier, Troy, who exclaims, What was going on back there major? Civilians spiting on soldiers. Soldiers shooting at civilians (Three Kings).
Hence, the American soldiers go to Iraq in order to get Gold, but they find that the Iraqis are in need for their help. The husbands are held captives in the Iraqi prison leaving the children and the woman starve to death. The Americans get the gold and free some prisoners and decide to leave. The Iraqis scream and plead the Americans not to leave, Dont leave, dont leave. Look, look, they want to kill us. Help, please help. Meanwhile, an Iraqi soldier kills a woman in front of her children and helpless husband. This scene affects the Americans who
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 127 left the gold and fight the Iraqi soldier. Gates decides to carry the Iraqis with them.
Unfortunately, after saving the civilians, the Americans are attacked by the Iraqi soldiers by tear gas. This causes Troy and Vig to lose control of the vans which hit a ground mine. The Humvee and the car overturn. All are safe. Troy has to save two Iraqi children who run across a mine field screaming. Troy chases the children through the brown fog, drops one of the suitcases, catches up to the Girl and scoops her up in his left arm. He runs between land mines after the Boy, who is way ahead. He drops a bag and catches the Boy and has both children under his arms, when suddenly Troy is grabbed from behind with a cord around his neck. He is dragged to an Iraqi jeep. The Iraqis exploit this incident to put conditions on the Americans. They know that they cannot be safe without the Americans help. They want the Americans to help them cross the Iraqi borders to Iran. The Americans accept this and at the end they help them to cross the borders.
The most significant scene that highlights the need of civilized westerner is the scene in the bunker where they find the cars. The Americans, are explaining, instructing and encouraging the Iraqis to fight Saddam. Gates is instigating the Iraqis to stand up and find for themselves and then America will fight with them:
Archie Gates. United. George Bush wants you -- Chief Elgin. To stand up for yourself.Iraqi Soldier. George Bush.Archie Gates. He wants you --Chief Elgin. You.Archie Gates. Make the fight for freedom on your
own.Chief Elgin. Oh, yes, you can. Vig. Go, baby, go. Archie Gates. Then America will follow.
Said in his book, Orientalism (1978) explains how the Arabs in western culture are portrayed as submissive and the West as wise people who are always questioning. The Arabs are not trying to better themselves. Politically, they are submissive to their rulers. Economically, they live in poor conditions and have no desire to work and make use of nature. The message here is that it isthe Americans duty to teach them democracy and make use of their raw materials and all this will be for their good.
Historically, for the West, the Eastern people are unchangeable, subservient and ruled by minority. In ancient times, specifically, before the wars between the Greeks and the Persians around 490 B.C.E., before this date Padgen argues that Herodotus discussed that the Persians from the East once discussed the topic of democracy but, this debate failed and despotism triumphed at the end. Padgen argues that Herodotus asserted that the Persians refused democracy because they were afraid to ape the West. This shows that the westerners think that the obstinacy of the Muslims is hereditary from their Eastern past. In fact, many of the negative images of Arabs and Muslims that are seen today were transformed during the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment from an old clash between West and East, redirected against Islam during its appearance and then against the Ottoman Empire and passed on to the Muslim World later. Herodotus gave some qualities or traits for the Persians that crippled them from being democratic. These are the same traits attributed to Muslims in modern days.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 129 Currently, Muslims are accused of adhering to a religion that cripples them from embracing modernity. Another inherited negative stereotype of Islam which is linked to the Greeks portrayal of the Persians is that Muslims believe that they are ordained and thus, always attribute their failure to Destiny. Padgen points out that Herodotus narrates that at the end of the battle of Plataea, the Persian commander was invited to extricate what was left from the Persian army from the Greece. At this time, the Thebans, who supported the Persians in this conflict, invited the commander of the Persian army to the banquet. Padgen argues that Herodotus asserts that the dinner attended by Thersander, a Greek man, who told him that during the course of the dinner, the Persian commander told the Greeks that most of the Persians who are in the banquet will die due to the adventure that surround the mission attribute to them. The Greek told Herodotus that when the commander was asked that if he is sure of this, then he should retreat. It was shocking for the Greek when the commander replied, my friend what God has ordained no one can by any means prevented. Many of us know what I have said is true; yet we are constrained by necessity; we continued to take orders from our commander (qtd. in Padgen 18).
The sharp contrast made between the Persians and the Greeks is conspicuously reflected in the film as contrast between the Americans and the Iraqi soldiers. This comparison highlights the image of the Arabs as submissive, sly and deceptive whereas the Self is courageous, curious, faithful and honest. They are not only submissive to the ruler, but to the Americans as well. Four American soldiers come into Iraq. They scare, kill and defeat hundreds of Iraqi soldiers. The American soldiers come to retrieve the gold that the Iraqis have taken from Iraq. When they reach, the American flag moves. They jump from the Hum-
vee. Troy and Chief Elgin leap from the Humvee with pistols drawn and their free hands held up in a 'halt' sign. The two Iraqi guards look stunned as Troy and Chief Elgin simply take their machine guns and put the Iraqis face down on the ground. Troy and Chief Elgin pull out plastic twist handcuffs in order to chain the Iraqi soldiers. They are already submissive to the Americans; they never attempt to resist. The other Iraqi soldiers shiver. They are overwhelmed by fear as they raise their hands in the air. More Iraqi soldiers came from inside the bunkers raising their hands up. The Americans effortlessly make their way inside the bunkers.
Another scene that shows the brutality, submissiveness and ungratefulness of the Iraqi soldiers and the bravery and goodness of the Americans is when the Americans come from the wrong bunker where the Iraqi soldier guides them to, they come back and get the bunker. They get the gold. In front of the Iraqi soldiers, they secure a van. And also get these soldiers to load the bags into the van. Though these soldiers are completely submissive to the Americans and the ruler, they are very cruel to their own people. They torture them, and even kill them for any silly reason. After helping the Americans in loading the gold, they kill a lady in front of her husband and daughter. This scene disturbs the American leader who realizes that the other Iraqis, including the daughter and the husband of the murdered woman are under threat. Therefore, he decides to help them. He easily manages to kill the enemy and assist the civilians.
Another common theme in Orientalist works is the submissiveness to a despotic. The ruler has an absolute power. He can do anything without being questioned. According to Padgen, the laws that exist in
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 131 Oriental despotisms are few and unchanging, since "when you instruct a beast, you take care not to let him change masters, training, or gait; you stamp his brain with two or three impulses and no more "(ibid 348). In this film, the Americans go without the wish of their leaders, but the laws are the thing that they are afraid of. They know that their leaders are incapable of imposing severe punishment on them only through proper channels. These channels alsoallow them to defend themselves. So their punishment will come only from the court. On the other hand, the Iraqis are haunted with the fear of Saddam. Saddam has the right to kill and punish without questioning. So when the Americans take the gold and go, one of the leaders comes and blames the soldier who is in charge of the bunker, Are you crazy? Saddam is going to kill you.
Hence, the fear of the despotic is exploited well by the Americans. When the Americans lose one of their friends, they are told that he is taken to Oasis bunker guarded by much republican guard. Then the American Sergeant asks what are these soldiers afraid of? The leader of the uprising replies that they are afraid only of Saddam. Then, the Americans contrive a plan that will help them to retrieve their friend without too much fighting. They have to collect some cars and go to these guards in procession as that of Saddam. One car will go to the guards few minutes before they reach the bunker and tell the guard that Saddam is coming to kill them all because they let the Americans take the gold.
This plan works very well. When the messenger tells the guards about Saddams arrival, they are petrified. One of the guards cannot even have a bite from the bar of chocolate that he holds. It is only few
seconds that they see the procession which they think to be of Saddam. They throw the guns and everything and run for their lives.
The image of the Arab woman also is fabricated to sustain western domination of the Other. The westerners asserted that their mission (colonization) in the East is only to civilize the other and improve the status of their women who is silent, helpless and male-dependent. The same image of woman in western culture is reproduced in the American popular culture. Amira Jarmakani (2008), points out that:
As with many stereotypes of ethnic others, the predominant images of Arab women in U.S. popular culture lie at two opposite poles: Arab women are either represented as erotic, romanticized, magical, and sexualized, as with most images of belly dancer or harem girls, or they are portrayed as helpless, silent, secluded and male dominated as in representations of the veiled women or harem slaves. It benefits the creation and propagation of these images to make them appear to be as different, and, indeed, as opposite as possible. (Jarmakani 4)
In fact, this film belongs to the period after the 1948. The predominant image of the woman in this period is either silent or a terrorist- as explained in Chapter Three. The Arab woman here is shown as silent and marginalized.
The image of the Arab woman in the film is juxtaposed with the image of the American woman. The American women are free and independent whereas, the Arab women are secluded and dependent on
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 133 man. In the film, the Arab woman has no voice except that of the wife of the Iraqi uprising leader who pleads in front of all the males to the Americans to help them. But this voice is shut for ever with a bullet from the male after making this appeal publically. The female sound is heard once towards the end of the film which is a special sound for happiness that the Arab woman usually produces in marriages or when they welcome dear once. Here, they produce the sound to welcome the Americans who come to help them. Vig produces the same sound when one of the Iraqis say, No my friend! The men do not do that. Only woman. The association of this sound to woman seems very strange to the Vig, Why is that, Chief Elgin clarifies Vig doubts because it is their custom. On the other hand, the American woman is shown as free and independent. She works as a journalist. Her voice reaches every place in the world.
Orientals or Arabs are thereafter shown to be naive, lazy and waiting for our help. They are singularly deficient in the logical faculty (38). The theme of irrationality and primitiveness emerge from a binary opposition of the rational developed Westerner verses irrational and primitive Orient. This theme is elaborated by Said in his book Orientalism. Of course there must be a political message. The message of this contrast is that Arabs or the Orient is uncontrolled and unreasonable, so the Americans must control them.
The film opens with a vast barren desert in which an American soldierbefore killing an Iraqi- shouts to his friends whether to kill an Iraqi in distance or not:
Troy: Are we shooting?
The officer: What? Troy. Are we shooting people or what? The officer: Are we shooting? Troy: That is what Im asking you? The officer. What is the answer? Troy: I do not know the answer? That is what Im trying to find outI think the guy has weaponyes he does.
This dialogue presents Arabs as a source of threat. The armed Iraqi is a threat to the very existence of the Americans. The Arabs are dangerous, stupid, and irrational. Since they use whatever lays on their hands for destruction, they must be controlled. This message is only to support U.S. foreign policy that Arabs must not get the weapons of mass destruction. The reason, as it has been shown in the films is that they will use them madly and irrationally for destruction. Hence, this dialogue is a keynote to the whole film. The Arabs are shown as a product of bloody civilization. They are not like Americans. The Americans have patience and control. They can control themselves just opposite to the angry and bloody Arabs.
Furthermore, the Arabs are introduced as subhuman. The dialogue in the tent, after discovering the map at the ass of the Iraqi, is racial and contains stereotypes against Arabs. When Vig describes Arabs as dune coon, Chief Elgin, an Africa American objects and Troy calms him down explaining that he is not educated:
Troy. He's got no high school, man, he's from a group home in Jackson -Chief Elgin. I don't give a shit if he's from Johannesburg. I don't want to hear dune coon or sand nigger from him or anybody.Vig. Captain uses those terms.Troy. The point is, Conrad, 'towel head' and
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 135 'camel jockey' are perfectly good substitutes.Chief Elgin. Exactly. (Three Kings)
Moreover, the theme of Arabs as uncivilized primitive beings who are incapable of embracing modernity is clear when an American soldier discovers the map of the whereabouts of the bunkers where the Kuwaiti stolen gold in. They find it in an Iraqis ass. In the age of technology, the Arabs do not have minds to think of a more sophisticated way of hiding the letter. Hence, as long as the Other is primitive, this means that we are modern and sophisticated. Said (1978) argues that the orientalist thinks that:
The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. (Said 1978; 38)
In the tent also, the contrast between the rational westerner and the primitive is established. Unlike the Arabs who could not hide the map, the American officer, Sergeant Gates, takes the map and puts some of alcohol on it, exposes it to the light. He puts it on the table, turns the light off and clicks on an infra-red flashlight and a completely different map appears in green markers.
The irrationality of the Iraqis is explored further when the Americans go to Iraq for gold. They are welcomed by the Iraqis, but unfortunately the Americans come for gold and once they get the gold, they are about leave. An Iraqi woman pleads the Americans for help. This teases the Iraqi army leader who asks one of the soldier to shoot her. Therefore, the rationality of the Iraqi soldier is questioned here. How can a perfect human being kill another human without reason? The viewer is left for a while watching what will be the reaction of the American to this brutal and illogical act of the soldier. Whether the values of kindness and respect of life that is fundamental traits of Americans will triumph or the selfishness and love for many will triumph. Sergeant Major Archie Gates dismounts the loaded with gold track. He says, We can help these people, then we will be on our way. The Americans killed the Iraqi soldiers and carried the people in the Humvee.
The other contrast is made between the American soldiers and the Iraqi civilians. The Americans soldiers are not selfish. They are good and honest. Though they come for gold, the goodness of their nature triumphs. They are not greedy. Dramatically, the Arabs are turned to be greedy and irrational. They venture the gold and their life in order to save the Iraqi civilians who are oppressed by their authorities. In the process of helping them, they lose one of their friends Troy who was captured by the Iraqi soldiers. Now they need the help of the Iraqis. All they want is a vehicle. The leader of the uprising whose life was saved by the Americans is now putting conditions. He wants fifteen bags from the gold to help them. The Iraqis want our help to free them, but they are not ready to help themselves. They are greedy. In another bunker, the Iraqis welcome the Americans. They shout, welcome America, welcome America or America! Welcome, but when they ask them to
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 137 give them cars to fight Saddam, they refuse. Archie Gates asks the Iraqi Listen. We use these cars to go fight Saddam soldiers. The Iraqi looks at Chief Elgin and laughs. What's so funny? Cannot take.
Thus, the film shares the same feature of other Orientalist piece of writing. It carries on reflecting the same image of Arabs as uncivilized barbaric and subhuman, blaming Islam for being the source of their backwardness and fanaticism. It is an extension to the policy of the American government. It creates bad, hostile, Arabic character who is a threat to the existence of the American nation in order to justify the over use of arms and power to control this threat. In fact, Three Kings introduces the Arabs as a challenge to American pride. They are boisterous and must be refined, they are immoral, crooked, traitors and cowards whereas the American are absolutely self-righteous, straightforward, honest and courageous.
Works Cited
Curtis, Michael. Orientalism and Islam European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Print Farra, Narmeen. Arabs and the Media. Journal of Media Psychology. Vol. 2 (Spring 1996).Web. 23 March 2010. Frakes, Michael. Film Review: Three Kings. The Tech Online. 119. 49 (1999): n.pag. Web. 23 December 2011. Hagopian, Kevin. Three kings. New York State Writers Institute. New York: New York State University, 1999. Web. 15 December 2011. Jarmakani, Amira. Imagining Arab Womanhood: the Cultural Mythology of
Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancer in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Jordan, Glenn & Chris Weedon. Literature into Culture: Cultural Studies after Leavis. Ed. Patricia Waugh. New York: OUP, 2006. Print. Kamalipour, Yahyar R. The U.S. Media and the Middle East: Image and Perception. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Print. Khatib, Lina. Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinema of Hol lywood and the Arab World. London and New York: I.B Tauris and Co. Ltd., 2006. Print. Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. New York: CUP, 2009. Print. McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S Interest in the Middle East since 1945. 2001. Berkeley, Los Angles and London: University of California Press, 2005. Print. Mller-Hartmann, A. 2nd Gulf War: Three Kings. 7 March 2006. Seminar on America at War. Heidelberg: School of Education Heidelbege. Web. 20 December 2010. Print. Padgen, Anthony. Worlds at War: The 2,500- year Struggling between East and West. New York: Random House, 2008. Print. Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Define How We See the Rest of the World. 1981. NY: Vintage Books, 1997. Print. ---. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978. Print.
Samudrala, Ram. Three Kings. Movie ram-blings. Web. 13 Dec. 2011 Shaheen, Jack G. Arab and Muslim stereotyping in American Popular Culture." www.ascribed.com. Georgetown University Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Jan 1997. Web. 27 March 2010. ---. Reel BadArabs: Hollywood Vilifies a People. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2001. Print.
New Aestheticism: An Angel against Theory as Hermeneutics of Suspicion

-Dr. M. Elangovan* Abstract: This article proposes to analyse the reliability of theory is an illusion. The aesthetic mode of text is linked with a three way connection where the operation, the medium and the effect of text are functionally engaged. The ontological basis of a literary text is based on its ability to change fragmentism into a kind of holism, and argues that, the aesthetic consideration should be more important than theoretical considerations, in the evaluation of a text. Key words: New Aestheticism, theory, ideology WE ARE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT THEORY as a tool is very important to analyse the literary text as a cognizant one. Literary texts are structurally analysed, theoretically explained and philosophically approached. But what happens in the analysis is that the text becomes a foreground of many imposed ideas which are irrelevant to its existence. The existential reason for the literary text becomes superficial in the content of an extrinsic value which is given from an outside authority.
The outside authority who is supposed to have a sound theoretical knowledge is turned to a fact-finding machine applying theory as a tool. What happens in the application of such a theory is that the literary text is relegated to a marginal level where theory becomes more important than the text. The tool masters the text in an ideological situation. The rift between the tool and the text widens in the contextual frame work.
* Assistant Professor of English, Thiagarajar College, Madurai. Email: fusion.605@gmail.com
2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
It is a popular belief that we are living in an age of theory. The theoretical considerations which are applied to text as functional modes nullify for aesthetic considerations of the literary text. The reader is placed as a medium between the text and the analysis. Through the reader go all types of ideological tolls in order to make the literary text a reliable source of information.
However, the reliability of theory is an illusion. The aesthetic mode of text is linked with a three way connection where the operation, the medium and the effect of text are functionally engaged. The ontological basis of literary text is based on its ability to change fragmentism into a kind of holism. This approach to literary text as a holistic object is to see the literary object as it is to give an Arnoldian phraseology.
It is a popular belief that a systematic approach to literature with theoretical background will throw some light on the subtleties of literary texts. Peter Barry in his introduction to Beginning Theory asserts that the technique which is known as SQ3R will definitely give a systematic approach to reading literature. He says that survey makes the reader to get first hand information about the text. The reader gets a concentrated and focused view on the opening and the closing parts of the text. This method gives a scope and nature of argument regarding the reading of the text. In the second step Barry emphasises that questions related to the text will definitely will bring out the hidden parts of the text. In this stage, the reader becomes an active reader and he transforms himself from a passive condition where intricacies of the text go into him. At this stage his reading becomes a purposeful one.
In the third stage, which is known as reading stage, the whole text is
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 141 taken as a play ground of various ideological systems. The key points and the difficult areas are remembered. The active participation of the reader at this stage is enhanced and even a minimal active participation will surely give an aesthetic and ideological centre for the reader. Then in the fourth stage, the process of recalling takes place. The summary of the text is remembered and reader finds out answers for the questions he has raised in the second stage. Clarifications are arrived at. Some concrete responses are recorded and the reading process becomes a useful one. The pragmatic approach to the text reminds a fulfilled one. In the last stage, the process of review takes place. In this stage, there is an interval between the reading process and the review process. Experiments are done in this stage. The reader refers back to the ideas he has gained; reminds himself of the questions that he has raised in the reading process.
The above mentioned methodology of reading the text becomes useful when there is a close reading of the text. However, what happens in the theoretical approach to the literary text is that the reader has a strong ideological background and tries to look in for the representation of these ideologies. The text becomes an elusive reality and the reader loses his aesthetic centre. The loss of aesthetic centre makes the readers attempt null and void. Therefore, aesthetical consideration should become more important than theory.
The old aestheticism as a movement considered the fixation of the nature of art to be a prime function. In order to achieve this end, it gave many definitions to art, though the definitions continuously change from Hegel to Adorno. The Romantics highlight aestheticism as an end of criticism. They looked at it as a philosophy of art. Throughout the
nineteenth century, aestheticism gained its popularity and dominance by giving extended speculations about art. It had a systematic exposition to the issues of art.
As a philosophical discipline, aestheticism slipped into metaphysics and ethics. Its prime aim was to see art in relation to its writing system. Hegel had two prime ideas with him. By the first idea, he studied how the spirit moved on its way to self-consciousness and by the second way, he analysed how art provided the sensuous appearance of the idea.
Aestheticism is a study of representation; it conceives art as a medium wherein the truth about this world is represented. The popular conviction of aestheticism is that it believes that art is knowable. It cannot consider art other than, except art for arts sake. Art, according to aestheticism, serves as an indicator.
According to Adorno, a genuine work of art contains a kind of rift in it. The rift indicates the gap between the work and the world from which it has originated. Adornos view limits the concept of beauty to the world of nature and it also suggests that the work of art represents the non-existence and illusory reality. This is the view which takes aestheticism to a metaphysical level.
The metaphysical level of aestheticism has taken art to a highest possible human achievement. And New Aestheticism, after the appearance of so many theories, is a new emergent movement. This New Aestheticism is the result of many philosophical arguments about aestheticism.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 143 According to New Aestheticism, specialty and particularity are the two essentials of any literary work. It considers that there should be a dialogue with the text and one need not get a mastery over the text. The text is only a part of a continuing debate and the debate is not yet over. The debate continues within the text and within the reader.
New Aestheticism advocates that the text should be viewed as a representation of any fixed position and it believes that there is no place for any pre-determined ideas in literary texts. It is a reactionary movement against many literary theories which gained prominence form 1970s. Most of these theories challenged and denied the authority of the literary text. For example, for the Marxist critics, literature is an expression of social forces; for the psychoanalytic critic, it is the voice of the self, for the post-structuralist, it is an expression of language itself. Almost all these theories strongly believe that the writers have a hidden agenda and writers mean more than what they say.
The practices of theoretical formulations do not allow literature to speak for themselves; in fact, they make literature to become an object spoken off. Various combinations of social, psychic and linguistic forces make the literary object as a spoken off object. They think that the critics know better than the writer.
Literature, in this context, has lost its autonomy, authority and strangeness. Theorists and critics stop the flow of literature, though it appears good with its function. They think that something is hidden behind the text. They want to see whether literature stands for the oppressed; for the idea of equality and for the idea of any social cause. There is a kind of mistrust against the writer. The critics become a kind
of thought-polite. They watch the secret movements of both the writers and the texts. Paul Ricoeur calls this mistrust as heremeneutics of suspicion. He defines it as:
a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text. The purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those interests. (Brown 28)
Since the defeat of the liberal humanists, critics and theories have reigned of literary text is disregarded. It is believed that the literary text is turned into an object of crime where literary investigation takes place. This literary investigation is historical.
Feminists see the issues of gender and sexism out of this investigation; post-colonialists look out for Orientalism; deconstructionists go in for logocentricism and so on. New aestheticism insists on the fact that literature should assert itself the differences among the literary texts should be accepted and recognized. They should not be viewed as stereotypes having the representative qualities of anyone of the social theories.
All theories should accept the view that literature has its own differences, alterity and particularity. If theory recognizes these characteristics in all spheres, why cant it see these things in literature? Literature should be viewed as a whole. It is not a fragmentary entity having its own fragmentary theoretical formulations.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 145 Since 2000, new aestheticism has established use it. It has fought back authority of theory for which has ruled over entire scene of the last thirty years. The rule of investigation is over. Theory as a hermeneutics of suspicion is over. The re-assertion of literature takes one to the issue of close-reading of the best of the yester years. One can care to the conclusion that new aestheticism does not take one to the founding principles of I.A. Richards and William Empson.
The re-readings of the literary texts by most of the literary theories are based on the assumption that their readings are permanent and decisive. Their re-readings are only open-ended readings. The theorists have read against themselves. New aestheticism is actually a reversal of the reversal wherein it has gone against theories.
In its practical session, new aestheticism makes many interventions with the text. It tries to go balks to the days old aestheticism which was expressed through the works of A.C. Swinburne, D.G. Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. The art for arts sake movement which asserted the autonomy of art and literature is emphasized through new aestheticism.
New aestheticism expresses its desire to re-instate the literary texts as the centre of literary studies. It wants to see literature in its totalized form. The process of thought-policing and hermeneutics of suspicion is opposed in its way.
It is said that new aestheticism can be viewed in many ways. In the first way it can be considered to be a way to the revival of the old aestheticism of the nineteenth century and it can be studied as a re-
opening about the philosophy of Kant and Hegal. It can also be regarded as a kind of ethical criticism which is a dialogue between the reader and the text. Finally, it can be viewed as a new form of formalism foregrounding the formal features of the text.
Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Viva Books: New Delhi. 2011. Print. Brown, Erica. Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Ju daism. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory. Blackwell Publishing: USA. 2006. Print. Johnson. R.V. Aestheticism: The Critical Idiom. Ed. John. D. Jump. Great Britain: Methuenol co Ltd, 1969. Print.
Womanhood beyond the Devi1 Syndrome: A Critical Analysis of Deepa Mehtas Fire
- Shweta Kushal* & Evangeline Manickam**
Abstract: The concept of the feminine mystique (Friedan) continues to hold sway on the imagination of Indian societies even today. The construction of the ideal woman as the perfect housewife, whose only ambitions are motherhood and fulfilling her duty to her husband dictates the manner in which women have formulated their self through generations. Even in modern day India, women are more attuned to the needs of the family than their own and learn to conduct themselves in accordance with the same. Deepa Mehtas controversial feature film Fire challenges this structure and proposes an alternate means of self-articulation. The present paper attempts to study Fire as a quintessential rebellion against the dominant discourses that construct femininity in Indian culture. It further delineates the manner in which the narrative overthrows the rhetoric of the ideal woman, promoted through legends such as the Devi Sita myth in the Ramayana, and prioritises desire as the base of womanhood. Through this attempt, the paper argues that the narrative advocates self-expression that is not only non-conformist in nature but also exposes the controlling nature of societal norms. Key words: Womens narratives, Ideal woman, Femininity, Culture, Patriarchy WHEN FIRE WAS FIRST RELEASED IN INDIA, it sparked off controversies and responses so intense that it had to be withdrawn from many theatres across the country even though the Indian censor board had cleared the movie without any cuts. This is because the basic narrative
* Research Scholar, IIT Madras ** Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras Email: shweta.kushal@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
of Fire challenges the patriarchal structure of Indian society. Deepa Mehta, through Fire, completely overturns male supremacy and the sacred institution of marriage to reveal discontent, dissatisfaction, life without happiness and personal gratification for the women involved. The film looks at the dominant discourses that go into the construction of the ideal woman, especially through the story of the perfect wife Devi Sita in the Ramayana, and exposes these discourses as being controlling, inhibiting and servile. The text subverts these meta-narratives and creates a space for the articulation of difference and also for the formulation of an identity that primes this difference. This paper focusses on the narrative aspect of the feature film and treats it as a text. The technical aspects like montage and shot angles are discussed only when they have a direct contribution to or impact on narrative progression.
The story revolves around two female protagonists, Radha and Sita, who are married to two brothers, Ashok and Jatin respectively. At the beginning of the story, Radha and Ashok have been married for years while Sita and Jatin are newly married.Radha is the docile, obedient and long-suffering wife of Jatins older brother Ashok and tends to the needs of all the members of the family, including the invalid mother-inlaw Biji. Sita, on the other hand, is expected to provide the family with the much wanted offspring that the older daughter-in-law was unable to produce. They both have their roles cut out for them, as caregivers and as the cradle of a new generation to propagate the genetic code of the family. However, as the narrative progresses, they find love, sexual satisfaction and happiness with each other. As they claim their bodies through an acceptance of sexuality, they overthrow the norm of a heterosexual relationship as the only valid life choice for themselves.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 149 The movie is replete with references to cultural paradigms and time and again reminds the viewer of the concept of the ideal Indian woman. The narrative introduces the concept of a devoted wife through the story of Karva Chauth2. It is the tale of a devoted queen who spent a year taking out pine needles from her husbands body but was distracted by the maid when the last two needles on the eyes were left. In her absence, the maidservant removed these needles and was rewarded by the King for her supposed devotion as he thought that she had persevered through the year, while the queen was demoted to a maid. The queen was then advised by a holy man to observe a fast from dawn till moon rise without food and drink in order to break the spell. She did the same and after moonrise, the King realised the mistake he had made and restored the previous order (Mehta 44: 15-47: 10). According to Mundu, the servant of the house, she is a true Indian woman as she upholds the virtues of sacrifice to prove her devotion to her husband. This larger than life construct governs the lives of these women, through the insidious workings of tradition represented by their silent mother-in-law, Biji, who acts as the watchful eye of tradition over the two women. Even though she cannot speak, the ringing of her bell is like the toll of duty that the two women must observe. Moreover, there is another aspect of tradition that lives inside the protagonists. When Radhatells Sita that she is not obliged to observe Karva Chauth fast, Sita responds, My mother would kill me. And Biji? She would never stop ringing the bell. Isnt it amazing? We are so bound by customs and traditions. Somebody just has to press my button, this button marked tradition and I start responding like a trained monkey (Mehta41:4342:17). Apart from external markers of tradition, there are also internal checks that control the women from straying off the accepted path. As Freund and McGuire point out in Health, Illness and the Social Body:
Internalized forms of control, such as individual conscience, are far more subtle and effective means of assuring uniformity. The standards by which persons learn to measure themselves are another way in which society uses the social self as a means of control (8).
However, dissension against both internal and external control begins to set in early in the narrative. Commenting on the Karva Chauth story, Sita says, I guess the queen just couldnt leave her husband, could she? However, when Radha tells Sita the moral of the story, So now you know why we fast? To prove how loyal and devoted we are to our husbands, Sita responds with What a wimp? I mean the queen. And as for the king, I think he is a real jerk (Mehta 45:47-47:21). Sitas outspokenness and unconventional attitude make her the agent of liberation. As a result, Radha is able to give her opinion, I dont know. She didnt have many choices. This is said with a pointed glance at Sitaand Sitarises to the bait with, I am so sick of all this devotion. We can find choices (Mehta 47:35-47:55). This is the first instance when the two women express a desire for alternatives to their meaningless existence.
The most poignant representation of cultural paradigms and the ideal state of womanhood is achieved through the delineation of the Devi Sita story in the Ramayana through the Rama Lila3.The narrative of the Rama Lila progresses such that it is able to create pathos and empathy for Devi Sita. When asked to prepare for the Agni Pariksha, Devi Sita asks Rama, Mere Swami hua kya kasoor? Kyon karte ho daasi ko door? My Lord Rama! What has your Sita done to deserve this? Why do you distance me so and test my purity? Rama replies that he is aware of her purity but it is his duty to put her through the test of fire. To this
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 151 she responds, Swami! Jo bhi hai marzi tumhari, le lo agni pariksha humari My Lord, God Rama! Your wish is my command. She walks into the fire requesting the Lord of Fire to turn her to ashes if she is guilty. It is nothing short of a miracle that she walks out unscathed. Nevertheless, she still has to be sent into exile and left in the forest (Mehta1:00:001:03:50). If a woman such as Devi Sita, who is devoted and pure, is meted out such treatment there is no hope for other women who cannot even dream to match up to this lofty ideal. She is the ultimate Indian woman and her example is what all women must aspire to. The fact that at the end of the Rama Lila, the spiritual guru for Ashok, Swamijisays, Poor Ram! highlights that the sympathies of the patriarchal structure lie with Rama. According to Swamiji, Rama has had to make tough choices because of the position that his wife has put him in. Without her, there would be no dilemma in his life. The wife is a lesser being and should not have put her husband in this position, in spite of the fact that she had no control over her abduction by Ravana. The graphic representation of the Devi Sita myth makes this unfair power equation more evident.
The narratorial introduction of these ideals and myths serves the purpose of providing a context of duty, service and self-sacrifice in reference to which the self of the two protagonists is constructed. Feminists have argued over the years that patriarchy as a system has been formed to dominate women in order to curb, control and regulate their sexuality to assure authenticity of lineage. Shulamith Firestone argues in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution that a good wife and mother was an asexual woman, her sexuality denied in order to ensure faithfulness to her husband and the paternity of the offspring (195). The only individual who can authenticate the claim of a father is
a mother and if she were promiscuous, this claim could be challenged. Patriarchy, therefore, builds up a stereotype of the docile, loyal, unsexed woman or daughter or wife whose only manifestation of being a woman is motherhood and any expression of sexual desire is labelled as slutty. Anne Summers in Damned Whores and Gods Police observes:
It is conveniently forgotten that married women must have sexual intercourse in order to reproduce: a general puritanism has managed to convince itself that mothers are not sexual creatures and female sexuality is either denied or relegated entirely to the Damned Whore stereotype (153).
She has to be the epitome of sublimated self in order to live up to the expectations that patriarchal society has of her. She should live without any sexual manifestations of desire in order to fulfil the ideals of womanhood.
In the beginning of the text, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are clearly demarcated, but as the narrative progresses the protagonists provide a perspective that forces the audience to acknowledge the presence of desire as the basis of human life. The protagonists question the hegemony of heterosexuality and create a self that is predicated on desire and mutual happiness. Fire rejects the concept of the ideal woman and opens up an avenue in which the need for male appreciation and acceptance is also rejected. The two women are able to slowly and steadily shed the shackles of tradition that bind them to their duty as wives and are able to fulfil their duty to themselves as women and as sentient and sensitive beings. The exchange between Ashok and Radha after he
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 153 discovers Radhas and Sitas relationship highlights the awareness of desire and personal happiness that Radha has achieved. Ashok tells her, Look Radha, what I saw in the bedroom is a sin in the eyes of God and man. Maybe Swamiji can help you, help us. Desire brings ruin, I know that. Radhas response to this comes as a shock to Ashok:
Brings ruin! Does it Ashok? You know that without desire I was dead. Without desire there is no point in living and you know what else? I desire to live. I desire Sita, I desire her warmth, her compassion, her body. I desire to live again. If you want to control desire, ask for Swamijis help, not mine!
Ashoks flabbergasted and outraged response in which he calls her names and screams at her, What kind of wife have you become? What kind of woman are you? You should be touching my feet and asking me to forgive you. Touch my feet! I said do it! Touch my feet! (Mehta 1:37:34-1:40:50) has very little impact on Radha as she leaves him in the hope of leading a more fulfilling life with Sita. Radha makes it very clear that she is happy when she is loved like a woman and desired for her body, her beauty and her warmth, instead of just being in an asexual relationship with her husband in order to fulfil her duty. This is her preference and she is making this choice out of a conscious desire to live. Both the protagonists, through each other, are able to liberate themselves from a womanhood that turns them into desexed, servile beings devoid of all agency, but instead become fully aware, sexually conscious individuals who choose to reject male subordination for female companionship. Deepa Mehta favours the idea of a wholesome sexually satisfying relationship between two women over a normal
heterosexual dissatisfied relationship. While the end of the narrative where Radhas sari catches fire as her husband nonchalantly looks on is reminiscent of Devi Sitas Agni Pariksha. It also subverts the myth of the ideal woman who sacrifices everything for the appreciation of her husband. Instead of proving her worth to her husband, this trial by fire frees Radha from the shackles of tradition, convention and duty and purifies her to pursue a fulfilling and satisfying relationship. With the introduction of the proverbial test by fire in the end, Deepa Mehta draws a parallel between the Devi Sitas Agni Pariksha, which was a penance and a sacrifice and the completely opposite nature of Radhas trial by fire which liberates and frees her to live a happier life. Through this remarkable trope, Deepa Mehta debunks the woman as Devi concept that all the myths construct and takes a stand that prizes personal happiness over social conventions. This perspective questions the celebrated virtues of duty and self-sacrifice of a woman for her husband and for the general good of society. It highlights the importance of a self that is negotiated independent of the constructs of a perfect wife or mother and is articulated in terms of womanhood rather than selfdefinition in the form of a role. It challenges the discourse of conformity and emphasises the misery it brings to the lives of the women involved.
The construction of womanhood through the Devi rhetoric creates a uni-dimensional expression of self that focusses on the purity and the divinity of the woman. Through Fire, Deepa Mehta challenges this dominant discourse of culture and tradition by highlighting it as a means of immense control over the women in the community. Her narrative studies and showcases the various levels at which tradition works in order to exercise dominance over the women of the community and provides alternatives to overthrow this dominance. Fire rejects these
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 155 ideals to claim the body as part of femininity and female identity. In its assertion of self, it celebrates the body as the seat of desire. The pleasure that the protagonists find with each other becomes the foundation of a self-construction that is not bound by social conventions or stale morality. The text advocates a definite ownership of the body and sexuality instead of a negation of these for a lofty ideal. It discards the desexed, docile and devoted wife ideal that Devi Sita represents and prioritises womanhood that revels in its sexuality. Desire then stops being the root of all evil and becomes the principle of life itself. In Fire, Deepa Mehta has created a powerful narrative that indulges in the construction of identity through difference and presents an alternative narrative to the dominant discourses of the woman as Devi and the abnegation of self it promotes. She demystifies the feminine mystique (Friedan) to create visibility for the female self that is predicated on being a woman with an awareness of womanhood.
Notes:
1. Devi essentially means the divine or the Goddess. She is the consort of the male God and the perfect wife. In the context of the legend of the Ramayana, Devi Sita represents forbearance, wifely devotion and chastity and is the ultimate ideal woman.
2. Karva Chauth is an annual one-day fast observed by Hindu and some Sikhmarried women in Northern parts of India.They observe the fast from sunrise to moonrise in order to pray for the safety and longevity of their husbands. Karva Chauth is celebrated in the northern states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Indian Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It falls on the fourth
day after the full moon, in the Hindu lunisolar calendar month of Kartik, following the Autumnal Equinox.
3. Rama Lila is a cultural presentation of the story of the Ramayanaon stage. It is a dramatic folk re-enactment of the life of Lord Rama as described in the Hindu religious epic, the Ramayana. A tradition that originates from the Indian subcontinent, the play is staged annually often over ten or more successive nights, during the auspicious period preceding the Dussehra festival. The performances are timed to culminate on the festival day of Dussehra that commemorates the victory of Lord Rama over demon king Ravana.
Works Cited
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Paladin: London, 1972. Print. Freund, P. E. S., and M.B. McGuire. Health, Illness, and the Social Body: A Critical Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991. Print. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Print Mehta, Deepa, dir. Fire. Kaleidoscope Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., 1996. Print. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and Gods Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Allen Lane, Ringwood: Victoria, 1975. Print.
Creating a Dialogic Space: A Bakhtinian Reading of Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things
Jubimol, K. G* Abstract: The unfair and destructive dualisms-male/female, touchable/untouchable, high class/low class, rich/poor and culture/natureexisting in Indian society disclose the bitter realities of India progressing towards prosperity. So this study on Indian society explores the aspects like nation as everyday life, popular culture and the marginalized voices which are ignored by dominant narratives. Mikhail Bakhtins theory of dialogics is one of the analytical approaches to the study of novelistic discourses that centers on the theoretical concepts such as dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival. All these notions are primarily concerned with the exposure of neglected, suppressed voices and work as a powerful tool for subverting hierarchies and questioning the prevailing oppressive orders. Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things is a polyphonic novel of and about India by presenting a plurality of independent and unmerged voices. This paper is an attempt to evaluate how Roy has attempted to subvert conventions of traditional narrative, dismantle hierarchy and exhibit the postmodern accent of dialogic narration where meaning is constructed through an interaction of the multiple systems, discourses, ideologies and voices within the artistic entirety of the texts. Key words: Bakhtins Dialogism, carnival, heteroglossia, subversion, marginalized, polyphonic voices, Indian voices. THOUGH INDIA IS CELEBRATING HER SIXTY FOUR YEARS OF FREEDOM, the unfair and destructive dualisms--male/female, high class/low class, strong/weak, rich/poor and culture/nature--existing in Indian society disclose the bitter realities of India progressing towar* Research Scholar, PhD., Department of English, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala. Email: jubigirijan@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
ds prosperity. So any study on the nation must be interdisciplinary and should explore intersections of race, class and gender in the formation of national identities and power structure. We should takes up the up the aspects like nation as everyday life, popular culture and the marginalized voices which are ignored by dominant narratives.
Mikhail Bakhtins theory of dialogics is one of the analytical approaches to the study of novelistic discourses that centers on the theoretical concepts such as dialogism, polyphony and carnival which themselves rest on the more fundamental concept of heteroglossia. All these notions are primarily concerned with the exposure of neglected, suppressed voices and work as a powerful tool for subverting hierarchies and questioning the prevailing oppressive orders.
Bakhtins concept of dialogism underlines the hybridity and heterogeneity of all the cultural constructs, including language. His writings are mostly animated and controlled by the principles of dialogue. Dialogism is an antidote to monologism that shuts down the dialogue and its different perspectives.
In dialogic literature, there will be an inter-play of various characters voices, where no world-view is given superiority over other. Bakhtin calls these multiple narrative voices as Polyphony. For Bakhtin, Dostoevskys fictions are perfect examples for polyphonic novels. Pam Morris in his introduction to The Bakhtin Reader quotes Bakhtin:
In Dostoevsky, consciousness never gravitates towards itself but is always found in intense relationship with another consciousness. Every experience, every
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 159 thought of a character, is intensely dialogic, adorned with polemic, filled with struggle. . . . Dostoevsky offers, in artistic form, something like a sociology of consciousness. (14)
For Bakhtin narrative forms are the manifestations of interactions between individual consciousnesses. The plurality of world-views provides the basis for the different ideological positions in society and the heteroglossia of language itself. Heteroglossia limits the forces of monoglossia which works for a unifying language.
Heteroglossia refers to the conflict between the centripetal force that tends to homogenize the language and the centrifugal force that attempts to diversify the language. The speech-diversity within the same language or a hybridization of different languages also gives rise to heteroglossia. According to Bakhtin, the multiplicity of fictional voices, with the hybrid nature of the novel form permit the incorporation of various genres, both artistic-- like poems, lyrical songs, other works/texts, dramatic scenes--and extra artistic like every day, rhetoric, scholarly, political and religious discourses.
The theory of dialogism is linked to the concept of carnival, argue Bauer and McKinstry in their work Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, as it is concerned with the exploration and activating of the unvoiced exiled world (215). Bakhtins carnival celebrates a form of popular resistance to authority in all ages in combination with the concept of grotesque as a figure of unruly biological and social exchange. Michael Gardiner in his work The Dialogics of Critique argues:
Carnival effectively breaks down the formations of all types of hierarchy and the inherited differences among different social classes, ages and castes. It replaces established traditions and canons through free and familiar social interactions based on the principles of mutual cooperation, solidity and equality (52).
In novel, a carnivalesque language is an expression of freedom from official norms, from grammar and syntax. Grotesque realism is a literary mode for describing hidden aspects of reality: that is, something is made monstrous, distorted and bizarre. It can incorporate the supernatural and violence, the unmentionable and sexuality; grotesque also comes through dreams. Its positive meaning is linked to birth and renewal, and its negative meaning is linked to death and decay.
Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World writes, An essential principle of the grotesque realism is degradation; that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, or abstract (19). A topsy-turvy world is a characteristic of carnivalesque-grotesque, in which the world is upside down due to the wrong rulers. John Fiske in his Understanding Popular Culture observes carnival change, . . . as an ongoing process aimed at maintaining or increasing the bottom-up power of the people within the system (188). Thus, Bakhtins ground-breaking theories are the best platform for women writers, as a great part of it deals with offering alternate visions of the world where womens voice is no longer neglected and marginalized.
Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things is all about the rights of women and untouchables and their maltreatment by the traditional In-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 161 dian society. It is a story of Estha and his fraternal twin sister, Rahel, and their divorced mother Ammu, a Syrian Christian, who had no choice but to return to her parental home Ayemenem in Kerala, following her divorce from the Hindu man she had married. The story revolves around the events surrounding the drowning death of the twins' half-English cousin Sophie Mol, a forbidden love affair between Ammu and the familys carpenter Velutha, an Untouchable and the subsequent beating and killing of Velutha by the police. All these incidents have a dialogic relation with one another and haunt Ammu, Estha and Rahel rest of their life. Roy presents the novel as an expression of Indian social structure.
The novel discusses the details regarding the hypocrisy, cruelty and callousness of the guardians of the law--like the police and politicians, troubles of globalization, problems confronting women in maledominated society, caste taboos, the lives of children in a broken family, pain and misery of a lonesome mother in an indifferent world and the aftermath of British rule and its influence on Indian thoughts. This paper is an attempt to evaluate the novel from the perspective of Bakhtinian concept of dialogics. An analysis of the topics bearing on conventional literary concerns such as the status of the author, points of view of the characters with their difference in ideology, social status, and speech diversities, narrative structure, counter cultural elements, and the elements of degradation, sex and violence shows how Roy has attempted to subvert the preset norms of monologism and brought the concepts of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, grotesque and carnivalesque through the framework of a fierce socio-cultural and political criticism of the Indian society.
In The God of Small Things, we frequently encounter a fine combination of carnivalesque-grotesque, which Bakhtin had discovered in his work Rabelais and His World. Roy brings this carnivalesque technique through the binary opposite, the Big and the Small things. The Big things stand for the male world/upper class/the traditional Indian society with its burden of history, caste system, dead limbs of tradition, political opportunism and the objectification of women. The other layer comprises children, insecure women, nature, untouchables and the working class with their struggle for identity, independence and desires. The Small things also include secrets and scandals like Estha's molestation by the Orangedrink Lemondrink man, the affair of Ammu and Velutha and the story's three major deaths. Instead of being acknowledged and worked through, they are preserved like Mamachis pickles and jams. So they re-emerge in an unexpected, often grotesque ways through language, memory, dreams, daydreams and incest. The grotesque permeates the story of The God of Small Things from the very beginning, when Rahel imagines the ceiling painter dying on the floor to the final chapter The Cost of Living, which deals with the sexual act between the touchable Ammu and the untouchable Velutha; a mingling of high and low, pure and impure, a fine example for carnivalesque- grotesque realism. Grotesque are the Small Things at the funeral, which Sophie supposedly shows Rahel. These are the baby bat that crawls up Baby Kochamma's sari , A bee died in a coffin flower (5), the beautifully painted ceiling, and the artist falling from his perch and cracking his head open, "dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret"(6) which reflects the image of Velutha, dying wrongfully accused in the police station. All these grotesques are connected with a terrible sense of things gone wrong and the manifestations of the ugly secrets of that family that they refuse to acknowledge. The two repeating grotes-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 163 que images in the novel are of Velutha's broken body and Sophie Mol's drowned corpse which become macabre images that haunt the characters, especially Ammu, Rahel and Estha.
The twins' incest also falls under the categories of the grotesque. Roy portrays the act of lovemaking as beautiful, but it is made bizarre by the fact that Rahel and Estha are siblings-twins. In the final chapter Roy employs a caste transgressive act: the portrayal of the sexual relation between these two different caste people who are not supposed to meet in any way, builds a new form of sexuality that transcends and takes the individuals beyond the barriers of class and caste. Here, carnival is used as a social process which frees people from traditionally constructed value systems.
Roy also focusses on the discordant attitudes of phallocentric society towards the sexual desires of men and women. Whereas, Chackos mans need are not only tolerated but also accommodated by the family, Ammus affair is treated with extreme revulsion. The title of the novel, The God of Small Things, which makes the highest divinity residing in the most humble human Velutha, an untouchable, itself is an example of carnivalesque, and ultimately deconstructs the hierarchy of domination. The grotesque mutilations, dismemberment, violence and references to different parts of the human body connected with food, sex and death which the writer mentions over and over again also fall into the category of grotesque.
Roy attacks the brutal and systematic oppression exemplified by figures of power such as Inspector Thomas Mathew, Comrade Pillai and the hypocrisy of the traditional moral code of Pappachi and Mammachi,
which are revealed to be much more concerned with personal gains than with any notions of social justice. Through these men Roy presents a topsy-turvy world, a characteristic of carnivalesque-grotesque, in which the world is upside down because the wrong people are often in charge. Roy shatters all the fetters of societys norms and regulations, which changes according to class, caste and social status.
Thus, Roys novel, The God of Small Things, itself can be seen as a carnivalesque-grotesque realism about the harsh realities of Indian society presented through irony and satire, two important elements of carnivalesque-grotesque. The God of Small Things, here justifies Toril Mois comments upon the importance of transgressive qualities of carnival laughter for feminist movement in her Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory: Anger is not the only revolutionary attitude available to us. The power of laughter can be just as subversive, as when carnival turns the old hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable ones (40).
Roy, in her novel, The God of Small Things, incorporates many different discourses, genres, and types of speeches. Throughout the text, the reader frequently comes across English and Malayalam songs, poems, dictionary definitions, recipes, the Urdu political slogan Inquilab Zindabad, snippets of newspaper writing, diary writing, prayers, Biblical notes, use of proverbs, Hindu ritual recitation of the Mahabharata, use of a lot of abbreviations, italics, parenthesis and forgrounded capitals.
The parallel reading and intertextuality, which is a postmodern alternative to dialogism, also helped Roy to make her novel constantly and plurally in dialogue with other novels and other writings. Roy at-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 165 tempts a parallel reading of this novel with the Mahabharata when the kathakali artist plays the acts of Karnas birth, Draupathis insult by Kauravas and the resultant battle. She connects this violent story of family betrayal with Ammus life, destroyed in the hands of her husband and her family. The intertextuality of this novel also helped to incorporate other works/texts into its structure. The Heart of Darkness and its Kurtzs, Shakspeares The Tempest and its character Ariel, Julius Ceaser, Kiplings Jungle Book, Story of Ullysses, Walter Scots Lochinwar, the song from the movie Chemmeen and quotes from Communist Manifesto and reference to Karl Max are a few examples of intertexts in the novel. The God of Small Things here explicates Michael Holquists argument in his work Dialogism: Novels are overwhelmingly intertextual, constantly referring, within themselves, to other works outside them (88).
Roys prose is strongly marked for textual features as strong rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, simile, metaphor, symbols, and imagery which are the characteristics of poetry. Switching from one language to another in conversation is a frequent thing in this novel. The mixed use of Malayalam or very rarely, Hindi with English makes bilingualism or multilingualism as an example for polyglossia. The different linguistic varieties existing within Malayalam and English used here, on the other hand, makes heteroglossia.
The alteration of British English in order to accommodate the Indianness of the text is a predominant factor. As we read the text, we encounter the voices of different characters and those of the narrator with a different variety of language for each character. There is a difference in this high and low versions of languages. For example, Velutha
and other untouchables speak a language different from that of the upper class people like Baby Kochamma, Chacko and Comrade Pillai. The mingling of high and low languages and cultures also brings carnivalisation.
Roy in her novel simultaneously presents the traditional and cultural beliefs of a society along with some of her beliefs that are counter to them. Counter culture is a part of heteroglossia. The strong countercultural elements that come across in the novel are the theme of forbidden and taboo types of love, resistance to the communist politics of Kerala, caste system, patriarchy, globalization and the consumerist culture which believes in the economy of a capitalist society. Though Roy portrays the lush green areas of Kerala abounding in natural beauty with its mysterious Meenachal river, a part of her novel seems to mourn at the loss of cultural purity and the natural beauty that has lost when Kerala became a tourist location, the God's Own Country. She presents the deterioration of the village of Ayemenem and the pollution of the river Meenachal as an aftermath of globalization. Here, we can establish a correlation between ecological abuse and gender, class and caste discrimination as these are linked and based on value-hierarchical thinking, value-dualisms, and a logic of domination. Karen J. Warren in her essay Towards an Ecofeminist Peace Politics argues: within patriarchal/capitalist/colonial conceptual framework, difference breeds domination (184). Early in the novel, Roy makes a pointed critique of globalization for environmental degradation in her description of Esthas walks around Ayemenem: Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died (14). The novel proves the ecofeminist argument by Greta Gaard in her essay Living interconnections with
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 167 Animals and Nature: The ideology which authorizes oppression such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality and physical abilities, is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature (1). The God of Small Things also conveys the damages provoked by tourism through the portrayal of the Cochin city. The historical buildings in Cochin are turned into hotels and Kathakali, a rich traditional and cultural art form of Kerala, is fused in a new way to attract the foreign eyes. Characteristically, the text does not miss an opportunity to ridicule these social pretensions.
In the case of narrative structure also, Roy weaves back and forth from the present-day India to the fateful drowning that took place twenty-three years earlier, in 1969 and violates the traditional conventions and rules of writing which give a chronological order with a beginning, middle and an end--another instance of carnivalesque in this novel. The omniscient narrator of The God of Small Things manages to get us to experience multiple points of view even though the entire novel is told from Rahel's point of view. The narrator also gives us bits and pieces of information about each character, including information unknown to others like Baby Kochamma's diaries, Estha's private fears, and Velutha and Ammu's love. A monologic reading of a text always focuses our attention on the central characters and fails to acknowledge the importance of the secondary characters. Only a dialogical approach can reveal them in a better way.
The novel powerfully moves those characters who are otherwise kept at the silent margins, such as women, nature, children, the untouchables and the working classes. Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things is, thus, a polyphonic novel of and about India by presenting a
plurality of independent and unmerged voices. Roys novel represents all the social and ideological voices of its era through her different characters who belong to different social stratum and represent different and contradictory ideologies. The readers can hear the many voices like the sounds of a hippocratic politician, a patriarch like Pappachi, the feminist voice of a devoiced single mother, the suppressed voice of untouchable Velutha, the traditional voices of Baby Kochamma and others who believe in patriarchy and casteism, silent voices of polluted natural world and so on--a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices of Indian society. All of these voices, with their different value systems, are set against one another dialogically. By using the elements of Bakhtinian poetics, Roys novel subvert conventions of traditional narrative, dismantle hierarchy and exhibit the postmodern accent of dialogic narration where meaning is constructed through an interaction of the multiple systems, discourses, ideologies and voices within the artistic entirety of the texts. Luce Irigaray in her work This Sex Which Is Not One argues: If we keep on speaking the same language together, were going to reproduce the same history (205). Arundhati Roy has taken a bold initiative to write the genealogy of the untouchables and to rewrite the empirical history from the perspective of the downtrodden. Thus, Roys novel is a structural paradigm of a linguistic innovation in a perpetual quest for possibilities of communicating resistance to the preset norms of patriarchal/ casteist/ colonialist/ capitalist/ literary hegemony.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Iswolsky. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 169 Bauer, M. D., and S. J. McKinsly. Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic. New York: Suny Press, 1991. Print. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Gaard, Greta. Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature. Ecofeminism:Women, Animals, Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Phila delphia: Temple University Press, 1993: 1-12. Print. Gardiner, Michael. The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology. New York: Rutledge, 1992. Print. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Irigary, Luce. This Sex Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 2002.Print. Morris, Pam. ed. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1994. Print. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink, 1997. Print. Warren, Karen. J. Towards an Ecofeminist Peace Politics. Ecological Feminism. Ed. Karen. J. Warren. London: Rutledge, 1994. 79-195. Print.
Sleeping Beauty as a Gendered Icon

- Libin K. Kurian*
Abstract: Childrens literature is anytime entertainment irrespective of the age of the reader. Its perennial potential to entertain rests on its capacity to take us to the world of its creation- its a fairy world. But a critical reading stands to expose the feminine traits that are built in along with the entertaining element that it offers the reader. Close analysis reveals the fact that the patriarchal gender bias is clearly marked out in these stories. This paper is an attempt to expose the feminine qualities that the character Sleeping Beauty stands for. Sleeping makes her beautiful. Sleeping is a state which rules out the possibility of reacting to a situation. Beauty is born when a woman is passive. Feminist writer Erica Jong in some of her novels works out alternative choice in case the prince doesnt turn up. Taking up a few instances from the novels Parachutes and Kisses and How to Save your own Life, the paper tries to bring out a rereading of the harmless fairytale so as to expose female traits that go along with the character and its characteristic response.
Key words: Iconization, Gender, Patriarchy, Priorities, Displacement, Intervention CULTURE IS OFTEN A MANIFESTATION OF some underlying priorities. These priorities are often the extension of economic preferences or class foundations. The paper is an attempt to bring out the other side of the fairy tale popularly known as Sleeping Beauty. She is known by different names but the basic element of the story is credited to Perrault.
Feminist writers take up the same story and explore the patriarchal machinery that has, till the second half of the twentieth century success fully conveyed a code of conduct. This code of conduct is drilled into
* Assistant Professor of English, KCG College of Technology, Chennai Email: libinkuriank@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 171 the child too early. The childs mind, which is prone to asking questions about anything and everything, sometimes forgets to ask questions regarding a story that is a part of her enjoyment. The acceptance of the underlying messages of such fairy tales is dependent on the nature of the young mind.
Very often this passive reader fails to observe that the story is only an interpretation. Unknowingly, children drill down the code that reward and acknowledgement follow when they imitate this patient waiting Beauty. Generally, Fairy tales, being her early favorites, the marks they leave behind are long lasting and difficult to be erased or replaced. What feminist writers do with these stories is to project them from a different angle. In doing so, they expose the so far hidden intention of cultural recruitment (DuPleissis 106). It is worth analyzing the technique Erica Jong uses in her works to expose the role of patriarchy.
A deeper study into the myths of the Sleeping Beauty as used by Jong clearly speaks of the type of displacement of attention and the extent to which displacement of the priorities can be studied as the cause for the resulting plight of women, both in the story and outside. It is interesting to note the development in the feminist narrative especially in relation to the myth of the Sleeping Beauty. The attention has been displaced from even the time of Simone de Beauvoir. There has been a marked shift in attention being projected towards the Princess rather than the vantage point of the prince. It has travelled quite a bit from Beauvoirs What would the Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping Beauty? (183). In Parachutes and Kisses, Jong has titled a chapter almost on the myth of the Charming Princess. What if the Prince doesnt come? It is a question that makes the read-
er think of a different option. The casual readers attention parallels the attention of the innocent three-year-old daughter. It is depicted as deeply interested in the scene where the Prince comes to awaken the Sleeping Beauty. Attention is concentrated on the effect of the masculine intervention. The reader is usually mesmerized by the relieving charm of the Prince on the Sleeping Beauty.
Feminist writers of the twentieth century come to find in the repository of myths - a set of culturally resonant material that chokes the very essence of their identity. Alerted readers are shocked to recognize the patriarchal message that went undetected and unexpressed due to the muted position of the Sleeping Beauty in the story. What once a sleeping beauty has done loses its historicity and is interpreted by culture as the true nature of every person who happens to be a female. That is what DuPleissis means by historicized sense of myth (106). Jong has picked up this myth of the Sleeping Beauty and has given an answer to the characteristic waiting for the Prince to kiss her back to life. The writer interprets Sleeping Beauty as every woman, whose sleep has to be terminated by the debut of a Charming Prince. Jong makes a straight reference to the conventional morality, politics and narrative that thrives through similar stories that have come to acquire the power of traditional myths.
Jong is attacking the colonized or iconized image of the Sleeping Beauty, as a paradigmatic and timeless archetype of any woman who has to wait for the male intervention. Breaking the course becomes symbolic. It stands for freeing her physically from the curse of her subordinate position and it means freeing her consciousness from the grip of similar archetypal colonizations and letting free the self to continue
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 173 its quest in life rather than accept the death that traditions have destined for the woman who violates such accrued ideology. She is trying to expose the strong system of interpretation masked as representation and thus, challenges the aim of culture to use the masks as a model to rehearse ones own colonization or iconization through the materials ones culture considers powerful and primary (DuPleissis 106). This noncolonial consciousness of Isadora, as DuPleissis describes such attitudes, makes her a critic and also a member of culture within which positions she often oscillates.
Jong brings in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, as a displacement of attention and delegitimation of the known tale that she aims at. The reader is forced to turn her attention from the culturally accrued impressions that she has carried about the Sleeping Beauty story and to question the sequences of events that result from the patriarchal priorities of the narrative which doesnt leave any space for the muted female characters. Importance in the narrative is given to the cultural message that Sleeping Beauty represents- she has to sleep till the Prince comes. And if this muted female is to acquire her voice, she has to think of alternative options like breaking the curse without the intervention of the Prince Charming and at the same time escaping the curse of death that has been destined for such violators. The readers attention is, thus, being displaced from the impact point of a strong system of interpretation to the position of the interpreter of the representative meaning of the myth. She begins to detect the role of patriarchy in focusing attention only on the favor done by the Prince. She slowly acquires the voice to speak from her own angle instead of just cohering to their patterns. The representative meaning is revealed to be the scheming priorities of the dominant class that transfer the male oriented desires
on to what according to them can be the expected goals in the life of the weaker class. The inevitable end of death for the violators then becomes the punishment defined by the powerful when anyone attempts to go against the code of priorities prescribed by them. The sequence of events like the punishment with death or suicide shoots out from the selfish priorities of patriarchy.
It is worth credit to refer to Jongs characteristic use of the story of the Sleeping Beauty. On another occasion, Jong speaks of the Sleeping Beauty who has to think of kissing herself back to life in case the Prince doesnt turn up. Though the suggestion is only part of a dialogue between a mother and her child in Parachutes and Kisses, still the alternative of breaking the normal procedure offers an opportunity for displacing the delegitimated attention on to another option that would offer woman a role and involvement of her choice. The poets attitude towards the tale as given determines whether there will be displacement of attention to the other side of the story or delegitimation of the known tale, a critique even unto sequence and priorities of narrative (DuPleissis 106). This use of displacement and delegitimation as critique of the dominant culture serves to rupture the conventional morality and politics as colouring the narrative ideology.
Jong also speaks of another feminine aspect unknowingly being stabilized in the female consciousness of the reader- the image of the Sleeping Beauty. Are women most beautiful when they are asleep-like children? (Parachutes and Kisses 118). Beauty of a woman is here defined as dependent on her sleeping attitude. In other words, the passive unquestioning attitude of the women is what makes her the source of attraction for the Prince. Rather that is what the male expects. A
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 175 sleeping woman becomes symbolic of a woman who is not expected to question or assert her talents in front of the Prince who seeks her hand. The female has no right to ask any question about the justification for the curse on her. Neither does she feel the need for an alternative action that might save her from the sleeping condition by thinking of kissing herself back to normal life. The priorities set by the masculine narrative can never feel such a need to provide a voice for her whom they have muted down the centuries.
Right from the time of the rule of the Judeo- Christian myth of the image of the unquestioning virgin has repeatedly been drilled into the consciousness of women through similar stories. But the twentieth century writer is ready to offer her worried daughter another option, in case the Prince does not arrive. The thought of having to sleep away her life because of the absent male disturbs the mind of the twentieth century three year old (Parachutes and Kisses 118). Isadora convincingly provides the answer in telling her daughter that kissing herself back to life is also possible. Well, then darling, she just kisses herself and wakes herself up (Parachutes and Kisses 119). Here, Isadora is producing a critical mythopoesis that could save women from the institutional authority and lead them to the liberated mythopoesis (DuPleissis 107). How we women, three and thirty, five and fifty, long for him to come and make all things right (Parachutes and Kisses 118). Whether she is a three year old like Mandy, Isadoras daughter, or a forty year old Isadora, the feeling that there should be a male to make all things right sends the woman a race yearning for the Prince (Parachutes and Kisses).
The reader gets another case of displacement of attention from the story content to its psychological impact on the believer of these myths. The title of the chapter, Isadoras Shwantz-Song or What If the Prince Doesnt Come? itself awakens the curiosity and interest of the reader with its seductive power, but manipulates this interest and diverts it in such a way that the reader takes in the message along with the story. Here, the myth or just the name of the Sleeping Beauty stirs the desire of the reader and helps the writer in using the same medium used by patriarchy to control women, as a means of releasing women from the same grits that suffocate them. The writer simply recapitulates one of the affirmative functions of myth and applies it to the muted group. (DuPleissis 107) Thus, women writers have started using the mythic effect of fairy tales as a correlative to rewrite some of the patriarchal canons. Works Cited
Rodway, Allan. The Craft of Criticism. University of Cambridge, 1982. Print. Banes Sally. Dancing Women. London, Routledge, 1998. Print. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York Vintage Books, 1999. Print. DuPleissis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print. Jong Erica. How to Save Your Own Life. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1997. Print. ---. Parachute and Kisses. USA: New American Library, 1984. Print. Kundu, Abhijit. The Humanities: Methodology and Perspectives.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 177 Noida: Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd., 2009. Print. Le Galliene, Richard. Sleeping Beauty and the Other Prose Fancies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print. Moore, Henry. Critical Essays. Burlington: Ashgate Publications Ltd., 2003. Print. Segal, Robert. New Delhi: Oxford U. P., 2006. Print. Smith, Mark J. Culture: Reinventing the Social Sciences. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2002. Print.
Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines: A Delusion of Consciousness

- David Abraham Albert* Abstract: Crossing borders both real and symbolic has been one of the major themes of Indian English fiction. Leaving the homeland for foreign lands, either looking for greener pastures or out of compulsion has been the plight of many a character in fiction. The consequences of crossing the border have always been a dire. Uprooted from the homeland and unable to take root in the alien land, characters are torn between memory and desire. In other words they suffer from a fractured consciousness. Amitav Ghosh in his The Shadow Lines poignantly presents characters who are caught in a limbo as they struggle to identify themselves with their new found land. My paper proposes to study the psychological turmoil undergone by the major characters in the novel with regard to the problem of belonging. The paper will study the role played by memories and their impact on the characters in order to foreground the deep psychological pressures which lurk within the characters. The paper will also study the title shadow lines in psychological terms. Key words: fragmentation, identity, search for spaces WE EXPERIENCE OURSELVES, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. - Einstein
Our understanding of home and alien land is constructed by the way we relate to geography and history. Ones nationality especially in the case of the subcontinent which has been partitioned time and again
Assistant Professor of English, Madras Christian College (Autonomous) Email: davidalbertmcc@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 179 to created fragmented nations, is decided by historical accidents. Amitav Ghoshs novel The Shadow Lines explores the historical accidents which create nations, both as physical entities and as mental constructs, and the impact of such a creation on individual lives.
The Shadow Lines is a serious meditation on places and spaces. A place is a geographically defined entity, a territory that is mapped and circumscribed, primarily for political reasons. Space on the other hand has a psychological dimension and when there is incongruity between place and space, it results in a schismed and fragmented consciousness. This is what gives rise to an identity crisis. This paper will look at consequences of a disjuncture between place and space with reference to the characters of the narrator, the narrators Grandmother, Ila and Tridib. Each of these characters responds to home differently because of their differing positions in history.
The novel begins with these lines: In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my fathers aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib (3). Structurally and thematically the beginning of the novel is significant as the novel is going to journey down memory lane and this journey will include a constant juxtaposition of the past and the present inorder to foreground the method employed in the novel which is one of recording and meditating. The novel i9s filtered through several memories-meta-memories. The over-arching memory is that of the narrator which frames the individual memories of other characters to which he has a direct or indirect access. For example, while he assesses Ilas memories through her own narrations, the most crucial memory, that of Tridib is meditated for him by Mayas narration. It is through these conflicting and complementary narrations that
the quest of various characters for a home is carried out. In a sense, the novel to use Radhakrishnans term, is a narrative search:
The postcolonial search for identity in the third world is beset primarily with the problem of location. Within what macropolitical parameters should such narrative search take place? Given the reality of nonsynchronous histories within the so-called one nation, how are any blueprints to be drawn up towards authentic Indian
identity. (Between Identity and Location 162)
In the novel, a poignant and agonizing search for home is that of the Grandmothers. Born in an unfragmented nation and living in a nation that has been fragmented twice, she is left unsure of where she belongs. It is for this reason that the novel is divided into two parts: Going away and Coming Home. One deals with the displacement which is physical atleast in the beginning and Coming Home solves only the problem of physical displacement because the mental, cultural and hence, psychological displacement are the actual problems which characters encounter. To Thamma, innocuous words such as coming and going can create existential crisis:
Oh that my grandmother laughed. It wasnt the same thing. There werent any forms or anything and anyway travelling was so easy then. I could come home to Dhaka whenever I wanted. I jumped to my feet, delighted at having caught her out- she Whod been a schoolmistress for twenty-seven years. Thamma, Thamma! I cried.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 181 How could you have come home to Dhaka? You dont know the difference between coming and going! (168)
The nation that Thamma was born is not the nation she lives in. The mixing up of the coming and going is not a mere error in grammar, but rather an indication of a consciousness which mixes memory and desire, a consciousness which has suffered fragmentation as a result of constantly shifting constructed boundries-shadow lines. The colonial experience, along with its consequences, has created this fragmentation which is expressed in linguistic terms by Thamma. As Daruwalla observes, Colonial history shows that language can be as domineering as any occupational army. It supplants myths, whole iconographies, and world-view ideologies. It ushers in its own values. An armada of new texts sails in (The Decolonized Muse: A Personal Statement).
Language very often assumes a fixed point of reference, while life is fluid and constantly shifting, as Thamma, and through her the narrator, recognizes. The sad incompetence of language to capture this shifting reality is what makes for Thammas experience a deluded consciousness:
But of course, the fault wasnt hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and central point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. (169)
The grandmothers experience of exile is, thus, not one of place but of space, unlike Ilas. Ilas experience differs from that of the grandmothers in significant ways. While the grandmother has never travelled beyond the subcontinent, Ila is a true post-modern global citizen. She has lived in several countries across several continents and seems to shift boundaries effortlessly. It is through her memories that the narrator undertakes mental journeys, imagining spaces through the places Ila describes. When the narrator fails initially to enter the spaces behind Ilas description of places, he learns a crucial lesson from Tridib:
I knew that the sights Tridib saw in his imagination were infinitely more detailed, more precise than anything I would ever see. He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire.that carried one beyond the limits of ones mind to other times and other places, and even if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and ones image in the mirror (32)
Ilas travels have obliterated the lines home and other lands and she thus emerges as a metropolitan hybrid. Radhakrishnan draws an important distinction between metropolitan hybridity and postcolonial hybridity in his book Between Identity and Location:
The crucial difference that one discerns between metropolitan versions of hybridity and postcolonial versions is that, whereas the former are characterized by an intransitive and immanent sense of jouissance, the latter are expressions of extreme pain and agonizing dislocations. Again, whereas the metropolitan hybridity is ensconced comfort-
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 183 ably in the heartland of both national and transnational citizenship, postcolonial hybridity is in a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity. It is important to the postcolonial hybrid to compile a laborious inventory of ones self and, on the basis of that complex genealogical process, to produce her own version of hybridity and find political legitimacy for that version (159). While the grandmother seems to be involved in compilation of an inventory of ones self and in legitimizing of her political version of the nation, Ila slips smoothly into a transnational citizenship though the location of a homeland in her case is dubious.
Tridib provides the link that strings together the various strands of narrative memories; he plays, as it were, the role of sutradhara; and what is more significant, interprets these fragmentary narratives into a cohesive narration. He integrates metropolitan hybridity and postcolonial hybridity by transcending these limitations through his allencompassing consciousness. The novels complexity lies in the fact that though it is only Tridib who has the insight to identify the shadowy qualities of the lines that demarcatenations, both locationally and spatially, it is he who falls a prey to petty notions of nationality. The incidents that lead to the victimhood of Tridib are strategically placed towards the end of the novel. It is the culmination of the narrators growing up and understanding; and again the catalyst for this understanding is a foreigner May.
This incident is crucial not only to the narrators quest for identity but also for the novelists understanding of the times he lives in. while talking about the genesis of the novel, Amitav Ghosh observes that it came about in the process of trying to make sense of the anti-Sikh riots,
an aftermath of Indira Gandhis assassination. This is a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them. The title is a reference to Jopseph Conrads The Shadow Line (1917). Conrad uses the term to refer to the threshold of a young mans development. Ghosh, however, uses it to refer not just to a single individual but to nations, which have shifting boundries. Bill Ashcroft observes:
The nations were and are profoundly unstable formations, always likely to collapse back into sub-divisios of clan, tribe, language or religious group, is nothing new, and the false tendency to assign this unstable condition to specific regions or conditions is reflected in contemporary discussion of national questions. (149-150)
Amitav Ghoshs novel The Shadow Lines is one such discussion.
Works Cited Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998. Print. Radhakrishnan, R. Between Identity and Location: The Cultural Politics of Theory. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007. Print. Daruwalla, Keki. The Decolonized Muse: A Personal Statement http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_modu le/index.php?_id=2693. 17 February 2012. Web. Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Rout ledge, 2009. Print.
Narrative Time in Nayantara Sahgals Storm in Chandigarh

J. Baby Eliammal*
Abstract: It is said that modern narratives have subversive treatment of the various categories of time but none of them invalidate them. Treatment of time undergoes various changes, yet time is indispensible to both story and text. This paper proposes to analyse the concept of narrative time formulated by Genette, which helps to unearth the master craftsmanship of Sahgal by rereading her novel Storm in Chandigarh. Key words: anachrony, analepsis, narrative time GRARD GENETTE IS A FRENCH LITERARY THEORIST, associated in particular with the structuralist movement. His work on narrative is best known in English through Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, which is a section in the multi-part Figures series. The five main concepts elaborated by Genette in this work are Order, Duration, Frequency, Voice and Mood. They are primarily used to investigate the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of the narratives.
Nayantara Sahgal, a well known Post Independent Indian English woman novelist, who has so far published nine novels and eight works of non-fiction. Storm in Chandigarh is her fourth novel. It is about the result of bifurcating Punjab into Punjab and Haryana. There are quarrels over sharing the boundaries, water and electric power between the two states. The chief minister of Punjab, Gyan Singh threatens that he will begin a state-wide strike. At the other side, Harpal Singh, the chief minister of Haryana refuses to give in. The stage is set for a confrontation. It is at this point, Vishal Dubey, the centres most able bureaucrat,
Associate Professor of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli Email: babyeliammal@gmail.com 2012 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 430X print
is sent by the Home Minister, to ease the situation. While resolving the chaos in Chandigarh, the common capital, Dubey is drawn into the lives of two people - Jit and Mara and Inder and Saroj. This paper studies the treatment of narrative time to be specific order of narrative time, in this novel in accordance with Genettes conceptualization of Order.
In Chapter 1 entitled Order Genette begins quoting Metz: Narrative is a . . . doubly temporal sequence . . . . There is the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier). This duality not only renders possible all the temporal distortions . . . . More basically, it invites us to consider that one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme (33).
Anachrony is the discordance between the story time and the narrative time. This point is more hypothetical than real because folklore narrative usually follows the chronological order. Anachrony is not a rarity or a modern invention. On the contrary, it is one of the traditional resources of literary narration. Genette identifies two metrics of anachrony that help to distinguish qualitative demarcations: reach and extent. Genette says: An anachrony can reach into the past or the future either more or less from the present moment this temporal distance we will name the anachronys reach. The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent (34).
While theorizing anachrony under Order Genette renames the tra
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 187 ditionally known narrative modes flashback or retrospection as analepsis and foreshadowing or anticipation as prolepsis. An analepsis is a narration of a story-event at a point in the text after later events have been told. The narration returns, as it were, to a past point before earlier events have been mentioned. If events a, b, c figure in the text in the order b, c, a then a is analeptic. A prolepsis is a narration of a storyevent at a point before earlier events have been mentioned. The narration, as it were, takes an excursion into the future of the story. If the events a, b, c appear in the order c, a, b then c would be proleptic. Both analepsis and prolepsis constitute a temporally second narrative in relation to the narrative onto which they are grafted and which Genette calls first narrative (Rimmon-Kenan 46).
According to Genette, the analepsis that is about either a character, event, or story-line mentioned at that point in the text is homodiegetic analepsis and the analepsis that is about another character, event or story line is heterodiegetic analepsis. Here is an example for heterodiegetic analepsis from Storm in Chandigarh. The Home Minister, who is the last surviving figure of the Gandhian era left in public life (3) wants Vishal Dubey, an able civil servant, to leave for Chandigarh, because he thinks that Dubey has the capacity to counsel patience(4). Dubey accepts the assignment and leaves the Home Ministers office. The analeptic note begins with the Home Ministers recollection about Dubey and the first report he received years before about Dubey:
his mind had gone back to 1947.He had been touring the border districts between Uttar Pradesh and Punjab with their heavy concentration of bedraggled refugees.The problem had been to feed the thousands on
march, and those locked within their own neighbourhoods . . . particularly over a Muslim neighbourhood surrounded by Hindu residents . . . . There was a young rationing officer called Dubey, he was told, who continued to get supplies to it against formidable opposition. (10)
The novelist has cleverly used the heterodiegetic analeptic mode to highlight the heroic as well as the good humanitarian qualities of the central character of the novel through the reminiscence of another character who comes only in two places one at the beginning and the other at the far end of the novel as a dead man.
The first half of Storm in Chandigarh has a quantifiable number of examples for both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic analepses. The analepsis whose entire extent remains external to the extent of the first narrative (49) is called external. An example for external heterodiegetic analepsis can be noticed when Harpal thinks about the day that had unwittingly started him on his political career(22) and his first meeting with Gyan Singh, now the chief minister of Punjab, then the bus driver who brought for money, the refugees from terror-hit Jhelum to Delhi:
There was nothing in his appearance and manner to suggest that the town behind him was a death trap and the people surrounding him fleeing for their lives. . . He was briskly selecting the better customers, the merchants who had been able to rescue their money boxes from the wreckage of their homes, and relieving them of their savings as he admitted them to the bus. . . The man asked
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 189 for his purse, noted its contents, put them into his pocket, and said, All right, get in. (24-5)
Five years later Harpal met Gyan Singh again, outside the dingy office of the district Congress committee during his election campaign (29) as an uncompromising activist of the congress party. Instead of introducing one by one the two chief ministers, their differing characters and the past of their political career, the novelist has deftly weaved a single heterodigetic analeptic chapter through which she has presented them with every detail necessary for the reader to expect what will come next.
Before leaving for Chandigarh, Dubey wants to meet Gauri and Nikhil, his friends. After dinner Nikhil leaves for Calcutta. Gauri and Dubey return home. Now, Dubey muses over his relationship with Gauri:during the four years since Dubey had known her, the urgency between him and Gauri had evaporated and they had settled into a friendly familiarity (13). Here, the analepsis evokes a past that precedes the starting of the first narrative. The first narrative of the novel is Dubey leaving for Chandigarh to settle amicably the political animosity between the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana. In Genettes term this analepsis is external homodiegetic anaplesis. Such analepses provide the reader ample chances to have a clear perceptive about the character who narrates them.
Anticipation or temporal prolepsis, is clearly much less frequent than the inverse figure.The first person narrative lends itself better than any other to anticipation(67) says Genette about prolepsis. It generally begins with a sort of anticipatory summary. The first state-
ment in Storm in Chandigarh is Violence lies very close to the surface in Punjab (1) said by the Home Minister to Dubey. While the readers expect a political violence, Nikhil says Violence lies close to the surface everywhere (12) and he means violence at the mills because they expect bonus (12). Later in the novel Dubey observes psychological violence meted out to Saroj by Inder. These are examples for prolepsis: the first one is an internal heterodiegetic prolepsis, the second one again an internal heterodigetic prolepsis and the third one is external heterodiegetic prolepsis. Through these, the novelist is successful in kindling the curiosity of the reader to read further and to anticipate the unfolding of the novel with expectancy.
It is said that modern narratives have subversive treatment of the various categories of time but none of them invalidate them. Treatment of time undergoes various changes, yet time is indispensible to both story and text. Narrative time formulated by Genette has, thus, helped to unearth the master craftsmanship of Saghal by rereading her novel Storm in Chandigarh.
Works Cited Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980. Print Sahgal, Nayantara. Storm in Chandigarh. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008. Print Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics. Chen nai: Chennai Micro Print Pvt. Ltd., 2005. Print
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 191 Notes:
AIMS AND SCOPE OF ECLECTIC REPRESENTATIONS
Eclectic Representations is a peer-reviewed biannual journal, which covers English literature from the time of Chaucer to the present day. It features scholarly essays on diverse literatures like British, American, and Indian Writing to name a few. It encourages the re-reading of familiar authors, as well as those that champion new or neglected works. It presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. The journal remains committed to the re-appraisal of accepted views, and the principle that criticism and scholarship should reinforce the pleasure for which literature and other works of arts are created. It brings together scholars from throughout the world to facilitate information flow and discussion on developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. It sets out to reflect the essential pluralism of modern language and literature studies and to provide a forum for worldwide scholarly discussion. The journal maintains that originality in interpretation must be allied to the best scholarly standards in order to ensure a holistic discourse on an understanding of the constructive and the sceptical at a time when criticism has become so diversified.
Eclectic Representations Vol.2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 193 Call for Papers
The next issue of Eclectic Representations will be published in January 2013. The last date for submission is 31st October 2012.
Submission Guidelines
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Eclectic Representations Vol.

2, Issue 1 July 2012 | 1

ISSN 2231 430X

PG & Research Department of English

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Department of English, Madras Christian College (Autonomous) Chennai

ISSN 2231 430X

Printed at BHAGHAVAN PRINTERS West Tambaram, Chennai 600 059

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5. Issues in Diasporic Literature: A Synoptic View

10. New Aestheticism: An Angel against Theory as Hermeneutics of Suspicion M. Elangovan

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The Portrait of a City: Lawrence Osbornes Bangkok Days

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and relates personal experiences to recent events in a constantly evolving environment.

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King explains the notion of Bangkok as a chaos as follows:

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In order to develop the theme of the East-West dichotomy, the novel

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Notes (1) Lawrence Osbornes personal website, he hails from England,

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The novels only comparison to an Asian city comes near the

very well (54), but does not substantiate this claim.

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Postmodern Politics of Representation: Other Voices in Angela Carters Fiction

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Judith Rodriguez and Feminism

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Rodriguez in her interview with Peter Haddow exclaims:

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as K.R.S. Iyengar calls the

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