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Political Propaganda in the Feature Film Industries of Nazi Germany and Maoist China

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James D. Decker, Middle Georgia State College & Patrick S. Brennan, Middle Georgia State College

Abstract

This interdisciplinary paper examines important similarities and differences in the way that Maoist China and Nazi Germany used political propaganda in their national feature-film industries. The first of part of this paper examines the film industry in the People’s Republic of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The Chinese communist regime used the power of film to perpetuate communist themes and to educate the masses about the heroic nature of the Chinese revolutionaries and Marxism. Mao believed through popular film the Chinese Communist Party could educate, entertain, and indoctrinate the Chinese population and could ferret out capitalist and bourgeois elements which he believed were infiltrating Chinese society. The second case study examines how Kolberg (1945), the very last feature film released in Nazi Germany, communicates key elements of Nazi ideology: the Leadership Principle, the celebration of Blood and Soil, and the call for total war, especially as expressed by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in his 1943 “Total War Address.”Kolberg demonstrates both the power of Nazi political propaganda and its limitations as a political tool.

The twentieth century saw a marked increase in totalitarian states. These states, in seekingcomplete control of their populations, each deployed what the French Marxist Philosopher Louis Althusser has termed Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses. According to Althusser (1971/2009), a Repressive State Apparatus controls the populace through physical violence and threats. It contains such institutions as “the Army, the Police, the Courts, and the Prisons” (p. 302). The Ideological State Apparatus controls the populace through ideology. It relies on private institutions, such as family structures, churches, political parties, and communications industries, to represent “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 1971/2009, p. 304). The boundaries between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus are somewhat porous. The Repressive State Apparatus relies on some form of ideology for its structure, and the Ideological State Apparatus relies on some form of violence for its implementation. Still, it is the Ideological State Apparatus that offers citizens a sense of belonging and purpose. It recruits the people’s active participation in the state’s goals by constructing and proposing imaginary relationships between them and the state. In the twentieth century, an important tool of any state’s Ideological State Apparatus was its film industry. This paper will examine how two of twentieth century’s most repressive totalitarian regimes, Maoist China and the Third Reich, deployed their national feature film industries as propaganda tools, which aimed to spur their citizens to support the state’s ideological goals.

Maoist China

In May of 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong launched The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its stated goal was to enforce communism in the country by removing capitalist, traditional and cultural elements from Chinese society, and to impose Maoist orthodoxy within the Chinese Communist Party. During the years from 1966 to 1976, this movement became the biggest non-wartime concentrated social and political upheaval in world history. Following Mao’s edicts, a nation of over 800 million responded to the whims of one man to purge the country of noncommunist, revisionist thought and art (Clark, 2008).

The revolution marked the return of Mao Zedong to a position of power after the failed Great Leap Forward. The movement paralyzed China politically and significantly affected the country economically and socially. Millions of people were persecuted in the violent factional struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property. A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked (Tsou, 1986; Dreyer, 2000).

The success or failure of communist regimes to transform the attitudes and behavior of populations is an apt example of the use of propaganda within the wider application of political culture theory. Gabriel A. Almond (1983) proposed that political culture theory ascribes some importance to political attitudes, beliefs, values, and emotions in the explanation of political, structural, and behavioral phenomena such as national cohesion, patterns of mass cleavage, modes of dealing with political conflict, the extent and level of political participation, and the compliance with authority. The communist experience has been particularly important as an approach to studying propaganda and political culture theory application because from one point of view it represents a genuine effort to “falsify” it. The attitudes that communist regimes encounter where they seize power are often viewed as false consciousness, which may include nationalism, religious belief systems, ethnic subcultural propensities, or economic views. These attitudes have been viewed as the consequences of preexisting class structure and the underlying mode of production, which are transmitted by the associated agents of indoctrination. Communist movements/regimes seek to eliminate or to undermine the legitimacy of these preexisting processes and frameworks and replace them with a new and thoroughly penetrative set. The goal is to reshape the society and transform the thinking of its citizens toward a new paradigm of education and actions.

According to Dittmer (1977), one of the main purposes of the Cultural Revolution was to change the people’s ways of thinking and relating to one another, a pragmatic objective concerning the trinary relationship among elites, masses, and the target to which considerations of political theory and propaganda were focused. By drawing attention of the masses to the target’s deviation from the norm, and by dramatizing that deviation by means of exaggerated contentious symbolism, the elites sought to persuade the masses to embrace and incorporate the norms. Another benefit was to permit the masses to displace regressed negative emotions against the target. This allowed elites to seek enhancement of solidarity within the community and increase the masses’ support and commitment to the societal norms. The implications of this propagandistic process for the target were that that he should rectify his deviation through self-criticism and reintegrate himself within society. In the end, the target may hope to atone for his sins and become a model of the type of moral transformation expected by the masses…Access Full Text of the Article

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De-Essentialising Indigeneity: Locating Hybridity in Variously Indigenous Performative Texts

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Sibendu Chakraborty, Rabin Mukherjee College, Kolkata                

Abstract

Australian Indigenous literature in general and theatre in particular has been found to chart a trajectory of self-reflexivity. What I mean to show in this paper is this sense of inherent scepticism which indigenous theatre unfolds in course of its identity formations. The politics of inclusivity and ‘othering’ that regulate the domain of identity formations seem to stereotype essentialised identity around specific fantasies of exclusivity, cultural alterity, marginality, physicality and morality. The articulation and representations of full blooded Aborigines, half-castes and other successive generations of culturally diluted Aborigines problemetises the notion of indigeneity resulting in a complex interplay of inter-racial, socio-political, economic and cultural dialog. Thus Aboriginal theatre often grapples with these crosscurrents of diversity of identity formations along essentialised and hybrid representations of Aborigines. By decoupling indigeneity from certain fixed phenotypical traits I seek to uncover the hybridity of indigeneity as articulated through variously indigenous performative texts.

Key Words: stereotype, cultural alterity, Aboriginal theatre, hybridity, de-essentialising indigeneity, performative texts

“The continual questioning of who we really are is the essence of Australian nationalism.”

(Lattas 1990: 54)[1]

 

“It seems to me, then, that generalizations about Aboriginal literary discourse must be grounded in a reading of individual Aboriginal (inter)texts which will reveal their destination, their less or greater openness, in terms either of an interethnic or of an intraethnic dialogue.”

(Riemenschneider 1997: 177)[2]

Australian history writes itself into performance by utilising the double narrative threads of inclusion and exclusion, attraction and repulsion, idealisation and marginalisation. To contextualise its relevance to the notion of the Derridean ‘difference’ we need to scrutinise the essential ambiguities that accompanies the nation-building endeavour. The dominant trope of politically, culturally, economically marginalising the Aborigines by imposing on them a supposed tag of inferiority and inconformity is counter balanced by a corresponding ideology of identifying them as timeless and spiritually dominant or sacred. Hence, “white Australians displace Aboriginal cultures and bestow on themselves an antiquity and historical past which their recent arrival and colonial status precludes” (Dibble and Macintyre 1992: 93). This essentialist strategy of demeaning the Aborigines on one hand and simultaneously qualifying them for homogenous sacred affiliations on the other opens up spaces for critical attention and subsequently loads the discourse with an indulgence of looking for crosscurrents that might somehow tilt the balance towards ‘hybridity’. What I mean to show in my paper is this subtle interplay of discursive strategies which while making way for one kind of ideology engages itself in a performative gesture of articulating another range of essentialist interpretation.

Negotiating Indigeneity and Postcoloniality

Vitally connected to this issue of double narrative is the presence and application of rituals which directly or tangentially make theatre presentational, representational or manifestational. (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 55-60) The reception of Aboriginal theatre cuts across such diverse anticipations of actor-audience relationship expanding or contracting the gap to adapt itself to the desired mode of dramaturgy. But before going into all those details let us look at the term ‘indigenous’ to locate its significance in the discourse of Aboriginal performativity. The adjective ‘indigenous’ has the noun form, ‘indigines’ taken from the Latin ‘indigenus’ denoting “‘born in’, ‘native to’” (Hodge and Mishra 1990: 25). Hodge and Mishra go on to mention that “[m]any Aborigines prefer one of the names from heir own languages, Koori, Murri, Nyoongar, names which signify the plurality of nations of the Aboriginal people. In Australia the coloniser’s name concedes the whole case: the white ‘bastards’[3] do not after all try to deny the priority of Aboriginal rights” (1990: 25). Kevin Gilbert grappling with this task of defining Aboriginality notes:

But what is Aboriginality? Is it being tribal? Who is an Aboriginal? Is he or she someone who feels that other Aboriginals were somewhat dirty, lazy, drunken, bludging? Is an Aboriginal anyone who has some degree of Aboriginal blood in his or her veins and who has demonstrably been disadvantaged by that? Or is an Aboriginal someone who has had the reserve experience? Is Aboriginality institutionalised gutlessness, an acceptance of the label ‘the most powerless people on earth’? Or is Aboriginality, when all the definitions have been exhausted a yearning for a different way of being, a wholeness that was presumed to have existed [before 1788]? (1978: 184)[4]

Indigenous identity in the twenty-first century might be strategically divided into ‘Indigenous One’ and ‘Indigenous Two’. Richard Borshay Lee makes critical elucidation while he notes

[1] Quoted in Brian Dibble and Margaret Macintyre 1992. ‘Hybridity in Jack Davis’s No Sugar’ Westerly 37(4): 93.

[2] See Dieter Riemenschneider. 1997 ‘Aboriginal Literary Discourses and Australian Literature’, Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia (Cross cultures 28; Amsterdam: Rodopi). 177.

[3] See Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra 1990 ‘The Bastard Complex’ in Dark Side of the Dream, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, pp. 23-49. Hodge and Mishra notes that: “The complexities of what is at issue here can be seen in the curious of the word ‘bastard’ in Australian male colloquial speech. …but it can also express high solidarity between male ‘mates’ … It is the solidary meaning which is most worthy of note, because it is this usage that is definitionally Australian: only a true mate can call his ‘mate’ a ‘bastard’” (23).

[4] See Adam Shoemaker 2004 ‘Aboriginality and Black Australian Drama’ in Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988, ANU E Press, doi: <http://epress.anu.edu.au/bwwp/pdf_instructions.html>

…Access Full Text of the Article

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Metachronotopy and Transcultural Ideals: Insights into the Poetic Art of Eminescu and Tagore

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Ramona L. Ceciu, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

Abstract

This paper delves into the Romanian and Indian (Bengali) literatures to discover the concept of self in poetic art in relation to nature and divinity, keeping in the spotlight two major literary figures belonging to these different cultures: Mihai Eminescu and Rabindranath Tagore. I roughly argue firstly that the authors and their works embody metachronotopic entities that enable points of convergence and divergence, as well as varied articulations of ‘reality’, and secondly that ‘some self of Eminescu’ and ‘some self of Tagore’ meet into a ‘global cultural unconscious’ from where intriguing revelations emerge. I illustrate these instances of emergence by comparative critical analysis of their works, fragments of their lives and ‘selves’.

[Keywords: Tagore, Eminescu, Indian literature, Romanian poetry, self, nature, divinity]

  1. Introduction

In all cultures, the concepts of art, nature and divinity take shape in relation to the self – be it the human and ‘empirical’ or the transcendental selves – in different degrees. This study intends to review the concept of self – the authorial/ poetic and ‘empirical’ selves – in the Romanian and Indian (Bengali) cultures, keeping a main focus on the works of two major poets: Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Hopefully it will unravel some literary relations between these two cultures, common aspects of their imagistic worlds and their distinctions, but it will equally emphasize the differences and the uniqueness of the two authors and their poetic selves. Though there are innumerable perspectives that may be extremely revealing if analyzed in comparative fashion, I chose to focus on the self in relation to ‘nature’ and ‘the divine’ because among other aspects, acknowledged or not, they stand for integral dimensions of the human life. Moreover, they effusively populate the oeuvres of both Eminescu and Tagore, and in today’s world these concepts face serious challenges due to the actual ‘modern’ living as well as new discourses that render them more complex. All human beings experience these aspects of life in varied forms irrespective of their nationality or social customs, but each society imposes on people distinct patterns of cognition and manifestation of their experiences and the distinction between these two needs clear emphasis.

I argue, firstly that the authors and their works embody metachronotopic entities that enable points of convergence and divergence, as well as varied articulations of ‘reality’ and cognition and poetic art. Secondly, ‘some self’ of Eminescu and ‘some self’ of Tagore meet into a ‘global cultural unconscious’ from where intriguing revelations emerge. Thus, each “empirical self”[i] of the authors’ oeuvres represents concrete reflections of their ‘actual selves’ and their ‘lived’ experiences. Moreover, even though the two litterateurs under scrutiny belong to different chronotopic and cultural coordinates, ‘some self’ of Eminescu has met somewhere ‘some self’ of Tagore. Life is in itself a Text that cannot be deconstructed easily (a lived and living Text) and these ‘some’ and ‘somewhere’ are by themselves entities (even ‘empirical selves’) that depend highly on hermeneutical practice, as well as on the readers’ comprehension of the authors’ literary and lived Texts. I further the argument by maintaining that in general between the authors, their inspirations and their texts, multiple dialogical interactions generate complex and multifaceted selves that outlast the authorial beings in/ as different ‘alien’ contexts and metachronotopic entities. Elsewhere, I explained that “the ‘chronotope’ [Mikhail Bakhtin] of a given literary/ visual Text artistically expressing the intrinsic time-space matrix at the moment of its creation may be combined with the time-space matrix at the moment of its exhibition and reception, as well as with other works existing independently of, yet (in)directly, referring to it. All these can be seen as interconnected in a ‘real’ (lived) chronotope, which may be defined as a kind of metachronotope. This implies a “dialogic” encounter between the text and its contexts at different points in the course of a given work’s existence. It also suggests ‘an excess of seeing’ [Bakhtin]” on the part of the view-reader’s experience of ‘reading’ the text (Ceciu, “The Architectonics of Corporeal and Textual Selves…” 2013).

Tagore’s Bengali G?t?njal? and other works serve as appealing poetic-spaces for the ‘meeting’ of various concepts – divinity, nature, art, death etc. – and the metachronotopic entities ensued by them. The present paper will delve into Tagore’s poetic art to untangle significant metaphors, to draw comparisons with Eminescu’s writings, and to offer insights into the artistry of the two authors.[ii]

  1. Insights into the Poetic Selves, Cultures and Art

Mihai Eminescu – though having ‘journeyed’ for a very short time span in this world, for only 39 years – managed to create an oeuvre that would last forever in the cultural treasure of Romania, as a rare essence containing the whole spectrum of aromas specific to the spirit of the people inhabiting the ancient land of Dacia, specifically the space within and around the Carpathian Arch, bordered by the lower Danube and the Black Sea. Born in Moldova County, Eminescu became an icon of the Romanian culture the way Tagore was an icon of the Bengali culture. The tragic death of Eminescu, in a psychiatry ward where he had been admitted with depressive psychosis, in the full bloom of his life, stopped the author from gifting his culture with a vaster treasure of ideas and philosophical views, which may have provided the contemporary critics with clearer cues about his principles and personality. Being hailed as “the star of universal spirituality” and “the unmatched poet” during the communist era, after 1989 the poet came under the scrutiny of the literary and cultural criticism that had since then split into two camps, pros and cons. As he never kept a diary and his existence abounded in controversy and inconsistency, all critics had a partial understanding of his persona, which at times seemingly contradicted the content of his writings. Irrespective of all such controversies, the literary work of Eminescu speaks for itself: it is wonderful in its tonal, intellectual, philosophical, emotional, musical, aesthetic variations and concerns that cannot be easily defined or classified. In this sense, Constantin Noica (1909-1987) declared:

“at this moment, Eminescu is not to be critically judged by us, he is to be somehow assimilated as a cultural consciousness larger than ours – considering that his work ranges from folklore to positive sciences -, this way improving our consciousness or maybe that pang of conscience belonging to every intellectual who can grasp his infiniteness by synthesis itself.” (Junona Tutunea, trans.)[iii]

Bernard Shaw considered that “Eminescu’s music matches the music of Berlioz and the palette of Delacroix”, while the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi called him “the Beethoven of Romanian language”. K. Gajendra Singh described Eminescu as “Romania’s all-time great poet, novelist and journalist… – a sort of Ghalib and Tagore rolled into one” (2011).

         At the end of nineteenth century, Mihai Eminescu published his first Poezii (Poems, 1883) and marked a new era in Romanian literature. Along with Vasile Alecsandri, Eminescu became the most published Romanian author of the fin-de-siècle, drawing his inspiration from the Romanian popular culture, traditions and folklore, philosophy, mythology and his understanding of life itself. At the same time, concepts of cosmogony rooted in other European cultures, Asian philosophies, especially Indian, along with Latin, Greek and Dacian myths among others, can be identified throughout his literary works. His oeuvre incorporates all culturally specific myths and symbols, some included in this investigation. Although the actual lives of Eminescu and Tagore were different and the two poets were not fated to meet in this life, their writings contain the unique vision that only great poets and artists are gifted with, embodied in exceptional panoply of expressions, feelings, experiences and aesthetic sensibilities.

[i] Concept coined by William James to refer to the Self that “may be known” and includes all that a person is and does, one’s work, relations etc.

[ii] I have translated myself from Romanian and Bengali into English all passages and verses quoted in this article, except some cases where I mention the translators.

[iii] ‘Contantin Noica: Eminescu or Some Considerations on Total Mind in Romanian Culture’ translated by Junona Tutunea. www.mihaieminescu.ro…Access Full Text of the Article

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Adnan Al-Sayegh’s Anti-War Poetry: A Cry Against Inhumanity

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Hana’ KhaliefGhani, University of Al-Mustansiriya & Sura Hussein Mohammed Ali MA, University of Baghdad

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the impact of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) in the poetry of Adnan Al-Sayeghwhose participation in this war makes him a firsthand witness to the atrocities of the trenches and fight in the frontlines. This war did not only change Al-Sayegh’s life and worldview for good, it changes the nature of his poetry as well. As a result, war becomes a central issue not only in the poetry Al-Sayegh wrote in the 1980s and 1990s in Iraq, but also in the exile. The study is divided into three sections of various lengths. While section one sheds lights on the most important aspects of Al-Sayegh’s life, the second is a critical analysis of some of his anti-war poems. The conclusion states the main findings of the study.

[Keywords: War, Al-Sayegh, Poetry]

I: “What Remains of my country Iraq”: The homeland as a battlefield:

Adnan Al-Sayegh’s (1955-) was 25 years old when he participated in the Iran Iraq war(1980-1988) and saw his country devastated by the havoc of war. He was 36 when a more destructive war broke out between Iraq and the United States of America and its allies in 1991 followed by 12 years of heavy economic sanctions that affected all aspects of life. Al-Sayegh was 48 when the third war broke out between Iraq and the United States of America. In these three wars, “not a single Iraqi family was left untouched,” as Al-Athari (2008,3). As a poet, Al-Sayegh belonged to what is called “The 1980s War Generation” which included a number of Iraqi poets who, one can safely say, wrote about nothing but war (Jabr, 2011,363). In 1987, poets prepared aspecial issue in Huras al-Watan journal, in the literary sectionof this military magazine, headed and edited by poet Adnanal-Sayigh. Fourteen poets wrote of their personal experiencesand philosophies concerning war. It was in this issue’s introduction, considereda manifesto, that the eighties generation named themselves “theWar Generation,” although knowing that this name would mostlikely anger the authorities.     Like the other Iraqi anti-war poets, Al-Sayegh had to “create tools to survive the various fronts: the war itself, their own stance on the war, and their fear of falling into the war’s propaganda machine” (Ibid,374).

Al-Sayegh’s poetical talent began to manifest itself at an early stage of his life. However, an untimely poem of protest against the managerial officials of the Club of the Institution of Agriculture which was grossly misunderstood as a provocation against the State resulted in Al-Sayegh’s dismissal from the Institution. Besides this, there is another incidents that rubbed salt into Al-Sayegh’s wound. As a result of accusing Al-Sayegh of having some banned books, he was arrested, transported, and then detained in a stable with a number of soldiers for two years. There he lived amidst the animals’ excrement, bombing, scorpions, boxes of ammunitions, and the hallucination of Said Hirz; a soldier who was suffering from schizophrenia(Al-Sayegh, 2008).

These two years Al-Sayegh spent in the stable left an indelible impact in his morale and psyche. As Ismael meaningfully remarks, this stable becomes, metaphorically speaking, “his own country in miniature”. In other words, what Al-Sayegh witnessed in the stable, represented what “THEY wanted to do with the country”(Ismael, 2002). In the stable, Al-Sayegh tried to write poetry, but all his efforts were in vain. In a desperate attempt to overcome his feelings of alienation and frustration, Al-Sayegh launched, as Ali Haider points out, “a poetic counterattack on war itself”. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this poetic act of war resistance made Al-Sayegh a “war poet par excellence”(qtd. in Ibid).

II-Al-Sayegh’s Poetry of Trauma and Resistance:

In critically reading Al-Sayegh’spoetry which he wrote in Iraq, one must take into consideration that he was living in what he called “The Homeland of Wars”. This description is not surprising since, in less than three decades, the Iraqis have been experiencing continuous wars that wreaked havoc in all aspects of life. Like other Iraqis, Al-Sayegh had had a firsthand experience of war atrocities and its tragic consequences. No doubt, these successive wars and their catastrophic occurrences left an indelible mark in the psyche of the Iraqis.However, nowhere this impact is clearer than in the poetry of Al-Sayegh which Al-Shabinder (2004) asserts:

[R]ises the curtain on a more dangerous death than the physical; it is the moral and psychological death with which Al-Sayegh is concerned. This death reigns supreme over all aspects of life. His poetry displays images of physical death, killing boredom, deadly routine. There is no attempt at hiding or beautifying what is already condemned in the war. But there is one subtle aspect which we must look for: the moral [and psychological] death.

During the war, poetry for Al-Sayegh helped to alleviate the feelings of loss and frustration amidst the sounds of shelling and the overwhelming smell of death. Al-Sayegh’s depiction of daily life in the trenches and front lines was realistic to the marrow. The images of the helpless and powerless soldiers who were forced to act deadly parts in the massive drama of war were vivid and quite impressive. His poetry photographically captured the grotesque and gruesome experiences of war. He relied heavily on the direct description, everyday language, and all the figures of speech available to him, to present a war poem as close to reality as possible. This enabled Al-Sayegh, Al-Sagar (1988) remarks, to “meet the war in the middle of the distance between the poem as a literary construction and himself as a poet/soldier. He did this deliberately to make his poems closer to life and ordinary people”.

In his narration of his war experience, the soldier/poet, Al-Sayegh(2004,404) assured his readers that “He had seen trenches, camps, huts, and cannons more than [them] / He had carried dozens of corpses away from the battlefields”. At the age of 26, Al-Sayegh found himself in a situation where “the absurdity of death intermingles with the absurdity of life”.(Ibid, 496)

Al-Sayegh’s poems photographically portrayed the soldiers’ daily life in the trenches and the frontlines ramparts; among the blown bodies of his friends and the smell of death. By making war his central cause and poetic cocern, Al-Sayegh was able to acquire a socio-political vision that made his poetry quite unique. Using poetry to denounce war and to defend his humanness made Al- Sayegh’s war poem “the closest to the spirit of the age and the most honest in translating his life experiences in all their varieties and dimensions”.(Al-Sudani, 2013)

For Al-Sayegh, nothing is more real than the bombs, shells, and swollen corpses of the dead soldiers. Therefore, he admits in his poem ‘Searching for an Address’ that “bombs do not lie/ as do the military communiques and leaders/ Then take all the bombs and describe the war/ Take all the bleedings of war/… And describe the peace in my country”. (370 L19-21)(All subsequent quotations are from Al-Sayegh, 2004, nless otherwise indicated)

Al-Sayegh’s treatment of war acquired new dimension in “Flowers For ..The New Morning”. In this poem, he addressed the war directly. He was hopeful that sooner or later peace would come. He says: “O war / The swollen womb of life/ We planted everything inside you / Our childhood and wishes, our poems, fears, and our anxious lifetimes / So that a dewy morning, You could beget / the future child of peace”.(394-5 L17-22)

Al-Sayegh acknowledged his inability to forget his war experience which accompanied him like his shadow. In the same poem, he wondered: “How many bombs you have to count / To declare the end of war / How many flowers you have to pluck out / To shout ‘O Spring!’ / O My heart! / O the sparrowless city… / How much sorrow you have to endure / To write a poem of happiness” (394 L8-16)…Access Full Text of the Article

Nationalism and the Rationalization of Violence in Joyce’s Ulysses, the “Cyclops” Episode

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Camelia Raghinaru, Concordia University, Irvine

Abstract

In distancing himself from Western brutality in its religious and nationalistic forms, Joyce also registered his exasperation with Irish nationalism. Resentful nationalistic impotence structures the narrative core of the “Cyclops” episode in Joyce’s Ulysses. The impotence underlying the resentment stems from the inability to create an independent subject through any other terms than those of the master, given that postcolonial revivalist movements emulate the imperial subject. This essay dwells on the connection between impotent, resentful nationalism and its manifest violence. On one hand, I consider the stereotype of the “fighting Irish” as emblematic of instinctual, yet rationalized, violence. On the other hand, I emphasize the ultimate impotence of the realization of this instinct in its primitive, despotic form, as well as its sublimation in nationalist movements. The second essay from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality provides the theoretical tool with which I examine the parallels between the emerging narratives of rationalization and nationalism. Assuming that nationalism sublimates instinctual aggression, it also succeeds in perpetuating its aim—that of exercising the primal aggression upon which it is premised. Moreover, assuming that nationalism purports to advance the aims of the social contract between community and individual—viz., protecting the individual from aggression—it fails by the very mechanism by which it is supposed to function.

[Key words: James Joyce, Ulysses, “Cyclops,” Irish nationalism, ideology, morality, coercion, cruelty, reason, violence, Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, resentment, rationalization, impotence, resistance, racial purity, modernity]

Biographical accounts records James Joyce’s concern with religion and politics as sources of violence in the West. In his review of H. Fielding-Hall’s The Soul of a People, titled “A Suave Philosophy” and published in the Daily Express on February 6, 1903, Joyce claims that the relationship between religion, politics and violence is indigenous to the West (Davison, 1996, p. 89):

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence (Joyce quoted in Davison, 1996, p. 89).

In distancing himself from Western brutality in its religious and nationalistic forms, Joyce also registered his “apparent exasperation with nationalist laments, [stating] that he cannot understand ‘the purpose of bitter invective against the English despoiler, the disdain for the vast Anglo-Saxon civilisation, even though it is almost entirely a materialistic civilisation’” (Joyce quoted in Davison, 1996, p. 89). In a similar context, Joyce referred to Ireland as “a country destined by God to be the everlasting caricature of the serious world” and claimed “that it is rather naive to heap insults on England for her misdeeds in Ireland” (Joyce quoted in Nolan, 1995, p. 129). As Andrew Gibson (2006) documents,

Political schism and stagnation, decline and despair in the wake of Parnell, the rise of Irish cultural nationalism as exemplified in the Gaelic Revival, the cultural ‘last stand’ of the Anglo-Irish: these were the three most important features of the culture in which Joyce grew into adolescence. (p. 30-31)

Indirectly, Joyce seemed to indicate that the resentful side of nationalism stems from its impotence to measure up to its postcolonial ideal.

Resentful impotence structures the narrative core of the “Cyclops” episode in Joyce’s Ulysses. Diana Perez Garcia (2002) emphasizes the violence in the Citizen’s threat to anihilate Bloom in order to underscore the ultimate deflation and impotence of the speaker’s words. Overly inflated verbal violence is followed by the deflation resulting from its impossibility of ever being matched by the act itself. Edna Duffy (1994) has pointed out that postcolonial nationalistic violence reinvents the “primitive” and the “despotic” (p. 35) dimension of the previous colonial order while betraying, in the process, a “stifled ressentiment . . . in its attempt to delineate a folk tradition that will outdo the elite art of the colonist culture” (p. 101). The impotence underlying the resentment operates on several levels. First, it stems from the inability to create an independent subject through any other terms than those of the master, given that postcolonial revivalist movements “emulated imperial glorifications of the subject” (p. 101). Second, it lingers in the doubt that nationalism’s work in the colony can indeed successfully recapture the “romantic and atavistic view of Irish history” (Watson, 1987, p. 46). This atavism relies on its dark and violent cults of redeeming blood-sacrifices and the dynamic power of myth and legend to lift the patriotic heart into “that world of selfless passion in which heroic deeds are possible” (p. 45). Third, it questions whether the colonial administration can indeed “protect the natives from their own proclivity to violence” (Duffy, 1994, p. 35).

This essay dwells on the connection between impotent, resentful nationalism and its manifest violence. On one hand, I consider the stereotype of the “fighting Irish” (embodied in the “Cyclops” by the Citizen’s throwing the biscuit box at Jewish Bloom) as emblematic of instinctual, yet rationalized, violence —particularly as premised on the necessity for a “periodic blood-sacrifice to keep alive the National Spirit” (Watson, 1987, p. 46). On the other hand, I emphasize the ultimate impotence of the realization of this instinct in its primitive, despotic form, as well as its sublimation in nationalist movements. The second essay from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality provides the theoretical tool with which I examine the parallels between the emerging narratives of rationalization and nationalism. I claim that the “Cyclops’s” failure as a nationalistic discourse is predicated upon its success in the same vein. Assuming that nationalism sublimates instinctual aggression, it also succeeds in perpetuating its aim—that of exercising the primal aggression upon which it is premised. On the other hand, assuming that nationalism purports to advance the aims of the social contract between community and individual—viz., protecting the individual from aggression—it fails by the very mechanism by which it is supposed to function. Duffy (1994) posits the failure as postcolonial interpellation of the subject. In her view, nationalism works in the colony to imaginatively reinvent the “primitive” or “despotic” modes of production that are            likely to have long been torn apart and marginalized by the colonial administration, but  merely to offer them as so much spectacle through which the masses can be interpellated            to the cause of the newly invented nation. (p. 35)

The spectacle of impotent violence is best showcased in the Citizen’s performative threat against Bloom. His recourse to open violence, following a series of verbal assaults and racial insinuations, conveys the colonial import of his violent nationalism. The double-jointed politics prevents the formation of a homogenous community integrating multiple postcolonial identities into a collective dynamic. It also insists on imagining an elusive and illusionary conformity, “supposedly generated as if by magic in the glorious moment of independence” (Duffy, 1994, p. 128).

The failure to integrate differences stems not only from an inability to comprehend the perverse inner-workings of nationalism in postcolonial cultures but also from an ostensible unwillingness to subvert these mechanisms. Nietzsche argues that modernity emerges from the sublimation of violence through reason and rationalization. Consequently, in its postcolonial form, the nationalism of the “Cyclops” (represented not only through the Citizen’s open recourse to aggression, but also through the nameless narrator’s hate-speech against Bloom and the many overt and covert hints of violence interspersed through the narrative) must perforce perpetuate its own existence out of a more primal claim than the national-identitarian one—that of the primeval instinct of cruelty founding the ab-original community:

“The Cyclopean giant who threatens the Dublin Ulysses is not something real in the situation of the country or its inhabitants: the danger comes from the swollen dreams and illusions which are the compensation for pointless and trivial lives, and from the giant hatreds and prejudices which originate in such dreams and give rise to blind nationalism, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism and all the other symptoms of spiritual poverty and frustration.” (Peake, 1977, p. 235)

In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche constructs a narrative of resentment in which cruelty (i.e., the practice of the prohibited) is rationalized as a social contract between the individual and the community. “Bad consciousness” initiates the development of reason and rationality as tools, masks, or excuses that veil the great historical performance of the instinct of aggression and cruelty (powerful drives recognized by Nietzsche and Freud) that, in their rationalized form, become fundamental to the development of modernity (and, I would argue, to that of modern nationalism). Rationalization develops as a sly move: that of indulging in cruelty, a violation of the moral code, while exercising the otherwise prohibited, yet subversively encouraged instinct. The master race, paradoxically, prohibits violence, while also prescribing it as a virtue. According to Nietzsche (1887/1989), the rationalization of cruelty precedes guilt and resentment because it is connected to the individual’s awareness of his cruelty as “proud consciousness” (p. 59)—a driving instinct synonymous with the life-force. The institutionalization of promise forms the basis of this contract, accomplished through the blood and gore, torture and penances accompanying the enforcement of the penal code…Access Full Text of the Article

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Politics of Abjection: Analysing the Debasement of Female Bodies in Cross-Border Conflicts

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Deblina Hazra, Jadavpur University

Abstract

Julia Kristeva in Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) describes abjection as the ambivalent process of subject formation in which elements that the self cannot assimilate are expelled, disavowed and designated repugnant. Female bodies in cross-border feud have always been subjected to abjection for the greater religio-political need. The bodies of women have proved to be useful mediums to transfer symbolically messages of power, victory and supremacy. Violence perpetrated on these bodies not only metaphorically asserts male superiority, but also serves as an effective platform to terrorize people. Degrading the female bodies also signifies the extermination of a particular community, both by destroying the honour and impregnating them with the seeds of a foreign community. Reading Jean Franco’s account of debasement of female bodies in the war across USA-Mexico border and the partition narratives based on the Indo-Pakistan front, as well as taking into account the contemporary scenario of Islamic terrorism, this paper aims to look at the ways in which women’s bodies are violently debased, and analyse the symbolisms of such abjection against the backdrop of border-wars.

[Keywords: Border, partition narratives, Islamic terrorism, female bodies, abjection.]

Introduction

“…when the taboo against harming others is broken, there can be no limits, no social pact.” (Franco 1)

Franco in her 2013 book Cruel Modernity analyzes the various forms of cruelty that has begun to define modernity in Latin America. Though focused only on the discriminating atrocities committed across the USA-Mexico border, her reading is an echo of border politics all around the globe. Border exists, whether visible and physical or invisible and imaginary, because there is an ‘other’. It differentiates race, religion, ethnicity, community, nationality, language and even gender. Franco’s extensive research reveals that the only possible way modernity can negotiate with such varied borders is through an extreme form of violence which amounts to a complete dehumanization of both human body and psyche. The violence inflicted on human beings, in such cases, leads to a debasement of the human body and reduces it to an animalistic status. The human body, subjected to beatings, curses and other forms of humiliations, loses its subjectivity and becomes synonymous to a non-human existence. Franco examines the conditions under which extreme forms of cruelty become “the instrument of armies, governments, and rogue groups” and seeks to answer the question, “Why, in Latin America, did the pressures of modernization and the lure of modernity lead states to kill?” (Franco 2) This is not to say that Franco considers cruelty as a newly emerging phenomenon. She is not blind to the fact that neither cruelty nor its exploitation is new. However, it is the lifting of the taboo against harming others that concerns her thesis. She explores how “the acceptance and justification of cruelty and the rationale for cruel acts” (Franco 2) has become a major feature of modernity. The scenario that she paints is a universal one – be it across the USA-Mexico border or the India-Pakistan border. The root cause of such barbarism across multiple forms of borders can be pinned down to the internalization of border in human psyche. Border denotes difference and difference is a natural phenomenon, since the world as it was created was not a homogeneous one. However, the differences of race, religion, ethnicity, language has led to an utmost intolerance towards the other calling for its cruel annihilation. The hatred towards the other has been nurtured to such an extent that human conscience no longer recognizes cruelty as an act amounting to crime. The involvement of state apparatuses in further endorsing this hatred and its participation in the game of brutality deprives humans of their rights in such a manner that “no act committed against them could appear any longer a crime” (Agamben, qtd. Franco 4).

‘Cruel Modernity’ and the Female Body

Among other forms of brutality which constitute ‘cruel modernity’, the treatment of the female bodies in cross-border politics is the most grotesque and barbaric. The female body is a site of numerous conflicting and contesting claims. It is a site to assert male supremacy; it is simultaneously a site where the symbolic extermination of an entire community or race can be carried out; it is also a site which bears the burden of honour. This honour once again is not singularly of the woman’s. The honour of her family, the honour of the race and ethnicity to which she belongs are all manifested on her body. The female body, therefore, is a vulnerable site – a site whose violation can symbolically violate an entire community, and a site whose protection is mandatory to maintain the purity and integrity of the community, even if that protection comes at the cost of her life. This paper studies this complex reading of the female body and how it is used to manipulate cross-border politics. Through a comparative reading of instances of abjection of the female body from Franco’s Cruel Modernity and literary examples from the Indo-Pakistan border this paper attempts to show how two widely different border spectrums resort to a similar brutal treatment of the female body with an aim of turning it into an abject to assert various forms of male supremacy in their own individual ways. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines abject as “Brought low, miserable; craven, degraded, despicable, self abasing” and it describes abjection as a “state of misery or degradation.” While describing how abjection is expressed, Samantha Pentony in her article ‘How Kristeva’s theory of abjection works in relation to the fairy tale and post colonial novel: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People’ comments that

“[R]eligious abhorrence, incest, women’s bodies, human sacrifice, bodily waste, death, cannibalism, murder, decay, and perversion are aspects of humanity that society considers abject” (Pentony 1; italics are mine).

This paper traces how women’s bodies in being subjected to the politics of abjection become a means of proclaiming male supremacy in conflicts across all kinds of borders – whether geographical, political, racial, or most importantly, gender.

Julia Kristeva put forward her theory of abjection in Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) where she identifies that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother. This idea is drawn from Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory which underpins her theory of abjection. She identifies that abjection represents a revolt against that which gave us our own existence or state of being. For Kristeva, the corporeal link between mother and child is the most fundamental abjection of all, initiating the logic upon which all other forms of abjection are predicated and paving the way for the child’s entry into the symbolic. This, for Kristeva, is why language is a masculine preserve and why femininity – and particularly maternity – is tainted with the abject. According to her, abjection describes the ambivalent process of subject formation in which elements that the self cannot assimilate are expelled, disavowed and designated repugnant. Her model of the Abject outlines a conflict in gender between patriarchal signification and the female imaginary and explains female oppression as an inability to cast off the internalization of the mother. Taking her cue from Kristeva, Barbara Creed writes:

“The place of the abject is where meaning collapses, the place where I am not. The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self. (Creed 65; italics are mine)

Besides political, racial, communal, ethnic and linguistic borders, women have to confront what is probably the most unaccounted but the most diabolic border – the border of gender – where women are seen as men’s ‘other’ and, thus, are separated out in heinous ways of all kinds…Access Full Text of the Article

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The Idea of the Border in the Digital Age

Debra A. Castillo1 & Parthasarathi Bhaumik2 1Professor, Cornell University. Email id: dac9@cornell.edu. 2Associate Professor, Jadavpur University, India. Email: parthasarathi.bhaumik@jadavpuruniversity.in Rupkatha Journal, Vol.

Indian English Fiction – The Fruit Inevitable: A Review Indian Fiction in English: Mapping the Contemporary Literary Landscape

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Edited by
Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Arnab Kumar Sinha & Himadri Lahiri

New Delhi: Creative, 2014
Page nos. 432
 ISBN 978-81-8043-108-1.

Review by
Partha Sarathi Gupta
Tripura University

Fiction is the rotund fruit which blossoms spontaneously and inevitably in the fast spreading, all encompassing, encroaching and evergreen tree of life, observed Tagore in the introductory paragraph of his essay Shesh Kotha (Final Words) in the fourth volume of Golpoguchho. Life spreads its ever expanding branches about its trunk, and the monotony of its accessions envelops existence, till one fine day, on one of its branches, a fruit blossoms. It is rotund, bright, being sweet, sour or intensely bitter in its pulp, and has an inevitability about itself. Fiction is the fruit of the tree of life and experience. Tagore made the above observations on the nature of the short story in particular. But the remarks are equally applicable to the art of fiction in general. If the content of fiction is life, like the huge expansive evergreen tree, the form is the fruit. The rotundity of the fruit suggests the shape and significance offered by the artist of fiction to the immense panorama of the chaotic variety of life and its experiences. Tagore’s observations fit smugly into the territory of English fiction in India. Amit Chaudhuri observes, “Indian life is plural, garrulous, rambling, lacking a fixed centre, and the Indian novel must be the same” (115). A relatively new genre in the matrix of Indian literature, the novel in India is a colonial child. The English novel in the Indian soil is more so, as the enterprise of writing fiction in the colonizer’s language ought to be fraught with and wrought in anxieties of influence. But it is the same influence that underscores the first colonial experience, and hence life, in those times of anxiety. Hence the cross-pollination of language, race and art gave birth to the fruit called Indian English novel.

The recently published anthology of essays titled Indian Fiction in English: Mapping the Contemporary Literary Landscape (New Delhi: Creative, 2014) edited by Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Arnab Kumar Sinha and Himadri Lahiri makes fresh forays into the taken-for-granted literary landscape of Indian Fiction in English. The “Introduction” to the volume explains to the reader the inevitability of the genre in colonial and postcolonial India, rooting it back to 1835, the year of the publication of Macaulay’s Minutes on Education. Since then, the bogey of Indian English fiction chugs on, traversing the landscapes of colonial India, forging new narrative forms to articulate the Indian experience in the language of the colonizer. Amit Chaudhuri rightly points out that “since India is a huge baggy monster, the novels that accommodate it have to be baggy monsters as well” (Chaudhuri 114); “the largeness of the book allegorizes the largeness of the country it represents” (114-115). The bulky Booker of Bookers – Midnight’s Children – automatically comes to mind in this context. Chaudhuri draws a contrast between them and the novels written in the regional languages such as Bengali, “where the short story and novella have predominated at least as much as the novel, often in the hands of the major novelists of the first half of the century, such as Bibhutibhusan and Tarashankar Banerjee” (114). Moreover, Chaudhuri also refers to the writer and critic Buddhadev Bose who reminds the scholar that Tagore brought the modern short story into Bengal in the late nineteenth century, “some time before it was introduced to England” (114). Any attempt to map Indian English Fiction may refer to these valuable insights provided by none other than Amit Chaudhuri, to situate the contemporary Indian English novel in context. And there lies the value of the volume under review edited by Bhattacharya, Sinha and Lahiri. Although the book attempts to “map” “the contemporary literary landscape” of Indian English Fiction, the chapters in the first section initiate a discussion on the history of the evolution of the Indian novel in English.

The essays in this volume have been distributed across seven sections on the basis of their thrusts of argument, followed by an “Interview” with Tabish Khair presented by Sajalkumar Bhattacharya. However, the common linking paradigm of critical evaluation seems to be the question of the identity of the Indian English novel, inextricably connected with questions of nation, postcoloniality, history, ethnicity and representations of the diaspora. Almost all of these contentious issues have been addressed by Tabish Khair in his interview given to Sajalkumar Bhattacharya in the final section of the volume. Hence, instead of beginning from the beginning, one may begin from the end. Khair responds to a set of penetrating questions that naturally arises in any critical engagement with the genre in question – Indian English Fiction – covering almost all the above-mentioned areas of enquiry. With a critical detachment, he separates himself from the privileged metropolitan positioning of the Indian English novelist, despite having migrated to Denmark himself, and celebrates his root-status as the Indian in Gaya, which to him is different from the Indian in Goa. However, his celebration of his small-town roots must not be deemed as one that claims a false subaltern status, as he frankly cautions. As a critic, he vehemently resists West-centric stereotypes of assessing the Indian English novelist. One such stereotype that is commonly used in discourses of scholarship is the idea of mimicry. Khair vociferously declares that the contemporary novelist in India writing in English has nothing to mimic. Mimicry might have been a reality to the top-thin layer of highly anglicized ‘natives’ in the past. But today, it is important to realize that the Indian English novelist took from the English or the West what came naturally to them, “without realizing their source”, or acting under duress. The sensibility that comes to be portrayed in Indian English Fiction thus has been inevitable. Khair’s observations once again legitimize Tagore’s definition of fiction – the inevitable fruit of life. Khair maintains that writing is not a cultural activity for him, a mark of sophistication or education. “I do not write because it is the thing to do or because I have time to kill…I write because I need to, because I feel an urge to tell that story or those stories in that way.”

The first section “Parameters and Politics of Indian Fiction in English: Some Reflections” presents three valuable essays that historicize and problematize the much used category “Indian English Fiction”, critiqued, debated upon, and sometimes passionately vilified by both purists and globalists. The opening essay by Somdatta Mandal, true to its title “Past, Present and Future of the Indian English Language and Literature: Some Observations,” provides a bird’s-eye view of the history of Indian English Fiction with its antecedents in less known non-fictional narrative pieces such as Travels of Dean Mahomet in 1794 and the first drama scripted by an Indian in the English language, The Persecuted or Dramatic Scenes Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society in Calcutta by Baboo Krishna Mohan Banerjea in 1831. Adopting a socio-historical approach to the rise of English writing in India, Mandal highlights less heard names such as Cavelly Venkata Boriah, Kylas Chunder Dutt and Reverend Lalbehari Day, Dhan Gopal Mukherjee and Sudhin N. Ghose, to name a few, among the well known stalwarts such as Khushwant Singh and Nirad C. Choudhuri, to show the narrative continuum of Indian Fiction in English. Besides, she also observes how writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan and G. V. Desani, in order to cater to the tastes of “dual readership” either chose to get their novels published from abroad or got veterans such as E. M. Forster, Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess, to pen prefaces or recommendations for themselves. Providing a plethora of interesting information for the scholar of Indian English Fiction, Mandal’s essay traverses the evolutionary path of both the Indian English novel and the Indian English idiom which happens to occupy a contentious position in the linguistic matrix of the country since the publications of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864 (printer’s devil dating it to 1964 in the volume) and Govinda Samanta by Reverend Lalbehari Day in 1874. The complexities involved in the state of affairs of the genre today are sensitively documented in the essay which exposes the unaddressed and unrepresented facets of contemporary Indian culture such as the overarching presence of the pan-Indian urban middle class, which today forms a major demographic component. Instead, English educated writers based abroad, represent heroes who hop, skip and jump continents as if the globe were their backyard, very frequently valorising exile.

Himadri Lahiri’s essay in the first section “Nation, Nation-based Category and Indian English Literature: A Belated View”, defying all narratives of post-theory scepticism, argues in support of the need for categories in critical scholarship, without the support of which Indian Fiction in English cannot be critiqued. Lahiri argues in support of the role of geopolitical spatiality in the act of forging fictions in postcolonial India that cries out naturally for a nation-based category. He calls the creation of such a category “an absolute practical necessity” However, he too provides a stark critique of the most commonly used category to brand fictional narratives composed by writers writing in English in India – “Indian English Fiction” or “Indian Fiction in English”, which incidentally happens to be the title of the volume reviewed at present. Lahiri’s critique poses uncomfortable questions for the academia of the Indian subcontinent that seemed to be complacently ensconced in the cushion of such categories as the Indian novel in English and the Pakistani novel in English, after the freedom at midnight when two nations were left bleeding with gaping and running sores that would never easily heal. Lahiri’s questions to the literary historiographer may be summed up in one line: can one partition history in the act of historicizing literature? Otherwise, what rigid posturing denies great storytellers of the Indian nationalist movement of the pre-partition period such as Ahmed Ali, Feroze Khan Noon, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas a well-deserved space in the canon of Indian English Fiction? Lahiri rightly points out: “This is an area which has not been addressed in a critical way so far.” Confused and hopelessly communalised by the great divide, Islam has been equated with Pakistani identity when it came to labelling the above writers who could never imagine that they were heading for a partition of consciousness and even literary scholarship, a dilemma quite evident in Tariq Rahman’s book A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1991), from which Lahiri quotes in order to substantiate his argument.

Amidst the flood of articles sifted through critical anthologies and volumes on Indian English Fiction in the market of academic scholarship, rarely do we stumble upon one which opens up several potential areas for further research for the inspired scholar working on the subject. One may identify at least two potentially rich areas for further study in Lahiri’s essay – the one that may involve that group of marginalised Muslim writers from the Indian English canon, who, for no fault of theirs, do not find a place, as mentioned earlier. Among them, there is another sub-group represented by writers such as K. A. Abbas who never left India after partition, yet has been denied a place in the canon, both in India as well as Pakistan. Abbas, sadly has not found a secure place in the canon of Pakistani fiction in English too as he had never migrated. Tariq Rahman, as if in a magnanimous gesture of comradeship, allows a space to him in A History of Pakistani Literature in English on account of an audaciously parochial rationale, as referred to in Lahiri’s essay: “However, I have dealt with Abbas because he represents a neglected aspect of Muslim consciousness which found literary expression in English before the Partition”. The other potential area of inquiry for further research may be detected in the first and only work in English on the Indian Chinese community by an Indian Chinese author Kwai-yun Li who later migrated to Canada. Lahiri’s essay identifies similar narrative spaces on the peripheries of the contemporary fictional landscape in India, such as writings from India’s North-East and Kashmir, both insurgent infested locales which cry out for representation both in literature and literary historiography. Angshuman Kar’s essay “No War in Inter-War Indian English Fiction” addresses a few questions on the studied silence maintained by Indian authors writing in English as well as in the regional languages on the impact of the two great wars that left Europe bleeding. Despite their British and European counterparts actively engaged in representing war and world politics in their fiction, Indian novelists such as Anand and Narayan consciously avoid the war backdrop or war as subject in their fiction. Kar attempts to read into the silences and expose the politics beneath the blank spaces of fiction writing in Indian English literature.

Pradip Ranjan Sengupta’s essay “Word, Language and the Indian Idiom: A Study of Ghosh’s Use of Dialect” in the second section “Representation of the Postcolonial India” is a commendable study of Amitav Ghosh’s sincere attempt at providing a mature rendition of the modern English idiom in contemporary Indian English fictional space, particularly in his later novels such as The Hungry Tide in which he adopts the method of partial translation to effectively capture the spirit and essence of his milieu and tell his story in English. Rajarshi Mitra’s essay on Jim Corbett’s My India titled “Dear Native Sahib: India in Jim Corbett’s Autobiographical Writings” is a surprise entry in this anthology of critical essays on Indian Fiction in English. One might wonder how an autobiographical writing may fit into the schema of fiction. However, a closer reading would reveal an insightful critique of the autobiographical elements in Jim Corbett’s My India. An autobiographical account may naturally raise the expectation of credibility. But Mitra detects several fissures in Corbett’s representation of India, particularly during those moments when he bids farewell to the country in which he lived, breathed and wrote. A fondness of spirit coloured by nostalgia for the land makes Corbett’s My India too sweet and too nice, where “even the rogue Sultana is portrayed as a benevolent dacoit helping out the poor in need.” “The marked sense of sexual and political innocence that might at times seem too contrived” makes Jim Corbett’s My India fictional. Corbett’s convenient and quiet espousal of the colonizer’s anxiety leaves several political questions answered, which Mitra attempts to address in this essay. While Corbett chooses Kenya as his future home, we see the East-West encounter from the other side of the colonizer’s gaze.

The first essay of the third section “History and Ethnicity” titled “Making Little History Happen: An Evaluation of History in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle” offers another fresh perspective of the East-West encounter from the gaze of the Anglo-Indian. The generic use of the “nama” as in Akbar Nama or Babar Nama, popular to traditional Indian chronicles and biographies, has been carefully chosen as a narrative device which allows the narrator Justin Trotoirre an informal entry into the official discourse of history in the annals of which the Anglo-Indians do not find adequate representation. Sudipta Chakraborty’s essay “Interpolating Renaissance: History and Allegory in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence” busts the Eurocentric myth of the Renaissance, asserting Rushdie’s re-reading of the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance not as a Western monopoly, but as a movement that had its roots in Emperor Akbar’s world-view. Samrat Laskar’s essay on Kunal Basu’s The Yellow Emperor’s Cure underscores a new engagement, on the part of the Indian English novelist, with China, the rising neighbour in the East, with whom India has shared a complex relationship over the past few decades. Basu’s representation of China’s inhibitions in engaging in active cultural communications may go a long way in addressing future questions on some of the burning issues which have determined Indian ties with China.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) has garnered considerable critical attention in the fourth section of the volume “Women and Representation.” Two essays have been devoted to the novel in this anthology. Trayee Sinha’s essay addresses the identity question and its representational potential, and the one jointly written by Soumyajyoti Banerjee and Amrita Basu addresses questions on the body as text. Draupadi, addressed as Krishnaa, with a double ‘a’ by none other than Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata, has always intrigued novelists and critics alike. But what has evaded both these essays is Divakaruni’s engagement with this highly complex power centre of the Mahabharata – Draupadi – from a global/international/metropolitan perspective of the contemporary globalised Indian English writer, as Tabish Khair may have read it. The Sahitya-Akademi-Award-winning Marathi narrative Yuganta (1998) by Iravati Karvey and Prof Nrishinghaprasad Bhaduri’s Krishnaa, Kunti Ebong Kaunteya (1998) in Bangla are two highly reputed works on Draupadi, both of which are well researched interpretations of the myth of the lady in the centre of the Mahabharata in the respective regional languages. Moreover, both are non-fictional narratives. It would be an interesting exercise to examine Divakaruni’s global perspective as an Indian English novelist, on the silences in the epic when it came to act of narrating her in fiction. Divakaruni’s novel may be read as Draupadi’s narration of herself, which may become the focus of critical engagement for critics in future. In the same section of the volume, Pradipta Shyam Chowdhuri’s essay “Looking into the Arabian Nights: Reading Gita Hariharan’s When Dreams Travel” offers a fresh perspective to the woman as story-teller in Hariharan’s hypertext-novel on the Arabian Nights. The four essays in the fifth section Representation from the Diaspora effectively highlight the fluidity of identities and problems of fictional representations of the diasporas in Indian English Fiction. The complexities involved in categorization of these texts within the matrix of Indian English Literature have been appropriately approached by Tabish Khair in his interview to Sajalkumar Bhattacharya.

What is fresh about this anthology under review is its sensitive focus on fictional writings in English from the North-East and the newly emerging trend of churning up bazaar fictions in the market of the popular literature industry. In the former section dealing with the North-East, Rumpa Das’s essay “The Strength of the Weak: Power of Women Against Terror” appropriately contextualizes the hangover of logo-centric tendencies of colonial scholarship in the act of categorizing the North-East as a broad all-encompassing topos, a uniform whole for matters of political convenience. Such tendencies are hegemonic, running the risk of gross oversimplification, as Das rightly observes. Her readings of Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao and Mitra Phukan open up new vistas of critical scholarship by engaging with female points of view of North-East concerns – namely terror and violence – in the respective states popularly clubbed together as the Seven Sisters. Manas Pratim Borah’s essay, “Narratives of Violence and Northeastern Terror Lore: A Reading of Select Fictional Writings from Northeast India” engages with the fondness for lores in this part of the country, which have provided narratives of this region with energy and vigour to address the hardships of life and the adverse socio-political experiences which have become realities of the region over time. Borah is chiefly concerned with what he calls the “terror lore” typical to the diverse narratives of the region. However, despite Borah’s interest in lores, he has not engaged with the rich treasure troves of oral folklores of the region, particular to each of the innumerable ethnic communities across the Seven Sisters. Although they do not belong to the category of ‘Indian Fiction in English’, it goes without saying that their presence feeds the creative imagination of the North East with life blood and vitality.

The final section on popular Indian English Fiction titled “Pop-Lit” attempts to jolt multicultural/global award-winning Indian English fiction writers out of their complacency of publishing one novel at intervals of three to five years. Hoards of young writers of fiction from both cities and small-towns are making a beeline to offices of publishing companies everyday to get their stories published. The book-market of popular fiction respectfully bows down to the overarching presence of both prolific Indian writers of international repute such as Chetan Bhagat and Aravinda Adiga in academic forums and bookstores across India, and bestselling authors credited with one or two novels such as Parul Mittal. It seems, there is space for every writer of pop-lit in bookshelves across India. However, when it comes to critical engagement with such fictional narratives, a few suggestions may be necessary. It is important for the critic of such texts to investigate into the engineering of stories that thrill and charm readers cutting across age and class. Strategies adopted by the popular culture/literature industry to install thrill in narratives, through a certain amount of amnesia, may be explored through a detailed reading of such narratives in the light of Western theorists of popular literature such as Umberto Eco. Mahitosh Mandal attempts to engage with Chetan Bhagat’s reception and literariness, but falls short of providing a theoretical assessment of Bhagat’s literariness. Abhilash Dey’s essay on the “Desi Chick-lit novel” raises expectations on a more penetrating theoretical engagement. However, the sociology of the stories seems to dominate the focus of critical attention. Matters of execution in the domain of popular fiction have largely remained unaddressed.

To conclude, one must not forget to mention the importance given to the exhaustive notes at the end of some of the essays of this volume, particularly in the first section. They would go a great extent in providing vital cues for further research on areas unexplored so far within the domain of Indian English Fiction. Besides, the “List of Publications of Prose-Fiction in English Since 1980” at the end of the volume may be used as a valuable database for students, scholars and teachers.

WORKS CITED

Chaudhuri, Amit. (2008). Huge Baggy Monster’: Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel after Rushdie. Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Ranikhet: Black Kite. Print.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Chhoto Golpo: Shesh Kotha. Golpoguchho. Vol. 4. Kolkata: Visva-Bharati. 751-768.

Karve, Iravati. (1998). Yuganta. Bengali translation by Arundhuti Bandopadhyay. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Bhadhuri, Nrishighaprasad. (1998). Krishnaa, Kunti Ebong Kaunteya. Kolkata: Ananda.

Partha Sarathi Gupta is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Tripura University. He completed his Ph.D on the Representation of Urban Reality in Indian English Drama. He has been actively engaged in translating oral folktales of the North-East under the auspices of the Sahitya Akademi.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), Vol. VI, No. 3, 2014.
Ed. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay &Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
URL of the Issue: http://rupkatha.com/v6n3.php
URL of the review: http://rupkatha.com/V6/n3/14_1_Review_Indian_Fiction_in_English.pdf                                   
Kolkata, India. Copyrighted material. www.rupkatha.com

 

The Curious Case of Shanthi: The Issue of Transgender in Indian Sports

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Sudeshna Mukherjee, Bangalore University          

Background of the study

Shanthi Soundarajan an Indian runner was born in 1981 in the village of Kathakkurichi in Pudukkottai District of Tamil Nadu, India. Soundarajan, a dalit by birth belongs to poorest of poor category. She grew up in a small hut devoid of toilet, water or electricity. Her mother and father had to go to another town to work in a brickyard, where they earned the equivalent of $4 a week. While they were gone, Shanthi, the oldest, was in charge of taking care of her four siblings. Sometimes, Soundarajan’s grandfather, an accomplished runner, helped while her parents were away. When she was 13, he taught her to run on an open stretch of dirt outside the hut and bought her a pair of shoes. At her first competition, in eighth grade, Soundarajan won a tin cup; she collected 13 more at interschool competitions. The sports coach at a nearby high school took note of her performances and spotted her. The school paid her tuition and provided her with uniform and lunch. Athletics gave a new dimension to her life engulfed with struggles.

She had very impressive track record to her credit. At a national meet in Bangalore in July 2005 she won the 800m, 1,500m and 3000m.In 2005 she attended the Asian Athletics Championships in South Korea, where she won a silver medal. In 2006, she was chosen to represent India at the Asian Games held in Doha, Qatar. In the 800 meters, Soundarajan took the silver in 2 minutes, 3.16 seconds, beating Viktoriya Yalovtseva of Kazakhstan by 0.03. This win and a subsequent failed gender test lead to Soundarajan becoming embroiled in an ongoing, unresolved debate over the issue of transgender and sports (BBC News ,2006).She was told results indicated that she “does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman” (BBC News, 2006). Soon after the results of the sex test came out, she was stripped of her silver medal.

In this backdrop, my descriptive, diagnostic study, based secondary data, would like to trace the plights of transgender sports personnel in India and abroad.

Conceptualizing Transgender:

A person’s sex is rooted in biology. Sex is “either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species…distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). On the other hand, gender is a socio-cultural construction. It is the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. Transgender is an umbrella term that describes “individuals whose gender identity doesn’t match the gender identity commonly experienced by those of the individuals’ natal sex” (Buzuvis, 2011).

Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individual, behaviors and group involving tendencies that diverge from the normative gender role (woman or man) commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society.Transgender is the state of one’s “gender identity” (Self-identification as male, female, both or neither) not matching one’s assigned gender”(identification by others as male or female based on physical/genetic sex) Transgender does not imply any specific form of sexual orientation, they may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual or asexual. The precise definition for transgender remains in flux, but include, of relating to or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these.

A transgender individual may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular gender, identify elsewhere on the traditional gender continuum, or exist outside of it as “other”, “a-gender”, “inter-gender” or third gender.

According to S.Kessler & W.Mekenna (1978) in theory, transgender is a challenge to the Social Construction of gender. In practice, it is usually transgender people in one way or another not place them outside the conventional male/female dichotomy, yet live in social world that recognizes only females and males. In the light of three possible meanings of trans, they considered to deconstruct gender.

The prefix “trans” has 3 different meanings. Trans means change, as in the word “transform”. In this first sense transgender people change their bodies to fit the gender they feel they always were. Transgender in this sense is synonymous with what is typically meant by the term (Kessler & Mekenna, 1978).

In the second sense “Trans” means across as in the word “transcontinental”. In this sense a transgendered person is one who moves across genders. This meaning does not imply being essentially or permanently committed to one or the other gender and therefore has a more social-constructionist connotation. The transgender person in this meaning does not leave the realm of two genders. The emphasis is on the “crossing” and not on any surgical transformation accompanying it such a person might say “I want people to attribute the gender “female” to me, but I’m not going to get my genitals changed. I don’t mind having my penis”. It is more like a previously unthinkable combination of male and female (Martin and Nguyen, 2004).

Third meaning of “trans” is beyond or through”. In this a trans gendered person is one who has gotten through gender, beyond gender. No clear gender attribution can be made, or is allowed to make. Gender ceases to exist, both for this person and those with whom they interact (Martin and Nguyen, 2004). This third meaning is the most radical, which talks for elimination of gender.

The term transgender was popularized in the 1970’s describing people who wanted to live cross-gender without sex reassignment surgery. In the 1980’s the term was expanded to an umbrella term and became popular as a means of uniting all those whose gender identity did not mesh with their gender assigned at birth. In the 1990’s the term took on a political dimension as an alliance covering all those who have at some print not conformed to gender norms, and the term became used to question the validity of those norms or pursue equal rights and antidiscrimination legislation, leading to its widespread usage in the media, academic world and law. The term continues to evolve; Transgender identity includes many overlapping categories including transsexual, cross-dressers, and transvestite and so on. Among these the term “transsexual” requires little elaboration, as it is closer to the term transgender.

Transsexual is a subcategory under the transgender umbrella. Three criteria are used to classify a transgender individual as transsexual: “(1) persistent discomfort about one’s Birth-Sex, (2) at least two years of persistent preoccupation with acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex, and (3) having reached puberty (the age at which the reproductive organs mature)”( Pilgrim,2003 495- 501 ) .Transsexual people have deep conviction that the gender to which they were assigned at birth on the basis of their physical anatomy or birth gender is incorrect. That conviction often compels them to undergo hormonal or surgical treatment to bring their physical identity into line with their preferred acquired gender identity.

Transsexualism is not the same as cross-dressing for sexual thrill, psychological comfort or compulsion. It is not the same as being sexually attracted towards people of the same sex. Many transsexual people wish to keep their condition private, and this must be respected and they should be treated as members of their acquired gender…Access Full Text of the Article

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Sexual Psychology in Theodore Sturgeon’s Fiction

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David Layton, DeVry University

Abstract

Many critics have mentioned the importance of Theodore Sturgeon to the history of science fiction, but his work has not received enough academic critical attention. One probable reason for the praise Sturgeon’s work receives, especially from fellow writers, is his candid portrayal of the psychology of male sexual desire. Sturgeon focuses on three specific aspects of male sexuality: the sexual charge of being needed by a woman, the overwhelming power of male sexual urges, and the importance of chance encounters to create the spark igniting a sexual conflagration in men. Sturgeon’s candor about how male sexual desires feel sets him apart from his contemporaries and provides a major reason for the appreciation he receives as a writer.

Theodore Sturgeon’s name is one of those most cited in lists of the writers of science fiction’s “Golden Age.” Many consider him the best “Golden Age” author, mainly because he concentrated less on scientific hardware and more on character interaction than did his contemporaries. A moralistic and romantic writer, his major themes were tolerance for otherness of all kinds and concern that many social problems were results of repressed sexuality. He was among the first American science fiction writers to write plausibly about sex, homosexuality, race, and religion. Because of this, he has sometimes been accused of writing pornography by those who prefer their science fiction in the standard starched-collar puritan mode. In reality, Sturgeon is among the first to turn American science fiction into a fiction for mature, thinking adults, as his influence on writers including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Samuel Delany attests.

Indeed, the praise for Sturgeon’s writing is directly proportional to the lack of critical attention paid to his writing. Probably no author so highly regarded has received so little genuine critical assessment. The praise is often effusive, and mostly coming from fellow science-fiction writers. Norman Spinrad(1990) says of Sturgeon that he is “probably the finest short story writer the SF genre has produced, and arguably the finest American short story writer of the post-World War II era” (p. 167). Encomiums nearly this strong have come from Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, and Samuel Delany. Others, such as Brian Aldiss and Barry Malzberg, though not as wowed with Sturgeon’s style, still admit that Sturgeon is essential to understanding the development of science fiction.

What is there precisely in Sturgeon’s writing that garners him such praise and loyalty from other writers in the science fiction field? A key to answering this question may be in the way Sturgeon handles characters, especially male characters. Even when Sturgeon’s characters fit the stereotypes of the markets in which he published, there was usually some dimension beyond the stereotypes, something that made the characters seem like real people and not idealized or cartoon people. Brian Aldiss(1988) has noted Sturgeon’s concern for the underdog, and in particular his rejection of “the dangerous cult of the superman” (p. 226). Aldiss notes Sturgeon’s “interest in the psychology and oddity of human beings” (p. 219), but Sturgeon’s peculiar interest is in the odd psychology of human beings.

An example of this interest in odd psychology is in the way Sturgeon writes about male psychology. Sturgeon’s presentation of sex through the psychology of sex sets him apart from other science-fiction writers of his generation. Sturgeon avoids the “peek-a-boo” prurience of many lesser authors. Other writers of his time often write around the subject even when they try to write about it. Sturgeon also usually avoids the moralizing lecture approach to the subject that Heinlein mistakes for honesty about sex. When Sturgeon writes about sex, he often appears not to be, because titillation, mechanics, and conventional morality in sexual matters do not interest him as a writer. Sturgeon’s subject is the perception and feeling of the man whose mind has been taken over by the sexual imperative.

A running theme in his fiction involves men who find themselves needed by women. Sturgeon twists the “damsel in distress” scenario a little because in his fiction the woman is not the prize. Instead, the psychological driver is being needed. Sturgeon realizes what a potent sexual stimulus being needed by a woman can be. One sees this in “Ghost of a Chance” (1943), in which a man feels compelled to help a woman he has never before met because she proclaims that “something” is after her. She slaps him when he tries to help, and this brings upon him a terrible fascination with her. After a second, humorously painful encounter with her, Gus the protagonist and narrator is hooked. He finds her and finding her cements the sexual bond between them. The driving force for this modern mating dance is that a jealous ghost is smitten with her and attacks any man with whom she becomes even remotely close. Of course, the ghost does terrible things to Gus before he finally figures out how to get rid of it. The question for the reader is this: what drives Gus to emotional extreme and nearly total devotion to a woman with whom he has had only a few brief conversations? It is that he thinks he can do something for her and makes himself determined to do it.

Writing for a popular magazine in the 1940s, Sturgeon could in “Ghost of a Chance” bring the reader only up to a quick view of this aspect of male sexual psychology. Ten years later, Sturgeon had much more room to give the reader a good, hard look at it. In “Bright Segment” (1955), Sturgeon takes a much more graphic and physical approach to this concern. In this story, Sturgeon makes explicit the psychological power of being needed. However, he removes most of the popular fiction-writing encumbrances that prevented a full view of it in “Ghost of a Chance.” In “Bright Segment,” the protagonist is like Gus a man of limited intelligence and no obvious sexual appeal. However, while Gus was just a kind of normal guy, the unnamed protagonist of “Bright Segment” is mentally retarded and physically repulsive, being called an “orangutan.” Like Gus, he encounters an unknown woman in distress late at night. Unlike Iola’s problem in “Ghost of a Chance,” this woman’s problem is neither at a remove nor supernatural – she has been wounded in a mob deal gone badly wrong.

The major and important difference in “Bright Segment” is how this reduction to fundamentals brings out hitherto unknown dimensions to the psychology of male need. Slashed with a razor from groin to throat and dumped out of a car, the woman is insensible and dying when the protagonist first finds her. Sturgeon in this story ups the stakes in terms of desperation, but also carefully avoids explaining the context for what is going on. This has much to do with the protagonist, whose limited intelligence means that he can fix his mind to only one thing at a time.

For the first part of the story, the reader is left bewildered as to what precisely the protagonist is doing with this bleeding woman. Did he attack her? Is he trying to hide the body? After he dumps her onto the bed, is he going to do something perverse? The limited third person point of view works against the reader, who is desperate to find motivation for this man. Yet, it turns out that none of the above questions is true. Instead, this man’s limited intelligence presents a different sort of motivation. He is desperate to be needed, a point driven home several times in the story. He sees in this woman’s situation an opportunity to do the only thing he knows how to do well: “fix it right.” So, he sets out not to abuse the woman, but using nothing other than his handyman skills and the tools in his apartment, to operate on her and save her life.

Sturgeon has freed the issue of “need” from the sexuality of the character, and thus it more intimately reflects on the sexuality of the male reader. That sex is not a motivation for this man is made clear when weeks after the operation, the recuperating woman offers him sex as a “thank you” only to be firmly rejected. His pleasure is not in being wanted, but in being needed. This difference gets revealed late in the story, so that in the earlier parts, the reader fills in what would seem to be “normal” motivation. This technique is particularly strong in the beginning of the story, which describes the operation in quite some detail. The protagonist must undress the woman, must cut away the brassiere and silken panties, must work up close for quite a long time at the open wound in her groin. Sturgeon has brought the matter to the level of touch in this story; whereas, in “Ghost of a Chance” the two principle characters interact mostly through the more distant sense of sight…Access Full Text of the Article

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Resisting Biopolitics through “Diaphanous Wonder”: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2003)

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Doro Wiese, Utrecht University

Abstract:

In Gould’s Book of Fish (2003), author Richard Flanagan manages to invent a format in which content and style account for historical events on Sarah Island, Tasmania in the 1820s, yet he does so in a manner that is not in the least objective, disinterested or fact-orientated. The perspective of Gould’s Book of Fish’s (Flanagan, 2003) first-person narrator is highly subjective, usually unreliable and always less than truthful. Flanagan (2003) thereby shows that literature can provide a form of knowledge that differs from historical truth, but without being its dialectical opposite. Literature can construct a non-referential narrative space in which experiences unfold that hardly unimaginable. Literature can show the urge and desire to understand historical events that are terrible to relate to. It can invent a story that can account for the consequences of a violent colonial system. Yet, above all, the novel stresses a desire to render stories of unspeakable horrors through what can be call the “becoming-fish” of its first-person narrator. This desire expresses a hyperbolic love of each and everyone, one which extends so far as to even include all the other wonders of this world in its account too. By depicting convicts and natives as loving and lovable persons, author Richard Flanagan (2003) refrains from reducing them to the colonial conditions in which they were caught up. He thereby offers a point of view that differs from Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) highly influential account of “bare life.” I will take this perspective, in which life and its conditions cannot be lumped together, as a point of departure from which to criticise Agamben’s (1998) transhistorical and transnational account of biopolitical determinations of life.

[Key words: Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish, Tasmania, colonization, convict-system, Agamben, bare life, aesthetics, resistance]

Gould’s Book of Fish, a novel by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan (2003), is set during the early days of Britain’s colonisation of Tasmania in the 1820s and used the unreliable narrative voice of inmate William Buelow Gould, a prisoner who lived in the institution from 1829-33. Though based on documented historical occurrences and persons, the narrative relies heavily on metafictional devices to comment on its own constructed nature and uses the voice of the main character to express a distinct view of historical events. Specifically, the first-person narrative voice of the protagonist is used to portray historical events in a distorted and idiosyncratic manner, speaking to and reflecting the distortions and biopolitical control imposed upon on people by brutal and genocidal colonial systems, as occurred in Tasmania, and where the experiences of those under that brutality have been silenced. This novel manifests the fundamental need to tell the story that has been untold or silenced. In the novel this need is manifested in Gould’s desire to tell the story of a fish – an animal that is, by human standards, voiceless.

The novel’s narrator undergoes significant perspective transformations which allow him to be affected by a hyperbolic, generalized love for everyone and everything in the whole world, which can be identified with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of “becomings”. These becomings are important to analyse because the love that they bring about is not only central to the novel’s vision of life, it also is central to the important shift of perspective presented by the novel. This love will also be the counterpoint for examining Agamben’s (1998) highly influential notion of ‘bare life,’ which was introduced and expounded upon in his work Homo Sacer.

  1. Literary Style versus Biopolitical Capture

Gould’s Book of Fish (Flanagan, 2003) is set in the first prison settlement in Tasmania, the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, built in 1822 on a small island in the Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast. Sarah Island, a place of extremely harsh geographic and social conditions (see Maxwell-Steward, 2008), was quickly regarded as one of the harshest locations in the English-speaking world (Hughes, 1987, p. 372). Convicts were worked for twelve to sixteen hours daily, with inadequate food or housing, and corporal punishment was not uncommon (Hughes, 1987). Prison records report 33,723 lashes during public floggings between 1822 and 1826 (Hughes 1987, p. 377). Just as Gould’s Book of Fish describes the conditions in the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station as they appear according to historical records, the first-person narrator is superimposed onto the convict-painter William Buelow Gould (1801-53), imprisoned for forgery, who has been historically recognized for his supurb naturalistic paintings of the area’s flora and fauna (see Allport, 1931; Clune and Stephensen, 1962; Pretyman, 1970). In both the novel and historical record, the protagonist was assigned to assist the colonial surgeon Dr James Scott on Sarah Island, who commissioned him to paint the depictions of local fish, plants, and birds for which he is now known. The novel Gould’s Book of Fish (Flanagan, 2003) takes the form of the convict-painter’s journal, and though fictional, the fish-drawings included in the book are those of Gould, used with permission, and are said to have been painted from memory. The novel weaves a fictitious and embellished storyline based on Gould’s prison time through historical information based on known persons and events on Sarah Island during that time.

Though based on historical events and characters, the use of a non-linear chronology and frequently interrupted storyline, metafictional literary devices, and fantastic and parodic interventions avoids any positivistic renderings of history, and allows the novel, according to various critics, to counter enlightenment thought’s teleological narrative of the “progress of civilization” (see Bogue, 2010; Jones, 2008; Shipway, 2003; Weir, 2005). Gould’s narration depicts the traumatic events transpiring in the Tasmanian penal colony (and in the story itself) through a distorted lens, in this way reflecting the distortions imposed upon people by the brutal and genocidal colonial system in Tasmania, but also testifies to the capacity of people, even under those circumstances, to maintain affective relationships. I will argue that with this novel, Flanagan (2003) shows us how literature can be used as a space to examine (un)imaginable experiences, to aid in comprehending historical events so horrible as to seem incomprehensible, and to address the need for the expression of silent and silenced voices. In Gould’s Book of Fish, Gould’s longing to tell the story of the (voiceless) fish manifests this desire, through a process which is inherently tied to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming. I will contrast Flanagan’s use of literary, stylistic and narrative devices to create an empowering depiction of convicts and indigenous persons in Gould’s Book of Fish, with Agamben’s failure, in Homo Sacer (1998), to similarly invest in the creation of an analysis in which human beings are not dehumanized.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987), in their concept of becoming, have drawn from ideas of Spinoza, especially the importance he places on the composition of relations and encounters, and the effects of those encounters, rather than on the essential traits of a being. Human beings’ understanding of the encounters with external ideas or entities tends to be limited to how the encounter is affecting us: “only our body in its own relation, and our mind in its own relation” (Spinoza qtd. in Deleuze, 1988, p. 19). However, if we are able to go beyond this initial reaction, our minds and bodies, and the bodies and minds of others, are capable of surpassing “the consciousness that we have of it” (Deleuze, 1988, p.19). Though becoming lacks a form through which it can convey its meaning, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 253) understand it as an interplay of specific, unique moments, happenings, intensities and affectivities. Becoming, therefore, is a process that expresses the capacity of life to go beyond meaning and to create a formulation for the potentiality of joy and possibly even a “love of the whole world” (Lawlor, 2008, p. 173).

In the following analysis I focus on Gould’s becoming-fish, which through its hyperbolic affect of love provides readers with one most consequential and fundamental perspective shifts: that the understanding of a life cannot be limited to an understanding of its circumstances, its suffering, or the brutality imposed upon it, because it has its own subjectivities beyond those bounds that are able to create more and different relations, desires, and action. This understanding of life will be the counterpoint upon which I base my criticism of Agamben’s (1998) transhistorical and transnational analysis of the biopolitical determinations of life in Homo Sacer. I will show how Flanagan’s sets out a vision in which the lives of those historically silenced, subjugated and colonized are given value, character and humanity, and how this vision might guide readers towards the creation of an accountability with the past and a responsibility to the future…Access Full Text of the Article

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

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