Vol 9 No 2

Author: Paulo Coelho
Translated from: Portuguese
Translated by: Zoe Perry
Published: 2016
Publisher: Vintag, Penguin Books.
Book Length: 186 pages.
Price: Rs. 299 (Indian Currency)
Reviewed by
Sayantan Pal Chowdhury
Assistant Teacher, Siliguri Baradakanta Vidyapith (HS). Email: no1sayantan@rediffmail.com

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.40

Paulo Coelho’s latest book The Spy, published in 2016, has been translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Perry. It deals with the encounter of the historical figure Margaretha Gertrude Zelle, famously known as Mata Hari. The incident took place during the World War I. As the epilogue of the book contains the report published in the newspaper on October 15, 1917 about her encounter, it was clearly reported that she had been “court-martialled on the charge of espionage.” In this story Coelho has used the history and presented it wrapped in the colourful cover of myth and fantasy. He has used imaginary and most probable conversations.

If we take a bird’s eye view of the story, we can divide it into a complete form of beginning-middle-end structure. The beginning of the story contains the ‘Prologue’ where the morning of the encounter is retold with a very detailed appearance of Mata Hari, her physical appearance, her mental stability, her death sentence. In the ‘middle’ the narrator, Mata Hari, in the first person gives a minute description of her adventurous life, her experiencing life, her understanding of human dignity. In the ‘end’ we cannot hear the narrator’s voice anymore; rather, it is replaced by the voice of her lawyer, Maitre Clunet. The most of the story is in the form of letters—the first one from Mata Hari, and the second one from Clunet. In Parts I and II Mata Hari writes to Clunet the letter which she wants to be delivered to her daughter, Non. In Part III the letter is written by Clunet to Mata Hari which is delivered to her on the eve of her encounter.

The encounter of Mata Hari was a wrong decision and the power-play of the war politics. She could not be “incriminated” as no such evidence was found against her. She was caught without much of her knowledge on a morning from room 131 of the Hotel Elysee Palace where she was found “in a silk robe, still taking her breakfast.” (Coelho, 161) The only thing she knew was that she was innocent. When she came to know all about what was played behind her, she became stoic. She willingly handed herself over her fate. Her encounter has been very minutely and passionately described by the author in the Prologue—“Then her knees buckled and her body fell to the right, legs doubled up beneath the fur coat. And there she lay, motionless, with her face turned toward the heavens.” (Coelho 7)

It is the expertise and the intelligence of the author that he plays with fact and fancy. He makes the readers knowledgeable about the history which must make human dignity ashamed. Mata Hari could not get the chance to prove her innocence. Her submission to the hands of face and the injustice done to her was not helpless; rather, she stands upright even to the very end. She faces the world which was against an independent woman. Feminine aspects are very prominent. At the end of the story we come to know that another woman, Helene Brion, was one of her cell mates. She fought for the “women’s rights,” that “women have the same rights as men.” (Coelho 171)

As the cover page tells us, “Her only crime was to be an independent woman,” Mata Hari’s case was an evidential case of feminine fights for equal rights. In a world of male domination she wandered one place to another in search of her identity and in so doing she had to choose to sell her beauty. She broke the social myth that sex should follow love. Soon she understood that sex is mechanical—“I began to associate sex with something mechanical, something that had nothing to do with love.” (Coelho 21) She was raped by the principal when she was in her teenage. She tried to hide the incident from others from a fear of being expelled. Not only she but many other girls of her age suppressed the same experience. She got married to a Dutch soldier Rudolf, but the marriage did not give her peace. He had always been suffering in those days from revealing her wife to others and from a fear to lose her. Hari was treated as an object. As soon as the incident of Andreas’ wife’s suicide was committed, Mata Hari had to leave her husband and her only daughter. In different places she had to lead her life and so, Hari started to share bed with dominant male characters, sometimes with the army people, sometimes with the artists. She was conscious about her beauty and so she knew how to use it to earn her bread and luxury. Whatever came in her life, she experienced everything. Striptease became a myth as Barthes told. It is a collection of images of some physical acts, some postures.

While she was began travelling from one place to another becoming an object in the hands of male characters, in take Holland into account, “The drums of war were not yet beating, and entering the country was still easy.” (Coelho 42) She met many influential men indifferent countries and all of them had the lust to get her in their beds. She used those men as being a woman, alone in the world, with no one to look after, she needed money and support. She got money, sometimes more than what she had needed, but there was always a question mark whether she got support. The author gives a proper mapping of geographical locations following which Mata Hari travelled.

Another thing that is notable in the story is the cultural difference. Mata Hari’s presentation of the tribal dance form of the East shows how the colonial West was attracted by the colonized East. According to Mata Hari’s husband, “no Eauropean woman could compete with an Asian woman.” (Coelho 25) And there are other references also like, “…and he told me this kind of ballet came from an ancient Indian tradition that combined yoga and meditation.” (Coelho 31) But what Mata Hari presented before her viewers was not an form of “oriental dance.” What Madame Guimet arrested was the cheating done by Hari, the act of cheating of the Orientals by the Occidentals. The West’s adoption of the East can be noted here.

To conclude, Coelho has presented the sufferings of Mata Hari as an answer to the prediction of Clunet, when he writes in his letter, “Perhaps one day history might also do justice to you, though I doubt it.” (Coelho 173) Clunet’s doubt has been wiped out when Coelho takes this subject from history to reveal the life of a woman who fought for her independent life at a time when society was not a very open a place for women. This book sympathizes with Mata Hari for her being one of the first women who became a martyr for equal rights, who had to accept death becoming a victim of suspicion. While reading the story the reader must be crowded with the ideas of feminine rights, geographical locations, war politics and human dignity. Coelho’s use of myths is another attractive feature of him. The reference to the Greek myth about Psych and Eros has been used again in this book after its use in his another famous book Adultery. The use of time from present to past and again to present with a hope for future when history should do justice to her is notable. As in all his books Coelho has again proved the importance of Love. Sex is no sin; rather, everything and every moment in life are important. Except this, what remains, is human dignity.

Reference:

Coleho, Paulo (2016). The Spy. Haryana: Penguin Books.

Sayantan Pal Chowdhury is an Asst. Teacher with Siliguri Baradakanta Vidyapith (HS) and writer. He has completed M.A. in English and again in Linguistics. He has published many papers in national and international journals. He has attended many national and international conferences and seminars. His debut short story ‘Progress’ has been published in New Asian Writing Short Story Anthology 2013.

Hardcover: 265 pages
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; Unabridged edition edition (1 November 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1443880868
ISBN-13: 978-1443880862

Reviewed by
Pawan Kumar
Center for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Email: pawan.voice@gmail.com

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.39

Last year while conducting archival research for my doctoral thesis on W. B. Yeats at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, I was in search of a newly published book by a non-Indian author to investigate contemporary views on    Yeats and India, when I chanced upon Snežana Dabi?’s W.B. Yeats and Indian Thought: A Man Engaged in that Endless Research into Life, Death, God. There has been a history of critical engagement with the Indian and Eastern connections in Yeats’s writing. After Yeats’s death in 1939, extensive researches were conducted on Yeats by noteworthy European scholars and biographers. However, one can readily notice a commonality in the works of all these scholars: they seem to be reading India or the East as a tangential source of inspiration for Yeats. However, the attempt by Dabi?, the latest in this long tradition of scholarly interest in Yeats and his Indian sources, revisits some of these discourses and tries to address poignant questions hitherto left untouched, some of them being, how exactly did W. B. Yeats use Indian thoughts to formulate and synthesize his ideas, why do we need to reanalyze Yeats’s work and existing critical interpretations from Indian perspective, does the subtlety and potentiality of Indian symbols have the power to shed new light on Yeats’s own philosophy and symbols, and, most importantly, is it even possible to demarcate Celtic and Indian mythology in Yeats’s works and philosophy?

There is no doubt that the influence of Indian thought on Yeats’s creative output has both fascinated and posed a challenge to Yeatsian scholars and researchers. After a long critical aposiopesis, Dabi?’s work provides significant information about the various academic researches done by Indian critics/authors on Yeats and India thought, thus trying to paint a clearer, fuller picture of the often romanticised notion of Yeats and India and the East.

In the book, Dabi? makes a diligent attempt to carve out a space for oriental discourse within the purview of euro-centric critical heritage. Writing from an alternative standpoint, yet well-aware of the vastness of Indian philosophical thoughts which she does not claim to be an expert in, Dabi? honestly proclaims, “Being aware of the dangers of focusing on a solely extrinsic method, I do not offer a finite Eastern conceptual framework for investigating Yeats’s poetic canon” (x). Nevertheless, in this ground breaking book, the author makes a strong case for the literary and philosophical values of Indian thoughts for analyzing Yeats’s work.

The author meticulously tracks Yeats journey through the Eastern knowledge systems and his interaction with Indian spiritualists/philosophers and writers, like Mohini Chatterji, Rabindranath Tagore, and Purohit Swamy, to name a few. The author brilliantly points out, in the preface to the book, that this association earned him [Yeats] conflicting names, “orientalist, colonialist, anti-colonialist, modernist, nationalist, revivalist and even traditionalist in his attitude and writing” (x). This in turn lands the author herself in troubled waters because by saying so, she has taken upon the challenge of dealing with conflicting interpretations and arguments related to Yeats’s work and his personality. And that, I must say, is a really daring thing to do!

The methodology adopted by the author makes the book expository in nature. While analyzing Yeats’s creative mind, the author has structured the book like a biography with a twist: she juxtaposes competing viewpoints from both sides of the globe throughout her work. Her effort in fusing two halves to form a complete whole translates into the bringing together of two distinct aspects of Yeats on one platform to give one a fuller understanding of the poet-playwright-philosopher Yeats. The introduction of the book also highlights the various challenges that her research has to face upfront, posed by the linguistic and cultural differences. Her quasi-Heideggerian style of representing atman and Brahmana, as the self/the Self respectively particularly fascinated me, although comprehending such Sanskrit words which have deep philosophical connotations requires a thorough study of ancient Indian philosophy and intense deliberation. My own research on Yeats has ushered into the understanding that these ideas for Yeats embodied a philosophical system which could make the metaphysical world commensurable: his use of the Upanishadic concept of the self and the way he related it to the ideas of reincarnation, karma, Maya, dreaming back, different phases of the Moon etc. reflects his deep understanding of the various nuances of these ideas. Dabi? also sheds light on the difficulties involved in decoding Yeats’s use of Eastern philosophy and symbols because he himself had left no written comment on his understanding of Indian philosophical texts which he read as a young man, except few “Indian” essays, introductions and prefaces to Indian texts that he wrote, mostly in the 1930s.

In the first chapter, “The Encounter with the East”, Dabi? traces the influence of Indian thoughts on Yeats’s early work and builds her argument around the meetings that took place between Yeats and Mohini Chatterji, the intellectual-cum-spiritual association between Yeats and George Russell (A.E), his interest in theosophical ideas, and the different oriental texts which acquainted him with the Eastern knowledge systems. On the one hand, the book constructs a cogent explanation for the Eastern influence on Yeats, and on the other, ends up substantiating the existing biographies written on Yeats by providing the much-needed information regarding Yeats and India thought. According to the author, Yeats’s search for a tradition, and his interest in folk cultures and supernatural/mystical pursuits prompted his interest in the Eastern thoughts. In addition to this, she also discusses the influence of Shankaras’s philosophy and other Indian thoughts on Yeats, and she argues that they have been used in “a merely decorative way” by Yeats in his writings. However, I tend to disagree with her argument that Yeats made “decorative” use of Indian lore or philosophy in his early poems. Various Indian critics like Harbans Rai Bachchan, Naresh Guha, and Sankaran Ravinderan, to name a few, have analyzed Yeats’s poetry from the Eastern philosophical and aesthetic perspectives and surmised that Yeats might have acquainted himself with the primary concepts of Indian philosophy through his interactions with Indian mystics and other European friends working on Indian and Eastern knowledge systems. The young Yeats might not have had access to the right resources or prolonged contact with the Indian mystics and scholars to develop a fuller understanding of Indian philosophical and esoteric practices in his times. In fact, what seems like a passing reference to ornament his works (to Dabi?) was sometimes a very conscious choice on the part of Yeats to carve new myths out of older Celtic and Indian myths in his literary works, as documented in his letters and interactions with members of the Theosophical society. However, as is well known by now, Yeats did make greater efforts to study Indian philosophy in the later stages of his life, which is clearly reflected in his later works too.

In the second chapter, “The East in the Poetry of Yeats’s Middle Period”, the author highlights Yeats’s silence about the East from 1890s to 1914, and how Yeats’s relationship with Tagore after this period of lull fostered the renewal of Yeats’s interest in Indian philosophical traditions and knowledge systems. What I found interesting about the handling of the Yeats and Tagore relationship is her highlighting of how the West viewed Tagore (on the basis of selective reading of his work) merely as a colonial subject, while Yeats was one amongst the very few who markedly differed from the prevailing western opinion. She also discusses Yeats’s aesthetic appreciation of Tagore’s work within the matrix of the dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized (England and Ireland respectively). Dabi? also tries in this chapter to answer the long debated question of why Yeats eventually got disenchanted with Tagore. Additionally, the fundamental idea of this chapter is the discursive use of G?rard Genette’s concept of “transtexuality” by the author to describe the use of Indian concepts in Yeats’s poetry. Dabi? discusses at length the influence of Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offering) on Yeats and the mystical ideas that the two shared. According to the author, “Yeats also saw in Tagore a man, not unlike himself, striving to revive a tradition and reinstate Bengal, which was exactly what he wanted to do with Ireland” (62).  She efficiently highlights how Tagore’s influence made Yeats’s approach to the East more philosophical in nature, with the incorporation of Indian ideas related to reincarnation and karma in Yeats’s later poetry and plays.

In the third chapter, “Eastern Philosophical Concepts in The Herne’s Egg,” the author draws together all the intellectual kindling that Yeats’s play The Herne’s Egg ignites. Starting with the framework of the play, examining whether it is solely Upanishadic in nature or not, Dabi? has given a new direction to the existing discourse on Yeats by juxtaposing conflicting arguments, like Ashley E. Myles’s postulation that there is nothing related to Indian concept or upanisadic philosophy apart from Brahma’s egg in the above mentioned play, and Bachchan’s assertion that Yeats was inspired by numerous symbols and images from ancient Indian scriptures, namely those of the birds, the egg, thunder, and the Self. Furthermore, the author’s deft handling of the voices of other Indian critics on the play like that of Narayan Hegde, who opines that there is an uncanny resemblance between the Hindu epic, the Ramayana and Yeats’s play; Krishna Ponnuswamy’s reading of “Bridal Mysticism” in the play; Sankaran Ravindaran finding that the play is “a celebration of the physical and the spiritual:” all clearly elucidate the importance of the Indian framework to understand Yeats’s oeuvre. The author also brings in her own argument regarding the play by taking a cue from V.K. Kantak’s suggestion about the applicability of the concept of the Supreme Self, reincarnation, and Samadhi, to name a few, on Yeats’s play. Some of the interesting aspects of this chapters are, Dabi?’s philosophical reading of this play in the light of the Hindu idea of gunas, her juxtaposition of Bhakti Yoga tradition and the attachment between Attracta and the Great Herne, influence of Zen philosophy etc. In addition, she also draws attention to the fact that during this phase, Yeats collaborated with Shri Purohit Swami for the translation of the Upanishads, he was deeply immersed into his reading of the Bhagvadagita and Patañjali’s Aphorisms of Yoga, and was also influenced by vedantic philosophy, to name a few.

In chapter four titled “Greater Maturity of Understanding the East in Yeats’s Later Poetry,” the author discusses the poetry collection The  Tower (1928) in the light of Indian philosophy and also brings in A Vision to discuss Yeats’s complex ideas related to reincarnation, karma, the different phases of the moon and his philosophy embedded in the multifaceted gyre. Furthermore, the author has sourced a number of important critical discourses to explain and discuss Yeats’s later poems. For instance, A. Davenport’s critical analysis of the poem Sailing to Byzantium based on Brihadaranyaka and Katha Upanishads, the influence of Kabir’s poetry on Yeats, and Tagorian influence on Yeats’s poetry collection The Tower etc. In her conclusion, the author has rightly summarized: “His [Yeats] writing benefited from his association with the Eastern lore, maintaining its idiosyncrasy just as he himself upheld that unique Yeatsean individuality” (221).

A detailed glossary of all the key Indian Philosophical concepts used in the book will help readers and Yeatsian scholars. The accomplishment of this book rests on the critical space given to Indian critics and crediting them for expanding the horizon of studies on Yeats. To conclude, this book offer an exhaustive overview of Eastern influence and thus paves the way for further research and critical engagement with Yeats’s oeuvre. It is a well thought out and thoroughly researched book and charting the unexplored aspect of Yeats’s creative mind, his literary output and his personality.

Pawan Kumar is a doctoral scholar at the Center for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His My doctoral thesis explores the influence of Eastern esoteric and philosophical systems on W. B. Yeats’s works. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin under the SPECTRESS project funded by the European Union in the year 2016. He did his M.A. and graduation from the University of Delhi.