Papers by Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Advances in Literary Studies, 2024
Carnivals in pre-independence India had a medley of episodes-sometimes fascinating and sometimes ... more Carnivals in pre-independence India had a medley of episodes-sometimes fascinating and sometimes marred by violence as such hostile incidents were mostly due to the feudalistic fabric that it worn. British ruled India presented some respite. Postcolonial India indicated a return to modernity but it was not to be. Regressive elements ducked in with myths and superstitions which stemmed the progress. Amidst this milieu, the postmodern and postcolonial elements of carnivalisation and representation have become a contested site. Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival theory assumes significance in that the problematization of carnival in the Indian scenario has resulted in a unique syndrome wherein the carnivalistic discourse is being subverted and appropriated by the forces by virtue of their dominance in power, class and the quite primitive social structure called caste. By deconstructing Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque, this research attempts to explore issues like carnivalisation and its relation to hegemony, demystification, representation and social change. How far has carnivalisation affected and effected the Indian society? What are the other forces that dominate the spectrum of India's landscape? Do these elements point towards an exclusive or an inclusive India? The present discussion assumes significance due to the volatile social and political climate since 2014 due to the divisive forces in power. Some of the findings from this research pose a humungous concern, aptly aided by the postcolonial and postmodern elements coupled with the likes of corporate cannibalism. Consequently, Bakhtin's idea of carnival has been reduced to a farce here. Plurality has been sacrificed at the altar of unitary centralized structure. With regard to the notion of representation too, a similar phenomenon has struck making this postcolonial conundrum into a sham.
Toni Morrison: Literary Perspectives and Critical Interpretations. Edited by Dr. Ajit Kumar and Dr. Rafseena M. Vitasta Publishing Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, 2023. Print, 2023
In the novel Sula, 1973, Toni Morrison’s first attempt at magic realism, most of the features are... more In the novel Sula, 1973, Toni Morrison’s first attempt at magic realism, most of the features are identifiable such as the story of three generations, the history and destiny of a settlement is traced from its beginning to the end, individual actions are made responsible for the destruction of the community. Not just that, one central family is most actively involved in the progress of the community. The history of that family is a typical cell in the tissue of the entire community. More than anything else, the individual’s love of the home town is supreme. Other than the matriarch, the house and the hundred years, one more magic realist feature of the novel is the symbolism of the robins. It is called the plague of the robins. So the plot of the novel amply illustrates the universality of experience through its magical realist overture.
Neruda preferred the medium of poetry even for his political expressions. Neruda felt that the be... more Neruda preferred the medium of poetry even for his political expressions. Neruda felt that the belief that one could write solely for eternity was romantic posturing. Nevertheless, he infused his political poetry with images of nature against catastrophe brought on by man. He praised the rise of Allende in Chile as the beginning of a new era of peace. He considered Nixon a tyrant and wrote poems about the Vietnam War. He criticized Nixon for escalating the armed conflict in Vietnam.
Nixon and his predecessors had always intervened with the governments of Latin America through economic warfare. In particular by taking control over Chile’s valuable resources such as copper, nitrate and timbre and by blockading essential supplies such as oil to the country and financially weakening them, the American government ensured their superior economic power. Their influence in politics and military support in the overthrow of elected governments by the army or authoritarian leaders, commonly known as regime change, was also part of this policy. This also restricted the spread of communism. Neruda was aware of Nixon’s Latin American policy and his poems reflect his opposition to it. It was a systematic destruction of the economy of Chile through the policy of economic war.
As late as in 1988 and since an economist named Christian Harbulot, director of the Economic Warfare School in Paris, writing in French, provides a historical reconstruction of the economic balance of power between states. As late as 1994, the South American states had not been able to recover from the destructive economic policy of the United States.
It is a well known fact that communism has not been a harmful political ideology after all. The only despot was Stalin, although he was popular in Russia and Georgia. The others like Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro have ruled their countries without much difficulty. In the case of Cuba, the Cold War caused substantial tension until the Cuban Missile Crisis after which Fidel Castro endeavoured in furthering socialism in the world until he in fact joined the Non Alignment Movement.
Now China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam in Asia and Cuba in South America are the only communist countries of the world.
The Poet’s Obligation is a poem written in 1961 where Neruda clearly states that his work is to communicate the scent of revolutionary ideas to the deprived people. He has to be alert, keep his eyes and ears open and whenever there is any dispossession, his poetry can energize people to retaliate. Even in a prison or a remote location, his poetry should reach the underprivileged or the wronged.
His poems should motivate people to fight for their rights and to dream big. He calls it the poet’s obligation or duty because hearts are shrouded in doubt, confusion, ignorance and domination by the powerful. Imagination is a rare privilege. It is the poet who would do the duty of imagining the good things for the future and transferring it to the people’s minds through his poetry.
Neruda believed that while the poet is an inspiration to the common people, in turn it is the vast nature that wakes up the poet to his task. The poet is only an admirer of the power of nature to upturn human civilization wherever it has gone wrong. He composed several poems in love for the power of nature around the time he was practically deeply involved in political affairs that jolted him. He was aware of the evil of human civilization that tries to destroy the laws of nature and he constantly took cognizance of the power outside human affairs so that drawing inspiration from the earth, the sky and the sea, he could reconstruct the world gone stale. Or so he thought until he died.
In 1970, he published Stones of the Sky, a collection of 30 poems dedicated to the power of nature to recall the land that is destroyed by humans. The sky has now become the cradle of the rocks. The first poem can also be interpreted as the sign of upheaval in political terms.
Chile is often called the land of fire and ice. It is dotted with hundreds of magnificent lakes and volcanoes. One gets a true feel of the majesty and power of nature in Chile. Since lakes are abundant, a view of one such beauty can be humbling. It is ‘a substantial witness’ to changes.
In Barren Terrain, Neruda asks about the genesis of humanity. It was necessary for a poet in his time and in the condition his country was in to use his contagious poetry to move his people towards a common goal which he believed to be beneficial.
The idea that a poet’s craft can come in handy in politics and not just sit there like a tranquilizer during critical times is well known and has been articulated by Indian nationalist poets also. In the case of Neruda, it was more appropriate as he was also a political man.
It is natural to be enraged by the interference of other governments in the internal matters of one’s country. Interference is achieved by generating opinion against a political side. So Neruda shrieked out in rage: Fratricidal claws want to lead us/into a civil war full of contradictions.
As a poet, in Against Death he also reasserted that the people of his nation were not so foolish that they would throw away the gift of life for a feud within the land.
It may be argued that these propaganda poems do not add much to the reading of Chilean history. What we do gain from these strongly worded and heavily politically loaded poems is the humanitarian values that every poet tries to uphold: the victory should be for the ‘people’, not for a man; the land should survive all strife and the one who is responsible for the death of innocent people should be punished by the earth. These are some of the ways in which a political propaganda can also be a source of courage and regeneration. It is not just the need to lead or dictate or to prosper in an administrative capacity that a poet works. His function in the world is far reaching and all encompassing. His ability to see human values such as worship of nature and the desire to uplift the condition of the poor makes him a greater leader worth celebrating worldwide. That is why Neruda’s political poems too have been zealously translated by American scholars into English.
Oskar Matzerath, the chief character of 'The Tin Drum' is technologically literate, a product of ... more Oskar Matzerath, the chief character of 'The Tin Drum' is technologically literate, a product of more than just one region and heritage and he is the citizen of a culture that said the most important stuff about itself in a world language. He is a morally complex character. He is a revealer of Nazi activities whereas he conceals the entire family’s goings on. He is as sick as everyone else in these dubious times. He is one of the frustrated rebels not acting out of idealistic concern at all but out of anger. He has no particular political leanings and he has no strategy to play upon. He is a mirror of his time. The magic of the tin drum is presented realistically in the scene of a rally and it shows how a loosened screw in Hitler’s Germany could have easily given her a different course in history. It shows that it is the hypnosis of Aryan alias Christian neighbours that caused the maximum strife to the Jewish citizens. It implies that art has the ability to defeat war and hatred.
The Vedic Path, 2012
Kundera's novels show the psychological stress undergone by thousands of Europeans who have been ... more Kundera's novels show the psychological stress undergone by thousands of Europeans who have been severed from their family members due to the communist versus democratic divide that has marked the Twentieth Century. In his critique of the politics of memory, Kundera shows how remembrances can differ markedly from the objective truth of the events as they had happened.
Kundera has been deeply influenced by Franz Kafka. He defends Kafka's works as a valuable referendum concerning the life and times of Prague during the War and its aftermath. To this he adds his own experience of exile and prosecution of artists.
Kundera suggests a term to define the structure of his novels. He calls it meditative interrogation or interrogative meditation. He has been striving to achieve an absolute originality of his writings which would be impossible to imitate in another form of art. He disbelieves adaptations, trying all his life to make a novel that is not possible to reduce or rewrite...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Art of the Novel
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Vedic Path, 2018
Neruda's Residence on Earth were poems published in three series. The third series Tercera reside... more Neruda's Residence on Earth were poems published in three series. The third series Tercera residencia which was published by Losada: Buenos Aires in 1947 contained poems written during 1935-1945 and is popularly referred to in English as Residence III. It is specifically about Spain.
At the time he was living in Chile but he supported the Spanish Republicans by means of his writings and speeches. His poetry of that period is chiefly an expression of his sorrow and hope for poetry to restore the beauty of a country. He uses symbols of rebirth such as roots, seed and a drop of blood that might give rise to life again in his poetry to rekindle the passion to live. In most of his poetry of that time, he exudes hope against fear. He remains forever optimistic. He has expressed sorrow in a few words and there is a melancholy note to his promises of revival but the larger chunk of his poetry stretches its arms towards better days. How he achieves the juxtaposition of sorrow and hope is a matter of genius...
The1964 play Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss easily lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading. The lead ... more The1964 play Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss easily lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading. The lead character called Marat is a paranoiac. The director of the play in this play-within-a-play is Sade, the notorious eighteenth century Marquis after whom is coined the psychological term Sadist. Weiss wrote in the aftermath of the holocaust and his plays represent the theatre of cruelty. The present analysis is a psychoanalytic study of the play, chiefly the character of Marat as a delusional in the lines of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Here the actor that is named Marat is looked at as suffering from paranoia, a madness/psychosis where he cannot be expected to play any roles. He is being himself and still effectively appears to imitate the legendary leader of the French Revolution Jean-Paul Marat.
Keywords: Peter Weiss, French Revolution, Paranoia, Jacques Lacan, Marat/Sade, psychoanalysis, The Theatre of Cruelty, Sadism, play-within-a-play
The mind is a mixed fruit juice of all that has gone into it since birth. Neruda’s has been no ex... more The mind is a mixed fruit juice of all that has gone into it since birth. Neruda’s has been no exception. He had never disowned the fact that it is all a matter of chance that he was a poet. In the poem The Enigmas, there is evidence of his belief that the work of a poet is no more mysterious than any ordinary labour and not in the least magical.In the assertion that his poetry is merely a product of his experiences put together in various shapes, he assumes a kind of belongingness in the role of the earth.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has explicitly said that for the man the woman does not exist. [On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Seminar Vol XX (1972-73)]
Naomi Zack has discussed the definition of the word ‘woman’ with a long list of things: “We know that each individual woman who has ever existed, exists now, or ever will exist, is real … These are things that can be said about “women” and “woman” as abstract general nouns.”
Till the very end Neruda seems to acknowledge a woman's presence as important to him until the same question of whether her presence was as an individual or as a body resurfaces when he talks of ‘your eyes close with my dreams’. Thus, in the present world, feminists can forgive him for his headless love for the body of woman only because of his limitless praise for her body.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923-24)
The Captain’s Verses (1951-52)
The Furies and Lives
One Hundred Love Sonnets (1957-1959)
Mother is considered the first proletariat novel. It is a socialist realist novel where the autho... more Mother is considered the first proletariat novel. It is a socialist realist novel where the author shows the evolution of an ordinary middle aged mother of a worker into a revolutionary voice. Mother encourages the parents of the young workers to join them in their rise against injustice.
Every classic is a text which helps us understand who we are and the point we have reached, said Italo Calvino. Mother is one such classic. The novel is also rich aesthetically.
A paper on Indian culture with reference to Buddhism and the psychoanalytic views of Jacques Laca... more A paper on Indian culture with reference to Buddhism and the psychoanalytic views of Jacques Lacan, his theory of the limits of knowledge comparable to the Buddhist understanding of 'Upaya'. It also refers to the concept of love as identification.
An analysis of Luigi Pirandello's 1924 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It explores Pi... more An analysis of Luigi Pirandello's 1924 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It explores Pirandello's idea of illusion, reality and imagination as well as that of the imagined character as more real than lived reality.
In Arundhati Roy's view, the State is the ruling body while the citizens of the country are mere... more In Arundhati Roy's view, the State is the ruling body while the citizens of the country are mere subjects. That is how the representatives behave when they are in power. They often violate Human Rights to cater to the whims of those in power. Power politics is a matter of awareness and manipulation.
The Vedic Path, 2007
One of Brecht’s mature plays, Mother Courage and her Children is set against the antiquated backd... more One of Brecht’s mature plays, Mother Courage and her Children is set against the antiquated backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War [1618-48] which raged in almost the whole of Europe. It was a conflict between Catholics and Protestants that adopted the shape of war and bore down upon whole cities and populations, involving the nameless masses in a tremendous scale. The war forms the background and theme of the play. Its significance is enhanced by the way Brecht employs it as a metaphor for Capitalism. From the outset, the play is characterized by the canteen wagon as the central figure, a capitalist symbol of the Modern Period.
Mother Courage, a woman with three children, draws a canteen wagon with the Protestant army. In spite of her unwillingness, her two sons are employed in the war, one in the fighting and the other as paymaster. Her daughter is dumb and has reached the age of marriage. The mother’s chief concern is to earn a living by exploiting the war situation. From Brecht’s Marxist standpoint Mother Courage is specifically a representative of the petit bourgeoisie. In her view, since back at home there is no wealth, she joins the war to make quick profit. By turns, her sons are dragged into the quagmire of commitment to the war and they lose their lives. At the end of the play, her dumb daughter Kattrin is killed for drumming a warning to the townsfolk about a surprise attack at night.
The present psychoanalytic reading shows the ways in which the play subverts the intention of the said author. It leads us to the conclusion that there is a realm of the real beyond the symbolic order which perforates the self-sufficiency of the authorial intentions.
The import of the play is reversed if we read it from the Freudian angle. The attitudes which Brecht apparently denounces as low, mean and savage are the products of civilization. Instead, a primitive attitude, untrammeled by civilized moral consciousness is purer and healthier. It gives men a courage of dumb Kattrin.
There are several metaphors in The White Tiger. The present paper is a first hand analysis of som... more There are several metaphors in The White Tiger. The present paper is a first hand analysis of some of them. These are the white tiger, the rooster coop, the Red Fort, the black fort, human spiders, human beasts of burden, the entrepreneur, the party logo, the river Ganga and the god Hanuman.
Freud worked on myths in 1912 when he wrote Totem and Taboo. In Six Characters. There he wrote ab... more Freud worked on myths in 1912 when he wrote Totem and Taboo. In Six Characters. There he wrote about the taboo of virginity. The thought that extreme passion cannot be shown on stage also underlines the fact that authors tend to expose their own passions in their creative writings. Taking the theory of the name-of-the-father from Lacan, this paper reads the taboo of virginity as expressed by The Step-Daughter in the play.
The ironical portrayal of the progressive country that India is, is displayed in Adiga's The Whit... more The ironical portrayal of the progressive country that India is, is displayed in Adiga's The White Tiger. Adiga's narrator is not a criminal. He has a soft heart, a nervous god-fearing nature. He has succeeded in murder, in building up a business with stolen money and thereafter he is scrupulous as an employer and benevolent towards the poor people. He is an eternal fugitive with a difference. Adiga presents before us a situation. It is a probable truth, one which can ignite a sense of insecurity among certain sections of the society.Are we in the dark or in the light? One may wonder if entrepreneurial success is equal to good life after all. This is a portrayal of the finer differences among the Indians.
The term Jouissance refers to the dialectics of desire. Suffering is, in Lacan, a function of des... more The term Jouissance refers to the dialectics of desire. Suffering is, in Lacan, a function of desire. The present analysis is centered on the Buddhist doctrine of consciousness. It is an exploration of how some of the Buddhist precepts have an echo in Lacan's theory of psychopathology.
A dream Play is a 1902 play by Strindberg. It is informed by Freudian theory of Dreams. Although ... more A dream Play is a 1902 play by Strindberg. It is informed by Freudian theory of Dreams. Although Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto appeared much later in 1924, the theme of Strindberg's play and its technique is Surrealist. The present paper goes on to show how surrealism can be found in almost all great works of literature.
Books by Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Zennaby, 2022
On his father’s insistence, twenty one year old Zen joined a coaching institute for Management St... more On his father’s insistence, twenty one year old Zen joined a coaching institute for Management Studies after a lifetime of hostel life. He was most reluctant to attend classes, until he met Laisha, one of his teachers. He wanted to run away from the city to pursue a career in modelling but delayed it on account of her. She had an ideal that if she filled in the void in his heart without any commitment, on the sly and carefully preventing any misadventures, the boy would study. However, it turned out that her ideal was flawed and nature revealed to her the secrets of feminine love.
Europe: a mix of races, a continent torn by conflicts, a group of nations united by Christianity ... more Europe: a mix of races, a continent torn by conflicts, a group of nations united by Christianity and more recently, the Euro. Under this canopy lies a myriad of works of art critically acclaimed as European Literature. The very character of Europeanism forms the basis of this distinction. Each author from Europe has written in his native language and everyone has been examining one’s times. The sense of belonging to Europe has been the platform from which each author has presented his own version of the scenario and offered his insights.
There has been a constant dialogue between authors from each of these European nations. Creative writers base their art on some thought propounded by their gurus, men of genius whom they consider seriously, whether to refute their theories or to endorse them. Therefore, other than their nativity, nothing differentiates them from each other and all the authors from the continent are grouped together as European.
If we look into the twentieth century alone, as this volume offers, the common experience of all the European authors has been that of the world wars and the revolutionary wars. With the political and economic scenario in view, many European thinkers have developed many philosophical ideas, some rooted in Christian doctrine and some rooted in scientific inventions. Modern European thought is a mix of many brilliant minds who have been grappling with nature and reason to explain away phenomena so varied and so bewildering such as the Nazi Movement or the advent of Communism.
Modern European Literature addresses some of the basic problems forced upon beliefs rooted in Christianity. The death of god professed by Nietzsche after the development of genetics became an intellectual quicksand in which every brilliant mind fell. According to the Bible, God created man in His own image and created all the other things for man to enjoy. Man is god’s favourite creation. He has been situated at the centre of the universe to assess the rest of nature according to his whims and fancy or call it reason. Moreover, the purpose of life is to be morally good according to what the priests taught so that one can attain heaven after death. God as the higher intellect that governs human life became nullified by the theory of evolution of species where only the fittest survive.
For the Western world comprising of the United Kingdom, European nations and the United States where Christianity is the major religion, every modern thinker is great for the bulk of writings, philosophical treatises that they have produced and which are meticulously preserved, studied and reproduced. But for an Indian mind, rooted in Hinduism, much of what Marx, Freud or Nietzsche has said is an additional subject of study forced upon by English education.
The book is designed for an average Indian student who has not incorporated western ethics via Christianity since birth. Much of the confusion that Indian students feel regarding a philosophy such as Existentialism is because one encounters it in fragments in English and European literature, not as a given such as the Hindu ethics. For an Indian, God is manifest in the animals and plants and does not interfere in day to day decisions. For a Christian, God is the father who governs all our actions and each utterance, each action is judged as either faithful or blasphemous. A Hindu does not face the existential question of what is the purpose of life if it is not to please God. For a Hindu, life is a part of nature, like grass, and like any other animal one becomes earth after death. As given in the Bhagvad Gita, the concept of soul as a traveler from one body to another newborn makes it easier for a Hindu to swallow the bitter truth of death.
Thus it becomes a struggle for an Indian to understand the chief concerns of the Western authors who questioned religion whenever there was a social crisis. It is also not unknown that most of the greatest writers of the twentieth century became strictly atheists.
Such extreme apathy, extreme sense of futility and the extreme worry for mankind becomes a burden on the Indian mind which is content with little and happy to do one’s small part in the vast world. The sense of purpose of living ends quite satisfactorily if one has simply earned one’s respect in one’s immediate society. That includes the teachings of elders and priests.
This is where the introduction to European literature and its wider concerns becomes a job, a deliberation. While studying Modern English Literature a student is briefed about the advent of realism, naturalism and a little about the politics of the century. The major thinkers, Marx and Freud, the scientific developments, whose advantages we all share, and the unhappy effects of the wars and catastrophes of the twentieth century are all part of English Literature. The same concerns in a more marked way make up the European consciousness. Their literature reflects economic as well as political concerns in many ways.
A few areas which stand out as more specifically European in theory are surrealism, epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, magic realism, meta theatre, existentialism and the communist occupation of many European nation states after the second world war. Political conditions such as totalitarianism, communism, anti-Semitism, exile, the holocaust, the scientist’s predicament and the common man’s predicament in the face of dictatorship are central to a European author’s work in the twentieth century.
It is important to acknowledge that the history of the world has been created largely by the activities of the Europeans and therefore, their books are also part of our cultural baggage.
In addition, there is a baggage of literary theories propounded by students of language which bog down the average reader. Someone who wants to enjoy a work of art is hugely frustrated when he is accosted with a flood of literary theories and asked to attack a text with critical tools. A student of English is generally taught to use many of these tools before one can read a text of considerable literary value today.
Thus, the following essays have been designed to provide a vivid variety of readings of some of the most famous European texts translated into English for an Indian student. The essays are free of lines from western critics who are wont to quote and refer to many theories and many scholars and thereby confusing the subject of the text in hand. In our days, critical essays are like jigsaw puzzles, where each reference is supposed to link a thought and tease the synapses of a clever mind. References are virtually hyperlinks that take one into wider and wider scopes endlessly. In a way it is good to be able to let a student wander into greater mysteries of literature, but in doing so one gets further and further away from the actual work of art, one’s first reference. I have noticed that many brilliant students can perform well in the examinations without having read the text at all. They are habituated to learn the great comments by great scholars rather than great lines from the text.
In view of the aforesaid problems I have tried to quote extensively from the texts rather than from the scholars. The aim is to give a complete account of the text instead of making oblique references to history and its erstwhile scholarly discourse. It will encourage the student to read the play or the novel with enjoyment and not merely for scrutiny. The following essays address the texts without tools, like a tolerant admirer who also understands differences.
There was a time when the job of publishing was difficult and only those who had firm conviction about the worth of their words went out of the way to publish them. In this way only those works have been able to survive which have passed the test of time, which have proved their worth generation after generation. Until literature became a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to comment on someone else’s work was felt only as an instigation from the work or the author. But now every scholar has to write critical essays, whether he feels compelled by his inner drive or not. It has become a means of earning one’s bread and butter. No wonder much of what a student gets to read in the library is forced reading, with little instruction. And one is likely to get lost in the maze of hyperlinks.
It has been an imperative for scientific advancement that a student should learn everything that has been already discovered by one’s forefathers. The same imperative is now applied to a student of literature that one should read all that the other scholars have already said about a particular work of art; hence, the abundance of discourse. Books are full of citations and references. It definitely ruptures the unified experience of reading one volume.
This argument does not lead to discourage secondary reading. The aim of this book is to help an Indian scholar to assess the whole of modern European consciousness in a small space. Beyond this, there is ample scope for further reading. In this book I have not included words of other scholars. I have only discussed all the concerns raised by the individual works of art. Needless to say, the choice of the nine texts discussed in the following sixteen essays is based on my own reading of experts in this area. These nine texts are selected from among the greatest classics of the century.
History and philosophy have been woven intricately in the discussion of every text in this book. This book is an outcome of my own teaching experience in this part of the world. It is a gift to my students and to the community at large to encourage the study of European literature.
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Papers by Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Nixon and his predecessors had always intervened with the governments of Latin America through economic warfare. In particular by taking control over Chile’s valuable resources such as copper, nitrate and timbre and by blockading essential supplies such as oil to the country and financially weakening them, the American government ensured their superior economic power. Their influence in politics and military support in the overthrow of elected governments by the army or authoritarian leaders, commonly known as regime change, was also part of this policy. This also restricted the spread of communism. Neruda was aware of Nixon’s Latin American policy and his poems reflect his opposition to it. It was a systematic destruction of the economy of Chile through the policy of economic war.
As late as in 1988 and since an economist named Christian Harbulot, director of the Economic Warfare School in Paris, writing in French, provides a historical reconstruction of the economic balance of power between states. As late as 1994, the South American states had not been able to recover from the destructive economic policy of the United States.
It is a well known fact that communism has not been a harmful political ideology after all. The only despot was Stalin, although he was popular in Russia and Georgia. The others like Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro have ruled their countries without much difficulty. In the case of Cuba, the Cold War caused substantial tension until the Cuban Missile Crisis after which Fidel Castro endeavoured in furthering socialism in the world until he in fact joined the Non Alignment Movement.
Now China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam in Asia and Cuba in South America are the only communist countries of the world.
The Poet’s Obligation is a poem written in 1961 where Neruda clearly states that his work is to communicate the scent of revolutionary ideas to the deprived people. He has to be alert, keep his eyes and ears open and whenever there is any dispossession, his poetry can energize people to retaliate. Even in a prison or a remote location, his poetry should reach the underprivileged or the wronged.
His poems should motivate people to fight for their rights and to dream big. He calls it the poet’s obligation or duty because hearts are shrouded in doubt, confusion, ignorance and domination by the powerful. Imagination is a rare privilege. It is the poet who would do the duty of imagining the good things for the future and transferring it to the people’s minds through his poetry.
Neruda believed that while the poet is an inspiration to the common people, in turn it is the vast nature that wakes up the poet to his task. The poet is only an admirer of the power of nature to upturn human civilization wherever it has gone wrong. He composed several poems in love for the power of nature around the time he was practically deeply involved in political affairs that jolted him. He was aware of the evil of human civilization that tries to destroy the laws of nature and he constantly took cognizance of the power outside human affairs so that drawing inspiration from the earth, the sky and the sea, he could reconstruct the world gone stale. Or so he thought until he died.
In 1970, he published Stones of the Sky, a collection of 30 poems dedicated to the power of nature to recall the land that is destroyed by humans. The sky has now become the cradle of the rocks. The first poem can also be interpreted as the sign of upheaval in political terms.
Chile is often called the land of fire and ice. It is dotted with hundreds of magnificent lakes and volcanoes. One gets a true feel of the majesty and power of nature in Chile. Since lakes are abundant, a view of one such beauty can be humbling. It is ‘a substantial witness’ to changes.
In Barren Terrain, Neruda asks about the genesis of humanity. It was necessary for a poet in his time and in the condition his country was in to use his contagious poetry to move his people towards a common goal which he believed to be beneficial.
The idea that a poet’s craft can come in handy in politics and not just sit there like a tranquilizer during critical times is well known and has been articulated by Indian nationalist poets also. In the case of Neruda, it was more appropriate as he was also a political man.
It is natural to be enraged by the interference of other governments in the internal matters of one’s country. Interference is achieved by generating opinion against a political side. So Neruda shrieked out in rage: Fratricidal claws want to lead us/into a civil war full of contradictions.
As a poet, in Against Death he also reasserted that the people of his nation were not so foolish that they would throw away the gift of life for a feud within the land.
It may be argued that these propaganda poems do not add much to the reading of Chilean history. What we do gain from these strongly worded and heavily politically loaded poems is the humanitarian values that every poet tries to uphold: the victory should be for the ‘people’, not for a man; the land should survive all strife and the one who is responsible for the death of innocent people should be punished by the earth. These are some of the ways in which a political propaganda can also be a source of courage and regeneration. It is not just the need to lead or dictate or to prosper in an administrative capacity that a poet works. His function in the world is far reaching and all encompassing. His ability to see human values such as worship of nature and the desire to uplift the condition of the poor makes him a greater leader worth celebrating worldwide. That is why Neruda’s political poems too have been zealously translated by American scholars into English.
Kundera has been deeply influenced by Franz Kafka. He defends Kafka's works as a valuable referendum concerning the life and times of Prague during the War and its aftermath. To this he adds his own experience of exile and prosecution of artists.
Kundera suggests a term to define the structure of his novels. He calls it meditative interrogation or interrogative meditation. He has been striving to achieve an absolute originality of his writings which would be impossible to imitate in another form of art. He disbelieves adaptations, trying all his life to make a novel that is not possible to reduce or rewrite...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Art of the Novel
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
At the time he was living in Chile but he supported the Spanish Republicans by means of his writings and speeches. His poetry of that period is chiefly an expression of his sorrow and hope for poetry to restore the beauty of a country. He uses symbols of rebirth such as roots, seed and a drop of blood that might give rise to life again in his poetry to rekindle the passion to live. In most of his poetry of that time, he exudes hope against fear. He remains forever optimistic. He has expressed sorrow in a few words and there is a melancholy note to his promises of revival but the larger chunk of his poetry stretches its arms towards better days. How he achieves the juxtaposition of sorrow and hope is a matter of genius...
Keywords: Peter Weiss, French Revolution, Paranoia, Jacques Lacan, Marat/Sade, psychoanalysis, The Theatre of Cruelty, Sadism, play-within-a-play
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has explicitly said that for the man the woman does not exist. [On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Seminar Vol XX (1972-73)]
Naomi Zack has discussed the definition of the word ‘woman’ with a long list of things: “We know that each individual woman who has ever existed, exists now, or ever will exist, is real … These are things that can be said about “women” and “woman” as abstract general nouns.”
Till the very end Neruda seems to acknowledge a woman's presence as important to him until the same question of whether her presence was as an individual or as a body resurfaces when he talks of ‘your eyes close with my dreams’. Thus, in the present world, feminists can forgive him for his headless love for the body of woman only because of his limitless praise for her body.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923-24)
The Captain’s Verses (1951-52)
The Furies and Lives
One Hundred Love Sonnets (1957-1959)
Every classic is a text which helps us understand who we are and the point we have reached, said Italo Calvino. Mother is one such classic. The novel is also rich aesthetically.
Mother Courage, a woman with three children, draws a canteen wagon with the Protestant army. In spite of her unwillingness, her two sons are employed in the war, one in the fighting and the other as paymaster. Her daughter is dumb and has reached the age of marriage. The mother’s chief concern is to earn a living by exploiting the war situation. From Brecht’s Marxist standpoint Mother Courage is specifically a representative of the petit bourgeoisie. In her view, since back at home there is no wealth, she joins the war to make quick profit. By turns, her sons are dragged into the quagmire of commitment to the war and they lose their lives. At the end of the play, her dumb daughter Kattrin is killed for drumming a warning to the townsfolk about a surprise attack at night.
The present psychoanalytic reading shows the ways in which the play subverts the intention of the said author. It leads us to the conclusion that there is a realm of the real beyond the symbolic order which perforates the self-sufficiency of the authorial intentions.
The import of the play is reversed if we read it from the Freudian angle. The attitudes which Brecht apparently denounces as low, mean and savage are the products of civilization. Instead, a primitive attitude, untrammeled by civilized moral consciousness is purer and healthier. It gives men a courage of dumb Kattrin.
Books by Anuradha Bhattacharyya
There has been a constant dialogue between authors from each of these European nations. Creative writers base their art on some thought propounded by their gurus, men of genius whom they consider seriously, whether to refute their theories or to endorse them. Therefore, other than their nativity, nothing differentiates them from each other and all the authors from the continent are grouped together as European.
If we look into the twentieth century alone, as this volume offers, the common experience of all the European authors has been that of the world wars and the revolutionary wars. With the political and economic scenario in view, many European thinkers have developed many philosophical ideas, some rooted in Christian doctrine and some rooted in scientific inventions. Modern European thought is a mix of many brilliant minds who have been grappling with nature and reason to explain away phenomena so varied and so bewildering such as the Nazi Movement or the advent of Communism.
Modern European Literature addresses some of the basic problems forced upon beliefs rooted in Christianity. The death of god professed by Nietzsche after the development of genetics became an intellectual quicksand in which every brilliant mind fell. According to the Bible, God created man in His own image and created all the other things for man to enjoy. Man is god’s favourite creation. He has been situated at the centre of the universe to assess the rest of nature according to his whims and fancy or call it reason. Moreover, the purpose of life is to be morally good according to what the priests taught so that one can attain heaven after death. God as the higher intellect that governs human life became nullified by the theory of evolution of species where only the fittest survive.
For the Western world comprising of the United Kingdom, European nations and the United States where Christianity is the major religion, every modern thinker is great for the bulk of writings, philosophical treatises that they have produced and which are meticulously preserved, studied and reproduced. But for an Indian mind, rooted in Hinduism, much of what Marx, Freud or Nietzsche has said is an additional subject of study forced upon by English education.
The book is designed for an average Indian student who has not incorporated western ethics via Christianity since birth. Much of the confusion that Indian students feel regarding a philosophy such as Existentialism is because one encounters it in fragments in English and European literature, not as a given such as the Hindu ethics. For an Indian, God is manifest in the animals and plants and does not interfere in day to day decisions. For a Christian, God is the father who governs all our actions and each utterance, each action is judged as either faithful or blasphemous. A Hindu does not face the existential question of what is the purpose of life if it is not to please God. For a Hindu, life is a part of nature, like grass, and like any other animal one becomes earth after death. As given in the Bhagvad Gita, the concept of soul as a traveler from one body to another newborn makes it easier for a Hindu to swallow the bitter truth of death.
Thus it becomes a struggle for an Indian to understand the chief concerns of the Western authors who questioned religion whenever there was a social crisis. It is also not unknown that most of the greatest writers of the twentieth century became strictly atheists.
Such extreme apathy, extreme sense of futility and the extreme worry for mankind becomes a burden on the Indian mind which is content with little and happy to do one’s small part in the vast world. The sense of purpose of living ends quite satisfactorily if one has simply earned one’s respect in one’s immediate society. That includes the teachings of elders and priests.
This is where the introduction to European literature and its wider concerns becomes a job, a deliberation. While studying Modern English Literature a student is briefed about the advent of realism, naturalism and a little about the politics of the century. The major thinkers, Marx and Freud, the scientific developments, whose advantages we all share, and the unhappy effects of the wars and catastrophes of the twentieth century are all part of English Literature. The same concerns in a more marked way make up the European consciousness. Their literature reflects economic as well as political concerns in many ways.
A few areas which stand out as more specifically European in theory are surrealism, epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, magic realism, meta theatre, existentialism and the communist occupation of many European nation states after the second world war. Political conditions such as totalitarianism, communism, anti-Semitism, exile, the holocaust, the scientist’s predicament and the common man’s predicament in the face of dictatorship are central to a European author’s work in the twentieth century.
It is important to acknowledge that the history of the world has been created largely by the activities of the Europeans and therefore, their books are also part of our cultural baggage.
In addition, there is a baggage of literary theories propounded by students of language which bog down the average reader. Someone who wants to enjoy a work of art is hugely frustrated when he is accosted with a flood of literary theories and asked to attack a text with critical tools. A student of English is generally taught to use many of these tools before one can read a text of considerable literary value today.
Thus, the following essays have been designed to provide a vivid variety of readings of some of the most famous European texts translated into English for an Indian student. The essays are free of lines from western critics who are wont to quote and refer to many theories and many scholars and thereby confusing the subject of the text in hand. In our days, critical essays are like jigsaw puzzles, where each reference is supposed to link a thought and tease the synapses of a clever mind. References are virtually hyperlinks that take one into wider and wider scopes endlessly. In a way it is good to be able to let a student wander into greater mysteries of literature, but in doing so one gets further and further away from the actual work of art, one’s first reference. I have noticed that many brilliant students can perform well in the examinations without having read the text at all. They are habituated to learn the great comments by great scholars rather than great lines from the text.
In view of the aforesaid problems I have tried to quote extensively from the texts rather than from the scholars. The aim is to give a complete account of the text instead of making oblique references to history and its erstwhile scholarly discourse. It will encourage the student to read the play or the novel with enjoyment and not merely for scrutiny. The following essays address the texts without tools, like a tolerant admirer who also understands differences.
There was a time when the job of publishing was difficult and only those who had firm conviction about the worth of their words went out of the way to publish them. In this way only those works have been able to survive which have passed the test of time, which have proved their worth generation after generation. Until literature became a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to comment on someone else’s work was felt only as an instigation from the work or the author. But now every scholar has to write critical essays, whether he feels compelled by his inner drive or not. It has become a means of earning one’s bread and butter. No wonder much of what a student gets to read in the library is forced reading, with little instruction. And one is likely to get lost in the maze of hyperlinks.
It has been an imperative for scientific advancement that a student should learn everything that has been already discovered by one’s forefathers. The same imperative is now applied to a student of literature that one should read all that the other scholars have already said about a particular work of art; hence, the abundance of discourse. Books are full of citations and references. It definitely ruptures the unified experience of reading one volume.
This argument does not lead to discourage secondary reading. The aim of this book is to help an Indian scholar to assess the whole of modern European consciousness in a small space. Beyond this, there is ample scope for further reading. In this book I have not included words of other scholars. I have only discussed all the concerns raised by the individual works of art. Needless to say, the choice of the nine texts discussed in the following sixteen essays is based on my own reading of experts in this area. These nine texts are selected from among the greatest classics of the century.
History and philosophy have been woven intricately in the discussion of every text in this book. This book is an outcome of my own teaching experience in this part of the world. It is a gift to my students and to the community at large to encourage the study of European literature.
Nixon and his predecessors had always intervened with the governments of Latin America through economic warfare. In particular by taking control over Chile’s valuable resources such as copper, nitrate and timbre and by blockading essential supplies such as oil to the country and financially weakening them, the American government ensured their superior economic power. Their influence in politics and military support in the overthrow of elected governments by the army or authoritarian leaders, commonly known as regime change, was also part of this policy. This also restricted the spread of communism. Neruda was aware of Nixon’s Latin American policy and his poems reflect his opposition to it. It was a systematic destruction of the economy of Chile through the policy of economic war.
As late as in 1988 and since an economist named Christian Harbulot, director of the Economic Warfare School in Paris, writing in French, provides a historical reconstruction of the economic balance of power between states. As late as 1994, the South American states had not been able to recover from the destructive economic policy of the United States.
It is a well known fact that communism has not been a harmful political ideology after all. The only despot was Stalin, although he was popular in Russia and Georgia. The others like Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro have ruled their countries without much difficulty. In the case of Cuba, the Cold War caused substantial tension until the Cuban Missile Crisis after which Fidel Castro endeavoured in furthering socialism in the world until he in fact joined the Non Alignment Movement.
Now China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam in Asia and Cuba in South America are the only communist countries of the world.
The Poet’s Obligation is a poem written in 1961 where Neruda clearly states that his work is to communicate the scent of revolutionary ideas to the deprived people. He has to be alert, keep his eyes and ears open and whenever there is any dispossession, his poetry can energize people to retaliate. Even in a prison or a remote location, his poetry should reach the underprivileged or the wronged.
His poems should motivate people to fight for their rights and to dream big. He calls it the poet’s obligation or duty because hearts are shrouded in doubt, confusion, ignorance and domination by the powerful. Imagination is a rare privilege. It is the poet who would do the duty of imagining the good things for the future and transferring it to the people’s minds through his poetry.
Neruda believed that while the poet is an inspiration to the common people, in turn it is the vast nature that wakes up the poet to his task. The poet is only an admirer of the power of nature to upturn human civilization wherever it has gone wrong. He composed several poems in love for the power of nature around the time he was practically deeply involved in political affairs that jolted him. He was aware of the evil of human civilization that tries to destroy the laws of nature and he constantly took cognizance of the power outside human affairs so that drawing inspiration from the earth, the sky and the sea, he could reconstruct the world gone stale. Or so he thought until he died.
In 1970, he published Stones of the Sky, a collection of 30 poems dedicated to the power of nature to recall the land that is destroyed by humans. The sky has now become the cradle of the rocks. The first poem can also be interpreted as the sign of upheaval in political terms.
Chile is often called the land of fire and ice. It is dotted with hundreds of magnificent lakes and volcanoes. One gets a true feel of the majesty and power of nature in Chile. Since lakes are abundant, a view of one such beauty can be humbling. It is ‘a substantial witness’ to changes.
In Barren Terrain, Neruda asks about the genesis of humanity. It was necessary for a poet in his time and in the condition his country was in to use his contagious poetry to move his people towards a common goal which he believed to be beneficial.
The idea that a poet’s craft can come in handy in politics and not just sit there like a tranquilizer during critical times is well known and has been articulated by Indian nationalist poets also. In the case of Neruda, it was more appropriate as he was also a political man.
It is natural to be enraged by the interference of other governments in the internal matters of one’s country. Interference is achieved by generating opinion against a political side. So Neruda shrieked out in rage: Fratricidal claws want to lead us/into a civil war full of contradictions.
As a poet, in Against Death he also reasserted that the people of his nation were not so foolish that they would throw away the gift of life for a feud within the land.
It may be argued that these propaganda poems do not add much to the reading of Chilean history. What we do gain from these strongly worded and heavily politically loaded poems is the humanitarian values that every poet tries to uphold: the victory should be for the ‘people’, not for a man; the land should survive all strife and the one who is responsible for the death of innocent people should be punished by the earth. These are some of the ways in which a political propaganda can also be a source of courage and regeneration. It is not just the need to lead or dictate or to prosper in an administrative capacity that a poet works. His function in the world is far reaching and all encompassing. His ability to see human values such as worship of nature and the desire to uplift the condition of the poor makes him a greater leader worth celebrating worldwide. That is why Neruda’s political poems too have been zealously translated by American scholars into English.
Kundera has been deeply influenced by Franz Kafka. He defends Kafka's works as a valuable referendum concerning the life and times of Prague during the War and its aftermath. To this he adds his own experience of exile and prosecution of artists.
Kundera suggests a term to define the structure of his novels. He calls it meditative interrogation or interrogative meditation. He has been striving to achieve an absolute originality of his writings which would be impossible to imitate in another form of art. He disbelieves adaptations, trying all his life to make a novel that is not possible to reduce or rewrite...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Art of the Novel
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
At the time he was living in Chile but he supported the Spanish Republicans by means of his writings and speeches. His poetry of that period is chiefly an expression of his sorrow and hope for poetry to restore the beauty of a country. He uses symbols of rebirth such as roots, seed and a drop of blood that might give rise to life again in his poetry to rekindle the passion to live. In most of his poetry of that time, he exudes hope against fear. He remains forever optimistic. He has expressed sorrow in a few words and there is a melancholy note to his promises of revival but the larger chunk of his poetry stretches its arms towards better days. How he achieves the juxtaposition of sorrow and hope is a matter of genius...
Keywords: Peter Weiss, French Revolution, Paranoia, Jacques Lacan, Marat/Sade, psychoanalysis, The Theatre of Cruelty, Sadism, play-within-a-play
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has explicitly said that for the man the woman does not exist. [On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Seminar Vol XX (1972-73)]
Naomi Zack has discussed the definition of the word ‘woman’ with a long list of things: “We know that each individual woman who has ever existed, exists now, or ever will exist, is real … These are things that can be said about “women” and “woman” as abstract general nouns.”
Till the very end Neruda seems to acknowledge a woman's presence as important to him until the same question of whether her presence was as an individual or as a body resurfaces when he talks of ‘your eyes close with my dreams’. Thus, in the present world, feminists can forgive him for his headless love for the body of woman only because of his limitless praise for her body.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923-24)
The Captain’s Verses (1951-52)
The Furies and Lives
One Hundred Love Sonnets (1957-1959)
Every classic is a text which helps us understand who we are and the point we have reached, said Italo Calvino. Mother is one such classic. The novel is also rich aesthetically.
Mother Courage, a woman with three children, draws a canteen wagon with the Protestant army. In spite of her unwillingness, her two sons are employed in the war, one in the fighting and the other as paymaster. Her daughter is dumb and has reached the age of marriage. The mother’s chief concern is to earn a living by exploiting the war situation. From Brecht’s Marxist standpoint Mother Courage is specifically a representative of the petit bourgeoisie. In her view, since back at home there is no wealth, she joins the war to make quick profit. By turns, her sons are dragged into the quagmire of commitment to the war and they lose their lives. At the end of the play, her dumb daughter Kattrin is killed for drumming a warning to the townsfolk about a surprise attack at night.
The present psychoanalytic reading shows the ways in which the play subverts the intention of the said author. It leads us to the conclusion that there is a realm of the real beyond the symbolic order which perforates the self-sufficiency of the authorial intentions.
The import of the play is reversed if we read it from the Freudian angle. The attitudes which Brecht apparently denounces as low, mean and savage are the products of civilization. Instead, a primitive attitude, untrammeled by civilized moral consciousness is purer and healthier. It gives men a courage of dumb Kattrin.
There has been a constant dialogue between authors from each of these European nations. Creative writers base their art on some thought propounded by their gurus, men of genius whom they consider seriously, whether to refute their theories or to endorse them. Therefore, other than their nativity, nothing differentiates them from each other and all the authors from the continent are grouped together as European.
If we look into the twentieth century alone, as this volume offers, the common experience of all the European authors has been that of the world wars and the revolutionary wars. With the political and economic scenario in view, many European thinkers have developed many philosophical ideas, some rooted in Christian doctrine and some rooted in scientific inventions. Modern European thought is a mix of many brilliant minds who have been grappling with nature and reason to explain away phenomena so varied and so bewildering such as the Nazi Movement or the advent of Communism.
Modern European Literature addresses some of the basic problems forced upon beliefs rooted in Christianity. The death of god professed by Nietzsche after the development of genetics became an intellectual quicksand in which every brilliant mind fell. According to the Bible, God created man in His own image and created all the other things for man to enjoy. Man is god’s favourite creation. He has been situated at the centre of the universe to assess the rest of nature according to his whims and fancy or call it reason. Moreover, the purpose of life is to be morally good according to what the priests taught so that one can attain heaven after death. God as the higher intellect that governs human life became nullified by the theory of evolution of species where only the fittest survive.
For the Western world comprising of the United Kingdom, European nations and the United States where Christianity is the major religion, every modern thinker is great for the bulk of writings, philosophical treatises that they have produced and which are meticulously preserved, studied and reproduced. But for an Indian mind, rooted in Hinduism, much of what Marx, Freud or Nietzsche has said is an additional subject of study forced upon by English education.
The book is designed for an average Indian student who has not incorporated western ethics via Christianity since birth. Much of the confusion that Indian students feel regarding a philosophy such as Existentialism is because one encounters it in fragments in English and European literature, not as a given such as the Hindu ethics. For an Indian, God is manifest in the animals and plants and does not interfere in day to day decisions. For a Christian, God is the father who governs all our actions and each utterance, each action is judged as either faithful or blasphemous. A Hindu does not face the existential question of what is the purpose of life if it is not to please God. For a Hindu, life is a part of nature, like grass, and like any other animal one becomes earth after death. As given in the Bhagvad Gita, the concept of soul as a traveler from one body to another newborn makes it easier for a Hindu to swallow the bitter truth of death.
Thus it becomes a struggle for an Indian to understand the chief concerns of the Western authors who questioned religion whenever there was a social crisis. It is also not unknown that most of the greatest writers of the twentieth century became strictly atheists.
Such extreme apathy, extreme sense of futility and the extreme worry for mankind becomes a burden on the Indian mind which is content with little and happy to do one’s small part in the vast world. The sense of purpose of living ends quite satisfactorily if one has simply earned one’s respect in one’s immediate society. That includes the teachings of elders and priests.
This is where the introduction to European literature and its wider concerns becomes a job, a deliberation. While studying Modern English Literature a student is briefed about the advent of realism, naturalism and a little about the politics of the century. The major thinkers, Marx and Freud, the scientific developments, whose advantages we all share, and the unhappy effects of the wars and catastrophes of the twentieth century are all part of English Literature. The same concerns in a more marked way make up the European consciousness. Their literature reflects economic as well as political concerns in many ways.
A few areas which stand out as more specifically European in theory are surrealism, epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, magic realism, meta theatre, existentialism and the communist occupation of many European nation states after the second world war. Political conditions such as totalitarianism, communism, anti-Semitism, exile, the holocaust, the scientist’s predicament and the common man’s predicament in the face of dictatorship are central to a European author’s work in the twentieth century.
It is important to acknowledge that the history of the world has been created largely by the activities of the Europeans and therefore, their books are also part of our cultural baggage.
In addition, there is a baggage of literary theories propounded by students of language which bog down the average reader. Someone who wants to enjoy a work of art is hugely frustrated when he is accosted with a flood of literary theories and asked to attack a text with critical tools. A student of English is generally taught to use many of these tools before one can read a text of considerable literary value today.
Thus, the following essays have been designed to provide a vivid variety of readings of some of the most famous European texts translated into English for an Indian student. The essays are free of lines from western critics who are wont to quote and refer to many theories and many scholars and thereby confusing the subject of the text in hand. In our days, critical essays are like jigsaw puzzles, where each reference is supposed to link a thought and tease the synapses of a clever mind. References are virtually hyperlinks that take one into wider and wider scopes endlessly. In a way it is good to be able to let a student wander into greater mysteries of literature, but in doing so one gets further and further away from the actual work of art, one’s first reference. I have noticed that many brilliant students can perform well in the examinations without having read the text at all. They are habituated to learn the great comments by great scholars rather than great lines from the text.
In view of the aforesaid problems I have tried to quote extensively from the texts rather than from the scholars. The aim is to give a complete account of the text instead of making oblique references to history and its erstwhile scholarly discourse. It will encourage the student to read the play or the novel with enjoyment and not merely for scrutiny. The following essays address the texts without tools, like a tolerant admirer who also understands differences.
There was a time when the job of publishing was difficult and only those who had firm conviction about the worth of their words went out of the way to publish them. In this way only those works have been able to survive which have passed the test of time, which have proved their worth generation after generation. Until literature became a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to comment on someone else’s work was felt only as an instigation from the work or the author. But now every scholar has to write critical essays, whether he feels compelled by his inner drive or not. It has become a means of earning one’s bread and butter. No wonder much of what a student gets to read in the library is forced reading, with little instruction. And one is likely to get lost in the maze of hyperlinks.
It has been an imperative for scientific advancement that a student should learn everything that has been already discovered by one’s forefathers. The same imperative is now applied to a student of literature that one should read all that the other scholars have already said about a particular work of art; hence, the abundance of discourse. Books are full of citations and references. It definitely ruptures the unified experience of reading one volume.
This argument does not lead to discourage secondary reading. The aim of this book is to help an Indian scholar to assess the whole of modern European consciousness in a small space. Beyond this, there is ample scope for further reading. In this book I have not included words of other scholars. I have only discussed all the concerns raised by the individual works of art. Needless to say, the choice of the nine texts discussed in the following sixteen essays is based on my own reading of experts in this area. These nine texts are selected from among the greatest classics of the century.
History and philosophy have been woven intricately in the discussion of every text in this book. This book is an outcome of my own teaching experience in this part of the world. It is a gift to my students and to the community at large to encourage the study of European literature.
My grandfather Sri Asoke Kumar Bhattacharyya was a brilliant student throughout his career. He was fond of exploring old things in a new way. He was a teacher of Sanskrit for a few years until he turned to archaeology and joined the National Museum as curator. From then on, he was often invited abroad to deliver lectures on Indian art. He had been researching in the area of iconography in the stone edits of the temples of Bengal, in the art and architecture that was inspired by Buddhist and Jain philosophy and in the history of art in India. For all his contributions in this field he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2017, just 7 months after his death at the age of 97.
The My Dadu series of poems are compositions highlighting the very unique influence of my grandfather on my young mind since he was not one of the cuddling playful types. He would confine himself to his study for endless hours and he had various engagements such as with typists, publishers, book sellers, academic institutes, libraries, the post office and the hospital. The latter, due to his incessant work made everyone else in the family, all of us women – my grandmother, my mother and me – take his work with a pinch of irony.
He continued in his disregard for age related issues till the last three months of his life when he really could not leave the bed. Credit goes to my grandmother for taking care of his daily needs ever since their marriage so that his health never failed. The poems are accompanied by a short memoir by my mother Smt. Chitra Bhattacharyya. She has written about her experience as the daughter of a well known man.
The poems in this collection were selected by the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi for their Grant-in-Aid for publication in the category of English poems in 2019. The poems are illustrated with paintings and pictures based on each poem’s theme. It is a fully coloured book printed on glossy paper of about 80 pages. The photographs of my grandfather’s typewriter, books and trophies are added along with a brief chronology of his life and works. There are the photographs of my mother receiving the Padma Shri from the hands of the President of India and of my Dadu sitting with the statuette of Lord Mahavira as part of the Acharya Hemchandra Suri Samman Puraskar that he had received in the year 2013.
Contents:
1. My Dadu
2. Dadu’s Clock
3. The Second Grandchild
4. The Balding Head
5. The Mawlawi
6. The Typewriter
7. The Camera
8. Dadu’s Pride
9. The Wastepaper Basket
10. Dadu’s Slippers
11. The Reference Books
12. The Book Racks
13. The Booksellers
14. The Job of Publishing
15. My Dadu’s Telephone
16. The Pacemaker
17. The ICU
18. His Smile
19. The Champa Tree
20. The Air Conditioner
21. Dadu’s Voice
22. The Call of Nature
23. The Burrow
24. Dadu’s Poetry
25. The Bed
26. Dadu on Ice
27. In Writing
28. A Heart Attack
29. Anointed Logs
30. Deluge
Fifty Five Poems, in other words, fifty five words to pen down in poetry, all the depths, the highs and lows of love and life and the miracle of becoming a poet: that is what the 1998 book expresses.
A cat answers a poignant call, leaps over the boundary, comes up the stairs and rummages through the library and the racks and hides in the bag. Hung on the wall like a spider, a muddled mind not dead, sometimes hungry, at times a wooden flower and not knowing the real from the ideal, the loner envies the lover of his games. He paints the world in new hues, adds music to many songs and sets the loner’s groaning heart right. He uses his hypnotic charm to restore youth to a stifled life. He has come like rain where the sun rules. He is lofty above the crowd and he gingerly lifts a retired bird on his wind. As love flows sometimes in fairy tales of emotions, you wish you could offer more caresses to a flower but indeed, you take flight in poetic expressions.
Nothing surpasses passion except compassion. If someone tugs at your sleeve and suggests a whirlwind romance what will you do? If you give in to passion, your conscience pricks; if you do not give in, the whole world pricks. I have tried to give expression to a cultural chasm that becomes apparent to one at middle age and only after the best things offered to one have disappeared due to a lag.
When with time life begins to show signs of crumbling, you groan in pain. I have captured the sound of those groans in numerous images. It becomes more hysterical when something emerges from the unknown zones of your heart and tries to conquer time, restrain decay and forces you to push hard against accepted cultural ties. It requires a lofty ideal to deal ideally with a cultural hole. In the following poems one can read the heart’s dilemma at such an interruption. If read in the given sequence, the poems form a storyline.
If Lofty touches you passionately, it would mean that you have not been swallowed up by the chasm.
List of contents:
Lofty Above The Crowd
A Muddled Mind
Rain
Hero Honda
The Atlas
Me On The Wall
Pity
Goals
Over The Boundary
A Cat
Lover
On The Rack
I Wish
Fairy Tales
I Am Not Dead
Hoax
Answering Call
It Has Never Been As Before
False
Games
Panther Passion
The Bag
Another Possibility
Hungry Rhymes
We Shall Talk
Emotions
Sometimes
The Spider On The Wall
Those Stairs
Tug at My Sleeve
A Wooden Flower
Reality
Vegetable Passion
The Fall
The Flight
Forces
In Disguise
The Cobra
I Was Drunk
Caresses
Edging Forward
A Loner
The Naughty Streak
Jacques Lacan was a follower of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He expanded on it with inputs from social anthropology and linguistics. He is read widely as one of the post-modern thinkers and there are numerous books on the subject.
The focus of this book is on the juxtaposition of psychoses with creative genius. In Lacanian theory nothing is irrelevant. Therefore focus has been on his seminars where the discussion of poetic skill appears along with identity, primary symbolization and delusion.
For ages man has grappled with the question of birth and a growth from a tiny speck to sophisticated machinery that is human. The native acquires social and cultural features to grow further into a being.
An author is a queer being. He is eccentric, rebellious and unreasonable. He writes. The book explores what is to be an author and what is the value of his writings for him.