Introduction
The motivation of my dissertation steins from a serious consideration of the failure of responsibility in Europe that has occupied some of the most prominent thinkers of this century. Where does one search in one's effort to (re)gain an ethical vindication for all action in life in the aftermath of countless wars whose damage on the human psyche as well as on ecology has been unparalleled in human history? My search is premised on synthesizing a comprehensive ethical perspective by engaging the vision of a fivethousand year old philosophical tradition, the Indian Darshna, in which Death does not exist at both the ontological and conceptual levels. As a
consequence, the framework of dharmic-elbics that I highlight enables an ethical understanding of human action that does not essentialize the Other. I initiate a dialogue between the Western ontology of the Self/Other and the Indian ontology of the ethical sodality of the Self. The dharmic-ethical framework gives the lie to the Western category of the "singularity" of an individual: singularity as a function of death, as an essential aspect of the otherness of the other's death. It is my view that the very philosophical foundation enabling singularity needs to be re-examined in any discussion of ethical responsibility as the twentieth-century draws to a close.
In my first chapter, I take up the question of Dftarmic-ethics vis vis some current investigations carried out by Western thinkers into the notion
of ethics and responsibility. I consider Jacques Demda's recent inquiry into personal versus absolute responsibility in The Gift of Death. The title of his book is itself indicative of a certain measure of incommensurability between thinking responsibility and ethics through death and thinking and, more
precisely, living dharmic-ethics. Derrida's recent work has been curiously occupied with coming to terms with an orisnary moment for ethics and responsibility. Derrida's intellectual preoccupation with responsibility signals both a fatigue with and response to the perennial detractors of his deconstructive philosophy, detractors whom Demda presents as accusing him with the following plaint "Ce que vous elites n'est pas vrai puisque vous questionnez la verity aliens, vous etes un sceptique, un relativiste, un niluliste, vous n'stes pas un philosophe serieux!" (17-18). The trajectory on
which I launch my discussion of Dhannic-ethics, which starts with Derrida, traces a path through the crucial biblical event of Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham. It is against this "originaryt'event that I set up the yapa performed by A q u a at the behest of Krishna, a y p a whose dharmic-ethical scope is the subject of
the Bhagvada Gita. The Bhagvada Gita serves as my primary philosophical text. This text,
which crystallizes the essence of Indian philosophy, is a chapter in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharafa. As an indicator of the quality and nature of
dharmic-ethics, of darshana and dharma, it is notable that the most important texts convey their revelation in poetic form. The Gita, as representative of Indian darshana/dharm (philosophy/religion), gives the lie to Emmanuel
Levinas's distrust of all tropic language as unethical. Levinas's philosophy of ethics is pointedly concerned with the experience of "Auschwitz," yet conceptualizes the "birth" of ethics only to couch it in the violence of a
confrontation. In opposition to Levinasian ethics, I consider the dynamics of
a maternal ethics as discussed by Cynthia Willett in Maternal Ethics and Slave Moralities. Willett proposes the reconceptualization of the ethical moment in the maternal caress as music and dance; while she does gesture in the
direction of dharmic-ethics, she remains within the confines of a Self/Other dialectic which arrests her thinking. Her work does, however, help me clarify the nature of dharmic-ethics as also the ethical sodality of the Self. Next, I consider the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus which, in my view, is an instance of thinking's becomingIndian. I conclude my first chapter with an invocation of Friedrich Nietzsche
and Mahatma Gandhi, as I share their concern for the technological "progress" in recent history.
In the second chapter, I elaborate the contours of a dhamic-ethics against some of the primary concerns in the academic fields of postmodernism and post-colonialism. A major thrust in my dissertation, entitled Dharmic-Etfa'cs: the Ethical Sociality of the Self in Post-colonialism and Postmodernism, is to read and apply dhamic-ethics in twentieth century postcolonial and post-modem literatures. The often-times dazzling theoretical sophistication of critical discourse in both fields seems again and again to elide the significance of ethical motivation in human action. I ask the following questions of literary criticism as it functions in American academia at the end of the nullenium: What is the relationship between literature and dfcarm ic-ethics? What is the rela tionship between literature, criticism, and
dftarmic-ethics? What is the value of focusing on dharmic-ethics in literary criticism? What are the dharmic-ethical motivations of the text at hand? What is lost in current debates that ignore the issue of d h i c - e t h i c s at the expense of post-structuralist language discourse? And, finally, what is the nature of the dftarmic-ethical investment of a critic vis-a-vis his or her
criticism? 1 explore these questions in the context of two prominent fields of
discourse in late twentieth century academia: post-mode-m coloni&m-
and post-
At a pMamphid level, 1 attempt to synthesize a
compr&emive ethical perspective through the injection of dhamic-ethics into the domain of literary &ticism. To focus my argument, 1 investigate the nafure of the academic divide ktweert post-modedm and postcolonidism. Both disciplines acquire their theoretical tools horn poststructuralist thought, yet both are considered as distinct and separate fields of
inquiry. In my d h a r m i c e ~ c dconsideration of these two fields and their theories*I engage the ideas of F~edericJmesun, Homi Bhabha, &if Dirlik, Robert Young, and Gayatri Spivak among others. Having introduced some of thte parmeters and the necessity for a dharmic-ethical revaluation of action, be it social, political, economic, academic, or critical, 1 turn my attention to the dhamic-ethical dynamics within fow literary texts, namely, Drazdpadi, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, Waiting fur the Barba~ans,by J.M. Coetzee, me M Q ~Last S Sigh, by S a h a n Rushdie, and Grauityrs Rainbow, by Thomas Ppchan. 1 have chosen these texts for their prominent status in post-colonid m d post-modem studiesDragipadi is a powerful account of the abuse of power by the police authorities against the armed Naxalite insurgents in Eastern India. The story ends with a post-htenoga~onDopdi, rapedt tom and bleeding, who in her nakedness appears victorious, and strikes hcomprehaible fear into the unperturbable police chief, Senanayak. Spivak, who has translated the stoq, reads the moment through a feminist, decommc~vistfilter whose Eurocentrism blinds her m d binds her to the politics of blame: in this case, man and male patriarchy. In contrast, my interpretation of the same
moment, which 1 discuss as one of atman-yapa or self--sacrifice,a b w s for an
m d e r s t m b g of Dopdi's actions beyond the rhetoric of blame and deconstruction.
Torture and the ethical crisis it admits recur as primary concerns in the South African writer Coetzee's novelBWaitifig fur the Barbarians. The magistrate, as first-person narrator of the events, shows a sensitivity for semiotics h his quest for a reconciliation with and justification for the events that turn his tranquil outpost in the empire upsidedom. Against the p r e d o a m f l y d h c o w - h a t e d criticism that this novel has generated?1 propose that the actions in the novel lead to a specific and univocal message about the nature of dhumie-eWcs in the world. This allows me to get
beyond the discursive impasse of paradox and contradiction that defies my analysis based solely on the operations of discourse. My reading allows for an mderstmdhg and mativation for action in the very face of the fact that there is an essential and unknowable mystery in the novel. Coetzee's novel
mobilizes a stark universe in which the ma@stratets only recourse, dharmicethicai in naturef is depicted through the Gandhim concepts of a h i m s ~@onviolence) a d satyapaha (passive resistance). S a h m Rushdie nee&
no introduction. His latest novel? The Muurfs
Last Sighf provides a complex inte&glhg
of races and cultures d s -
crossed with a weave of multi-national capitalist concern which leaves its protagonist, also a first-person narratorr befbddleci for the most part* The novel begins at the end of Moraes Zogoibytsstory, whof while recounting a carhsing saga, searches for an ethical vindication of the events in his turbulent history. h tracing out the dharmic-ethical trajectory of Moraes' talef 1 suggest that this novel crysta.&es
Rushdie's creative geniusBnamely,
the competition between two ontological determinations of selfhood, of
being: the Indian ontology of the Self and the Western ontology of the
SeE/Other. In dosingt 1&cuss the inorhate attention given to painting in this novel, and engage Merleau-Ponv's aesthetics to put in relief Rushdie's
dkarm ic-ethical vision.
Gravity8sRainbowt Thomas Pynchon's much celebrated postmodern text, serves fittingly as the last novel in a scheme of increasing complexityD Arguing that death does not exist in the urtiverse presented by Gravity's
Rainbow, 1 discuss that the impersonality of the novel combined with its explosion of ego-bound desire give the novel a tndy dhgmic-eWca1
character. Two major cosmo~ogieswhich confiunt each other in the novel
are h e Western and that of the Herera tribe. It is deax that the novel is critical of Chistian hypocrisyt and pointedly attacks the related histories of
colonizafion; in spite of this, a characteristic stzertgth of the novel lies in its refusal to perform any s b ~ g h ~ o m binary a d flip-flop that ends up simply
va10rizhg the hitherto suppressed, catonizedt or marginalized. 1 discuss the novelts imbrication of ted-motogy and nature through a dharmicee~cal
perspective, arguing that there is nothing new or dim afoot in its universe. 1 read Gravity's b i n b o w as a y a g ~ ~ celebration ic of the ever unpresentable and
unknowable in the universe.
Chapter 1
No Other for Abraham, but Brahman As a first step in the direction of re-engziging ethics in the fields of post-
modemism and post-coio~&mf I will consider Jacques krrida's recent and enigmatic discussion in The Gift of Death. Uemda paintedIy organizes his analysis of responsibility, ethics and duty around the r ' ~ e o l o @ c o - p o ~ ~ c d l domain (pre)scribed by the religions of the Bmk, i.ef Judaismf C?uisti~ty,
and Idam. R h d a finds it appropriate to hyphenate the three into one entity? '~Judaeo~hi~timo-~sldc.~~ 'I'hough this unification reflects their belonwpess to the t'Bookf"it is inacmate insofar as it d o w s him to presume Islam within the fabric of Judaism md Christianity; after aIl, o d y the latter two are under his scrutiny. Isaac is notf for examplef Abraham's
*'odybeloved sunt' (68) if one takes into account the Ishail of the QoranThis presumption on Demda's part is significant in that it prefigures his later ex&apolatiom where he forces his Bookish view on all humanity, even for that portion of the world whose very ontologies are constituted properly other-wise. Given that Derridats trenchant dissection of the "failuretfof European responsibility is founded on the iteration of God as the absolute Other, as absolute alterity?and on the Selfs as well as the Other's irreplaceable
singularity, 1 find his enthusiasm as spokesperson-at-lage for all humanity dangerously misinformed and thus mcomcionable: Isaac's sacrifice conhues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front. There is no front between responsibitily and irresponsibility but only between different a p p r o p ~ a ~ o of n sthe same sacrifice, dgferent orders of responsibility~different other orders: the
religious and the ethical, the religious and ethico-politicalf the theo1cigicd and the political, the &eolo@cepoEticd,the theocratic and the eWcepofiticd, mci so an; the secret and the publicf the profane and the sacred, the specific and the generic, the human and the nono human. Sacrifiad war rages not only among the refigions of the Book and the races of Abrakimthat qressIy rder to the sacrifice of Isaacf Abraham, or brahimf but between them and the rest of the starving and even those worldf within the immense majority of hm-d living ...who don't belong to the people of Abraham or firahim, all those others to whom the names of Abraham and firahhn have never meant anything because such names don't conform or correspond to mything. (70; see a h 79)
Is Derrida's text here not just another instance of h e indwionary violence of Western logocentrisrn? If notf then how can one justify that in spite of recognizing the existence of non-conforming traditions and cultures Brrida conforms them-"the rest of the starving world-within a SeU/Other ontology? Perhaps k m d a has presaged my perplexed response when he says that, "I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment d my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom 1 know or don't how, the billions of my fellows..my fellows who are dying of starvation or sicknesstt(69). And then again, perhaps notf for his disclaimer is not a sufficient response to my concern: that in at least one non-monoaeb~cand non-Book refison-fid&m-concepts
of respomib*~, duty, ethics,
sacrifice, and death are founded though a metaphysics and a cosmo~ogythat is irreconcilable with that of the Book The question of the moment becomes,
why continue to address the issues of duty and of respomibZv with a wilful1 blindness to any non-European conceptions of the same? One the one hand, Derrida admits that "modem civilization1'inasmuch as it is European "suffer[s] fiom ignorance of its history, from a failure to assume its resp~nsibiIity*~ (GD 4). 0x1the other hand, he displays a stubbornness, at least
an inflexibility, in his persistence not only to keep reading the European Book for a solutionf but also-and this is perp1exirtg-to make the book speak for the
condition of all the others, all those billions, starving and otherwise, all the world. If we are to speak for the universal concerns of all people on this planet, then why remain so firmly entrenched in the tradition of the Book whose human failure-a European failureis all too evident in the name of "Auschwitz?@' Can one, should one, must one not speak for all humanity other-wise? There is hope in Derrida's belief that Europe awaits a truer Christianity that is yet to be thought; my suggestion, which appears to be patently more practical, is to first consider the thought of a non-European tradition, Hinduism, with its ontology and cosmology in which no Other exists, in which death does not exist, and whose conception of dhamic-ethics
provides a philosophical tradition with a five thousand year history of what Judaeo-Christian Europe has opted not to think. As a preliminary address, as a brief suspension of suspense, and as a
suspended beginning, a few words about Death. The Bhagvada Gita, the
Hindu "Book" through which I will crystallize my understanding of the (ttarmic-ethics, unequivocally states that death does not exist. That which exists, exists; that which does not exist does not exist. There is no passage from that which does not exist to that which exists, and vice-versa: nasato
vidyizte bhavo / nabhavo uidyate satah... it is found that there is no coming to be of the non-existent; It is found that the not non-existent constitutes the
real...(a16,WBG 101). The importance of this conceptualization of the eternal nature of consciouness and of the transitory-transfornative nature of all bodies, of all manifestations of matter in the cosmos, cannot be overemphasized. For here begins an incommensurable difference from the
religions of the Book which threatens to nullify all discourses formulated around the preparation, the anticipation, and the "gift" of death. It is no accident that I begin with death and the lack of death, and with the eternal
consciousness; for Demda's discussion invokes the conscious self as much as it does death, the conscious self living in the face of death, that is, the conscious self living the ethical, the responsible life.1 For this text shows
more than any other a spiritual Derrida struggling with that one "essential interiority" which will not deconstruct: the conscious self. And in his attempt to binarize, perhaps, death occupies a similar slot as that which is equally unique and non-substitutable: "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, "given," one can say, by death" (GD41). The conscious self and death, which one makes me me, which one makes me responsible? Derrida privileges death, and this one can say is the privilege accorded by the Book. But one can also privilege the conscious self, the
atman, and instead of limiting sacrifice to examples of dying-"dying for God, dying for the homeland, dying to save one's children or loved one" (42, italics
m i n e ) ~ n ecan conceive of y a p a as all work or human action (karma)
performed in the right spirit: "What ever thou doest, whatever thou eatest, whatever thou offerest, whatever thou givest, whatever austerities thou perfonnest, Son of Kunti; That do as an offering to Mef'(IX27, BG WBG 403)? It will be a propos to clarify karma, as it is a word that has worked its way into the popular media culture and has resultanfly had its signficance dispersed. Literally, karma means action. All karma, all action, is triple in its nature as it belongs in part to the past, to the present, and to the future. The
consequence of an action or karma is inseparable from the karma itself, Qhis is a good moment for me to introduce a tenninologicat clarification. The conscious self in Hinduism is denoted by the word i'afrnan" In common parlance, the Hindu a t m a n and the Western "soul" are often used interchangeably, and erroneously so. In the rest of this dissertation, the word 'self," when used in a Hindu context, refers to the a t m a n . at or a discussion of yagna sunatanam or the eternal sacrifice as the cause of the universe, see my introduction, pages 1-8.
"hence, all things are linked together indissolubly, woven and interwoven inseparably; nothing occurs which is not linked to the past and to the future" flbshi 109). At no point does this mean that one is "fated" by one's karma, nor that one is helpless because of accumulated karma. The analogy of a sailor on the seas is apt here: one can choose to be tossed by the waves and tides and be
transported in any direction whatsoever, or one may choose to be an active navigator in the same circumstances. Joshi emphasizes that "karma is not a finished thing awaiting us, but a constant becoming, in which the future is
not only shaped by the past but is being modified by the present" (116). Here, the analogy of an archer with an arrow already on its way makes for an apt
Instead of the gift of death, the gift of life and the atman, the conscious
self in its eternal aspect. What are the contours of such an ethics? What is to be gained from such a comparison, from such a comparative study? For one thing, debilitating relativism can be combatted by bringing an Eastern
philosophy to bear on a Western domain which has been saturated by the infinitely generative and self-reflexive discourses of language, power and knowledge, and which, in its saturation, has forgotten the essential mystery of life. It heartens one to see Demda broach this mystery as he grapples with the
gift of death; it does not surprise, on the other hand, that Derrida dares not to confront the conscious self. In the revision I propose, the atman, the conscious self, and the essential mystery of life are in the forefront-for death does not exist. Everything is at stake here, inasmuch as such a revision is 3 ~ h e r e are three kinds of arrows, each representing a different type of karma. Prarabdhan is the karma which already awaits and cannot be avoided. Only living through it will exhaust it. Sannchira Karma is the accumulated karma of the past, and determines the "character" of the agent. Varramdna karma is the one that is shaping the future ti venir; it is the arrow already on its way. At any moment, there is an arrow always already on its way.
necessary, for Derrida himself has underlined the importance of his project in no uncertain terms: The question of whether this discourse on the gift and on the gift of death is or is not a discourse on the sacrifice and on dying /or the other is something that we must now analyze. Especially since this investigation into the secret of responsibility is eminently historical and political. It concerns the very essence or future of European politics. (33, bold emphasis mine) At the end of the millenium, if we are concerned with the future of
Europe, we are equally concerned with the future of the world; and equally, if we are concerned, as Demda obviously is, with the so-called "failure of
responsibility" tainting Europe's past unto its present, we are also concerned with its historical impact throughout the globe-not least the history and legacy of Imperial colonization. Following the suggestion in Jan Patocka's
Heretical essays on the Philosophy of History, that "the Europe to come will
no longer be Greek, Greco-Roman, or even Roman [and hence will be truly "Christiari'r', Derrida wonders "what would be the secret of a Europe
emancipated from both Athens and Rome?" (GD52). W.B. Yeats wondered about this too and his vision in "The Second Coining" has intriguing echoes with this text: "...somewhere in the sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is
moving its slow thighs...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?//" (1.13-22). The point being, of
course, that the Second Coming needs to be other than Judaeo-Christian, Yeats's poem, it would seem, prefigures Derrida's discussion of the failure of
responsibility ailing Europe?
*lt
is also significant, with regard to my discussion, that Yeatsts attempt in
Wheels to imagine a viable alternative cosmology, mystical and cyclical, has distinct similarities with Hindu philosophical thought.
In Demdafsenigmatic and slippery discussion where one is ofien hard put to differentiate his voice from Patocka's, and in which Abr&amPs story, which motivates the discussion of r ~ u d a e w ~ s t i ~ eethics, k ~ ~isc " Mated to indude Kerkegaard's musings in Fear m d Trmbting along with the '*sacredr'biblical textsf Demda undertakes a critique of the "disease of hespomibaw" of Western civilization. Demdars text launches itself from Patocka's hereticd essays about the Mure of responsibility in the Christian tradition and about the yet-to-come true Christianity, one which would begin to be reached once one began to think the nature of the Person who gazes
without being seen. Patodca argues that individud singularityfwhich in its exteriorkitable functions is used to represent cornmmal ethicsf hides the mystery contained in the interior of h e unique person. He is concerned with the ascendance of the being of quantifiable power at the cost of the
"authentict' unique personf one who hciions with an interiorized secret- It is the discourse of ethics as interiorized individual responsibility which has been found wanting i n the technological discourses of posmodedsm.
tkmda's reading of Abrahaxnlssacrifice enables him to discuss the "instantr*of ethics as *'inespomib~ation/that is, "as an insoluble and paradoxica1 contradiction between responsibility irz genera1 and absolzite responsibilityr'(61). Respomibiuv in general refers to the kind due to others
in one's community, whereas absolute responsibility is that due to God. The paradox lies in the fact that once entrusted by God with the task of s a d i c e , Abraham c a ~ odisclose t it, c o m h c a t e it to othersf he must keep it secretf one's even though ethics consists in answering for oneselff c o m m i c a ~ g intentions before the others. Paradoxically then, the unique hdividua1 who interiorizes responsibility towards God in secret becomes irresponsible in the
realm of public ethics. By Gadf Derricia finally understands an essential
interiority which is the principle structui.~gJ u d a e ~ M t i m e k l d c
Gad is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not &om the exterior. Once such a strucfue of conscience exists...once 1 have within me, t h n k to the in~sibleword as suchr a witness that others c a ~ osee, t and who is therefore at the same time other than me and mure intimate with me than myse5 once I have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing in me, then what I call God exists...God is in me, he is the absolute "meFr or Frse1f"...(108-9; bald emphasis mine) It is intezesting to note that in limiting himself exclusively to the religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianityrand Islamf and in daposhg the ailment of a European culture that is yet to think through to its "true1'Christianity, Derrida patently ends up strangely adjacent to precepts of the polytheistic
religion of Hinduism. Adjacent but also always parallelr for here the history of God which is the history of secrecy, remains the story of the indiuidzial's "desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness to that invisibility" (109). The lfindividual''according to Derrida: the unique person with his or her own absolute singularity. With a view to reading responsible md ethical action in the twentieth century texts and in the act of reading itself, it becomes necessary here to introduce, against the Judaeeektim-hl&c
histoire being recounted by
Derrida, some of the definitive precepts of Hinduism. And as Derrida frames his discussion with the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac by Abrham, 1 will kame
my discussion with the story of Arjuna's impending sacrifice in the Mahabharata, which is the occasion and also the instant of the discawse of the Bhapada Gita, the Song Celestial, by Kihhna revealed to Arjua. The moment that the Gita records is that which takes place before the climactic war, the Mahabharata?is engaged. Two armies face each other across
the battlefield K u r ~ k s h e t r aa~ d kjuna, the King of the Pandava m y f has a crisis faced with the task of massacre that awaits him and given the fact that
the "enemy" is none other than his kith and kin, the Kauravas who are also his cousinsf Arjma cannot justify his impending action- The system of ethics
and responsibility that has guided his Iife until this point fails to sanction his engagement in the ixmnhent war. He drops his weapons and tells K k i s h , who has agreed to be A.rjuna's charioter for the war,that he wiU not fight
0 Madhwuciana, when teachers, fathers, sons, gran&aihersf m a t e d uncles, fathers-in-Iaw, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other relatives are ready to give up their lives and properties and are standing before me, why should 1 wish to kill them, even though they might otherwise kcill me? 0 maintainer of all living entities, I am not prepared to fight with them even in exchange for the three worlds, let done this eaxth. (I.32-35;PBG 61)h response to this incapacity and confusionf Krishna the god-hcmate provides Arjuna with a series of dharmic-darshanic reasons for engaging the battlef for Idling all his kith and kin. h what is arguab1y a q s m a t i o n of the h d m e n t d precepts of Hinduism, W h n a discourses on the necessifies
of adhering to an absolute ethics beyond the r e a h of worldly ethics and according to whichf all human action must be performed as a yaps or
sacrifice to the etemd Self residing within the comcious seIf of all beings in the universe.
h Hindu terns, specifically in the revelation of the Bhapadu Gituf it is the mutable egoistic self-the atman laden with ukamkara (I-rnahg)--wK&,
through a series of y u p i c actions, begins to witness the secret of the immutable Self, Pztr~sha.Parusha begins to be revealed and realized only through y a p i c sacrifices which need to be performed without desire, whether it be material, sexual, or spiritual. An important stage in the realization of the Pzvusha is the howledge that the atman or self in others is an identical
atmm, one governed by the t h e e p n a s or qualities. Properly speaking, the other is never really Other: "With the self [ a ~ ~ mpresent z] in all beings, And a l l beings present in the selfgthe self of him who is disciplined by Yoga sees
the same (sew at a l l times" (W.29, WBG 300)-5 The impact ofthis formulation is far-reaching for it contradicts the privilege given to Mterity and Otherness which forms the unquestioned base for most of Western
philosophy. As we shall see, the justification for ethical action is premised neither on the existence of God as absolute Other, nor on the inter-face of self with the other, that is, the encounter with the absolute Mterity of the Other.
For the sake of simpIificationf it can be said that the system of dhamic-ethics
and responsibility as it is delineated in the Gita applies if there is but uric conscious self anywhere in the universe or on the pimetg for its justifkation is not founded on the Other, but on Purgsha and Prakriti. It can be said that Arjuna performs a y a p , the ultimate sacrifice on the battiefield of the Kumkshetra. The Gitiz is the doctrine justifying that
y a p a r that karma or action which is violence and slaughter of warf and which must be offered up by hjuna. Three aspects must be set up here as
they are in fundamental opposition to the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. First? Abraham's action is a call for faith, a faith which remains b h d as it is substantiated neither by revelation nor by hawledge. Abraham is never told why he must sacrifice his son Isaac, the sacrifice is commanded of Abraham
in the following words: "God did tempt Abrahamgand said unto himt 5 ~ h ebracketed (self) in this quotation results from the difficulty of translating the Sanskrit word Samada rsana. Sargeant directs us to Ramanuja's explanation for this term: "A persan who has brought his atmaa [soul] into Yoga, will see similarity in all mmurzs when separated from Prukriti (material nature); he will see that all beings are in his own iztmarz; in other words he wifl see that his own amaR has the same form as the atmaas of all other beings and contrariwise, so that he has seen all that is arman when he has seen one arman'' (WBG 300n.)
Abraham: and he said, behold0here 1 am. h d he said Take now thy sonp thine only son lkaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah;
and oEer him there for a bumt offering upon one of the mountains which 1 will tell thee of' (KJV 21-2). This absolute cornand leads to the secrecy and titus to the paradox, "the aporia of r e ~ o m i b (61) ~ ~that " Demda discusses as being imperative to maintaining the absolute singularity of the ethical
person- At the momat of divine htewentionOthe "instant" at which Abraham has dl but committed the act, it is notable that not God (as Demda has mistakenly written on page 71) but the "angelof the Lard communicates: '*Andthe angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven and said,
Abraham, Abraham: and he said Here atn I. And he said, lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou has not witheld thy son, thine only son, from metr (Gen.2211-12).6 At this moment0God is vindicated as the fearsome Other
who gazes irt judgment from the distance- In contrast, w u n a receives hawledge, gpm,from W h n a the Divine teacher and auatar. The concept of Avatarhood as exemplified by fiishna demonstrates yet again that Gad is
not a fearsome, inscrutable and inaccessible entity: ''Mtlwugh 1 am birthless
and my self imperishable, dhough I am h e lord of all beings0Yet, by 6 ~ h eambiguity of the term "angel of the Lordst is significant in terms of deciphering the meaning of this originary (for Derrida, at least) moment. Though the teem "angel of the Lord" is an epithet for God in the Jahwehite Writer's tradition, it is usually used to indicate a degree of remove from God. This remove is motivated by respect for and fear of the powerful nature of God. However, the rest of the text indicates quite clearly that God is "calling" to Abraham at this moment, and not appearing to him- This seems to suggest that the epithet angel is quite unnecessary as the remove is semantically signaled as it is. Of course, due to the nature of the Bible and its combination of the four Writerly traditions, it is impossible to go back to the source; our only recourse is to conjecture why "angel of the Lord" was used at that moment by the Jahwehite Writer--assuming all the time that it is indeed himithem, and not the Priestly writer's whimsy at hand. For an excellent discussion in this regard see Victor P. Hamilton's The 800k of Genesis, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Ca, Grand Rapids, MI, 1990, especially pp. 1-75.
controlling m y own material nature, I come into being by my own supernatural power" (TV.6, WBG 206). The theme of divine descent for humanity's sake is not unfamiliar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition; there is, however, a peculiarly Hindu possibility of achieving avatarhood by human
ascent, by realizing the Purusha in the atman, the Self in self, through a movement obnadbhmam agatah. Ignoring this double aspect of Avatarhood is to miss the purport of the Gitafs teaching, and Aurobindo is adamant about
this: "Other wise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen" (EG 140). k j u n a is not tested for his faith nor for his fear of God,
but is taught, directly by the Avatar, to recognize and love the principle of Brahman as firusha or Self in his atman or soul, and having acceded to the Self, to commit all karma as y a p a , all works as sacrifice. Second, Arjuna's knowledge is complete, complemented by action in the battlefield. After Krishna's discourse, Arjuna engages the War, the
Mahabharata, vanquishes and kills his enemies which are also his kith and kin. This is the bloody y a p a which he must perform and which he does perform, uniting the knowledge (eyaan) and the works (karma) and devotion (Bhakfi). In contrast. Abraham's sacrifice does not actually take place. The
moment in which he is ready to use the blade on his son is the moment or "instant" in which he has passed the test, and when a goat is provided in Isaac's stead. Third, Arjuna accedes, through his yagna or sacrifice done without
desire or motive for gain, to the spiriti of Brahman in himself, that which is also present in all manifest reality. The Karma and the yagna, the action and the sacrifice, are not justified by conventional ethics, but by the surrender of the self to the Brahman. The action and sacrifice performed by Arjuna is not
only performed after the renunciation of desire but also with the knowledge that he is not the doer of the works, but that the works are the operation of the active, unequal, mutable universal Force of Nature, or Prakriti. Arjuna realizes that the supreme firusha, Purushottma, governs Prakrifi, and the atman or conscious self is a partial manifestation of the Purushottma. All works in the being and becoming of the universe have the one cosmic cause, Pitrushoffama (or Braman), which generates both Purusha, as Self, and
Prakriti; as Nature. The conception here is monistic-ultimately, there is no qualitative difference between Purnshoftama and atman or self, it is a case of reciprocal containing; whereas, in Abraham's case, there remains a fundamental separation between the nature, quality, and being of God and that of his own self. The "instant" in which Abraham has decided to murder his son, to consummate the sacrifice, the "instant" that Derrida finds decisive in terms of its commitment to murder, is the moment of divine intervention
when the angel appears to provide a sacrificial lamb. Abraham is not reasoned with. Abraham's god exists in a "dissymetrical alliance" with Abraham, for God says to Abraham that "Ican see right away [d I'instanf] that you have understood what absolute duty towards the unique one means, that it means responding where there is no reason to be asked for or given"
(GD
72, emphasis mine). Derrida's dicussion demonstrates an incongruity
between responsibility and duty to the absolute and responsibility towards the family, the human species, the generality of the ethical (73). It can be said that
this split, between the absolute ethical and the mundane ethical, exists also in the discourse of the B h a m a Gita but with a crucial difference. A realization of the Divine, the order of the absolute in Derridean terms, teaches first and
foremost that the "unique" "singular"person is a hoax, that the ego is delusion, and that the atman or self must realize that it is not the doer of
action: "it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the right action is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer...all pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end" (EG 33).
Finally, in Hindu terms, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham demonstrates the first of "three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law"
(34).
In the first step, man is the doer of the yapa (sacrifice) performed to a
Deity who is the supreme and only Self, though not yet realized in the being of the doer: "this first step is Karmayuga, the selfless sacrifice of works and here the Gita's insistence is on action" (35). Abraham's sacrifice can be seen as a partial fulfillment of Karmyoga. In the second step, Jnanayoga, the sacrifice
of works continues but with the self-realization that is the loss of self and knoweldge of "all works as simply the operation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul, of Prakriti, the unequal, active, mutable power" (34). And lastly, in the third step, Bhaktiyoga, sacrifice of works, yagnic karma, continues but
with the added element of devotion to the principle governing Prukriti, "of
whom the [conscious self] in Nature [Prukriti] is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed" (34). It is emphatically stressed that the three modes co-exist in a triune way of works, knowledge and devotion. A pause must be made here in order to make explicit the interest in
introducing aspects of Hindu d h a r m and darshana, a tradition which Demda pointedly avoids in his discussion of the European (*responsibility.
The interest lies principally in the cause of a comparative approach which will allow a genuine move in the direction of providing a "positive
orientationr' to the movement of history its&.
Against the dominant
Western (Ewopean) experience in the twentieth centuryf with its "failure of resp~mibfiy,~' with its "AuschM&,'* with its postmodem r e c o & ~ a t i o m of lived experience, with its ascendant technological culturef it becomes urgent to think a revaluation kom the very foundations of ontology, cosmology, and metaphysics. If the Western desc~ptionhas proven catastrophic, it is time to consider another description which is different and which is not ndLified by hmmo-temporal events. Clearlyf for me, I-Endu thought provides such an ontology, cosmology, and d h a m i c e ~ c adescription; l and is seeing, especially, Demda's insistence to not only remain within the Western "Book but to speak for all humani& through it, that 1 am motivated to begin
introducing the scope of dhannic-ethics. k m d a asks some h d m e n t d questions abaut how we Iive our lives
in a responsible manner. h c i having set up, in good Demdem fashion, the "ap~riaof respomibsv," he is faced with the paradoxicd inevitability that being responsibIe to the one means failing his respansibiIity to the other.
This means that "I can never justify the fact that 1 prefer or sacrifice m y one ( m y other) to the other" (70).This declaration is what instigates Demda's musings as to how we can justify in the name of responsibility one*svery existence when at every step in life, at every responsible and sacrificial moment in life, we are being irresponsible to the other others perishing at every moment for want of our attention. At fixst glance this idea seems farfetched; however, Derrida himself has stretched the thought to its M t :
"Howwould you ever justiv the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every mo&g
for years, whereas other
cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention people?" (71)- Yet, this
s h p h t i c and exagerated question is also the most profound for the issue at hand, the issue of ethics and dhamic-ethics; it must be addressed. b m d a has made a couple of questionable judgments. He has assumed the
event of an orighary moment in which the c d to responsibility OCCWS,
and, additionally, it is a moment in which one (Abraham) has the choice to refuse the caIl to responsibility. For b m d a , the response "Here 1 a m " is optional even as it, and perhaps, espeady as it sign& the madgesture
which defines the system of S h N ~ v - ~ ~~ep r e s m t a t i oofnthe "Here 1
am,"here I stand finally defined as an individual, a singular being in the system of ethics: 'Were I ams': the first and only possible response to the c d by the other [why not '*Thereyou are"?] the uri@nary moment of responsibility such as it exposes me to the singulm othex, the one who appeals to me. "Here I am" is the only seU-presmta~onpresumed by every form of r e q o m i b s ~ I: am ready to respond, I reply that I am ready to respond" (71, italics mine).
Why does he miss the logic of the story? The logic of the biblical story is not that Abraham is a good guy because he "ch~oses'~ to do what God commands him to do without giving hkn any reason for it. To the contraryf the logic is to show that the biblical God cannot be asked to justify his waysf that the Divine is beyond the human economy of question and answer, that therefore
faith must be blind and God must be feared. This is the moral of the storyf and Derrida errs when he interprets the moral along the following k e s : "God leaves him free ta refuse-and that is the test" (72). That is not the test,
especially for an Abraham who has already lived the better part of his life in responsible fdfihnent of the word of God, for an A b r h m who is circumcised in compfimce with the Covenant and who is over a hundred
years old (Gen 171-26).
In fact, I find it p u z h g that both Kerkegaard (in Fear grid Trembling) and Demda, centuries apart, give averarching p r o d a c e to Abr&amls sacrifice as constitutive of the individual's shgdaxity and choice. Consider,
for instance, the fact that Abraham struck not one but two covenants with God prior to his act of sacrifice (Abrm becomes Abraham. during the contracting of the second covenant, see Genesis 17). During the compacting of the first covenant, a freewheeling and dealing Abram is asked to sacrifice
anim& in a riualistic manner which demands that they be sliced in half, whereupon both the parties making the covenant with each other are made to walk in between the halves. This is a symbolic gesture which signifies that,
should they fail in their h U e n t of the covenmt, a similar fate as that of the animals awaits them.'
Abram, after he has sliced the anhtds, is visited in a "deep sleep" by a "deep and terrifying darkness:" ''As h e s u n was going down, a deep deep [eksiasis] feu upon Abram and a deep and terrifying darkness [phobos] descended upon himrr(Gen 15:12). This deep darkness is customary for the visitation of God in his immediacy (see Moses in Exodw 19:9). As the sign of
the forging of the first covenant, a mixadous act takes place: ' m e n the sun had gone down and it was dark*a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed
between these pieces'' (Ga15:17).8
Abram is on h e way to becoming
Abraham, an Abraham who has witnessed in the miracle of the covenant the
power-disyme~cal, as Demda emphasizes-of God.
his is an ancient near-Eastern Hittite tradition, and is a custom described in Jeremiah 34: 18-19. 8 ~ h epieces refer tat eh split open pieces of the animals that were prepared by Abcaham for the covenant. Note the resonance here with the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire with which God led the children of Israel out of Egypt in Exodus.
Abraham's cataclysmic experience with God occurs in 15~12,which is the only instance in which God visits Abraham with the first intimation of the covenant.9 Demda's emphasis on the dynamics of the later sacrifice
elides the point of a sacred, bibilical story-we already know that the twice contracted Abraham is going to respond. What we don't know is what divine
Wade awaits his action this time.io The story of the sacrifice of Isaac,
h d y , is a story about the awesome nature of Abr&axnPsGod, of his God as the absolute m e r e As long as we are in the economy of the Other, absolute responsibility is in contradiction with public respomibSy-a Demda has well shown.
h
the economy of the
Self, however, a different story is being told. What does
W h n a tell Axjuna
propus of the sacrifice, the yaps that Arjma must
perfom? CmaaUy, that there is no existace outside of responding- Lile is the combination of a process of Prizkriti wiih its gzinas rumhg through
everythbg that is Prakriti and of the comdmce of self, which is an aspect of Purziska and a. h a p e n t of the cosmic consciousness, witnessing Prafiti- In
such a process everything is already a response, there is rzu originmy mumeat zuhen respondi~gbegins, when one is given he choice of whether or enter the economy of respomib*v.
to
1 see myself and my Self in all Nature.
9 f ' ~ the s sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abrarn, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.'* This descent is presumably that of God, who then speaks to Abraham of the Cuvenant* It is interesting to note that the Greek variant for sleep is Ekstasis, which is closer to the EngIish trance or dream-like state. I01 get the impression that the very command of being asked to sacrifice one's son seems to defy Kierkegaard's imagination. However, in the times that that bibiical laws were being forged, the practice of child-sacrifice seems to have been not so out of the ordinary. In Levictus 20~2-5,far example, God tells Moses the foIlowing: nAny of the people of Isme!, or of the aliens, who give any of their offspring to MoIech shall be put to death." It was customary to offer meis offspring as burnt-sacrifice; to state the obvious here: it is because the practice exists (seems rampant? by the sound of it) that a Iaw is being rather vehemently stated against it.
This absolute ethics in the Gita is based on the fact that everything is already
in process, that everything is a manifestation of divine energy. What matters it that you call the energy divine or not? For energy exists. The conception of
the universe in the Gita is not unlike that of modem-day particle physics; David Bohm offers the following proposition in Wholeness and Implicate Order: "The totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and time). So whatever part, element or aspect we may abstract in thought, this still enfolds the whole [172]"(WBG 11). We find in modem physics not the discourse of the Other but of the Self. But the story of physics, of course, is half the story of the gzinas, as only the energy of Prakriti or Nature. The gunas refer also to the qualities of Prakriti or Nature-all energy has quality.
Furthermore, the gunas are complemented by the inherent potential of t& One Consciousness, which Aurobindo calls Purushottama. And this combination of the Purusha as Selfand Prakriti as Nature as manifestations in the universe with the one originary cause means that the dhamic-ethical
nature of responsibility in Hinduism, is conceived without any recourse to the Other. It becomes curious horn a Hindu darshanic viewpoint, in fact, that so
much in Western thinking can be based on the Other. The answer to Demda's cat question, then, from the Hindu viewpoint of the Gita is dear: I am always already responsible for all of existence, for my
Self is present in all. When I feed my cat I perform a y a p , a sacrifice to the Self, upholding the Dharm of existence, and this Self includes me, my cat, all
the cats, and everyone else in addition. And when, to the contrary, I propose that, "What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male of female,
rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is Abraham's hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I
make at each moment" (71) I should realize that this formulation is nothing
other than the rule of Maya. Maya is a complex concept which has come to be trivialized in popular glogal culture as merely "illusion." In its ancient d w s h i c conception, m a y refers to two levels of organization. At one level,
mya is the principle which facilitates the creation of reality for the temporal and phenomenolo@cd being in the universe. In a universe of eternal, infinite being and becoming, "to settle upon a fixed truth or order of truths
and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite reality" (Sourcebook 596); maya is the name given to this selective faculty. At another level, maya is the illusion of reality become real, it is that
which abets an idea of singularity, of a monad and separate ego, of
making: "muya persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being, not as a being always inseparably one with the
rest of existence" (596). It is keeping these both levels in mind that the idea of tearing the veil of maya must be understood, a tearing which realizes the truth of maya, "where the "each" and the "all" coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and multiple symbol" (597).
In a dharmic-ethical universe there is ultimately no separable or essenatial "singularity," no individual in the Western sense, nor is there an Absolute Other who Gazes in judgment without being seen-for this is in direct opposition to the conception of firushottam or Brahman who is the
most intimate Self in my atman or conscious self, your self and all other selfs.
The Divine Soul, Narayana, co-exists with the human soul, Nara. It is the duty of the human soul to tear the veil, often referred to as Maya, the veil which keeps man within the world-bound, prey to the material and to the impulses of an ego, and get behind the ultimate secret, uttamam rahasyam,
which is to awaken to the eternal principle present within and to begin to live
in Brahman. And the emphasis is that this @vhg up of self, of personhood, of hdividuality is a goal that must be striven for and attained in the living moment; it is not a reward that lies beyond the threshold of Me. This ultimate secret is to be attained though gyam or knowledge, and knowledge itself is to be attained through action, through works or karma, in the material world. For the secret gives accession to ''livingcomciously in the Divine and acting from tisat comciousness" (JZG 23). Nowhere is there a conception of death, of death as being a gift. Justas there is no judging gaze of the absolutely Other, there is no salvation that lies beyond the threshold of
life- if there is a aosshg-over, it takes place here in Me, it is the crossing of the veil. And once the consc5ous self gains consaousness of its &vine and eternal nature, its function is to fulfill the works or kartng as yapcx, as sacrifice: "For the action must be performed, the world must f W i U its cycles,
and the soul of the hman being must nat tum back in ignormce from the work it is here to do'' (EG25)- h Arjma's case, this work is slaughter of his closest relatives in the Great War- That he must engage in the action which means he must kiU his kith and kin-this is Krishna's divine revelation.
To deny the p r h d significance of the inter-face with the Other, as 1 have suggested above, is aIso to subvert the premise of Levinasian ethics.
That this subversion is intended and necessary for my project should be apparent, but it must be pointed out that it follows a subtler undermining that takes place in Demda's text. 'This occws at the level of the "~acredness'~
of a text, specifically, the Bible. Demda seems to give no weight to the fact that
Abraham's story in the Bible is belongs ta a genre of writing which is
more primary than Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling in terms of originating the ethics of Judaeo-CMstibv; in his presentation of ethics, Eerkegaard's exegetical hypotheses function at the same level as that of the BibIical
revelation- Levinas?on the other hmd, has maintained throughout his career not only reverence for the k m m d m t d possibilities contained in the ethical structures and characters of the BibIe but also the imperative necessity of not forgetting the primacy of the Biblical text to dl subsequent and thezefure secondary philosophies8going so far as to say that "toute pede
pMosopfique repose SIX des eq6riences pr&philowpKques et que la lecture de la Bible a appartenu chez moi 2 ces exp&imces fondatrices''(I3 14)-
Equally significant is the oppositional emphasis placed by each philosopher on what constitutes h e core of individual singularity. Demda locates the essence of subjectivity in the non-emferabGv of death: "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or conf?ont in my place- My beplaceabSV is therefore conferred, deIivered?"givenr'*one can say, by dea&...It is from the site of death as the place of my k e p l a c e a b s ~that , is, of
my shgdarityf that 1 feel cdied to responsibilityt'(GD41). Levinas has expounded on the concept of the 'texisfer"in Le Temps et Z'autre, arguing that the subject's singular existence is what constitutes &at which can be comunicated but never shared: "Je suis tout seuIf c'est donc l' &re en moi,
le fait que j'edte, mon exister?qui constitue 1'616ment absolument intransitif, queique chose sans intentionafite, sans rapport. O n peut tout &changerentre &resf sauf l'exister. Je sub monade en tant que je st& [21]"
(51). Where can one find a more succht and direct opposition of the meaning of life and of death? Levinas locates the c d to responsibility in the living moment of the face to face with the Other?and this face-off constitutes the ariginary moment of the call to responsibility. And yet, strangely enough, this is where death re-enters the Levinasian scene: fur the originary call spells
out the foUawhg c o m m d : "Tu ne tueras point." You are not to killg This
sets up a troubling economy for sociality and ethical individuality.
One of the things that Levinas is womed about is emphasizing the
h c o m a w a b f i v of the inteefacial human experience. IR fact, dl thinking that ignores the infinite in the human encounter, that wants to
reduce the Other to the Same, and reduce difkrence to equality is a sign of absolute system, of Totaiity. It is against this that he projects his vision of the face of the Mer. k v i ~ doesnet s shy away kom critiquing the entire
tradition of Western pMosophy which he interprets as the search for a universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of d that belongs to the sensibIe, to a totaIity in which conscience embraces the world, leaves nothing ather outside itself, and thus becomes absolute thinking. The conscience of
self becomes at the same time the cunsaence of id (85). In other words?the totahtarian philosophy that Levinas is wary of occurs at that moment within the Western ontology of the Self/CMer when the Other is demy~tified~ and absorbed by the Self, as monad, as individud?as singular, in a uniformed description* Levinas's wariness against the latent?impending, or patent tyranny of the totalizing Western Self is well taken. It is as a stratagem
against this tyranity that he stresses the irreducibility of the properly Other, the mysterious message of the face of the Other. When the Western
conscience Levinas speaks of embraces the world, art operation of reduction
and tyranny is perfumed. The self as individual, as subject, as monad in command of its h t e n t i o n a h v - ~Western %If's conscience embraces the
world only in a gesture that reinforces its uniqueness against the world it occupies m d inhabits. And in such a reinforcement it reduces the difference of the Other's conscience to a version of itself?leaving no place far difference
to assert itself except a a suborhated and distanced term.
The "universal synthesis" that Levinas warm against is an operation of this
kind. But in taking up anxu for the reconcepmakation of ethics and
responsible philosophy in the experience of the m e r and the face of the Otherr Levinas can only get so far. 'I'he problem lies where Levinas is urtwib~gto look-in the Western (and Levinasian) perpetuation of the
unique Self and unique O&w. We must remind owselves here that Levirtas
does not think beyond the confining ontdogy of the %lf/Oiher itseIf' which
is inbinsic to that very tradition and its ~ c o n t ~ ~ - ' * A u ~ w to iname ~,'* h e obvious-that he is wary of.
The Indian ontology t e k a different story. Heref the atman, the conscious self's embrace of the universe results in a loss of aU ego-sensef of alI
ahamkaram or "I"-making. The attainment of freedomr of bliss, of At~anda
which results born this surrender is a consequence of realizing h e conscious principle of the cosmosf B r h m , hidden in the atman or WE
' t R e h q u k h gegotismf force, arrogancef desire, anger and possession of property; unseifish, tranquil, one is fit for oneness with B r h m ' * (XVDI-53,
WBG 714).
Why does Levinas want tor need to Iocate rn h c o m e w u a b f i ~in the human encounter, and more importantly, why is death given such a praminent role? Againf why is not the encounter a call to love, why is not the founding experience of the ethical a possibility of the celebration of life? Levinas' experience as a Jew in the Stalag during World War II must be
brought to bear on his phenomenolo@cal desire to constitute the foundational ethical experience as a non-reciprocalr non-symmetric assmption of responsibility in the face-to-face encounter. His first original treatise entitled De l'existmce
1'existant was written during his confinement
in a stalag during WWI. It broaches the "il y d* as a profoundly terrifying i n b a t i o n of "there being." The i2 y a, Levhas insistsFis that impersonal and horrible tiers excZzt the excluded third of nothingness and beingf and
occupies the absolute emptiness before creation its& (3&39). A child passing
a wakefd night and an insomniac whose conscience is ~person-ed
by the
inability to master sleep are used by Levinas as ready examples of the frightening experience of the if y a. Nights in the stalag not withstanding, it is dear that L,evi.nasr universe has the possibility of a feasfd and lurking violence in the 2 y a. The il y a cannot be thought of as loving, nurturing, nor caring. As such it signifies Levinas' loss of faith in a moral universe. And it can be said that his subsequent efforts have tried to resurrect an ethics
which would not result in the irthmm failure of the Nazi experience. It is to this end that Levinasim subjectivity conditions itself in response to the Other and its rule becomes not simply revomibZq to the Other but responsibility for the Other's responsibsv. Levinas is unequivocai about this: "je suis responsabIe des pers6scutions que je subis. Mais seulement
moi! ...Puisque je suis respomable meme de la responsabilit6 d r a u W *(95-96). 1 find that this mo&odox formdation brings him yet again adjacent to the
domain of h d u thought. But here the distance is great not only because the
Hindu seLf's responsibility is always to the absolute Self present in me and all others, but because the i2 y u doesn't exist in the m d u universe, it is Brahman that does, with its principle of sad-chit-ananda, existence-
comciousness-bliss. The il y a is the antipode of sociality. The experience of the i2 y a relies 0x1 singularity
in terms of isolation. The I2 y a is the anti-matter to creativity,
to creativity as poetry and art. Levinas' distrust of tropic language can be
traced back to the immanent black hole of the il y a which threatens to reduce
all osciliations to the flat-he of its homble signal. h the Levinasian economy, the 2 y a exists before sociality, it in fact motors sociality; it is to get
away from the il y a that the isolated I is forced to forge the bond of sociality
with the Other. Yet, the il y a also is the figment of a male imagination which
tries desperately to prioritize and locate the originaxy moment for ethics;
paradoxically, Levinas distrusts tropic language, for such language forefronts the impossibility of systematizing from any origin or originary moment. Levinas distrust of tropic language has been related to the necessity of
his rnasculinist ethical vision by Cynthia Willett in her important discussion of Maternal Ethics and Slave Moralities. hi a compelling feminist critique of Levinasfethics as privileging the fraternal and as the iteration of the
"masculinized metaphoric of the warrior" (551, Willett links poetry with the "rnamae~e,~' that which has been disparaged or ignored by all rational philosophies and patriarchal politics. Willett seeks to relocate the originary moment of the social bond in the joyous moment of sociality, one that is pre-
discursive as well as pre-intersubjective: the tactile sensuality between nurturer and child (42). She critiques Levinas for his conception of ethics as a response to the face in the visual register, and instead brings to the fore the importance of tactile contact which is at the base of a sociality that is also always erotic. Willett points out that Levinasian ethics repeats the mistake of man's creation ex nihilo, according to which myth "men give birth to themselves, they are fully self-responsible...these self-created men participate in an ideology of freedom that mystifies their interdependencies upon feminized dimensions of the self' (80). At one level, what Willett is saying and where she is taking the question of ethics is clear: after all, the Levinasian self at the moment of encountering the other is, quite obviously, not a two month old
child but an adult, preferably male. The simple question is how did he get there? Willett's work answers that very question-he got to the point where he can see the face of the other only after having lived through the erotic
caress and nurture of his mother or caregiver. She reminds us that Western creation stories share the same missing element-the mother. In a bold and refreshing move that marks the general tone of her work, she "mothers"
Levinas's it y a: ..already in the uterus, the fetus experiences rhythmic changes in energy levels that come over the mother. The horizon of existing, the pure il y a that precedes the categorization of the world, the elemental climate, is not the airy nothing of patriarchal mythology but the temperament of the mother. Nor is the i7 y a of existence, as Levinas assumes, neutral in its genealogy. It varies with the diffuse moods and directed attitudes of the mother. (78) Willett's attempt to counter the history of a male pathology that has divorced the body from the mind and then ignored the former is centered around the bodily and tactile origins of the experience of sociality. Upholding Iragaray's argument that "the hierarchies of the visual register of experience-are complidt in the patterns of oppression that define modernist social structures" (39), Willett highlights the precedence of tactile sensuality to the discursive realm in a parent-child relationship which is forged on nondiscursive expressions of the touch, the sounds, and the movements (mamaese): "the infant reciprocates parental overtures with its own score of movements. The ethical bond begins with an attunement that is musicality
and dance" (43). Willett's relocation of the origination of ethics is salutary not only as it exposes the blind-spot of the Western tradition but also because it is formulated such that ethics becomes the experience of erotic joy and nurture whose motivation confounds Hegelian recognition. This is a far cry from the Levinasian "tu ne tueras point, you are not to W*! But this feminist relocation insofar as it also seeks an origin to ethics,
an originary moment, begs the following questions: Why sociality? Where does the mother or caregiver get her ethics from? The force of Willett's
feminist appropriation of o r i e a r y ethics lies in the fact that it brings us in contact with the moment in which one is constantly faced with the sweet mystery of life and the eternal mystery of creation. Yet, what becomes evident is that while the desire for sodality is seemingly inborn, its origin is at the
same rime unknowable~indiscussing and proposing ethics we are always already in the realm of Faith and Fiction. For any deliberation on originary ethics relies on speculations that surpass the economy of proof, the methods
of evidence. Ultimately, Ethics is nothing more and nothing less than a fabrication designed to give ourselves a meaningful experience of Life. What is important is that the fabrication according to which we build our lives gives our existence joy where no ultimate answer is to be had.
Broadly
speaking, one can say that all ethical structures assume sociality-this is an empirical truth. It is also inevitable that in discussing ethics one is always in the middle ground between religion and philosophy. Hegel recognized this
in his discussion of the Bhagavada Gita : "The basic relation of all religion and philosophy is first the relation of the spirit in general to nature and then that of the absolute spirit to the finite spirit" (85). Critiquing the dialectic of
recognition which structures Hegel's master-slave ethics but always agreeing with the assumption that the desire for recognition from the Other is at the core of the (Hegelian) self (see Willett 105-119), Willett's feminist endeavor pinpoints the child-nurturer bond that is sociality as erotic ethics. The force of Willettfswork is that she has created a space in which Ethics is an act of love and sociality is born of the caress. In the end, however, she too remains firmly entrenched in the dichotomy of Self and Other and doesn't escape the Western problematic of distancing. For as long as one stays within the fundament of the Self and the Other, there exists a distance between the two
which is traversed only by making difference a quality of identity-the self and
the other are identified in a reflexive simultaneity, a moment in which identity is founded as being non-identical. There is nothing wrong with this formulation as it expresses Western thought; however, this neutralizes Willett's project in so far as she continues thinking the dichotomy of Self and
Other; ultimately, her assertion, that "practices whose genealogy is female
provide the basis for conceptions of subjectivity that cannot be schematized through the dichotomies that perpetuate the pathologies of Western culture"
(1441, is invalidated-for such pathologies, I am arguing, are built on the Self and Other as o r i g h q cause (orighary male cause, to be sure; yet, Western feminism is yet to travel to a point beyond/before this origination).
There are two fundamental models or fabrics that concern me here: the Judaeo-Christian sociality of the Self and the Other, and, the Hindu sociality of atman and purusha. the self and the Self. As an instance of the latter, the Gita tells us that there is no originary moment for ethics because the Self exists always, before and after birth, and also that the Self exists in all Prakriti
or Nature. There is no originary moment for the beginning or formation of ethics in a universe which is perpetual process and has as its cause one principle, the eternal principle of Brahman. This process consists of the twin principles of Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is the Cosmic Conscience by whom all Prakriti exists and by which all karma or works are directed. The
aim of life is to attain the state or condition of dehi, the conscious embodied soul, through the combination of knowledge and consdent works-ffyaanand
yoga. By gyaan is meant the recognition of the illusion of desire-ridden ego.
By yap is meant "the selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer activities as a ygm, a sacrifice to the Lord of all works,offered to the Eternal as master of all the soul's energies" (EG 64).
ICrisha's presentation tmubles kjunats mind, whose skepticism reflects the Westem mind's perplexity at being confronted by a system which wodd seem, in its advocacy af the impersonal performance of duty8higMy unethical. That is, there apparently remains no base for respecting and assuring sociality. But as 1 have already suggested above, this codusion s t e m from a mind used to assuming its identity as absolute or absoluteiy other-not to mention the 0therrs identity. A crucial conception without which the philusophy of the Gita cannot be apprehended in the right spirit is Dharma. The Sanskrit root of Dharma is dhr which means "to hold." Dhgrma quite literally means that which holds things together, "the Iaw, the normf the d e of nature, action, and lifer' (EG23). Dhama is the Sanskrit word that comes closest to the Western '*refigion? it is?however, the religion of dharmicethics as sociality of the Self. It is a conception that a ~ o w l e d g e the s entire
network of existence and energy and c m o t at any point be limited simply to a h u m - t w h m a n or even h u m - t o - m d scale of response and
respomibsq. Aurabindo explains the threefold nature of Dharma as
Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the rightf morality and justice* ethics; it is the whole government of all the relations of man with other beings? with nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, f o m of the inner and the outer life8orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dhama is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our h e r and outer ac~vities ...Secondlyf there is the divine nature [the Sew which has to develop and manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the inner workings by which that grows 21our being. Thirdlyf there is the law by which we govern our outgoing thought and action and our relations with each other so as to help best both our own growth and that of the human race towards the divine ideal. (162-63) The law of D h a r m as one of oneness in the universe is complex but dsu
p q o is~to miss the point altogether. Hegel is one such reader whof despite
his best intentionsf has entirely missed the sipficmce of the Gitaf and being thoroughly disgusted with the f'tediousness of the Indian verbosity and repetitions," seeks repeatedly to codom the philosophy of the Gifa into something recognizable and palatable for his Western sensibility- He fails to understand what ''duty as the performance of disinterested actionpicould possibly mean other than performing the action in ignorance: "the more senselessly and stupidly an acfion is pmfumed, the greater the involved indifference towards the succ~s''(47)- He misreads the scope and forms of yoga, relegating it to a passive and empty &&ed&ess
kom the material
world of action: "in it that kind of reflection ...is at work whichf without reasoningf through meditation strives after a direct awareness of the tmth as
such'*(311, andf "Yoga is rather a meditation withoat any corztmts, the abandoning of all attention towards external things...the silence of all inclinations and passions as also the absence af images, imaginations and concrete thoughts" (45). That h i s is a blatant misreading of the yoga doctrine is clear if we look at but one verse of the Gih: "he who performs that ritual action which is his duty, while renouncing the fruit of actionf is a renouncer (sanrzyasi) and a yogin; Nut he who is withoat a consecrated fire, a d mko fails to peflum sdcred rites. (WolfWG272, emphasis mine). Hegel's yogi is exactly the one who f d to perfom-for the Gifa is a doctrine of performance
and actian in the material world and nothing otherwise. One must not take Hegel's misreading lightlyf for it does not stop him
from making an all out indictment against hdian dkarma and darshana as caste-bound and thus unable of providing "any elevation to moral freedom"
(51If where "the work permanently performed by M s h a is the conservation of caste distinctions1'(55)f and which promotes detachment en posse such
that "he Indian isolation of the soul into emptiness is rather a stupefaction which...cannot lead to the discovery of true insighis, because it is void of contents'' (65). Hegel's employment of the word "mdf"a concept whose metaphysical lineage can be traced back to the Greek pszichi and Platoss
~ 36e), a d signifies discussion in the Timeus (especidy sections 3 4 to something very Merent from the conception of atmaw as the conscious self,
is an apt indicator of his blinkered reading. Hegel's Eurocentric righteousness and atisreading can be forgiven as a product of his times?but the same cannot be done in good faith for any camcien~ausintellectual or philosopher of our avowedly global and "multi-dtural" times. 1 wodd in fact argue that Hegel's misreading, his inability to comprehend the nature of and described
by the Bhapada Gita stems from his reliance on a SeU/O&er dialectic which is patently absent therein.
h e of Hegel's oversights is that he takes the p n a s to be attitudes and not the primary qu&~es-aenermof a l l Prakriti or Nature: S a f f ~Rajas, a ~ and Tamas?are the modes of world-energy in nature and also of human nature itself. Briefly, Saftua is the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction; Rajas is
the mode of passion, actionf and struggling em~tion;a i d f Tamas is h e mode
of ignorance and inertia. AH three interact with each other as they traverse both nature and being: "all the attitudes adopted by the human mind towards the problems of life either derive from the domination of one or other of these qualities or else from art attempt at balance and harmony between them" (EG49)But is the Hindu viewpointf as it is seen and described in the Gita, masmihist? For one cannot deny that its setting is War, its interlocutors are the ultimate Warrior and the God-as-d~oter.This would seem to put the discourse of the Gifa firmly within what WUett has described as "male
metaph~ricof the wamior." Yet? the case is not so simple for the very reason h a t it is not a co&onta~ond philosophy of Self and Other that the Gita develops. 1would argue that the G i t ~is a philosphy of ethics expressed in the ~anguageof the "rnamaese"-it defies rationality and rational system8always
forefronting the natural forces and the unknowable mystery of creation. A reflection of this d o w a b z is~ the fact that its doctrine is expressed in
poetic form. It is a mamaese that defies the Leuinasian claim that literature cannot be ethical. The Gita is written in elegant metered Sanskrit verse
which is meant for pleasurable readins and hearing experience- And it is consistently the expression of a system of ethics, the description of m ethical universe. It is also about love?about aeativiv and joy. But it also constantly reminds LBthat all language is ambiguous and d t h a t e l y only a pointer in the direction of the eternal mystery.11 It calls for a recognition that must be
made of the one %If h d8 and consequently, for a sociality which is always already forged; the god is to "perceive the self in the self by the self'' (XIE24)
and realize that the ~ t m mof others is identical with one's own atman:
"Seeing indeed the same Lord established everywhere8he does not injure the self by the sew' (XE28; WBG 556). In this it takes us beyond or before feminism8for it tells us that the "diffuse moods and directed attitudes** of the mothered i2 t j in that amniotic and primeval space is already traversed by
-
IOf course, Deconstructive critiques of language have already shown that language always displaces itself, that ciifferance is the norm. With this in mind* 1 find Levirtas' distrust of tropic language blinkered, as all discursive expression is inherently tropic. In terns of ambiguity of language, Sargeantrs comment about the complicated nature of Sanskrit language is exemplary: "it may be remarked that Sanskrit is a very ambiguous language in which a single word may have scores of meanings* sometimes contradictory ones. Thus the common verb dhu ...can mean put, place, take, bring, remove, direct, fix upon, resolve upon, destine for, bestow Qn. present, impart* appoint, establish* constitute, make, generate, produce, create* cause, effect, perform* execute, seize, take hold of, bear, supportp wear, put on, accept, obtain, conceive* get, assume, have, possess, show* exhibit, incur, undergo* etc/ (8)!
the essentid modes of nature, the gunas. Soaality is inherent in any c o ~ c i o u self-the s afmm contains the Self and smiles at the world. There is no originary moment fur ethics and responsibility to begin- Soadity
he
law of the universe, since everything is intercomected and traversed by the same Self. This Hindu aspect of sociality is pmmhd on the fact that Life does not
"lack'' mything- This lack of lackRso to speak, &a contradicts the Western pMos~phicdtradition?going back at least to Plato, where lack has been that and the Ideal, the hmm and the divine. ConsiderRfor example, the tyranny of Socrates in the Symposium as he d e h e s love or Ems to Agathon: S: ...that is, does love desire that something of which love is? A*. Yes, surely. S: And daes he possess, or does he not possess that which he loves and
desires? A: Probably not?I should say. S: Consider whether '*necessarilyr* is not rather the world ...instead of probably. The ~ e r e n c that e he who deskes something la& it, and that he does not desire something if he does not lack it? is in my judgment, Agathon, absutgfeZy and necessmily true. (59, emphases mine) If Agathon was weU-versed in the Gita he might have challenged Sacrates with the assertion that nothing is lacking in the universe which is comprised
everywhere of the Self and the pmas; that sensual desire is motivated by seme-ga~ficationand marks the reign of the fake ego, and that spiritual desire is for the recognition of the Self seated in the heart of all afmms or conscious selfs. In this regard, that desire is nowhere a lack? the anti-oedipal work of Delewe and Guattari, their critique of Western knowledge and their reconcep~afiza~on of desire as desiring production provides some interesting resonances with Hindu pkdosophy and d e s e ~ e ssome attention.
Deleuze and Guattari's critique of capitalism and schizophrenia in their anti-Oedipal argument brings together in one interactive economy the discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and anthropology. The repressive ideology shared by modem disciplines is laid bare by Deleuze and Guattari through their emphasis on the simultaneity of semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization of human agency as a schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." In their formulation, the subject is always a "residue" effect of the processes of social production. Such a subject is never truly representable in terms of a unified ego, and even less so in terms of the repressive and normalizing Oedipal triangulation. Their claim that the myth of Oedipus as it has been employed in Western psychoanalysis has no truth value other than the fact that it takes part "in the
work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy" ( A 0 SO), is representative of what Foucault sees as the anti-fascist nature of their
project. The alternative offered by them is one that challenges the entire tradition of Western metaphysics, at least all the way back to Plato, where
desire has mistakenly been assigned to acquisition and not to production. As a result, the history of desire has been &written as the story of a "lack,"
whereas, in anti-oedipal schema, desire is first and foremost the energy of production. Hence: desiring-preduction. The consequences of desiring-production are far-reaching. All activity in the world becomes the interaction of binary machines that are always
connected to each other linearly. For example, the breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it, and in turn, the mouth is also coupled to the stomach as machine. Though this series extends infinitely, it is never simply a binary series for a third term is always being
produced which is the body without organs (BwO). This B w O is the surface upon which all production is recorded, and from whose recording surface all production seems to emanate. The BwO is, however, unproductive, sterile,
unengendered, and unconsumable. For example, Capital is the BwO of the capitalist being. The "subject" is that which wanders above the B w O and exists peripherally to the desiring machines, having no fixed identity and coming into being only as it consumes various states made available through the recording surface of the BwO. Such a subject can situate itself only in terms of the disjunctions of a recording surface and is born and reborn with each new state it consumes.
It is worth making note here that the system offered by Deleuze and Guattari always exceeds binary enclosures. Desire, which is what causes the "current" to flow between machines, always flowing itself and breaking flows, leads to three types of production. The first is the production of production
and its energy is the Libido. Labor is the sign of this process. Here, the synthesis is one of connection. A part of the energy of the libido becomes the
energy of the recording process, Numen, and this leads to the production of recording. This takes place on the BwO, or capital, and the synthesis here is one of disjunction. The energy of the Numen leaves a residual energy of Voluptas which is the energy of consummation. This leads to the production of consumption. It is at this juncture that the subject is formed, through consuming, and through the conjunctive synthesis. The anti-Oedipal universe describes a domain of perpetual processes without beginning and
without end, of energies traversing all partial objects which are continuously
engaged in machinic operations of conjunctions, disjunctions, productions, etc. This world-view parallels the Hindu world-view of interconnectedness
of all phenomena and consciousness: "each finite working of force is an act of
infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent energy labouring in its own underived strength" (EG 144). Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal critique of normalizing and oedipalizing structures in Western life is based on the compelling argument that the Western civilization with its tyranny of a psychoanalyzable subject is
constituted on the repression of desiring production, on repressing desire because "desire is revolutionary in its essence" (116). Desire threatens Laws, hierarchies, established orders, and therefore, desire has been conformed to
the something of a Lack-in contemporary Western society, this has meant
crystallizing desire on the consumption of material goods-where desiringproduction has been transformed into desiring products; of normalizing and advertising desires through the ubiquitous influence of modem media; and
finally, on essentializing the other as Other as an incentive for submitting to the Law. There are numerous resonances between the anti-oedipal scheme
and the Hindu philosophy of the Gita, the complete lay-out of which is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However a couple of elements can be
mentioned in passing. The Hindu self can be seen as a "detachablepartial-object" instead of
complete objects detached (Phallus). The partial object doesn't allow the formation of the subject but instead is propelled by d r i v e s ~ s ? - and connects with a multiplicity of other partial objects: its sole subject is "not an "ego," but the drive that forms the desiring-maclune along with it, and that
enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with
other partial objects" (60). Furthermore, when Deleuze and Guattari state that, "the three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and siemfier
[whichdrag] their theological cortege behind-insufficiency of being, guilt, signification" (Ill), it is evident that the theology being referred to is that of
the Book- Clearly, in Hinduismf desire is conceived of as a positivity, the ego is dways on the verge of deperwn&a~on with the discovery of the &lff and
echoes the s c h i z o p ~ process c which R.D. M
g described as a "voyage of
hitiation, a wwcendmtd experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes the
subject to remark: ''1had existed since the very be-g---kom f o m of Ue-..to the present
the lowest
The Hindu afmm or conscious self is
always on the way to overcoming the mayu of becoriing a "global person'' who exists after fhe repressive sructures of the state have been internalized along with a corresponding creation of the subjugated subject. The atmanf on the contrary, comprised of the quditative merm-&ves of the gunas, seeks the g y a m or knowledge for a realization of purusha in afmanf that is, of the self in the self.
Dedeuze and Guattari's discourse reveals an intriguing comection with the philosophy of the Bhapada Gita, especially in terns of the
reincamatory character of the subject of consuxrunation. As Deleuze and Guattari define itf the anti-oedipal subject [is]produced as a residuum dongside the machine, as an a p p a d k r or as a spare part adjmcent to the m a W e p w w s through a l l depees of the circle?and passes from one d e l e to another. This subject itself is not at the centerf which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered?defined by the states through which it passes. (20)
Reconceived thus, subject fornation is a secondary or residual aspect of the natural processes of desiring machines. This subject c m o t be said irt anyway to be a bourgeois monad or to possess an interior and essential ego-the bourgeois monad with its anomie is nothing more than the result of repressive apparatii enforced on the subject in one stage of its becoming* The nomalization of the bourgeois is myth sedimented as realityr the "individual" and the "rightsitof the individual are products of the power of
Kera&a~on. Against &isf Deleuze and Guattarirsproject aims at a de-
hdi~du&ation
though active dispersal and reconstitutionpthrough
multiplication and displacement, and though iemtori&aGon and de* territo~aka~on. The anti-oedipd subject that is being born and reborn along side the various states of the deskhg-ma&es
in the same neighborhood as the
Pzlr~tshaor Self and Prdcriti or Nature. Here Prabiti with its thee modes takes the place of desag-production. The ego or individual subject is an illusion of the seIf as long as it is believe:
2 is the doer of h e action.
Once the self realizes that it is the forces of Prabiti that are responsible for
actionf the self then loses its illusion of a pragmatic or intentiond ego. All action continues to course through the self but a self that is properly detached: in this sense?then,the Hindu self/%lf can be said to be a body without
organsf a surface of recording and detachments. Foucault is correct in seeing the anti-oedipal pcoject as profoundIy one of ethics: "1would say that A~ti-Oedipzis...is a book of ethics?the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a
long b e 1 *(xii); howeverf here is a
moment where the anti-eodipal machine reaches a limit or point of
redundancy. At this pointf its ethics fly outf or escape through the h e s of flight? the detemiodakatiom. Anti-Oedipus remains, in my view, the only p o s t - s m c ~ & s tapproach that effectively injects the consideration of
prapatics into m y discussion of semiotic systemsf and is properly extradisciplinary as it is not M t e d by categories. It is this very quality which leads them to an embrace of the dispersal of ethical intentionality down the path of a delirious " h e of flight." Useful as the concept of detenitorhation appears
in aiding a critique of literary theories which privilege the commcte&ess of language along with its inherent decomtructive aspects?it ends up in a dead
end by not being able to impart to the det&tofi&d
subject a c o w of
ethical action that is more meanhgfid than the de@ous escape through
"linesof fight." h fact, d e t e ~ t o ~ & a ~ of o nthis kind seems nothing more than yet another ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy,
speaking born a WE-avowedGadhian perspective#d e c I W : "it has become more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but s to the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic t e ~ o l o g i e wedded new secular hierarchies which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set ofempty rituals'' (XI.The anti-Oedipal line of flight seeins to be one
such empty ritual, even though it takes off &om a terrain of proWerations
and disjunctions which is the very opposite of structures grounded in pyramidal (and secular) hierarchies. There is a striking resemblance between desiring production-wK& is the condition of a machine without beginning and without end, a machine
which proliferates to infinity, and Prukfiti-w&& is driven by the three gt~nas and fdfiUs the will of the Divine through endless and chaotic cycles of
creation and destruction. Desiring production is fundamentally a religious conception but not one that is of the Book. The dosest Western andogue for the anti-Oedipal system can be found in the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power and of the Eternal Retum#both of which exceed the restrictive economy of Self and Other. But why should desmg-prduction exist at all?
For while Prukriti as a process is conjoined with Brahmanic consciouness as its cause and witness, d e s ~ g - p r o d u c ~ oinn,its efforts to undermine the
individual and cohesive subject of intentionality, relegates subjectivity to the status of a by-product. It unleashes the unconscious and its positive energies of desiring production at the cost of the Conscious. In doing so, it makes the mistake of displacing if not erasing altogether the gtman or conscious self of
the person; the entire m a M c edifice becomes a process without a witness-
h this regard it remains hcomp1ete when compared to the Hindu conception of life as flowing from the one eternal causef B&anf
whose materid
m e e s t a ~ o mh the universe carry the potential for the realization of atman
and pz~rz~sha.In his ontologyf perpehd drives inherent in P r a ~ t lead i to processes of creation and destruction h which the sum totd of aU energy is always conse~ed.Brahman is the one cause of consciousness and material processes? so that a l l processes in the universe are interconnected with the same threads of quaties-asenerw, the gzmas of rajasfsatmar and tamas "in
every f'inite working of wilI and howledge we can discoverf supporting it, an act of the infinite &will and &-howledge'' (EiG 144). Anti-Oedipus is
ethical as it exposes the various kinds of "fascism1'hidden and operative in the construction of a nunnative Western reality but it spirals out on its own
line of fight without being able to providef by definition almost?an ethical alternative. It may be a p e d that this is perhaps on purposef that perhaps &is is altogether the pointf but do so wodd be to miss the point of my
discussion of the dhamic-ethical sociality of the seU/Self based on the concept of Brahmanf the eternal principle of the miverse. There is,
however, a proximityf a "neighbodgt' to LEX a Heidegerian termf between the Indian ontology and the anti-Oedipal framework, and 1 propose that a dharmic-ethical base would provide a positive orientation for all
In closingf 1 wodd like to turn briefly tu the pMosophica1 work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mahatma Gmdhi. To pair them within the same rubric may seem somewhat erroneous if one understands Nietzsehe's oeuvre
as the meditation towards a supremacist wamor-like Overman driven by an asocial Will to Power and Gandhi's work as the pacifist d u c h e of a religious
man who preferred to amid conflict and violence at all costs* These gaer&atiom ase gross as they are fdse but they serve the purpose of indicating the general and enaneous regard in which the two men are held. The convergence between Nietzsche and Gan& exists a t the level of reorg&hg
an ethical imperative within the context of a rapidly transforming
world in which technoIo@cd "progress" was b e c o m g h e standard of measure for a fdfilled experience of Life. Both W e r s foresaw the pathologies of violencef racismf and exploitation whi& have been the insufficiently chdenged norm of the twentieth century- A little juxtaposition is enlightening: And perhaps a great day will come when a people...will exclaim of its o m fiee will, "We break the sword,"..-the so-called m e d peace, as it now exists in all countriesf is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor andf half from hatxedf half from fea, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fearf and twice rather perish than make onesdf hated and feared-& must someday become the highest maxim for every single c o m o n w e a l ~too. , (inK a h m 178)
Wherein is courage required-h blowing others to pieces from behind a cannonf or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces?...Believe me that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive res&ter...Passive resistance is an all-sided sword, it can be used anyhow, it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood it produces far reaching resd&...One who is free from hatred requires no sword. ( h P W 248) This is only one instance of the numerous and striking resonances between the philosaphies of Nietzsche md Gm&.
Both thinkers expound radical
critiques of a "modem" civilization seemingly destined to ovemhelming te~o~ogical
Both are wary of the accompanying evanescence of
ethical codes which were rapidly becoming outmoded. And where Nietzsche undertakes a revaluation of morals through a philosophy of seU
aimed not least against the ascendant German Reich, Gandhi mobilizes a revolution whose impetus is derived from self-sacrifice and self-suffering, age-old Indian tenets against which the armed might of the British empire proved inadequate. It is of paramount importance to keep in mind that both philosophers
insist on the centrality of practical and courageous action that reaches for truth. In this regard, Nietzsche tells us: "Iwould praise any skqsis to which I
am permitted to reply: "Let us try it!" But I do not want to hear anything any more of all the things and questions that do not permit of experiment-for there courage has lost its rights" (M51).And likewise, Gandhi: "Science is essentially one of those things in which theory alone is of no value whatsoever-unless you have practical knowledge and conduct practical experiments...If you go in for science in the right spirit then I know that there is nothing so great or so valuable for making us accurate in thought and
accurate in action" (MPW 313). Both Gandhi and Nietzsche practiced the "scientific experiments" they saw as fundamental to our ethical well-being; in
fact, it is hard not to see Gandhi fulfilling to the fullest Nietzche's description of the overman (Sbermensch).12 Mahatma Gandhi's work reflects a twentieth century instance in which the philosophy of Hinduism has been reinterpreted and dynamized in an ethical form to defeat the colonial enterprise. His lessons regarding self-
'
I think that Gandhi's categories of uhimsa and satyagraha. supplemented by Nietzsche concept of selbstiiberwindung. can make for a productive application in the field of literary criticism. Though Gandhi's lessons regarding self-sacrifice and self-realization through passive resistance and truth-attainment are invaluable in mobilizing a project offering to infuse much needed ethical stakes in the field of literary criticism, his views regarding the zealous suppression of desire are unproductive and need the revision offered by Nietzsche's philosophy of self-overcoming. Striking as it may seem, Nietzsche's thinking is anticipatory in this regard and incorporates Gandhi's urge for moral discipline while also allowing for the creative productivity of desire.
sacrifice and self-realization through passive resistance and truth-attainment
are invaluable in mobilizing projects aimed at renegotiating the value and
function of the human being vis 2 vis the technological culture, that is, of reinvesting value in the spiritual facet of existence. Gandhi uses India as a model culture in which there exists a brand of ethnic universalism that has long since learned to assimilate foreign influences. These influences range
from different world-views, ontologically speaking, to the events and structure made possible by the technological progress of modem civilization. Whatever the compelling force, of colonialism for instance, Gandhi emphasizes the idea that "India is not nonoWest; it is India-the ordinary
Indian has no reason to see himself as the counterplayer or anti-thesis of Western man" (Nandy 73); even in Gandhi,a dismissal of the Other. In his
vision, fulfilling human action must always continue to follow the ethical paths of ahimsa and safyavaha. By ahimsa, Gandhi means abstention horn hostility in thought, speech, or action, and by satyapaha Gandhi espouses the notion of a t m a n - y w or self-sacrifice for the sake of truth.
An dhannfc-ethicalInjection for Post-colonialism and Post-modernism
In a recent panel chaired by J.F. Lyotard at Emory University (April 18, 1993, the somewhat belabored theme of 'literature as Estrangement" was
discussed. Summing up the day's proceedings, Lyotard observed and agreed with the panelists's presupposition that estrangement ontologically resides or
dwells in language itself, and that this language or tongue (langue) is already divided from itself. The function of literary work, then, is to intervene in
this divide or fissure and "extract through its passage from the secreta of the tongue a new idiom; literature is a "paroxysm" between the locuteur and the language or tongue." This formulation prompted Lyotard's suggestion that 'one constant" exists in all literatures, namely, that literature contains a "mystery" which must be approached but always missed by the writing. He implied a "mysticism"in the writing of literature, by which "the writing
must always respect the unknowable mystery and treat it not with devotion but with modest reverence."
Why make this ever unknowable "mystery" the cause of an estrangement in literature? Why not let it be the cause of a celebration, that is, why not celebrate this "mystery" which seems suspiciously dose to the
eternal mystery of Life. It is ever unknowable, it resides in our very language or tongue-but instead of harboring an estrangement through language's inability to capture, or express, or even "solve" the mystery, why not conceive
of it and receive it as a site of celebration of the ever unknowable? Why not m affirmationf why a negation? In Hindu terms? thenf a conception of bath
the literary composition and reception as work performed as a yaps or sacrifice to the divine Self and the eternal mystery. Literature as Yoga or Works and not Literature as Estrangement; let literature performed as yqpza be the site of pleasure and joy instead of estrmgemertk engagement wtth the
spirit of the eternal secret of Me. The panel was non-plussed by this Hindu formulation, primarily because they could not conceive of "sacrifice" as anything outside of the violence of dying* We had reached an impasse. It is of greatest import that death does not exist in Hinduism, a truth suc&ctly expressed in the Bhapada Gita: that which exists, exists; that which does not existf does not exist--rzasatu uidyizte bhavi~/ nabham aidyate safah..*It is f o n d that there is no coming to be of the noneistent; It is found that the uut nan-existent constitutes the red..*(II-16f WBG 101)- The negation and effacement of death carries over to an inevitable negation and effacement of the Other. The panel's reactionf and the consequent end of didopepindicate a two-fold operation that structures the parameters of howledge-pws~ttoday in those arenas in which the "post" marker is employed. The first consists of the very necessary operation of exposing the fiction of all Western epistemic
certitude. This exposition depends h d m e n t d y on resistingf challenging, and supplemenmg the rationality which is at the heart of both the tedmo~ogicd''progress'*and the globally transfornative processes of the history and legacy of European Imperialism. The second?as a consequence of the first?concern the resulting inability to replace with a cohesive formation that which has been exploded: chieflyf the p o s t d g h t e m e n t individual or subjectf but also the certitude of projects based on transparent methods and
aims that hope to grasp completely the essence of their objects- These objects diverse domain of howIedge, the problem today is reconcile the tremendous impact of recent techn01ogies on the lived experience of h u m beings with a determination of ethics, a justification of Me in ethical terms.14 Nowhere are these operations more in evidence than in the various
projects of past-c010nid and post-modern studies. With a rapidly spreading homoge&aaon of gIobal d t u r e s through the media and the information highways, inquiries in both fields have centered on processing h e newty emergent d t u d environments without having the solace of what Lyotard
has called the narratives of emanciption.1~P o s t - s m a & t philosophy is a narrative engendered by this failure of the narratives of emancipation. h
this regard, and h a m u c h as post-modedm finds its expression through post-smcaaEst thought, p o s t - c o l o ~ a mas a fieid of inquiry in academia is the bastard child of post-modemm. Post-coIonia1 theory is predominantly
p o s t - s m c ~ a b t - H o h Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Young, to name a I%ach object defies mastery; nonetheless, an immense amount of financial, scientific, and human resources are expended towards attaining an ever more complex composition regarding the particular knowledge of the object being "mastered." As Lyotard has stated in The Postmodern Conditiuav the criteria for measuring the value of a11 new knowledge today has become a function use: what use is it to me? (see pages 48-57. especially) I41n this respect* 1 recommend John Caputo's Againsr Ethics. His deconstructive rhetoric is packaged in an easy to read* entertaining language which relies on the performance of narrative knowledge. Though he is against an originary ethics--"I have already owned up to being cut off from wigins and beginnings. I am always too late for origins. 1 never arrive in timeir (7)--he remains firmly within the deconstructive eesystem" of language from which he posits the final unknawability of ethics; there is, ultimately, no practical solution living 'eethically" in the midst of an ethical crisis. It is perhaps for this reason that he remains wary of the etHegelian eagle" which awaits to swallow him, Derrida, Lyotard, Levinas. into the "System" (43). 1 5 ~ y o t a r dmentions the following as examples of the grand narratives of emancipation: "the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of a11 humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience ...Hegel's philosophy ..." (PE 18).
few-and yetr this means that it is unable to, or co-opted horn being able to, make an original or different c~ntribution:in espousing p o s t - s m ~ & m , it espouses a h a &tinct Western ontology. Post-colod&sm needs to dismpt the economy of Western discouse of which it is a part but to which it owes
the responsibility of making a breach by taking up the option -todiscover, reclaim, and assert its ncm-Western ontologies. A k s t step in any such dismption would be to rethink texfziality in the
name of ethics?and for my project, in the name of dhamic-ethics- The 'fsystem'twith which 1 intend to effect this ethical injection is, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, conceph&ed through m Indian ontology
in which &ere is no Other. In adopting this "nativisttV approach, I must make two things dear. Firstf it is as e q u d y vaIid as a l l other Western approaches founded on the Seif/Other dichotomyFand is perhaps more urgent Z one agrees that the Western universe is in crisis. Hopefullyf in this end-ofrn3Ienn.i~ juncture of rndti-cuhxual receptivity in the academia, my nativist voice can be heard in a ciamain aheady inundated by "native" pastcolonial voices that continue espouse the Western ontology of the Self/Oher.
Second? my approach is not motivated nor akin to the supposeci~y comrnonp1ace nativist position Robert Young describes in White
Mytkolugies: those who evoke the '*nativist1* position through a nostalgia for a lost or repressed culture idealize the possibility of that lost origin being recoverable in a l l its former plenitude without dowing for the fact that the figure of the lost o r i N r the other that the colonizer has repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the cofonizer's o m self-image. (WM 168). Young's statement demonstrates the impossibility in his thought of being able to conceive a position that is not founded in a Western ontoIogy. 1 must assert to h e contrary that my "nativist" pasitian which embraces a dhamic-
ethical ontoIogy, and employs the philosophicd vision contained in the
Indian tradition of darshu~a,is not marked by nostdgia for a lost d m e . Indeed, the processing of the events of the Imperial colonization of India
though a dhumic-ethicd hamework needs no recotuse whatsoever to the kind of philasophical. thinking that lies behind Young's statement above.
The much belabored concept of the "ofhm,'* for examplef does not exist in the domain of darshizrza. A primary thrust of my dissertation is chalImge the unquestioned hegemony of a Western ontology which defines the terms of all so-called "post-colonial" inquiries; a regurgitation of Western poststructuralist pMosophies must not remain a sufficient cause and exercise in post-cobniaIt and even postmadem, studies today. It WU be instructive here to turn to Ashis Nmdyls "alternative ~*~ rnythography of history which denies and defies the values of h i ~ t o r yin
The Intimate Enmy.
Nandy makes an important contribution against the
predammtly Western bias informing most if not all of post-colonial discourse in academia by tuning to hdia, where the "non-modem" tradition of ethnic universalism has remained vibrant beforef duringf and after the
experience of Imperial colonization, hdia, Nmdy emphasizes throughout, is not "non-West; it is India." Granting the bwfomation in culture and being
that 'lmimics'tWestern structures and attitudes#Nandy reminds us that this "modem1* section of India represents a small rnhority compared to the "ordinary h d i a n [who] has no reason to see h s e I f as a counterplayer or an antithesis of the Western man" (73). Textual critics of the Spivdcian trend will, of course#focus on the status of '*ordinaryt'and have a decomtmctive
field day, but more importantly for the argument at hand, Nmdy claims that the precolonial hdia has neither been lost nor repressed but has always
existed in its own peculiar indigenow fashion of a c c o m o d a ~ o nand adjustment: 'Ibis is the underside of non-madern India's ethnic tmiversdism. it is a ~ v e r s ~ wrhin ch takes into account the colonid experience,
including the immense sdering colonidism brought, and builds out of it a maturergmore contemporary, more seU-critical version of Indian badi~om ...hdia has tried to capture the differential of the West Gthin its own dtwd domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West as politicdy intrusive or as d W y iderior, but as a subculture meaningful in itselfgthou* not aIl-important in the Indian context. (75-76)
I am ~
~ of course, g that, the reason this ethnic tmivers&m exists and
operates as Nandy describes it is due to the nature of a culture whose traditional self-definition has not been premised on the t y r m y of the Other but on the delight of Brahman as the eternal principle-this is the Indian context. In my efEort to mobfie an "indigenous theory,'? 1 must also state that I
find problematic Spivaks dismissal of the U e with her statement that,
"1 c m o t understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality
of nineteenth century history... To cmstrz~ctindigenous theories
one must i p a r e the last few centuries of historical involvementtf(PC69, emphasis a e ) . Spivak's belief that indigenous theory would need to be *'constructed'fis perplexing given the vast and extant heoretico-p~losopfica~ texts within the Indian tradition of darsbana. Are we to believe that they are de fact0 inadequate to explain the meaning of events in the 1 s t four hundred years of the experience of h p e r i d colonization? Or worse yet, in what seems implicit in Spivak's remark above, are we to believe that there has been such a radical schism in our constitutive beings that a fivehornand year old philosophical tradition with a strikingly different ontological conception of the universe than exists in the West must be silenced, forgotten, ignored? Certainly not, 1 assert, especially in h e &exmath of the mprecedented
violence and ethical failure in the ~ a t i e 6 ~ whose c m ~enabling condition has been the t e ~ o l o g i c df*progxesst* ushered in by an idea of
modernity that is the product of a purely Western conception of Me,of a sounds a waming singularly Western ontology. The name of *'A~chwitz'~ s i p d with regard to the inherent fdwe that a Self/Ckher untology can and
has resulted h. Fur ''Aus&wit.z8" then, if for no other reason, an invitation to dharmic-ethics
.
?'he nature of Spivak's d ~ ~ sresides a l in her vdorization of textual
practices which inform the various narratives of our subjecthood. Her project signals the urgency for initiating strategies of decomtructive resistance against all resultant systems whose proclivity is absolutism of one kind or another. The texts which she investigates, without ever forgetting the textual momeqt of her o m engagement itself, cross over not only the boundaries of history, Marxism8Western philosophy, literature, feminism, m d imperialism and coloniaLism, but are part of a "network or "weave"-
f ' p o ~ ~ c o - p s y c h ~ ~ x u dyou ~ s oname ~ o , it1*-whosefabric is not simply language but which is the textual inescapability of our reality: "that notion that we are effects within a much larger text/asue/weave of which the ends are not accessible to us is very different from s a w g that everything is
Impage'' (PC 25)- But what is the h e a d of the weave? 1 argue that it must be reconceived in t e r n of d k ~ r m i c e ~ as c sthe primary soaafity of the Self, mci further, that one cannot in good faith continue to ignore dharmic-ethics at the expense of post-smcmakt textual discourses.
Am I grossIy mistaken? Consider8for instance, the fact that Spivdc is
held in high regard by her cofleagues for being "one of the few inteIlectuals actually carrying out the suggestians made by the post-Wghtement ethical movement associated with Demda and E m m u e l Levinas*'(SR 9). 1 find
myself agreeing? in fact, with Landry and Maclean's statement; what I disagree with (see m y first chapter) is the sole privilege given to the Western path of
ethical inquiry in the Derridean and kvinasian manner insofax as postcolonid studies is concerned. In other words, with regard to Spivak's itinerary?it is the hvers&ation
of the decomtructive project? of
deconstruction as the dominant or recommcied mode of critique in postcolonial studies that I find tragically limited in m d e r s t m h g the "truth,"
truth as a constructionf of our ontolo@caIbeing. &commdon is a Western phenomenon born of a Western tradition; its application allows the statement that "ethics is the experience of the impossib~e"to be meaningfully representative of the aporia (aporific?) nature of all our discursive certitudes, laws, systems, and experiences. Not to say hat this representation can be
expressed across aU cultures that have discursive realities. But the aporia and absence that deconstruction uncovers k e and time again is nothing other than another form of "the mystery"
which Lyotard addressed in his tak.
What becomes obvious is that there are vaxious form and disguises for the eternal return of this Mystery. It makes contra&ctions, aporias, paradoxest
and moral dilemmas abound. But above all this Mystery is? I will reiterate, the Eternal mystery of Me whose dh~mic-ethicalconception is through the preciiscmive ethical sociality of the Self. Here, we find ourselves in a radically different ontological determination where dkarmic-ethical sociality is the fabric of an interconnected material and conscious reality. Dkarmicethical sociality flows horn the eternal and single principle of the universef Brahman, and it exists properly speaking, au-del& de la Zangzie. Perhaps the foI.lowing claim can be excused its boldness for the sake of
bringing home my point: discourses priviieghg discourse as the site of ethics are unethical. In various more or less intelligible statemen&-su& as
"Puuuoir-Sau~iris the onto-ph~ommolo@cdtruth of ethics, to the very extent that it is its contradiction in subjectingt' (Spivak, SR 154)-they point to the fact that there i s an absence at the beginning and, equally, that the
beginning is absent. The question is what to da with this absence since times immemorid, and we are faced with at least two different ontulo@cal traditions: the (Western) Self and Othert and, the Indian self and Self. The tradition, d t u r e , and history of the Self and Other has led ultimately to an enterprise called Decommc~onwhich incessantly forefkonts the unknowable mystery#albeit in disguise, in every construction; on the other handt we have the tradition, culturef and history based on an ontology of the self and &If, which keeps the owa able mystery at the forefront of all its constructions. A fhdamental difference.
To say aU this is not to make an ouMght dismissal of a l l Westem discourse. It is rather to signal a redundancy in the operation of the critical enterprise within a certain sector of academia. In particular, I am expressing dksa&fac~onover the fact that there seem to be an exponential proliferation of engagement invested in playing Impage games armed with the tools of deconstruction within the domain of post-colonial and post-
modem studies. Each fieldf individually, has undergone extensive and often rigorous ~ e o r e ~ c k a e o n sOn . the side of the post-colonial, theoretical positions have been articulated in a domain that has provided the security of its immanent marealization, whether in socio-economic, politicohistoricalf or identiiy-racial terms. This fact has enabled the post-colonial enterprise to adopt a self-righteous attitude vis a vis questions that address the overlap between it and the post-modern. Indeed, the following statement, which serves as an introduction to a recent selection of essays addressing the Post-colo~al/Pos~odem issue in The Post-colonid2 Readerf is
symptomatic of a certain type of criticd sleightaf-hmd: *'Forin fhefinal analysis8 the problems af rqresentation in the post-colonial texf asszme a political dimension very diferenf from the radical pro~isionali& now accepted as findamental tu postmudemism
(117). Such a formulation
harbors a prejudice which sigmfies two diffidties. First, The "problems of representationRtin the postcolonial assume their political dimension by
rights, that is, by the right of historical contingency. This m e w fhat all heratwe in that area of the world referred to as the "ThirdWorH" must be informed by its Colonial past, and must confront at various level($) its National present. The textual engagement with concepts of representation, (National) identity formation, and self-definition automatically attain a t'politicd"urgency, and entail a critical reading that is above and beyond relativistic or ambivalent redactions of the postmodernist kind. This prohibition functions due to a paradoxical reversal-even though the '*Third Worldt' is criticized for being a pejorative (neo)hperiaI label as it "both sipfies m d blurs the functioning of an economicr political, and imaginary geography able to unite vast and vastly differentiated areas of the world into a
single "mderdevelopefl terrainrt(143)?and presents that which must be erased?it is its very preservation that unifies the postc~~onial crifical discourse under one rubric. In his sense, thenr it can be argued that the Postcolonial enterprise is r e a c t i o ~ a yin its most findamen tal compunent. Secondr the postmodem is credited with a "radical provisionality" that strips its textual message of any power for "actionfttor for "change," according to a specific yet spurious h e of reasoning which assumes that the pastmodem enterprise-"the d e c ~ n s ~ c t i oofn the centralized logocentric master narratives of European culture" (117)wis content simply with h e
kgNigh&g of fissure, fragmentationrambivalence, and does not extend its
deconstruction to m y rneaningfid poiiticd agenda. It is thus that we come across opinions such as Diana Brydon's which attach onto pos&odemsm the stigma of New Criticism: * * ~ o s ~ d e d supdates m ] the ambiguity so
favored by the New Criticsgshifting their formal mdysis of the text's unity into a psy&omdysk of its fissures, and their isolation of text horn world into a worldhess that cynically discounts the effectiveness of any action for social change-" (137). h p l i a t i n this view of the postmodem is the functioning of
the label "First World:' also impliat is the belief that the post-colonial e n t e ~ r i s eis not similarly debilitated by the cynical discounting endemic to post-m0de-m.
Being First-World productsgpostmodem texts end up being
radic&y provisional since they are articulated in a zone of socio-politicoeconomic superiority, a zone that remains "First WorIdl' regadess of the alternatives suggested by the postrnodem, since neither of these alternatives seeks to undermine the hegemony of the d o h a n t power base that is the "First World." It can be argued that according to this viewpoint the postm~dern eaterprise is cofisemafiue in its most findamental cumponefit.
However, this assertion of fimdamentd difference erases the enabling condition that is common to both post-madedm and post-colo~a~srn. Even in the Post-Colonial Reader, which represents a sustained dismissal of we, are told that the post-modefism in favor of p o s t ~ o l o ~ a h m postrnodem, "the cieeomtruction of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture," is "very similarf'to the post-colonial, "[the] project of dismantling the Cen&e/Mar@ binarism of Imperial discourse-" (117). Similar, but for some inexplicable reason, not identical. For what else is the logocentric master narrative if not the Ca&e/Ma@ binarism of
Imperial discourse? And isn't " d e c o m ~ c ~ o being n l ' opposed per force to
which allows a reading of postmodem fldeconstruction" " d i s m a n ~ g * ' That ?
and that which allows a reading of postcolonial "dismantling" employ the same philosophico-theoretical machinery: Post-Structuralism. Indeed, the leading postmodern as well as the leading postcolonial critics rely heavily on the conceptual positions played out by the post-structuralist philosophers.
How is it, then, that the prevalent viewpoint supports the idea of an apolitical ambivalent flux, on the postmodern hand, and simultaneously supports political univalent blocks, on the postcolonial hand? What are "the problems of representation" in the post-colonial texts? Who determines them, what readings are encouraged? Why is it "accepted and by whom, that postmodern texts are apolitical and provisional? But more importantly, what is the socio-political nature and the hidden academic agenda or impetus of
such criticism that reduces, as we have seen, the post-structuralist machine itself into a machine capable of producing only the conservative postmodern or the reactionary postcolonial?l6
The answer I propose addresses two intertwined concerns; one deals with ethics, the other with the nature of the discipline called "postcolonialism" within academia. I propose, further, that the operations within the two fields are indicative of a containment operation within academia
which seeks to neutralize the disruptive potential that is the proper charge
generated by the post-structuralist critique. The academic sanction issued for
16see Kumkum Sangari's "The Politics of the Possible" for a sensitive reading of G.G. Marquez's fiction within a "marvellous realismw context which is not identical with the postmodernist project of the West. Sangari seems wary of a postmodernism which wants to swallow-up the differences of post-colonial literatures into a version Western self-negation: "postmodernism appears to be a maneuver based on a series of negations, and self-negations through which the West reconstrues its identity as a "play of projections, doublings, idealizations, and rejections of a complex, shifting otherness"" ( 185). Who these postmodernists are is unclear in her work; to be sure, her postmodernists apparently have none of the Nietzschean affirmation that is characteristic of the postmodernism that Deleuze and Guattari project in Ami-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
interdisciplinary "post" discourses abets the elision of ethics and does so for
the specific purpose of a containment that is the sign of a last-ditch conservatism. This elision at one end serves the reinforcement and prolongation of outmoded turn-of-the-twentieth-century structures and categories of knowledge, whose principle, by definition almost, is compartmentalization. And while the "post" disciplines have exploded compartments of all sorts, they have been allowed to do so at the cost of
burying ethics under the resultant rubble. As a result, the open field has become one without a cohesive direction in sight since there is no ethical imperative or motive. As a result, "post" criticism has become a cannibalistic reflection onto itself, becoming the insatiable consumer of its own text and textuality, feeding on itself and regurgitating its material ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the power-knowledge base is held intact, patting itself on the back behind the scenes for having had and still having a sound ethical raison d 'etre.
This somewhat paranoiac description is meant to suggest conspiracy; but the powers-that-be, I feel, do conspire and collude together against deterritorializing transformations. Transformation is always a process of inter and extra-disdplinary operations; transformation is also the rule of the universe. But as a witness to transformation, one must first and foremost be grounded ethically-a Hindu agent, for example, is always already a part of the network of the sociality of the Self; as a participant in the perpetual processes of transformation one must base one's actions-criticism is an action-in accordance with those ethics, or dharmic-ethics. Here, a short exposition of the function of the ksetra or "Zone" and the ksetraeya or "knower of the Zone" is essential for my discussion. At one level it helps reinforce the conception of an Other-less universe which is the
sum of the processes + witness, Prakriti + Purusha, Nature + Consciousness. At an another level, it aids my endeavor of fore-fronting a dharmic ethical consideration to the field of literary criticism in general, and the fields of postcolonialism and post-modernism in specific. In simple terms, "the Gita explains the ksetram, Zone, by saying that it is this body which is called the Zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes cognizance of the Zone, Ksefrasya, the knower of Nature" (EG 398). The Gita teaches that true knowledge is knowledge of both the Zone and the knower of the Zone,
the ksetra and the ksetrasya. The Zone or body is comprised of the following elements: "The great elements, the consciousness of "I,"the intelligence and the urunanifest, the senses, ten and one, and the five Zones of action of the
senses, Desire, aversion, pain, the organic whole, consciousness, steadfastness,
This briefly is described as the Zone with its modifications" (Xin:5-6; WBG 534-35).17 In such a ksetra, the ksetrasya must strive to attain true knowledge,
which is "constancy in knowledge of the Supreme [Self],observing the goal of the knowledge of truth" (XIII:11; WBG 539). It is interesting that the object of
knowledge, as it is declared by Krishna to Arjuna, is a non-rational proposition which defies dualism and exceeds binarism, and sounds suspiciously like a deconstructive principle: "That which is the object of knowledge, I shall declare, knowing which, one attains immortality; it is the begmless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor nonexistent" (XHI:12; WBG 540). Finally, sodality is reaffirmed as the primary
condition of all existence: "Any being whatever, standing still or moving,
+
l'l^he "great elements" are: ether, air. fire, water and earth. The "consciousness of the "I"" is the translation of the Sanskrit ahamkarus, which also means consciousness of self and of self-making. The ten senses refer to the eye, ear, skin, tongue, nose, and the five organs of action, the hand, foot, mouth, anus, and genital organ. The "one" sense is the mind, and finally, the five fields of action of the senses are sound, touch, color, taste and smell. Sargeant reminds us that these are all Sankhya concepts.
hasmuch as it is born? Arises fiom the union of the ketra and the ksetragya"
(MIE26; WBG 5%); I have insisted on calling this union sociality since t h i ~ union of Zone and atnzm-z or self is traversed throughout by the same
parasha or Self. Tme knowledge, thenr begins when the knower of the ksetra or Zoner
the ksetrizg-ya,supplements knowledge of the Zone itself by turning into herself to learn of hexself within the Zone. Knowledge of either one aspect is insufficient mci incomplete; it is the simdtmeous engagement of both
aspects of knowledge and their d c a ~ o into n a celebration of B r h a n
which is true knowIedgef that isf *'itis the knowledge at once of the Zone and its knower...a united and even unified seU-howledge and worid-howledge?
which i s the red Uumhation and the only wisdomtt (EG 400). The inMguing question of the moment becomes to what extent does the Literary
crific, the post-colonial or the post-modem theorist, perhaps even h e poststructuralist philasopher, fulfill the condition of knowing not only the Zone
but knowing also his or her o m self within the Zone? It seems dear that o d y one half of the equation is W e d by &cawsep~vae@g knowers;
and if any claim can be made that such a bower is aware of his or her complicity or implication within the Zonef 1 hold it to be an insufficient process to properly h l f i h g the dharmic-ethical condition of seu-howledge because it means only that the knower is aware at a discursive level.18 The problem is that the discursive reign tells only half the story, and discourse criticism-or hawledge of the Zone as dbcouse-dupbcates the conditions of
18~sychiatricand psychoanalytic studies may be held up here as a contradiction to my argument, but 1 find them also to be a function of discourse. The schizoanalysis project envisioned in Arzfi-Oedipus is perhaps closer to reaching a truth about the field and the knower of the field, but as 1 proposed in my previous chapter, it erases the Witness, the Conscience, and is ultimately also an incomplete model.
a scientific knowledge akin to physics, mathematics, and the like. Here
Lyotardvsciisibction between scientific knowledge and narrative howledge
is useful. It can be said that the theorist or critic as betragya or knower of the Zone has fden prey to the institutional iegiihation of knowledge at a local level. To add what is missing in Lyotaxd's discourse, it can be said that the
petif*r&cifsare the signal of a knowledge in which knowledge of the ksetrapja or knower of the Zone has been covered over, that their IeGbation purely through the fdfihnent of their pedomative fimction is telling of a world in
which discourse is pureiy scientific and masquerades as the t ~ ~ t hWhat . is needed to fidfill the dkarmice~calcondition of the knowledge of the knower of the Zone is very much the non-dismsive and predismsive reality of the primary sociahty of ethics, of existence, of being. For f&eGita
says that the object of knowledge which is Brahman is beyond logicf rationality, and comprehension: ltOutsideand inside beings, hose that are moving and not moving, becmise of its subtlety this is not to be
cumprehe~ded...remote and dso near. Undivided yet remaining as if divided
in aIl beings, And the sustainer of beings, this is the abject of knowledgef their devourer and creator1'(XIEl5-16; WBG 544, emphasis mine). Knowledge of
the knower of the Zone must combine with knowledge of the Zone itself to reach its llsubtlellobject of non-comprehemion-gnij~qam:not to be knownF not to be understood, not to be cornprdmded. M y such a unified knowledge can impart a d h a r m i c - e ~ c dmeaning to action in the world, n the action of critiei~rn.~~ including the action of ~ e o r e G & a ~ oor
1 9 ~ as consequence of my discussion, an intriguing corollary, so to speak, presents itself. Only narrative knowledge* in this sense, can be ethical, whereas all systematic discourse which manage to suppress in one form or another the pre and nan discursive conditions of the knowledge of the knower of the field are ips0 fact0 unethical and non-dharmic. This takes us to the opposite end of the claim made by Levinas regarding the unethical nature of
My project seek not only to &ect a transformation h the nature of htibtion&ed
post-colonial
course, but insofar as post-colod&m
is
intimately imbricated with post-modemm, it aisns at centralizing ethics without detracting fiom or negating the value of discourse criticism. In other words, if I do indeed wish to suggest and perform a bansfomation in the action of criticism,this transformation is an additive process, one of completiw and complemata~on. Not just the Zone henceforth, but also always the knower of the Zone. Not just discourse and t e x W t y , but also always non-discursive (as wen as discursive) dhamic-ethics. Not just redundant reflections of the legitimized institutional terms of engagement sanctioned by the establishment, but also an expIosion of ethical and universd difference onto reductive dots that try to "containr' postcolonialism as well as post-mode~sm. t ~its~ c s Symptomatic of this espausal of ~ c o w s e ~ ~ o uand meaningless relativism is the contribution of the eminent post-colonial critic Hami K. Bhabha in his essay entitled "The C o m t m e n t to Theory." It is by intervening in Bhabha's argument that the urgency of a reinvestment in ethical positioning is revealed. Though at times incisive and provocative, Bhabhais thinking finds itself time and again unable to anchor itself to any
ethical gomd from which it could then a y s t d k e a reading beyond the easy conceptual impasse offered up by his brand of post-smcm&st rhetoric. This is why Bhabha fomulates his commitment &us: "I want to take my stmd on
the shifting margins of cultural dkplacement- at confomds any profound or "authentictrsense of a "national" cdture or an "organic'r hteUeaa1-md ask what fhe h c t i o n of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once -
-
-
-- -
-
-
-
-
-
- -
tropic language. A strong argumem presents itself in my account here for the unethical nature of a11 language that suppresses its tropic nature--for all language, is after a11, trope.
the d t u r d and historical hybridity of the postcolonid world is taken as the paradigmatic point of departure1'(LC21).Bhabha conscio~lypositions
himself in the fluctual and kmfomative moment of migration. Notably, this position is played out entirely in the realm of academic discourse, nay, more so in the r e a h made available by the indubitable conceptual space between the si@er
and signified-in the "vicissitudesof the movement of
the signifierff(23). From such a vantage point, Bhabha subordinates poIiticd action and the possibility of social e-foma~on
to the apparently
efiarating "discursive ambivalence [in rhetoric and writing] which makes the political possible'' (24). It is clear that Bhabha as the knower of his discursive Zone is ignorant of the non-discursive reality i n f o d g him as
ksetrag-ya,as knower within the Zone and enabling the "discursive ambivalence" he so cherishes.
h constructing his theoretical commitment Bhabha attempts to break down the bharism of theory versus politics? a relationship in which dearly0 for him? "critical theory" ftmctions as the "Other." As always byal to the post-smmaEst wont, Bhabha focuses on the "language of political ec~nomy,'~ on the scene of "writing''politics, and proceeds to discuss the ramifications of analyzing the discursive structures informing geo-pditical artidations. This process conveniently allows for him to disavow himself from providing a putative "object" to his commitment. Answering his own question0"comxniment to what?", Bhabha can be glib in saying that "I do not want to identi9 any specific "object" of political
[email protected] is a sign uf political maturity to accept that there are many forms of political writing whose different aspects are obscured when they are divided between the "theorist1'and the "activist"" (21). Really? k not Bhabha's rhetoric rather a sign of political escapism in the name of discourse? Is it not rather a sign of
pohticd immaturity to suppase that by locating himself in the interstitid hm y space between theory and politicsghe can "internme ideo1o@cagyqf
meaningful manner, that isginfIuence or effect the processes of "social k w f o m a ~ o n ? I fBhabhafsproject seems no more than a subservient accomodation to the institutionai delimitations of what may be said by the
''rna.r@Ucritic; for what Bhabha is in effect saying is that everything is
m a r e or boundary! A pleasing exexcise in discourse perhaps but if there is a co-tment
in his theory it is one that aims to postpone
any substantive
change in the power nexus of academic discowse.
A bdmentai problem lies in the valorization of the bharisrn of theory and politics. h 13habha1sdiscussiont **pofitics" slides into the slot traditionally occupied by "praxis." A probable reason for this sleight of hand is that in using the tern 'lpofiticsi'Bhabha is able to distance himself more
easily &om ethics than he wadd be if he was to remain in the domain of praxis. Indeed, it is hard to replace the word ''po~tical"with "practical" in the following statements: "the political subject-as indeed the subject of politicsis a discursive event...*' (23)?md, ' m a t the attention to rhetoric and writing
reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes the 'rpulitical"possiblef1(24)*
The erasure of praxis is further complicated by the absence of an ethical basis for his own writing. Having done away with the need of committing his theoretical engagement to any objectt Bhabha is content to uncover the "abstract free play of the s i w e r " that reveals "an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a politics" (24-25). Employing the discursive
transcriptions of Foucauldian power/howledge and the iterative slippages of Derridean difkrance, Bhabha digs himself into a hole he is satisfied to call the "space of translation" and from which he constructs the non-object of his theoretical commitment: "a political object that is newt neither the m e nor
the other, properly alienating] our political expectations, and chang[ing,] as it
must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics" (25
emphasis original). I would go so far as saying that Bhabha's new object is neither the one nor the other nor anything at all. What I would ask of
Bhabha is that he climb out of the "space of translation" and survey the actuality of Zones where concrete and non-discursive objects exist, where
knowledge must take into account of both the ksetra and the ksetragya, the zone and the knower of the zone, where the first step is a dhamic-ethical assumption of an ultimate unknowability in all rational and linguistic systems, and where, nonetheless, action in the world must follow a path of affirmation through yagna. A further problem arises when we are led to believe that history
properly happens only in this space of translation made available in theory by a critique engag&. This then allows for the conception of a "discursive
temporality" in which a true "negotiation" between existing power structures and emergent ones is possible, a negotiation which is happily oblivious to the
necessity of looking beyond its theoretical moment to any teleological or transcendent History, to any future as such. Instead, it is a moment of such radical import that it even "destroy[s] those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason" (25); and it is a space in which Bhabha can wholesomely assert that "there is no given community or body of the people whose inherent, radical historicity
emits the right signs" (27 emphasis original).
This is well and good in the realm of Derridean discourse, but in the realm of social praxis it difficult to see how activism and struggles for social transformation are to benefit by putting their objectives under erasure: "Each objective is constructed on the trace of that perspective that it puts under
erasure; each political object is determined in relation to the other, and displaced in that critical act" (26). Again, this is a masterful deconstructive if not obfuscatory way of saying that life exists in a vast interconnected network fueled by absence and without beginning. But Bhabha's statement is also redundant for it basks in its discourse without engaging the dftarmic-ethical conditions in which the "displacing," the "erasure," the "trace," etc. operate.
In the case of the Naxalite struggle in India, for example, it makes little sense to adopt a commitment which urges reflection on the textual determinations for a group of people who live the unique and abysmal poverty of the Indian dispossessed and whose existential lives are always already informed by ethics and are certainly not the resulting object of reflexive theory or writing; in fact, their espousal of a Maoist-Leninist ideology is theorizable only through and
after the existential violence of their commitment to social revolution. This commitment is not discursive but ethical. The point I am making is that events in history are precipitous and are always on the other side of the space
of translation which Bhabha valorizes. Bhabha makes the Derridean zone of
theory a primordial locus for understanding the constructedness, differential and deferential, of all structures; in this zone, however, ethics can be ignored
or subordinated to discursive effects-a dangerous and irresponsible maneuver. It is on the other side, the pragmatic side where objects and subjects exist, where they are interpellated through various structures, and most importantly, where they are animated only in ksetras or Zones whose constitutive threads carry the bond of a dharmic-educs that the theorist needs to make his or her commitment. Bhabha's is a case of misplaced emphasis,
then: the problem is not that one needs a Derridean commitment to theory but that theory needs a commitment to ethics. And such a commitment, finally, is impossible in the space of "the translation of theory."
There are two additional intme1ated concern which need to be taken
up here. The fist deals with the difference between ' ' d t w a l differenceV'and "4-d
divezsity," the second with the "ThirdSpace of enunciation."
Though Bhabharscd for a rdocatian of the demands made of theoretical work h the Zone of d t u d difference is sdubrious, his immediate m d constant will to assert the hybridization of the practice of language at the site of its enunciation negates theorySspossibility of an e ~ c d - p r a p a t i cproject
or h s t - By valorizing the splitting effect of the enunciative process, a splitting between "a stable system of reference" and *'thenecessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new demands" (351, Bhabha glorifies the
p o s t - s m c ~ dspace, the "zone of o c d t instability9'where formations such as authority, resistance, tradition, d t u r e are '*neitherthe one nor the other."
I do not take issue with the post-structural deconstruction of terms that
are invested with the sanction of le@&a~on; what is problematic in Bhabha's "location1'is the fact that he uses the p o s t ~ s ~ c ~ a took l i s t to
remain m
y q u a w e d in the space, or more precisely the moment, of the
instability, of the ~'vi&situdesl~ of the s i p . h doing so, he fixates on the "Third space" in the semiotic structure of signification inspired by Saussurian and Lacanian p ~ a p l e s : The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the 1 and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage though a Third space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a perfornative and institutionid strategy of which it cannot "in itself'' be conscious. What this mconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. (36) Apart horn providing a useful if veiled s
m
q of fhe founding principles
of semiotics in the second section of his essay on the commitment to theory, Bhabha does not instantiate my productive reorientation in the exercise of
interpretation. By prioritking the third space, the perfunctory ambivalence
in any act of enunciation, the u n c o ~ ~ o tenah us of utterance, Bhabha shirks away from taking a stand, one that is situated in the domain of pragmatics
and one that is ethicdy situated in the world of concrete events. In making statements such as, "the meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the
one nor the other" (361,Bhabha only provides an affirmative answer to the very question he consciously wishes to negate-"Ts the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to s o m power-howledge produce a discourse of the Other that r e ~ o r c e its equation?" (20-21). Bhabhais third space seems just such a ploy. But Where is Bhabha located? Needless to say, the site of Bhabha's production is titat temtory marked by the overlap between the disciplines of post~modefismand post-colod&m.
It is a territory wheref dismsively
speaking the subject is split, legitimation and authority are never whole, and ambivalence mocks the certitude of aIl enterprise. But more importantlyf it is a terrain in which the critic as Bhabha divests respomibzy by playing the
differance game of infinite deferrak without having to present any ethical
referrals to or for his enterprise. To his credit, Bhabha is M y a master sans pared in the Zone of theoretical obfuscation, that is, "in the substitution of
post-smcbrafist lin@stic manipulation for historical and social explanation'' (Dirlik 333). In brieff then, I am criticizing Bhabhafsbrand of post-colonial theory for Iacking a firm ethical foundation that is committed to mobilizing a cohesive political actionf or indeedf a project of social transformation. It must be noted here that J3habhais commitment to theory, thoughf is not expliatly presented in the trappings of post-colonial discourseit is seU-co~uawlya post-smcm&t statement inserted in, as fhe tide of
his book The Location of C~ltztresuggestsf theoretical debates informing
mIturd studies in general. As
SU&~ ib
co&mat
is purely Western i n its
implicit and often explicit espousd of the Sel.f/Other &&otorny as b d m e n t d structuring principle. Robert Young's White Mythofopks provides an excellent account of the Hegefian reign of the Self and Other dialectic in Western metaphysiar and also locates some key problems in Bhabha's discourse, specifically his of mimicry, hybridity?etc., which succeed recourse to the "static c~ncepts'~ each other without artidating any reIationship or continuity between each other. Young finds Bhabha's concepts " d o u s l y m h o p o m o ~ m e dso that they possess their own desire?with no reference to the k t o r i c d provenance of the theoretical material horn which such concepts are drawn, or to the theoretical narrative of Bhabha's own work, or to that of the cultures to
which they are addressed" (146). As a resultf a considerable portion of Young's energy in this essay is devoted to retrieving Bhabha's "theoreticist anarchism" in a positive light, by lauding its strate@ refusal to re*
mastery?
and seeing his eclectic use of theory as an ironic and self-comcious "colonid mockery:@'''A teasing mimicry of certain Western theorisis and discourses that is like, but not quite?'@ (155). Though Young makes an important contribution to ~ d e r s t a n some ~ g of the key discursive processes that have gone into "Writing history and the West,'' his critique itself remains limited by the range of possibilities dictated by the pervasive Western Self and Ckher
outside of dialectic, and is unable to conceptuaUze a positive @'~versalityi'
the Self and Other structure. Consequently, he applauds both Foucault and Lyotard for their quest to foregamd singdarity over universality (lO)* His statement?"this quest for the singularf the contingent event which by definition refuses a l l concepmakation b2re we find ourselves contemplawg the eternal non-dkmsive mystery!] can dearly be related to
the project of constructing a firm of howledge that respects the other
without absorbing it info the same1*(10, emphasis mine), indicates a symptomatic Western imaginative failure to conceive a form of knowledge
which does away with the Other altogether and ushers in a knowledge of the Self based on a non-Western ontology. To Yomg et a2 I say that the standard of measure doesn't h u e to be the d e of the Self and Other. kt this respect, I
find it useful to reiterate Cixous's discontent with the W e r (thaugh in doing so
i give it an unintended twist) in the The Newly Born Womaa: What is the Other? If it is t d y the '*other:' there is nothing to say, it cannot be theorized. The "other" escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. it doesn't settle down. But in History, of course, what is called the "othert1is an alterity that does settle down, that fds into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns "itstfother [70-711.(in Young 2)
Cixous' comp1aht is powerful and resonates with my critique, for it exposes
the absolute fiction of the Self and Other dialectic as the necessary condition for explaining lop-sided Western relationships and projects such as
Imperialism and Nazism, to naxne but a couple. Let us remember in counterpoint here Nandy's assertion that the ozdinary hdianrsethnic universaI.isrn remained impervious to the colonizer's %If and Other chicanery. i can now retum to the earlier discussion regarding the status of md
false divide between post-colo~ahmand post-modedsm. And it is with a view of reinvesting ethics into not only an appraisal of the Zone but also into
an appraisal of the knower of the Zone. ''his task must begin with the reconcephakation of the unique individual whose constitution henceforth must not be viewed simply as through and within the structures of a techol~@callytransformed ksetra or Zone but also through the continuous definition of the consciousness of the appraiser of the Zone, the ksetraaa. At
this point it is necessary- to emphasize that it is the absence of an ethically
responsible position that deprives Bhabha's text a geopolitical thrust and a
meaningful political agency. E%sdiscourse as post-colonial tiiscourse is exemplary in demonstrating the h d of "dubious spatiality'' and ''problematic temporality" that invalidates theory and criticism falling under the category of 'fpost-colonid" (Shohat). Although I W h a t Shohat is right in suggesting the deployment of the t e r n " n e o - c o l u ~ ~ sand r n ~''post~ independence1'against the debilitating ambivalences of h e term "postcolonial" as terms that axe more stringently defined to the on-going processes of political and dturd negotiations which are affected by the legacy m d history of Imperial colo&ation-md
are under the insidious attack of the
New World hegemony as defined by the United States-the answer to her a c i d question lies first and foremost in the domain of ethics: "Who is
mobilizing what in the artidation of [post-colo~dcriticism], deploying what identities, identifications and represmtatiom, and in the name of what political vision and goals" ( l l O ) ?
Arif DirU has undertaken the task of responding to another important question posed by Shohat, "when exactly...does the post-colo~albegin?", by aligning the conditions of the emergence of the post-colonial as a social practice and d ~ h t i o n a h e dinquiry with the moment, however extended
and fragmented, of the emergace of global capitalism. Accordbgiy, the pustcc~~onial critic speaks from a position of ''newfound power" within the
of fabric of transnational societies propelled to l o c ~ e recuperations d
meaning. There is a certain sense of hypocrisy, however, in fhe articulations made by such a post-colonial critic located within the Western academy: here is usud1y no a h o w l e d w e n t of the fact that it is the ubiquitous processes of capitalism, experienced today in its late or global or transnationai
stage, which is the enabling condition of the post-colonial discourse (which is vying, if it has not already done so, to supersede the older categories of the
Third World and of the three words theory), and more concretely, of the institutionalized post in academia for the post-colonial critic. This means that the "newfound power" lacks an ethical and dhamic-ethicd agency and therefore remains compartmentalized in spite of all its aspirations towards effecting deconstruction. A fundamental criterion which fuels post-colonial discourse is the
invalidation of the Nation as the hegemonic "global unit of political organization," especially for the migrant post-colonial critic situated at the spatio-temporal "in-between." It thus not by accident that both the content addressed and the strategies adopted by the post-colonial critic resonate with "the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships caused by changes within the capitalist world economy" (331). Having centralized the importance of global capitalism as the structuring principle of culture today, a move that necessarily erases the distinction between the
enterprises of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Dirlik pointedly suggests that "if a crisis in historical consciousness, with all its implications for
national and individual identity is a basic theme of postcoloniality, then the
First World itself is postcolonial" (337, emphasis mine). The conceptual framework dealing with the death of the postEnlightenment metanarratives has, of course, been explored at greater length by Lyotard in his discussion of the postmodern condition. In the postmodern age of perfonnative societies, legitimation occurs through petit-rtfcits at the institutions. In such a condition, one can see how the postcolonial critic is
performing nothing beyond the truth of the possibility of postcolonial discourse. Put another way, the postcolonial critic is yet another mask in the
series af roles written by the processes of a global capitalist economy whose only impetus is towards maximking the efieimcy of its productionconsumption ratio on the globe. The role played by the postcoionid critic is to act as an antagonist to Eurocmtric ideology, to suppress his or her own
c~nditionsof birth in the power-nexus of the material relationships of global capitalism, and finally, to avert attention &om the fact that global capitalism is rapidly recuzxfimg the gee-pofitical map of the planet through a movement of national and irttza-national h a w a t a t i o n along the lines of flight of transnational capital. What is a viable resistance that can be offered up in the face of such a relentless and speedy process? Or, to raise the question with which Dirm closes his statement, '*thecpestion,then is... whether, in recognition of its a m class-position in global capitalism, ["this global
can generate a
&oroughgohg criticism of its own ideology and fomdate practices of resistance against the system of which it is a producttt(356). The resistance against any contemporary ideological apparatus must consist in t a b 8 up options which have been covered up or devalued in the ma& of mademity
and teholo@cal progress during at least the twentieth century- My general argument, of course, seeks to revalue a discourse of ethical action and orient it towards both the theory and the d b e that is structured according to the textual and d t u r a l logic of late capitalism*
This logic has been interrogated at length by Fredric Jameson, who in
his study rightly links postmodem culture with America, as the exemplary post-hduskial society whose global cdtual domination is a sign of the power of media and also the "internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of h e r i c a n military and economic domination1*(5)-
Jameson is also quick to employ the "swface/depWt model to account for the
interpeflation of the postmadem subject in a wor1d of simulacra. This subjects akin to the B a u M u & m subject of jouissan~e~ fincis itself without the succor of interiorizable justification or morality; that is?it is no longer the
centered?bourgeois monad capable of feeling modemist anxiety of the type emblema&ed by Edward Munch's The Scream. This subject is no longer a
container of affet but a euphoric surface for the bombardment of fiee-floating signifiers.
Having set up this model for the postmodem subject, Jameson is content to conchde that moralistic criticism of Me as the experience of he hyperreality of postmodem space is a "category mistake,"since as a historical phenomenon postmodernity has already exposed the fictionality of any coUective project or progressive Utopianism. The only viable option for the cultural critic or moralist, thenf is to embrace a liberating materialist dialectic proposed by Ma=# one that is able to ''mthe dmal evolution of late
capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress ail together" (47). There are?however, a couple of fundmental problems in the way that Jameson, as a representative postmodemist for the post-coIaniabf construes
his subject. Firstf by categoricaUy denying my presence of depth in his subject he reiterates the prevalent h m d e r s t m d h g of what De~da-afier-Patocka calls the conception of the "unique self."The individuahm of technological civilization is related to the mask, to roleplayingf in other words to Jmesonian surfacesf and has effectively obfuscated the mystery of the unique person "whose secret remain hidden behind the social mask" (GI3 36). Such
an kdividualism is lived precisely in its relation to a metaphysics of force: "Force has become the modem figure of being. Being has allowed itself to be determined as a calculable force, and man instead of relating to the being that is h i d d e ~z d e r this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power"
(GD37')- Although premised on an arighary authenticity, his criticism of the tehoIo@cd individual holds merit for the purposes of interrogating the contours of m ethics which is not &abIed as it were in the confusion in
which "individualism becomes soaalism or collectivism [and]s h d a t e s an ethics or puIitics of singularity" {GD36). A second and related problem emerges once we juxtapose
p o s t c o l o d ~ awith ~ p a s m o d e h v . As seen above, the postcolo~dis properly a global reflection of the processes of late capitalism. Though the signifier ' t p o s t c o l o ~ d is ~ 'temporally r belated a5 opposed to the term " p o s m o d e ~ ~in' 'gaining cunmcy in World-systems discourses, once activated it is arguably a term which enables an analysis of global capitalism that is M y more '*global'' than the more restricted posmodeMm. This is to say that Jameson's culturd critique relies on a nmawly defined terrainone which wes Gibson's cyberpunk and Portmm's Bmaventure Hotel as examples to conceive of the subject as surface, fragmentation, and so on.
Obviouslypan analysis restricted by such post-tebolo@cd pxametexs cannot be extended in any m e ~ g way W to reflect the d t u r a i pxocesses in other territories which are not ody those outside the United States but also those outside the narrow band of cyberpunkism and bonaventurid lack of conceptual mapping within the United States itself. That this is a short-
coming of Jameson's discourse is evident considering that the pathways of globd capitalism, by his o m admission even, intersect and network across the entire planet today.
Why does Jameson base his understanding of posmodedsm on such a local and mepresmtative temtory? Because, it is only on this space that he can convince himself that the postmodem subject is beyond the category of depth. Not only does Jameson's thinking do away completely with the
category of the subject that is respomibie but it demonstrates the primacy of the Self and Other dichotomy as the structuring principle for his AmericaEurocentric &course.
h his somewhat infmous intervention in the arena
of post-colo~&rn in "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,'' the Self/Other relationship is recast in the guise of a First World/Thkd World binary. Under such a configuration, JamesonSsgesture
can be seen principally as stemming from the sympathetic desire of
ii
privileged member of the First World community to listen to the marginalized difference of a distanced and homogenized Third-World Other. It is this reductive approach from a Mgn Fixst-worldly Father which leads to
h e conscriptive and &empowekg formulation of his thesis: All third world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegoricali and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call ~atiunal dleguries8even when, or perhaps 1 shodd say p~cularlywhen their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. (69)
The Fkst WoridiThird World binary is also compatibie with Jameson's Pos~odeWsm/Nation&m b h q 8 for the First World's logic of late capitalism has supposedly made obsolete the forms of representation, such as realism and naturalism8which still abide in the nations of the Third World. Aijaz b a d , who has exposed the many prejudices which a r m s c r i b e the
limited scope of Jmeson's conception of the W d World, is right on the
money when he shows the theoreticali historical, and cultural inadequacy of the First and Third worlds b ~ c a t i o nand 8 urges instead a model that considers not three but one world stmctuxed everywhere by the processes of transnationd capitalism, "by the global operation of a single mode of productioni namely the capitalist one8and the global resistance to this mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe*'
(103)* h a d ' s model is certainly closer to the truth than Jamesonlsfthough his general critique of the hmpomibfiq of past-smw&t theories and post-modedt discourse, effixted by his socialist leaning, remains within the trappings of a M d t narrative of manapation, and camequently, within a Western ontolagicd kamework. An interesting moment occurs in h a d ' s text as he underlines the
ambiguity-operative in Jmeson's employment of the First and Third worlds divide (106-110). The First World refers variously to p o s m o d e d y , to the capitalist mode of production, and even to the 'lGmec~Judaiclr entirety of Western civilization; there is a similar sIippage and inflation of the category of the Third World. This d+ncompashg proMeration leads h a d to "the damning feeling that the Bkapada-Gifaf the edicts of Mmu, and the Qur'an itself are perhaps Third World texts" (106). Whereas Jameson's
categories are slippery in an effort to mystify the connivance of his text with a reiteration of the privileged enmuatozmy position of h e ~ c o - E u o c e n & m within Academia, h a d ' s critique remains trapped within the conceptuai
confines of Self and Other, with the notable exception of proposing capitalism as a global process (and he also hints at an h t e ~ m e e a t i o nof the purported
seE m d other when he points to the Judaic elements in the Qur*mand fhe Graeco-hdic elements of ancient Hamapan art). The ethical motive for Ahmad's project comes horn his Mawt-sou-t
philosophy, but this only
prompts his situating himself and his cause as the suppressed Other of
is critique stops short of suggesting an alternative for effecting capitalism. H substantive change in academic power structures, but it does have the merit of r e d d i n g
US
to be vigilant against the tendency of p o s t - s m c ~ d s t
appfications to faU into an endlessly reflexive language game at the expense of
losing sight of any effective horizon for the application its knowledge- Ws
discourse remains as equally limited as Jameson's as the demonstration of a knowledgeable exposition of the ksetra or Zone at the expense of ignoring completely knowledge of the ksetragya or knower of the Zone. As knowers
only of their Zones, then, Jmeson and Ahmad truly remain comrades-inarms. Though this is not the moment to begin explicating the ramifications of adding knowledge of the knower of the Zone in the equation of true Knowledge to invest criticism and theory with a dharmic-ethical thrust
(which I intend to do in my subsequent chapters as I read selected twentienth century fiction), I must point out that to do so means a necessary erasure of the First World/Third World binarism which is as a concept is ethically sanctioned by what Derrida has called the religions of the Book, religions that describe an ethical universe premised on an unequal binarism, on God as the
Absolute Other. Both Ella Shohat and Arif DirUk are right in noting that the sigiufier "postcolonial" has gained acceptance and circulation in academic discourse because of its ambivdence~asopposed to more stringent terms such as neocolonialism, neo-Imperialism, and even Third World-and because of its mystification of agency:
the term mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domination. The complicity of postcolonial in hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination, and in its obfuscation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence, that is, to global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations. (DirUk 331). Neither of them,however, extends their critique to constructing an alternative discourse which would not only combat this complicity-for to signal is a preamble to cornbathbut would also reorient the post-colonial
project to effectively transgress its compartmentalization. As such, then, both Shohat and DirUk remain firmly within the parameters of the postcoloniality; theirs is an exemplary post-colonial discourse which strains against the
bounds of its own compartment without breaking through and getting 'outside," and without effecting a reconfiguration or reshaping. There are
moments in Dirlik's writing that would lead him to such a reshaping but they are not pursued. First, why is it that post-colonial discourse and intellectuals gained validity and respectability in the 198OPs,that is, concurrently with Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom? My immediate answer as hasty gloss is because this is when the ethical as base was erased from the function of capitalist expansion, when politics overtly ceased to be "responsible," and when, therefore, postcolonial discourse could begin to speak itself without disturbing the emergent New World order. Second, even though it may be true that postcolonial discourse, far from being a representation of the agony of loss
and displacement, is an expression of "newfound power" for the migrant intellectual, it is a power that is already stripped of any agency for effecting meaningful social change or transformation. It is a discourse severed from
the ethical reality of non-discursive life, a discourse-symptomizing all the ills of post-modernism- that is unable in its very constitutive structures to address the world outside its textual Western tower. In this respect, Spivak's 'catachresis," for all its good intentions, accomplishes nothing if it simply reverses, displaces, and seizes "the apparatus of value-coding," for this apparatus which allows itself to be seized is a Western apparatus-it keeps post-colonialism furiously running in the same place. An excellent example of the fact that, without thinking about the non-
discursive ethical reality present in and informing all actions, all critiques
remain firmly ensconced in reiterating the power structures that make postmodernist and post-coloniaht artidations within acadernia possible? is tu be found in Arun Mukherji's highly problematic article entitled '7ivhose PostColonidism and Whose P~smode&m?~'. There is one instance when the
nun-discursive is mentioned?but never can it become an important point in Mukherji's thinking that seeks a sofution without &an@g the rules of the
game. This occurs when she cites Come1 WesiSsreminder of a readity which cannot be h o w discursively: "a reality that one cannut h u m . The ragged edges of the Red, of Necessify, of not being able to eat, not having shelter, not having health care-.." (5). West's emphasis on the lived experience is invoked by Mulcherji as rn example of that which is elided in l ' p a s ~ o d e ~ meternal r s fascination with languagels imperfect access to the
" r e C (45). But the space which is opened up for a reflection on the nondiscursive as it pertains to post-colonial and post-modem projects is promptly closed up by Mukherji in the name of discourse, here faulting posmadedsts for their supposedly eclectic discursive b~~oiage-'~pos~ode&t texts that "use and abuse1'everything" (5)-and their s h d t m e o u s amnesia, their "forget[ting] that literary discourse is deeply impficated with a l l other discowes current in societyi1(5). How can posmode-rn
use and abuse all
discourses and at the same h e forget that aU these d i s c o m s are impIicated with one another? Another problem exists at the level of definition:
Mukherji makes a divide between "lived history1'and l'justl'Iiterary or culhrd movements. The post-colonial project is a coming to terms with the
painful experience of Imperial colonizationr whereas, according to Mukherji? posmodemm i s at best literary parody. An Indian attitude towards Indian literatures, she teUs usF"is nut that of parody but respect for their equalitarian
and committed vision'' (4). Perhaps it would not be a waste of space here to remind Mdcherji that posmode&m
is not "justf' postmodern parody.
This bhkered appraisal of p o s m o d e d m is emblematic of the generd u w i b p e s s w i t h post-colod&m to think in a global manner. Pos~-co~o~&s& ii la Mdcherji will object here that such glababm is a ploy by the "white European maler1culture to homogenize important differences within the various cultures around the globe; however, if we only keep in mind Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal philosophy, which is certainly as postmodern as thinking gets in the twentieth century, we can see that posmodehsm is precisely the expiosion of differences onto a well-bounded terrain whose demarcations remained unquestioned and mproblema&ed ~ o u g h o u the t reign of modemism. Internalking modemist parameters for the critical appreciation of post-colonid texts certainly does not provide a
meaningful refutation to the scope af posmode&m.
It is interesting to
note hiit while Mukherji is uncomfortable about "the assimiIationist and homogenizing tendencies of postmodemist theory'' (I), her discussion takes place without ever presenting even a brief synopsis of the theories or theorists that are making her uncomfortable. W e asserting on the one hand that 'lpos&ode~smis largely a white European cultural phenomenon" (3), Mukherji uses, on the other hand, Said's question about deconstruction in her argument against p o s ~ o d e d s m : "the question, in Edward Said's words, "of what there is to be done afier deconstruction is well under way, after the idea of deconstruction no longer represents elaborate inte11ectua.l audacity" (Said 193)*'(4). Demda is deconstruction. Derrida is also an Agerim-born Jewish immigrant L v i ~ gin France. 1 do not think one can call Derrida a "white European male:
to do so would be to completely
ignore his Melong critique of Westen logocentrism.
Contrary to her stated intention, Mulcherji's article in fact provides an exemplary instantiation of the conservative justification for maintaining a divide between past-colo~&m and post-modeam" h her effort to polarize one against the other, Mukherji requisitions definitions of postmodemism which in their reductive formulation simpIy contradict the ~ t e p e n e b a ~ of o ndiscourses and events she holds as factual truth for both post-modedv mci for post
in the company of texts of E u e h e f i c m as though no racial, cultural, historical, political, epktemolo@cd and ontological differences separated themt'(3)- Clearly?posmad&m
for Artm Muherji has to be severed
horn the global processes of transnational capitalismf from the history and legacy of hperialism, as if the White European male came up with the idea all by himself! m a t we see happening in Mukhezji's text is an act of
p o s m o d e ~ s m - h her definition of it-in its defense of post-colo~akm: post-colofiafism becomes a complex weave of discursive and historical events and a heterogeneous Zone, whereas post-modeam becomes an insular homogedzhg mistake. Having set-up some of my concern in post-mode~smand postcolonidi~xn~ I will now turn to a reading of some contemporary fictionsf that belung to either cine or both the academic Zones, in order exempw the h d of dharmic-eihical criticism which 1 see as m urgent task and which 1 have
been setting up in these two chapters. Specifically, the fictions which I examine through my hamework have been chosen for heir prominent status in recent post-colonial and post-modem discussions and include:
Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), The Muor's Last Sigh (Rushdie), Waiting fur the Barba~ans(Coet~ee)~ and Draupadi (Mahmweta Devi). 1 &cuss
individual commitment to ethics and
concentrate an the prouerating
technologies which impact subject determination and being in cantemporary cultures and societies. As such, my investigation is both textual a d dharmicethicalf for 1 believe that only in unison will the two generate an alternative understanding of the ethical domains of the various actions and individuals represented in the fictions, and dso of the various critical actions performed
on those fictions, incluhg mine.
In conclusion, 1 would like to make explicit the prime motivation for
this project:
that
in my personal experience 1 have experienced a d b e
whose ontological determinationf that isf heir conception of being and becoming in tihe physical and conscious universef consistent and plastic even as it partakes in and enjoys the global processes of capitalism and technology; 1 refer specifically to the culture of modem hdia today. It is a culture which has two competing traditions, one which embraces modem civilization and its technological forcesf the other which has been and continues to remain non-modem in its e t h i c universalism: Arguably, this latter is a tradition
which is not in crisis, and its civilization is not weighed down by the failure of responsibility in any sense similar to the one Demda analyzes. But what
about the West? Axe there competing traditionsf or has the drive towaxd technology won out as J.F. Lyotad maintains? Has faith in meta-impages really ebbed to the extent that the only legitimation in post-modem h and petittechnocratic d t u r e s is to be found locally, ~ o u g institutions rgcits? Taking the onto1ogicaIly unique Indian experience of dharmic-ethical
action marks a provocative site for entry into a discussion of ethics within the fields of post-colo~afismand post-madeam.
Chapter 3
Of the four Mahasweta Devi stories recently transIated by Gayatri
Spivak, Draupadi provides an exceuent starting point for a discussion of the way in which a5tical scho1arship of the p o s t - s m ~ & s tpost-coIoni&t
brand, i.e. SpivaKs, interacts with literary texts &om the ex-colonies. Spivak's efforts to translate hta English the Bengali originals is an admirable instance of promotion by an outstanding scholar. Indeed, what better heavyweight
could Mahasweta Devi hope to find in order to communicate her literature, which specificaUy addresses the oubide+f-Ksto~status and the downtrodden nature of the tribal pupulations suffering in ignorance in "modemtsIndia, to a global readership? Mahaswetarsprose is powerful, and one realizes upon reading her stories that they have been written by an individual deeply committed to knowing and ~epresentingthe invisible tribals of hdia to the literate segment of Bengal-and by extension and
translation,of hdia and of the world-and to arousing political awareness of
the situation in dire need of remedy through meanin@
and organized
action.
In "The Author in Conversation," we are given a glimpse into the life and career of a remarkable activist whose efforts-poli~cd, journalistic, and
literary-toward the betterment of the tribals' lives has been ongoing for more
than three decades. Here are some of the salient revelations communicated by her: that there exists an inhastructural nothingness in so f a r as facilities and utilities-constitutionally and practically supplied by the Indian government to the rest of its "non-tribal" population-are concerned; that this lack is compounded in post-Independence India by the systematic
"modem" exploitation of both the tribal forest lands and the tribal peoples (the latter through a perpetual bonded-wage labor system); that the devastation of these peoples' ecologically motivated life has robbed them of their sustenance, for "they underst[and] ecology and the environment in a way we cannot yet imagine" (x). That, broadly speaking, the tribals have not
been a part of the decolonization of India even as they have paid the price. That the lip-service attention paid to the tribais by the government of India
has not succeeded in providing them with the merest of modem facilities,
that the monies disbursed for their cause is swallowed up by corrupt executive parties. That, for the tribals, there is no education, no health
facilities, no way of earning income. That in the prevalent attitude amongst those Indians who thrive on the relentless exploitation of the tribals, their status is lower
than the status of chattel such as oxen-according to at least
some of the exploitative upper-caste landowners, tribals are regarded as an expendable and easily replaced species ranking below the husbandry animals. That, in spite of all this, they have retained their unique culture and oral traditions and that they deserve to be recognized and honored by the rest of India.
Mahasweta Devi's stories enact disturbing moments in the lives of tribals, conveying a sense of their desperate predicaments through skillfully describing the interpenetration of the tribal and non-tribal universes. In The
Hunt, miscegenated tribal Mary Oraon's brutal massacre of a tiresome city contractor, on the occasion of a women's-day-out-in-the-forest ritual hunt, provides the unexpected by inverting the stereotypical outcome of rape and sexual exploitation of the hapless tribal woman at the hands of the non-tribal merchant class. Properly speaking, however, it must be noted that Mary's actions are not those of a tribal as she is twice an outsider: by blood, of an
Australian father, and by special status given to her by the rest of the tribal community, as a result of which social custom as religious prohibition does not apply to her-so that she can consider marrying a Muslim vegetable vendor without inciting her tribe. Doulotf, in Dodoti the Bountiful, is not to have any of Mary's fortune. As the result of a dubious transaction which is represented as "marriage" by
the Brahman Paramananda, poser godman and merciless pimp, to her fellow Nagesia tribals but which in practical terms forsakes her in the flesh trade, Douloti finds herself condemned to being a lifelong indentured whore in Paramananda's whorehouse. Her story offers no redemption; in the imagistic
end she lies diseased and dead in the map of India which has been freshly painted for the celebration of Independence day: "filling the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas, here lies bonded labor spreadeagled, kaxniya whore Douloti Nagesia's tormented corpse, putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in its desiccated lungs" (93). Hers is a shocking story which reveals at once the complete
governmental neglect and complicity of the societal system in which Douloti
can be possible, in which Douloti the Kamiya-whore can happen. No reader can dismiss the import of Mahasweta's observations, least of all self-professed "expatriate critic" Gayatri Spivak. She denounces the complicity of the migrant academic who reduces the potentialities opened up
by her special trail into American culture by "museumizing" the culture they left behind: "...Cultural Studies in the United States today is also fed by the
migrant academic's desire to rnuseumize a culture left behind, gaining thus an alibi for the profound Eurocentrism of academic migrancy" (xxiv). For Spivak, hoisting the flag of deconstruction is more than sufficient to counterbalance the trend toward espousing "the myth of pure difference" (xxiv). As is Spivak's wont, she reminds her reader about Derridean
diffkrance and its salutary effects when applied to claims of untheorized
essence or transparence. In this particular instance, she goes on to poke fun at the "East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet" idea. Yet,
the discourse on the subaltern seems curiously dose to an attempt in
thinking of modem India reconceptualized as West to a tribal or subaltern East.
Draupadi provides an excellent point of departure for a discussion of the moral vacuum amidst which an unhealthily large portion of postcolonial and post-modem theory and criticism is taking place within academia today. The absence of an ethical code manifests itself as and when literature gets analyzed and interpreted more with a view to supporting one theoretical framework against another, and less with a view to exploring themes which can help in an understanding of the ethical nature of human interaction with and within a complex end-of-millennium world. In the academic realm of high theory it has become more important to elaborate structures of power and knowledge based on the inherent constructedness of all discourse than to discuss the pre-dominantly extra-discursive ethical aspects that continue to inform human action.
Draupadi is a short yet complex story whose range of signification is enriched by references to Hochhuths The Deputy, David Morell's First Blood,
Antonioni's films, the god Pan,Shakespeare and Prospero, to Sankhya Philosophy, Archimedes, and Gandhi. The population depicted in the story is
also multicultural and reflects the cultural diversity of the Indian population: we have Bengali (Senanayak), Sikh (Arjan Singh), the Santals, the larger group of the Austro-Asiatic Munda tribes, the untouchables, and even the influence of American soldiers who fathered Dopdi's betrayers; in terms of languages, we have Bengali, its dialects, English, Mundari language, the dialect of Maldah. In terms of its politics, the story presents a violent world of tribal cleansing by the Indian Army, of landowner killings by the insurgent
tribals, a world in which left-politics, fascism, the Indian constitution and the Indian village system the Panehayat are mentioned, in which "the young
gentlemen" represent an educated left-wing sector inciting the tribals to armed insurgency, in which the system of landless peasant bonded-labor akin to slavery is normative thanks to a seeming collusion between the government and the landowner. Thus Dulna exclaims at the moment before he kills the landowner Sqa Sahu, "my great-grandfather took a bit of paddy
from him, and I still give him free labor to repay that debt" (OW 192). These are some of the elements of the ksetra or field described by Draupadi. It is a ksetra of combat, violence, and war. The universe we see
represented involves police and army operations, exploitation of bonded and tribal laborers by the landowners, and the counter or terrorist actions of the
insurgent rebels led by the "young gentlemen." While the landowners motivation for the exploitation of peasant laborers is maximizing profit in a capitalist economy, the police/armyls motivation is not similarly profit- as an armed force, it is fulfilling its political, economic, and moral function of
engaging in armed combat with the enemy-in this story, the revolutionaries represented by Dopdi. They act in opposition to the army, and their language
coinades with that of the anny; if anything, Arijitts rhetoric which is couched in an unspecified c o m ~ s agenda t &o signifies art equal investment in
warmgames as that of the armed force. Spivak's admonition to readers of texts in transIation, to beware of categorizing the narrative as 'rredistic,'' needs to be equally extended to hmlators-Spiv& included. In her Essay on Sfafiudayini,she points out that "Mahasweta's prose is art extraordinary melange of street slang, the dialect of East Bmgal, the everyday howehold language of f d y and servant, and the occasionai gravity of elegant Bengali" (267'). Spivak is well aware that this polyglot aspect to literatures written in Indian languages removes it from f a d e and reductive "realism:' h a mdti-lingual culture such as India's, literatures inevitably engage a polyglot textual world in which "bi.nguages throw light on one another: one language can, after all,see itself only in the light of another hnguagel' (B&W 12). In contradiction to this essential feature of Indian literature is the vast body of English kansiations in which the multiple planes of representation are subsumed wiih the view of making
the textud presentaiion convivial with the dominant style of continental
nineteenth century realism.20 Spivak as translator is sensitive to both the
language and the structure of Devi's story in Ben@; however, Spivak as critic perfoms a sophisticated reading which, th~ughcompelling in its
attempt to reveal the subjugated subaltern in an economy of differential sexuality governed by the patriarchal, effectively amomts to no more ihan an inversion of h e binary terms in the stoy-%nmayak/Dopdi and subjugator/subjugated, and all this at the level of discursive semantics.
*OFOF an exceIlent post-structuralist discussion o f the colcmial enterprise of transiation, its underpinnings and its consequences, see Tejaswini Niranjana's Citing Transiutiun.
h the broadest sense, Dragpadi engages issues of nation, revolution, (fenthhity,) and violace. h naming her character after the polyan&ous wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Makabh~rata,Mahasweta Devi has created a palimpsest tale which re-enacis the public stripping of the epic Draupadi; while in the epic Draupadi's prayer to Krishna is answered by the
& a d o u s infiniteness of her sa~+(a garment) sa that she cannot be h-ated
in the royal court, in Devi's story Draupadi h d s herself the
victim of multiple rape by none other than the Palice force. D r a ~ p a d i
provides a condemnation of the glaring lack of ethical imperative in the constitution of the State's executive organ as represented by the police force,
and it seem to me that any d t i c d appreciation of the story must begin by a c h o w l e d e g the crucial centrality of the issue of ethical action in this aspect of contemporary h&m culture. Spivak's sophisticated interpretation,
however, completely ignores this issue in favor of appropriating the story to support her deconstructive theories of post-colofi&m in her ongoing academic debates abaut femininity, "sexual differential," "disclosure of c~rnplicities,~' and the like.
This is signified not least by what little interpretation Spivak provides of the Mahabharata itself. This lengthy epic which measures over ninety thousand verses collected over an indetem-iinable period of centuries represents the multifarious dimemions of Indian experience and the ontological plurality of the Indian imagination. An ageless epic, the Mahabharata is neither influenced by the history of Imperial colonialism nor constituted in response to pressures of making it an O m R ; as a portion of Indian civilization, it contains structures of cosmo1ogica1 determination and ontological plurality which have, arguably, s u ~ i v e dmore or less unchanged for the past four thousand years. And it is art-one that does not necessarily
represent historical personages. In brief, the Mahabharafa needs to be understood primarily in the Indian context and in hdim termsf and only secondarily in the Western context and by Western term-and here I mean colonial and post-coIonid. It is d o r t u n a t e that Spivak's understanding is entrenched only in the secondary consideration. She regards the epic primarily in its ' * c o I o ~ ~ t function in the interest of the so-called Aryan invaders of India'' (183)- She happily attributes to h e epic h u p a d i a hcaniart llshguiarity,"and consequently steers her discussion into the terrifjmg domain of the Phallus where, dearlyf "no a h o w l e d p a t of patemity can secure the Name of the Father far the child of such a mother [one married to five hwbands]" (183)Spivak outdoes Lacan himself in resouceWess-whereas he went across the Atimtic and back a century to &cover Foe's ''Purloined Letterr1in support of
his post-Freudian and linguistic concept of the systemic &placement of the signifier and its deteminative function in the mconsciawpshe has gone all the way to India and taken the largest extant epic in the world to similarly
support Lacanian schema: "In the epic, Draupadits legitimized piwaiization (as a wife among husbands) in singdarity [read Lacanian] is used to demonstrate snde gloryr'(183). Such a co-optation precludes any mderstmdhg of the Mahabharata through Indian value systems in which the traditional concept of Narifua (the female principle of the cosmos) holds "the beiief in a closer conjunction between powerf activism, and femininity than between powerf aciivism, and masculinity,'' as it does "the belief that the
feminine principle is a more powerful, dangerous and uncontrolIable principle in the cosmos than the male principlei1(Nandy 53-54).
To say the leastf Spivak's Lacanian approach considers the epic absoiutely out of context. It ignores the important cosmological and
theologica1 implications which i d o m the Mababharafa. It ignores the
folio-g report made by Nf EKiltebeiteI, who took the trouble of i n t e ~ r e h g the epic event of Draupadi's dkxobing in the royal court by researching not Lacan but classical In&m sources:
...the epic Draupadi is akeady an image of the goddess in her whom she expIiatly hcamates, but totality: not only as Sri-&mi, as Bhudevi ( h e gaddess Earth), Kalaratri (the "Night of Time"), Mda-Prakrti (primid matter), and with intimations of Durga and Kali; in her relations to V k h u - f i s h a and to figures W e d with Siva; in her role with respect to the turn of h e y q p and the relieving of the Earth's burden; in relation to the Earth's potential dessication (it is the solar Kama who orders Draupacli stripped);..* and in connection with symbob that portray the M e r potential for the munixing and unleashing of alI the e l e m e n b e e , water, fie, airf and ether-that is prelude to the find dissolution or prakrta pralaya with its ''unbraidhg"of the ''strands" or gunas of matter. (42111) Spivak is seemingly oblivious to such complexity in the Mahabharata,
and often her critical statements exernpl* ludicrow reductionism: "Draupa&-wri~en into the patriarchal and authoritative sacred text as proof
of male power1'
and0"She [the epic Draupadi] provides the occasion for
a violent transaction hetween menf the efficient cause of the crucial battle"
(183).!
me t e r n "patriarchal," "authoritativefl*and "male power" all
resonate nicely within the discourse of Western feminist theory but come across as patently misinformed if one a d y keeps in mind Hiltebeitel's analysis. h an.epic whose world-view espouses he feminine principle as that of power and whose narrative consistently intertwines its "hmanl' and "divine" actors, it is hard to see where and how the very need could arise that would necessitate Rraupadi's inciusion to "prove" male power. Indeed,
Spivakrsstatement insults the ontological complexity of the Mahabharata by limiting its purpose to the redundant theme of proving male superiority-
Furthermore, her idea h
t Draupadi is
"the efficient cause of the
meid battlef'ignores the potent history of a w e s that leads up to the great war in the Mahabhffrata. Most strikingly, it ignores the heologica1 and
philosophical discourse contained in the chapter prior to the engagement of the great battle, the chapter popularly entitled Bhapada Gita or song celestid- The occasion for this discourse is prompted by A.rjrnls (Draupacii's first husband) refusal to kill his kin, for after a l l the great war opposes fixst c o u s of ~ the same dynasty. The G t a or song refers to the god Krishna's response to Arjunarslack of mativatiun, and provides reason after reason
why it is Axjuna's duty to engage in battle and kill his c o u s ~That . Krisha's song provides a crystallization of Hindu thought has been discussed in my fkst two chapters; more importantly, for this discussion, not once does W h a indicate Draupadilsdisrobing as the dhching cause for the
engagement of the battle. It is symptomatic of the functioning of the academic realm of Paste colonial studies that Spivaks simplistic and inaccurate interpretation of the
Mahabh~rafaand of the epic baupadi gains easy acceptance; afier all, it does l discourse, and employ the correct jargon of French s t m ~ apsy&omdy~c
thus, it does lead to an interpretation of Mahaweta's Draapiadi which fits
within the parameters of theoretical feminist discaurse. The grave oversight
that this kind of exercise perpetuates is the elision of broaching the essential
quality of ethical action. h the present case, this allows Spivak to read the cmcial moment in Mahaswetarsstory as an indictment against male authority and man's history. Man the scapegoat may, perhaps, be pleasing to the Western feminist ear but in this instance it sounds Like a tired theme
caught in h e flmitless flip-flap of binaxism.
Let us consider the political climate in which Draupadi is situated. The story is set in 1971 West Bengal. Spivak reminds us that the date is significant
because it marks the occasion for the Indo-PakistanWar;what astounds is that she asserts that India's participation in the war was simply the result of India's sudden discovery of cooperation between the Naxalites of West
Bengal (the properly Indian State) and the forces of East Bengal (what is today known as Bangladesh): "at a crucial moment in the struggle, the armed forces of the government of India were deployed, seemingly because there were alliances between the Naxalites of West Bengal and the freedom fighters of East Bengal" (182). This generalization is so completely off the mark that it necessitates a brief detour here for the discussion of the geo-political context of this war.
The impending disaster that was to strike the constitution of East and West Pakistan, putatively one country united by Islam but realistically two very different cultures speaking different languages and separated by more
than a thousand mile stretch of India, came to a head in 1970 when Sheikh Mujibur R e b a . of the East won an overwhelming victory in the National Assembly election of December 17. This meant that the Bengalis of the East
would effectively form the government and wield power over the Punjabis of the West, the traditional power-brokers. That this was unacceptable was finally confirmed when a martial regime in the West took affairs in its own
hands and deployed general Yahya Khan in East Pakistan with an intent of
inflicting terror on its population (and the descriptions of the inhuman operations carried out at his orders are not unlike the ethnic cleansing that has taken place more recently in Yugoslavia). The Indian government aided the undermanned and ill-equipped Bangladeshi Resistance movement,
Mukti Bahini, by providing arms, ammunition and training across the border
in West Bengal. As the conflict escalated, more than six million refugees
poured across the borders into West Bengal. Finally, executing an operation that had been in the works for almost a year, the Indian Armed forces engaged in War with the Pakistani armed forces, with the intent of aiding Bangladesh's liberation. That the objective was accomplished in twelve days is a remarkable modem day military achievement: "the Indian armed forces
executed, within the brief period of 12 days, the most decisive liberation campaign in military history-giving a nation of 75 million people its independence in one lightning strike" (Palit 17). Clearly, the Indo-Pak war of 1971 constitutes a political event far larger in scope than Spivak's assertion of
the purported alliance between the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini, who were
being trained and armed in India by the Indian Army, and the Naxalite rebels. Historical simplification aside, a central problem with Spivak's reading is that it ignores the structural play in Draupadi which disperses not only any
"realistic" representation but also any interpretation that seeks a response in
kind to the aggressive, male world represented by Senanayak. In paying close attention to the language, Spivak has critically ignored the story's dissipation
of conventional narrative strategy as also of the putative "subject" with a "bonded" identity and cohesive intentionality. When this structural dissipation is combined with the content of the story one can reconcile this strategy with its meaning only through a recourse to the ramifications of an ethical nature that does not rely absolutely on a bonded subject. Such an ethical consideration is more appropriate and, I feel, more productive than premising all interpretation on the cohesive subject of the "subaltern" in
Draupadi. There is a deliberate ambiguity in section 1in the manner in which the
narrative voice functions throughout the story. The story more or less begins
with a dramatic dialogue between two "liveried uniforms" to be followed by
the documentative "dossier" section which begins by stating what is apparently the summary of the official take on the Dopdi/Dulna case. However, this objective tone is undermined by the insertion of a humorous
and subjective description of the architect of Bakuli, w a n Singh, "whose blood-sugar rose at once...diabetes has twelve husbands, among them anxiety." (OW 187). The narrative then proceeds with an omniscient narrator's voice which soon asserts itself in the first person. This little trip into the narratorial "I" becomes intriguing as it is graphically merged with Senanayak's "I": "All will come dear, he says. I have almost deciphered Dopdi's song" (190). This vocal superimposition complicates not only the manner in which the reader's sympathies are to be engaged and deployed but also the meaning in the third and find section of the story, in the latter half of which there is no direct speech, be it Draupadi's, Senanayak's, or even the
guard's; the use of quotations, which signals distinct speaking-subjects, is abandoned altogether. Army jargon is employed by both parties, Senanayak's and Arijit's. As
employed by Arijit, its use signifies the inadequacy of the revolutionary movement to exceed or transgress its allotted spaceÑon of officially sanctioned resistance to the system. The army jargon as a unit serves another purpose: it acts as a territorial stake in counterpoint to the latent threat of the nomadological counter-signifying semiotic of the tribal forest.21 The forest, 2 1 1 think that it is necessary here to invoke Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal argument which brings together in one interactive economy the discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and anthropology. They lay bare the repressive ideology shared by modern disciplines through their emphasis on the simultaneity of semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization of human agency as a schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." It is, in my view, the only post-structural approach that effectively injects the consideration of pragmatics into any discussion of semiotic systems. Their thinking is properly extra-disciplinary as it is not limited by categories;
with its otherly coded flows, exists in topographical counterpoint to the
striated space inhabited by Senanayak's army. The early Draupadi and her
gang are differentiated from the "poor harvest workers" and the "tribals"of the "primitive forest," and are thus inhabitants of Senanayak's kse f ra,
inasmuch as they may take to the forest for cover-they are and behave like the enemy. Here the (narrator) tells us quite dearly that Draupadi's operations are as manual-oriented as Senanayak who lives by such knowledge as prescribed by the Army handbook (188) and the "anti-fascist paperback copy of The Deputy" (190): "The ones who remain [Draupadi] have lived a long time in the primitive world of the forest-They must have forgotten book-learning. Perhaps they are orienting their book-learning to the soil they live on and learning new combat and survival techniques." (191). However, the fact that Draupadi is apprehended tells us that her group has failed to forget the book; her capture is possible because she continues to behave and think in the manner prescribed for the enemy. In this way she remains within the Senanayak's signifying regime and justifies his strategy: 'In order to destroy the enemy, become one. Thus he understood them by
(theoretically) becoming one." (189). In this he, too, remains well within the purview of the State semiotic, which is what creates the space within which the "enemy"can exist to begin with.
In this context, then, it is hardly surprising that Senanayak has all their actions measured. except for the climactic last one by Dopdi. When Dopdi is captured, Senanayak's reaction is one of triumph and elation but also despondency and unhappiness. His theoretical savvy of anticipating the however, it is this very quality which leads them to embrace a dispersal of individual intentionality down the path of a delirious "line of flight." In chapter 1, I suggested that the Deleuzian/Guattarian critique takes us to the point where the necessity of a dharmic-ethical recuperation of moral action becomes all-important.
"enemy's moves has been confinned yet again in practice:
"if you want to
destroy the enemy, become oneÑA long as six years ago he could anticipate
their every move. He still can. Therefore he is elated (OW 194). He is unhappy not only because the enemy behaves predictably but also because he sympathizes with the peasant's cause; his sympathy for Dopdi and her cause is, however, of no practical consequence since Dopdi is also the enemy and
will receive the treatment an enemy deserves: "he supported this struggle from the point of view of the field hands. Dopdi is a field hand. Veteran fighter. Search and destroy. Dopdi Mejhen is about to be apprehended. Will be destroyed. Regret" (OW 194). Of course, Senanayak makes no ethical reflection on the fact of his assigning the role of enemy to Dopdi. This lack on Senmayak's part is part of the reason of his fear at the climactic end of the story. The smooth space of the forest has its own language, a "savage tongue," (188) which interestingly enough, is foreign to the State's. Senmayak's "tribal-specialist types" (189) are unable to translate Dulna's
dying cry, "Ma-ho." and have to rely on the interpretation given by Chamru, the lowly water-carrier in the camp. It is evident that this event can be read as paradigmatic of the colonial enterprise in general, one which published with certitude facts about indigenous cultures, forgetting that these facts relied not only on the contamination of translation but on the wiles of a native translator; the humorous if not farcical endeavor of the specialists flown in by the Defense Department is further accentuated by the irony of their having
to consult dictionaries put together by European scholars in the by-gone Imperial era, "by worthies such as Hoffman-Jeffer and Golden-Palmer" (189).
(Sadly enough, it is also typical of Spivak's scholarship as reflected in her
essay on Draupadi; her understanding of the Naxalite movement in West
Bengal is substantiated by the work of none other than an "ex-Maoist French "New PhilosophertfBernard-He& Levy.) But the more intriguing aspect of the Chamru episode is that it highlights the tramsemiotic aspect of
semiology-due to the surplus value generated by overcoding; at no point can one decisively present any one particular semiotic regime as unproblematicdy dominant. Instead, we see that Senanayak's State semiotic, C h a m ' s semiotic, and the Maldah semiotic (if Chamru is to be believed) are simultaneously operative; and transformational statements such as "Ma-Hot' signal the way in which the State's signifying semiotic "translates for its own purposes a statement originating elsewhere [from the Santals of Maldah], and in so doing diverts it [by reinscribing into the terrorist code a statement
originating in the Gandhian era], leaving untransfonnable residues [Dulna's corpse] and actively resisting the inverse transformation" (MP 136).
The fact that the media reified State language is communicated in English in a Bengali text points significantly to the standardization of the Nation-State as the globally dominant and normative model for the socius today. In section two, for example, Devi makes interesting use of italics for representing that which is media disseminated information (newspaper: Killed by police encoun terÑunknow male...age twen ty-two... (192); and, "
when employing army jargon for all military maneuvers (Cordon up, round the clock, cordite, close canal approach (193), Veteran fighter, Search and
Destroy (194)). This authorial strategy highlights the functioning of a State apparatus that is bent on the elimination of insurgent elements detrimental to the upkeep of the State's dominant regime of signification. Competing
semiotics are always present; and in pointing out that "the fighting words on both sides are in English" Spivak ignores the war-call "Ma-ho,"which the texts clearly tells us was used by the Santals of Maldah "when they began
fighting at the time of King Gandhi! It's a battle cry" (189). Spivak chooses not to hear this cry perhaps to aid her in concluding that 'Nation-state
politics combined with multinational economies produce war." This glib formula is motivated more by Spivak's post-Marxist intellectual make-up
than by the effective arena of the story, where the appropriation of fighting English on the rebel side supplements the pre-existing tribal war language suggested by "Ma-ho." This tribal fighting language is further complicated by the association with Gandhi's struggle of Nan-violence made by Chamru; it becomes uncertain as to whether the Santals of Maldah "fought"with or against "King Gandhi." Perhaps it signifies C h a m ' s understanding of the Gancihian effort as "battle" and "fighting" that marks the power inherent in
the ethic of non-violence and passive resistance. Whatever the answers may
be, what remains clear is that the w e of English army jargon describes the confrontation in one semiotic regime, and that one should be careful not to extrapolate from this a transcendent semiotic realization, such as "NationState economies combined with multinational economies produce war" (Spivak 185)! At the level of the &once, Draupadi's body becomes the instance of a "terror" statement that reifies the dominant signifying regime. The terror manifests itself as and when Draupadi and her troop engage in acts of retribution-it is easily seen that her land of violence merely mirrors the violence heralded by the figure of Senmayak-and as and when the figure of Draupadi is "countered" with rape, torture, and humiliation: both circles of violence are equally terroristic. In terms of effecting a "discursive displacement," then, Draupadi's violence is all for naught (Spivak calls function changes in sign systems "discursive displacements"). Though Spivak would like to see Draupadi as the properly insurgent or subaltern
f i v e , in whom the agency of change is Iocated-a f i p e able to effect change
thxough the violent force of a aisk-the violence of her terrorism remains within the bounds of what the State machinery can bath produce and contah as Spivak t e k us, "the men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi-in the
narrative it is the d m h a t i o n of her political p-hent
by the
repremta~vesaf the hwIr(185). As s i p , bath k a n a y a k and Draupadi refer to the supreme signifier, the State, which presents itself both as lack-signaled by his feu, and her taunt
at the end-and as excess-the evident suppression of Draupadi as enemy of the State. Draupadi, he^ partner D b a f her group of Naxdites, form no more than the "~ounterbody'~ to the body of the State-as-god: *'.-.thebody of the
condemned [wo]man; [s]hef toof has her] Iegd status; [slhe gives rise to her]
own ceremonial...in order to code the lack of power with which those subjected to punishment are marked. h the darkest region of the political field the condemned [wo]man outIines the ~yxrunetricd~ inverted figure of the kg'' (MP 116). In the light of this state coding, Spivak's foUowixtg contention regarding Draupadi's self-insistent nakedness appears as a somewhat hasty gloss: "Once Dopdi entersf h the h d section of the story,
l she is in a place where the postcript area of lunarflux and s e x ~ adiflerence, she will finally act FOR herself in NOT "acting," h challenging the man to (en)counter her as unrecorded or misrecorded objective historical monument." (184). ParaduGcdy, this statement relies on the essentiality of sex (%nmayak=mm=mde)as it tries to assert the deconstructive potential of
sexuality (Dopdi=comtered=&own).
Further, though Dopdi does not
"act" in accordance with what is prescribedf to what extent is she acting for herself if her gesture is to act as "counter" to Senmayak's enterprise and expectations?
It is basically here that Spivak betrays the Orientafi~tunderpinnings of her enterprise, one which dictates the artidation of the subaltern as ultimately no more than the political artidation of the identical:
My point is?of course, that through a l l of these heterogmeous examples of temtoriality and the comund mode of power? the figure of the woman? [moving from dm to clan and f d y to family as dau&ter/sbter and de/mother,] syntaxes patriarchal cuntinuity even as she herself is drained of proper identity. In this particular area, the continuity of community ur history, for subaltern and histo~analike, is produced on...the dissimulation of her discontinuity, an the repeated emptying of her meaning as instrument. (231)
If, on one hand, the subdtem (or historian) is an essential instmment for the upkeep and maintenance of the patriarchal or state machine, then how, on the other hand, can she be drained of her "proper" identity? A n immediate conceptual problem here is that Dapdi or the subdtem is conceived of as
"A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks
(coupwes)...e v e v machine, in the fist place, is related to a continud material flow (hy16)**(A0 36)- As machines, we are connected in multiple couphgs,
all of which traverse our bodies simdtaneously and variously. This
reconcepbabza~on,the functioning of the agent as machine and not as tool, is crucial to getting beyond the metaphysics of historical representation and
into an analysis proper of the possibilities of revolutionary b m f o m a ~ o n . 2 2 Aided by her best deconshctive intentions, Spivak ends up privileging the 3 cannot be an J u d e e C M t i m conception of History and ~ e i n ~ . 2Dopdi 221n A n t i - O e d t p u s : "Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine* and energy-machine: a11 the time* flows and interruptions." (1 1; also, "Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression o f desiring-machines'' ( 2 ) . 23 In Anti-Oedipus: "the idea primitive societies have no history, that they are dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is especially weak and inadequate. This idea was nat conceived by ethnoLogists but by ideol~gists in
mecorded or &recorded historical monummt if she is at once the subaltern " h m m t ' * driving official History; to the contrary?the histmy-
machine and the Dop&-mame exist here in a harmo~ousconjunctivedisjunctive synthesis. h d just as the officid History machine is not the only kstov-ma%@, the "subdtemf*is conceivably engaged in the productian of its awn history 'W what is called &tory i s a dynamic and open social reality,
in a state of hmtiond *qflbfim,
or an o
s
~ equilibrimr ~ g
...comprising not only M ~ h ~ a n & e conflicts d but conflicts that generate changes...then prixnitive societies are U y inside history..." (A0 150). And in
this point especially Spivak's fomda~on- at the subdiem cannot speak-is wrong.
h t e r n of the p n a s of nature, the f o ~ ~ w can h g be said about the two of them: Senmayak's nature is primarily rajasic with a slight satfzuic streak.
The sattzuic impulse shows itself in the firm belief Senmayak has in the principles, such as those in the Army Handbook, &at inform the course of desirable actions in Smanaydc's hefm or field. He demonstrates a certain mount of technical reflection on his activity and desires to c o m h c a t e his
knowledge to other h m m - h this too, he demonstrates a sattzuic tendency. The problem, of course, is that Senmayak's knowledge and reflection is
exc~usive~y about the k e f m and not its fietragya or h~wer-i.e.-~ himself. The littie insight we have into his thoughts are focused entirely around his
metier, never on himself. His WE-sa&factian with his station and b c t i o n in life hints at a sutttuic paise, but ultimately one sees that the rajasic
proclivity d o h a t e s his nature, especially in his arrogance at his awn expertise at being an accomplished general who out-thinks his enemy.
the service of a tragic Judaeo-Christian c~nsciousness that they wished to credit with he '*inventiont*of history" (150).
Senmayak reflects the rajasic man who "flings himself into the baffle and
attempts to tse the struggle of forces for his own egoistic benefitt*@G 49). Dopdi's natural makeup in the story is more complex. She has presumably overcome a famasic inertia that dominated her name until she rebeued and now is primarily motivated by rajas. Indeed, we see that Dopfls actions in the betra are impelled by a passionate necessity for action and that her emotional state is in turmoil. Having become an outlaw and being wanted "dead or alive'' at all costs by the government powers, Dopdi participates in organized guerrilla warfare, and shares the ultimate idealistic goal stated by Dulxsa regardhg the point of their "work" around the Jharkani belt, that 'flandownerand moneylender and poficmm might one day be wiped out!" (193). She acts primarily as an informant, always on the move
from one village to assother. There is no kseiric refledon in Dopdi as to the purport of her agency other than slaying the enemy; if any cohesive idedogy informs her actions, then it comes from the leadership of the '*young gentlemen" revolution~ies,whose ideology is not specified beyond the hinted Marxism. It is interesting that Dopdi's knowledge of the field is from immediate
and lived experience, which in this aspect is opposed to %mayak's knowledge supplemented by research and literature on the field. It is perhaps because of this that her howledge of the field is coupled by a striving to seek knowledge of herself as the Gefragya or knower of her field. The insight we are shown into Dopdi's mind reveals that she is still confused about the recent events in her life. Her ruminations about her own existential make-
up lead to a recall of he purity of her ancestral h e and pride in the ethical loyalty of her forefathers: "Nowshe thought there was no shame as a Santal -
in Shomai and Budhna's treachery. Dopdik blood was the pure
unadulterated blood of a m p a b h W . - - D o p & felt proud of her forefathers. They stood p a r d over fheir woments blmd in black ~IT~XCX'' (193). The ethical
principle of loydty is figured in the foUowing image: "crow wodd eat emwrs flesh before S a n d wouid betray Santal" (193). h important indicator of her
sutkuic countenance is seen in her decision that her Me is worth sacrificing for the revolutionary cause. She is certain that she will not betray her team by
giving out any infomation, and has reached a suttwic degree of selfdetachment from the strife and violent world-energy of which she is a part.
This is evident in her reply to Mwhai's wife's question, "Can't yau run away?? 'No. Tell me? how many times can 1 run away? What will they do if they catch me? They will counter me- Let themff(192). %on thereafter! she is being pursued and resolves to say nothing under tortme and/or capture: "I swear by my Me. By my Me, Dub? by my We. Nothing must be told" (193). Her reaction shows Dopdi to have reached a degree of detachment from her body and from her involvement within the ksetra, even though she will continue her actions as terrorist and idomant. Her commitment to
self-sacrifice reflects an inkling towards the Gan&an system of passiveresistance or sa&apaha- Gmdhi is adamant about the power and effectivity of passive-resbtmce and the virtue of seu-sacrifice: "Sa&agraha is referred to
in English as passive resistance. Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering?it is the reverse of resistance by arms" (245). This resolution shows Dopdi's incipient t ~ p ~ a t i t a - b e hbeyond g the gunas of nature-which become evident at the climactic ending. The third and climatic section of h e story begins with a mention of
Dopdi's formal interrogation which lasts an how and during which no one touches her. The details of this interrogation remain unstated in the storyf
which is interesting considering the attention accorded to Dopdi's self-
Ill preparation for action in the eventuality of an interrogation-that she will not reveal any information even if it means her death. What the interrogation shows is that information-retrieval is at best a secondary motive of her
capture; it may be argued that there isn't much she can tell Senanayak which he doesn't already know or cannot already divine about the enemy. The story also ends without imparting any information regarding this matter. What is certain, however, is the fact that rape as torture is very much the point of capturing Dopdi; in this her expectations are not deceived-she is indeed "countered" by the police force in a dose approximation of the way
she envisaged such a counter: "When they counter you, your hands are tied behind you [in her case, she is spread-eagled and tied to posts]. All your bones are crushed, your sex is a terrible wound" (OW 192). Though Dopdi's vision of a counter here is based on what happened to a male prisoner, it is significant that her own horrific experience as a female prisoner is not far removed: She too is tied down, spread-eagled and to posts, and as a consequence of gang-rape she too finds her sex to be a terrible wound: "Something sticky under her ass and waist-she senses her vagina is bleeding...her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples tom" (OW 195). This 'making" of the prisoner-Senanayak's casual and parting command to begin the procedure: "Make her. Do the needfil."-is quite literally the unmaking
of the dignity of a human being, be it a female Dopdi or a male Rana. What I
am saying here may offend feminist sensibilities, for I am ,after all, equating the suffering and humiliating experience of a woman's rape as equal to the suffering and humiliating experience of a man's torture (with or without the added possibility of homosexual rape). However, I think that I must make the claim that both males and females can be equally humiliated, tortured,
and "unmade," that is, made to lose their human dignity. This loss signals
the failure of and absolute violence against an ethical code. It is certainly
against all dharmic-ethics, an act that must be condemned. As an adhannic act, it is one that has lost all sense of the uniting Self, and thus unnaturally
worships satisfaction of the self and perpetrates an Asuric willful doing of
injury to others; it indicates a world "with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law...a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth" (EG 457). What then, is a tortured, bleeding, unmade Dopdi to do in her situation? How is she to react to her unmaking? The reactions expected from her are not described by the story, though we can surmise at the very least that she is expected to behave docilely, cover her body and wounds with her doth or sari and be escorted to her next interrogation. The way in which Dopdi does react, however, is absolutely against what is expected from someone who has been raped and unmade. The first signal that she gives of her defiance
happens when she tears the cloth or sari thrown at her by the guard and when she spills the pot of water on the ground-refusing to satiate her ravaging thirst and of washing her wounds. These actions demonstrate that Dopdi is willfully accepting further selfsuffering and that she is prepared for self-sacrifice; clearly, she has not been unmade. Her action here and subsequent defiance of Senanayak spell out the
Gandhian ethic of Satyagraha: "When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force...If I do not obey the law and accept the
penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self" (245). And in these terms, one can see that Dopdi has undergone a transformation, from
being a terrorist to being a s a t y a p h i ; whereas earlier her defiance of the law depended on the guerrilla tactics of surprise attacks, killings, and evasion, her present defiance constitutes an unarmed confrontation with the law with the
knowledge that she will endure further pain, torture, or death. This transformation is evident from her willingness for self-sadce and continued personal suffering. Draupadi as tezrosist could see violence as the ody option to fight against *may&-*at
Draupadi was effectively
"countered-" Draupadi as satyag~uhi,on ihe other handr rejoins poEtics and religion and begins to pedom "every one of her] actions in the light of 299). Dopas ~ ~ r e o ~ e n t a ies osuch n that it can ethical p ~ c i p l e s (Gandhi "
said to exceed the codes of the Army Handbook (something which she cannot said to have done at any earlier point in the stmy); thus the flummoxed guard who "doesn't know what to do if the prisoner behaves heomprehemibly" (OW 196). And when a naked and bleeding h p d i confronts Senmayak, he
too cannot understand the meaning of her behavior/ and particularly of her "hdomitable laughter." What kind of laughter is this? Clearly, it is not a demented or depraved laughter, since such a reaction would be very much within the parameters of the official expectation. It is most likely this
impetus of passive resistance which prompts her to offer herself up for further seE-sdfedg and puts the fear of god in Senmayak.
h the context of remaking the self, 1 would like to consider Kavita Panjabi's article, "Physical Torture and Modes of Creative Expression: A Study of "Cambio de h a s " and "Dra~padi"~ which provides an attempt to invest a creative charge to the re-making process.
makes two si@cant
In doing so,however, Panjabi
errors. She takes it for granted that the re-making is
going to be new and creative, and not simply dictated by the power-smcmes which were responsible for the unm&g
(and the original made-self) in the
first place. The second error o c m s when she reiies on an identify that is kept constant in the un-making and re-making processes. The following excerpt is problematic and serves to illustrate both points:
And in bath stories the dialectics of the loss of Dower versus the desire to control one's o m existence leads to a proce& of regaining agency in
which each woman's subjectivity is recodified though creative
It is hard to guess what, if anything, the italicized portion signifies. What makes the rebuilding process creative? How can it be creative if it depends on the identity that has been m a d e ? h d how can an m a d e identity still perform as itself and shdtmeowly as a restorative force? As long as it is ''subjectivity" that is being "re~ociified~" how can this lead to a different subjecthood? And finallyr to address an implicit assumption of her text, what
m&es this process unique to a f a d e victim? h other words, what is the transition between m-g-forced
by a rnde ideology and power-
structure-and the creative remaking attributed to woman? There is no substantiation provided in answer to these important questions that are nonetheless raised by Pmjabi's text. The answer, 1 feelf lies beyond the exigencies of discursive flip-flop and in the redm of the dhamic-ethical processes animating all human inter-actions. In Dopdi's caser for example, we see intimations of a saffwicsurge even before she geis captured and refer to the her insights about self-sacrifice). Without undergoes her ordeal (I this sizttwic awakening, her defiant response after the ordeal would not have
held any force of conviction. Thus, Panjabi's feminist bid to force a male female axis on the orientation of her interpretation is superficial and inaccurate; the truth of the matter is far removed from the following statement: "Draupadi derives the power of agency from the strength of her identityf her identity as a woman &&en@g a male oppressive act'' (93). One sees instead that Dopdi as a hum= agent derives her force from
espousing self-sacrificeand self-suffering as she resists to become a player or counter-player in an inhmm system bereft of ethicd values. Panjabi's claimf that "Ikaupadiregains mer agency] in the use of her own bodyf the victim of the attack, as t~ weapon of attaclf (94If emphasis mine), misses the project of the story entirely, and does so because her inteqretive approach is sold an the Western binary of Self and Otherf whish in this case is recast as
the oppressive m a l e / ~ c W e dfemale. In the flip-flop that leads nowheref Panjabi sees the female reversing roIes. So that in Panjabi's end, h a n a y & is afraid when Ropdi pushes him with her two mang1d breasts because those breasts are 'rweaponsof attadc"! This interpretation is simplistic, and reduces
the ethical import of the story. Panjabi is not done in forcing the urgency of a feminist reading upon the text. Spivak sees the project of the story to '%re& this bonded identity
[man'sapparently self-adequate identityf which sustains his theory-practice juggling act] with the wedge of an -SONABLE
feart'-as apposed to
*'reasonablet'fear, I suppose-(179). The fear refaed to i s one felt by Senanayak at the end of the story when a naked, torn and bleeding Dopdi mbs her breasts against him in the courtyardf challenging him to "co~nter~" her-
"come on, counter me-come on, counter me-?"(196). Structurallyf however, the text suggests that Senmayak's identity isf at this point, no more or less
bonded than Dopdi's, or the pard's, or even the naxrator's. What the story tells us supports Spivak's assertion; however, the manner in which it is told suggests that the subject-posi~omhave been dis-closed in a way that makes Spivak's reading inaccurate. In fact, it can be said in Spivakian terms itself that the story (t5nonc6) takes us to the brink of (but not beyond) a discursive displacement horn militancy to differential sexualify, whereas the text as
statement (&onciation) perforxis a translation from the discourse of dialectic into that of detemton&a~oa24 The fobwing question arises here: if the subaltern reveals herself in direct contradiction to patriax&d hegemony and thereby makes her voice
heard only as the shout of a hitherto silenced term in the Binary, what is the effective strength of her ethical subject position? Spivak's suggestion that the
project of the story is "to break [Senmayak's] bonded identity with the wedge of an measonable fear'' (185)does nothing to represent the "subdtem*'as a viable alternative subject and voice; on the contrary, her suggestion is yet another instance in which the name of the subaltern is sublated to the higher requirement of patronpy. In fact? no effective ''&a.nslation" is shown to have taken place; that is, It is ironic, then, that when Spivak Ends in
Senamyak "theclosest appro-ation
to the First-World scholar in search of
the third worlds*(OW 1759,not only does she admittedly find herself?but I would argue that she finds herself as a First World Chientalist capable only of reproducing the terns of enlightenment, of Western hmanist discome.
The moment when Draupadi begins to figure as the d e t e m t o ~ a b e d body without organs occurs just before her find "engagement" with Senanayak: [Senmayak] sees Rraupadi, naked?waking toward him in the bright sunlight with her head held high. The nervous guards trail behind. What is this,he is about to cry?but stops. Draupadi stands before him?naked. Thigh mci pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds- (OW 196)
2 4 ~refer to her statement regarding S z a a d u y h i : "At this point, if, therefore, the story (&nonce) se1ls us of the failure of a translation or discursive displacement from religion to militancy, the text as statement (6nonciation) participates in such a translation...from the discourse of religion into that of politicat critique." (266)
Senmayak's siIence heralds the advent of kaupadi's body without organs
which announces the transformative movement &om one semiotic into another?specifically from the si-g
semiotic, in which ''overcoding is
fully effectuated by the sipifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it," into khe p o s t s i m g semiotic, "inwhich a sign or a padcet of s i p detaches
fiom the irradiating c5nm.k~ network and sets to work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into a narrow, open passage*" (W 121?135). As a body without organs, Draupadi has become the s&o
deliberately scrambling the codes of hanayak's signfiying regime: "the s&o
has [her] own system of coordinates for situating [herlself at [her]
disposal-..she has at her disposal her very o m recording codef which dues not coincide with the soaal code.--" (A015).
So it is that the signifier "manf'used by Draupadi in her address and taunt-"you can strip me?but how can you dothe me again?are you a man?"
(196)- is not so much the indictment of mmz's self-adequate identity , as Spivak would have it?but of a gmdered and repressive historical State itself is emptied of meaning as it is tom apparatus. At this moment "manf1
from its circle of si@mce detemtofi&ation.
and plunged into the r e a h of a delirious
h ihe end? the find moment of the stov-"Draupadi
pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time
Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid." (196)shows Dopdi victorious at having effected a transsemiotic fissure.
The anti-Oedipal framework brings us closer than Spivaks deconstruction with a feminist bias to the "truih"of the story* But what good is a transsemiotic fissure if it is not accompanied with m agenda or a meaningful course of action, or, an ethical justification? The moment when the naked and bleeding Draupadi c ~ ~ o nSenmayak ts isf as we have seenf
the moment of detemtorialization. Useful as the concept of detemtorialization appears in aiding a critique of literary theories which
privilege the constructedness of language along with its inherent deconstructive aspects, it ends up in a dead end by not being able to impart to the deterritorialized object a course of action that is more meaningful than the delirious and almost psychopathological escape through "lines of flight."
In fact, detemtorialization of this land seems nothing more than yet another ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy, speaking from a selfavowed Gandtuan perspective, declaims: "it has become more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies which have reduced major aviteations to the status of a set of empty rituals" (x). Clearly, Draupadi in her mangled and violated condition represents extreme suffering. At this point, her message to Senanayak can be understood only by recalling the imperatives of dhamic-ethical action as outlined in the Gita. It is interesting that the third section shows only the exterior of Draupadi-no inner thoughts, no insight to what's going on in her mind. This supports my claim that we are dealing primarily with forces and processes of Nature and the Self, and secondarily with identifiable "subjects;"
our interpretive recourse is solely to the external actions performed by Dopdi. Her actions can be seen as a sattwic sacrifice performed for the sake of a higher truth, an ethical failure that she has suffered through and that she must
contest. Her contestation, as it is depicted, becomes an instance of "Work done with a disinterested religious faith or selflessly for humanity or impersonally from devotion to the Right or the Truth" (EG 471). Dopdi's behavior is not predicated on the motive of revenge, as Spivak has
erroneously concluded in a more recent introduction to the story: "In Draupadi, what is represented is an erotic object transformed into an object of torture and revenge where the line between (hetero)sexuality and gender violence begins to waver" (BS vii). It must be said here that Spivak's erotichation of Dopdi is unwarranted by the thematic and structural economy of the story. Spivak's assignation of "revenge" to the story is also equally inappropriate. Punishment not revenge is that which motivates Dopdirs rape
and torture by the police; when Dopdi pushes Senanayak with her mangled breasts, it is hard to see how her act "does hurt or harm to another in return for wrong or injury suffered" (OED). Senanayak suffers neither injury nor pain from Dopdi's action but fear. And as I have argued above, it is fear of the unknown, precisely the fear of ksetrajnic ignorance, a realization of the
inhuman lack of adhamic-ethical basis for his ksetric dispensations. Senanayak's mute and fearful reaction is the reaction of an Asuric official confronted by the superior power of the Deuasic Dopdi. Senanayak's fear is occasioned by Dopdi's superior knowledge that has combined the knowledge of both the ksetra and the Ksetragya. At this moment, Dopdi offers a sattwic sacrifice, her action is done without a personal motive, certainly not revenge, and as there is no personal action there is likewise no personal fruit that she
seeks. hi sum, Dopdi's sattwic action is "done impersonally, universally, for the good of the world, for the fulfillment of the divine will in the universe" (EG 471).
It is thus not at the deconstructive, nor feminist, nor solely deterritorial planes that the story makes its impact but at the dharmic-ethical plane. This is not to say that Spivak's criticism is unethical but it comes close in its
obeisance to the discursive GOD. It is Spivak's deconstructive framework
which allows her to conceive of and discuss "ethical singularity" as a "secret
encounter" demonstrated by the "impossibility of "love" in the one-on-one way for each human being"(xxv); it is through the ethical moment so conceived that she makes the following claim: "Thisis why ethics is the experience of the impossible" (xxv). Spivak's claim makes perfect sense in the world of the displaced and displacing signifiers, which admittedly is an
irrepressible deconstructive feature of all signification; pragmatically speaking, however, her statement is meaningless and does blatant disservice to the work of such an author/activist as Mahasweta Devi. The lived reality of ethics, and of (ftarmic-ethics in particular, makes no claim to a
significatory self-sufficiencynor to a logical rationality; to the contrary, dftarmic-ethics signals the non-discursive interconnection between the self
and Self which is the inescapable quality of the fabric of being and existence. Spivak comes curiously dose to broaching this non-discursive truth, in her introduction to the Breast Stories, at the moment when she briefly discusses maternal ethics in the moment of breast-feeding: The infant has one object with which to begin to construct the systems of truth (meaning)and goodness (responsibility) which will make it human. This object is its source of nourishment, deprivation, and sensuality-usually the breast. At weaning and before, the breast-and, secondarily, other part objects-become "symbolized" and recognized as whole persons. (BS xv). What this formulation belies is Spivak's own attachment to the breast of
discourse. It is replete with problems, all of which center around her blinkered viewpoint which sees nothing apart from the discursive possibilities of a breast-feeding situation. To say that the infant has but one object of the breast to begin constructing its truths and responsibilities can
make sense only if this Spivakian breast-feeding takes place in an environment of absolute sensory deprivation of any other kind of stimulus! For it ignores nine of the "ten senses and one" outlined in Gita: the eye, ear,
skin, tongue, nose, and the organs of action, the hand, foot, mouth, anus, and
genital organ, and the mind (I have discussed these in my second chapter). The experience of breast-feeding is but a minor part in the experiential realm
of the child. Clearly, Spivak's infant sucks in the vacuum of discourse. In
assuming a symbolizing function to the child's activity, she again forces it into a discursive realm and attributes a subjectivity to the child's actions.
How is a child, if indeed a dean slate of sorts, to assimilate "partial" objects as
'symbols"for "whole" persons? In this regard, I refer the reader to Cynthia Willett's discussion of maternal ethics, who at the onset acknowledges the importance of her personal motherhood experience in her text, and does so as
she is aware that the mother child relationship is a primary sodality between a ore-subject and a subject, that the tactile experience of caress is all-important in the development of this sodality, and that the social bond is music and
dance. Spivak's short-sighted and erroneous claims are useful in demonstrating the inadequacy of discourse worship, especially when it conies to the question of formative ethics and of dharmic-ethics. It leads to the selfdeluded tamasic satisfaction of stating that "ethics is the experience of the impossible."
That we should obey laws, whether good or bad is a new fangled notion..& is contrary to out selfhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and means slavery. The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi.
Chapter 4
Men like Us: Waiting/or the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians stands out in Coetzee's swore as the novel
most directly concerned with the nature of ethical responsibility and its intimate contact with the extra-discursive "unteachablef'core of human
being. The evocation of the non-discursive agency of ethics as primary sociality is figured through the many mysterious gestures depicted in Coetzee's lyrical and allegorical novel. This figuration importantly exceeds the bounds of discourse-fixated engagement which is a commonplace critical
attribute of Coetzeefsauthorial intentionality; exemplary, in this regard, are the following statements:
In Waiting for the Barbarians one finds a point at which history, in failing to transform the terms of discourse, becomes objectified as the myth of history, or History; with teleology thus undermined, the discursive nature of history is thrown into relief." (Atwell 14) In W a i w for the Barbarians, allegory is thematised as a means of articulating the liberal humanist crisis of interpretation, while at the same time allegory is employed as a structural device in order to imply
the inevitable imbrication of the novel's own discourse with the discourses it deconstructs. (Dovey, CPC 141) Both Atwell and Dovey are sensitive to the permutations of a post-structural analysis, and are right in finding in Barbarians some of the major elements that inform post-modem and post-colonial critiques, such as "History,"
"humanist crisis of interpretation," and self-reflexive strategy. The power of the novel, however, is dependent not only on its intellectual discursive strategies but ultimately in its homage to true knowledge, that is, a knowledge which combines the knowledge of the ksefra or field with the knowledge of
the Ksefragya or knower of the field. The narrative is mobilized in the first person of the magistrate, who is an acute observer of the ksetra but also of the nature of his ethical responsibility as a Ksetraeya. Waiting for the Barbarians, then, is a novel that investigates the nature of dharmic-ethics and in doing so
acknowledges the need for a revision which forefronts the unknowable eternal mystery of life. The arrival under emergency powers of colonel Joll of the Third Bureau of the "Empire" sets off the chain of events in Waiting for the Barbarians. The magistrate finds his tranquil and tamasic existence shattered
b y Joll's single-minded pursuit of investigating a purported barbarian revolt against the Empire. As Joll conducts torture interrogations upon his prisoners, the magistrate finds himself repulsed, angered, and confused. The magistrate's ethical principles make him abhor everything that Joll represents, not least the Empire of which he, too, is a representative. After Joll's departure, the magistrate takes in a young barbarian girl who has been
deformed and partially blinded by Joll's torture. Their relationship is indicative of the magistrate's need to repair an ethical breach, figured not least by his ambiguous desires towards her. He decides, finally, to return the
barbarian girl to her people, and sets off on a perilous expedition to do so. Upon his return, he is incarcerated as a traitor to Empire, and undergoes a long process of humiliation and torture. His incarceration forces him out into the open, so to speak, about his absolute opposition to the activities of the Third Bureau. He risks sacrificing his life for his principles. At the end of
the novel, the Third Bureau meets with defeat (and not so much with the
Barbarians) and leaves the frontier town in a state of devastation and exodus, wherein the magistrate resumes his official functions and awaits an uncertain
future. Waitins for the Barbarians hinges upon torture and the ethical crisis produced by it. Susan GaUagher, in "The Novelist and Torture," has addressed the South African background which relates to the deployment of torture in Coetzee's novel. Specifically, the Soweto uprising of June 1976 led to a sixteen-month period of social unrest and unconscionable Police
brutality. The volatile state of affairs reached a dangerous point with the death of Stephen Biko, the charismatic leader of the Black People's Convention, under mysterious circumstances after spending a month in detention with the Security Police (112-118). These events were among the inexorable consequences of the apartheid policies sanctioned by the National Party which gained control of South African policy-making in 1948. Though rumors of state-sponsored torture existed aplenty since then, the events culminating in Biko's death had important repercussions, not least at the global level: "the issue of South Africa filled public discourse of all kindsfrom government reports to protest poems, from United Nations declarations to novels" (112). Coetzee's response in Barbarians to the issue of state oppression and to torture, in particular, consciously avoids historical specificity of any kind
except for the menfion of m d e h ~ o n e sunglasses d and guns which wodd place the narrative anywhere after the ~ e m - c m * .
Certain South-
African critics have viewed the allegorical approach as insufficiertfly political
and thus escapist, blaming Coetzee for his avoidance of addressing the material and historical determinants of Imperialismf the economic processes
of capitalismf the contmpormeom political struggle in South-eta, and for his seeming lack of an ideolo@cdp v o w f i e s s . This leads to dissatisfied claims such asf "Coetzeefsfictional h g u a g e can say next to nothing outside the modality of its o m racial-historical didectic" ( V a ~ g h mandf ) ~ Barbaria~s shows the lack of a moral courage "as it ultimately challenges nothingf"
providing no more than "the mnocous malediction of an idealistic humanism finding itself in alien temtory" (in Penner 23-29). These critical responses to Coetzee's aesthetic effort failf most importantly, to appreciate the significmce of an ethical inquiry into the justification of all action in the various fields of politics, capitalism, historicismf Imperialismf and so on. In
devaluing the scope and power of ethical revisioning in the medium of artf these critics obey the laws of rational discourse and support its reign-md its ultimate haax-of language. Tisat isf they share a belief in the inescapable textuality of all events and actions, whether their stance be post or anti
modernist, past or anti colonialistf pro or con Coetzee. Huggan and Watson,
who rightly condemn the skeptical m t i c s for being entrenched in a binatism of po~tics/aestheticswhich approaches the crudeness and reductiveness of racial thinkingf'(CPC 3)f are themselves unable to posit the step beyond the textual when they ask about the nature of the "space elsewhere" and the "margin of fkeedom" that Cwtzeefsfiction creates- In the jaded gesture of discourse a c c o ~ o d a t i o nthey f refer to the customary Yhid" space between
binarism, the space in the m a w as they begin to seek an explanation and
meaning for the fact that Coetzee's fiction remainst in the final analysis, mysterious as it refuses to provide answers after having dissolved eitherlor categories "into a n ~ f i e n elaborate-play of paradox and contradiction'' (7)*
But what is paradox if not the moment of the unmashg of dl discursive certitude? Paradox is the ephemeral glimpse into the infinite in whose
domain it is that discourse signifies. Paradox is the reminder of the etemd mystery of life which rational discourse, in its dep10yment of objectivity and certitudes, tries to cover up. Paradox, h d l y , is the explosion of the Self's Other. It is in the necessity to silence paradox#then, that most Western academic critics leave untouched the universal binary and didectic of Self
and Other. It is the crucial investigation of the self Iaunched by the act of tortme in Barbarians that at once exposes the k i t s of binary dideetic and of language,
undoing the Self/Oher dichotomy as well as the recourse to ephtemolo@cal certitude. Coetzee,, in a&owled@g
that B a r b ~ ~ a nissa novel "about the
impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of comdence," proposes two reasons for the fact that to-e
exerts a "dark fascination" for (South
African) writers. First, torture provides "a metaphor, bare and extreme#for relations between a u t h o ~ t a d ~ sand m its victims" @I?
363). The barbarian
girl as well as the magistrate are victimized by the Third Bureau of EmpireCoIonel JoU wields a power sanction that is unopposable in me-terms. The resistance to JoU, then, takes place in the form of a Gandhian ahimsa or nonviolence and sawapaha or truth-espousal (though the concept of tmth is one that is problematized by the novel, and will be &cussed below) which is
evinced not only by the magistrate but is also reflected in the attitude of the girl towards JoU and the experience of torture, and in the aftermath of her life in her relationship with the magistrate who is unable not to echo the role of
inquisitor. Coetzee's second reason for the writer's dark fascination relates to the torture room and its experience, which provide that which is inaccessible to language, through the pain and destruction of the victim's self-digpity* The writer, as the magistrate and as Coetzee, hces the &aUenge and the need to represent and understand the event as it affects its partiupants. Of coursef the magistrate is a direct participant as victim of torturef but this does not
help him in any way to find expression to his experience, to give meaning to it in words, as is shorn by his repeated Mure to write his own history, to document his pain. But for Coetzee the author, the fact of torture produces two moral dilemmas* Coetzee's admission of being faced with such dilemmas is
extremely significant not only as it describes the context of the magistrate's actions in Barbarians?but because it sign& paradox and contradiction as the
conceptual base for the ethical inquiry undertaken by him, by Coetzee as author, and by the magistrate as failed author in the story. It is notable here that Coetzee, as opposed to the magistratef has managed to record a d o m e n t which indicts an Empire in which torture i s sanctioned. But in doing so in an
ethical way which exceeds the bounds of contained response sanctioned by the State's sigmfjhg reghnes, Coetzee has perforce written his work as a gesture to the inexpressible truth, the eternal mystery,
which lies au-dela du discuzm
and fkom which the fact of ethics as primary sociality stemsf both as spiritual reality and a condition of faith. Coetzee describes the two moral dilemmas for the writer as foUows. The first arises from the effort to resist the urge to make the "vile mysteriesi'
of the '*darkfforbidden &amberttof torture the occasion of fantasy (DP364)Since torture is conducted by the State in secrecy, it is an obscenity enveloped
in mystery and thus "creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its
work of repremtation" (364). Coetzee sees the dilemma0then, as one proposed by the state itself, namely to ipore its obscenities or eke to produce r e p r a a b ~ o mof it0so that "the true chdengewbecomes '%ow not to play the game by the rules of the stater how to establish one's own authoriv, how n (364). Coetzeet 1 fed, to imagine torture and death on one's ~ w termsf'
meets this cbUmge in Barbarians by mobilizing an &+fare fminin or feminine writing that exposes the knits of rational discourse and hearkens to
relationship. The second dilemma concerns the person of the tamer-"how is the writer to represent the torturer?" The problem here concern avoiding
the trivialhation of the experience of torture through the use of the various clich&sthat abound in describing the torturer as evil incamate. To s a t h e the torturer is to avoid responsibility in the system which sanctions torture
and this saps the writing of any ethical farce. Coetzeelsfictional torturer Joll is shown to be inscrutable, but his (in)hmanity is approached time and time
again as the magistrate finds the distance between himself and his torturers collapsing. In the endf of course, the magistrate reaIizes that what makes him different from JoU is the fact that he cannot reconcile his participation h the
(m)etJxicsof Joll's regime and is willing to pay with his life for his refusal to participate. To make this realization the magistrate follows not a line of reasoningf nor of rationalizing, but of eras for the Self of dl human lifeCoetzeevsnovel is an attempt to negotiate a movement towards a time when humanity will be restored across the face of society, and therefore when all human acts, including the flogging of an animal, will be retuned to the ambit of moral j u d p m t ....W e n the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one's eyes awayf then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of lifet and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design. (DI? 368).
The reaction that Coetzeers novel instantiates is an ethical sods
e
~ by ~a human g being implicated in the system which sanctions tortwe
of the Other- Gallagher notes that Cwtzee combines the allegorical form with a text emphasizing gaps and uncertainties to show, through '*thepersona of a weak and wondering man who continually f i ~ d that s words f d him'' (Ul), the failure of authority, of pen and penis, and of Impage. The result of the magistrate's ethicd seu-eqlora~unis not a failure but a bredsdown or destruction of the Self md Other dialectic which serves as the structural
foundation of Empire and validates its various conquests This dialectic is recast in the bin&=
of mpke/colany, master/slave, man/wornan,
b h h e s s /sight, law/b=b&mr
e q e d i a q / e (Penner), ~ ~ bat Watson
misreads the failure of the dialectic that Coetzee orchestrates in Barbczriiz~s: "so much of Coetzeetswork can be viewed as a failed dialectic, a world in
which there is no synthesisf in which the very possibility of a synthesis seems to have been permanently excluded" (382). The failure of dialectic represents
not the failure of a possibility of synthesis, but takes us beyond the scope of dialectical synthesis itself. Indeed, the force of Coetzeetsethical vision can be understood only if we are wilhg to accept the inadequacy and fictive certitude of the Imperial dialectic which Others the othersf and instead perfarm, as does the magistrate, a revaluation of our ethical determinants in the light of a self/%lf universalism. But to do so means to diminish our obeisance to D ~ S C Oand W ~its~run of didectier binarismst and d e c o m ~ c t i o mand f to ground the unknowable, the eternal mystery of lifethat is everywhere hidden in the gapsf absmcesr aporias of textuality-not
with a view to acquisition but to celebration. Such a revaluation is dharmicethical in nature and is realized by the magistrate when he intercedes in the
cruelest Imperial moment at the risk of his We, with the acceptance of selfs a d i c e for his ethical belief.
In this respectf Barbara Ecksiein's conclusion that the magistrate's experience teaches him that knowledge from language is less certain than knowledge oflfrom pain approaches the ethical message of the novel- Her Foucauldian reading of the novel is heavily influenced by Elaine %arryrs invaluable study on torturef 7?ze Body in Pain. S c q rightly claims that the god of t o m e f espeaally in its s t a t e s m ~ o n e dm m t i e * - c m q
form, is
nowhere the extraction of truth but the destruction of the self-hood of the tortured subject whose expression of pain, rn indisputable yet k c o m d c a b l e qualityf validates the metaphysics of presence on which the totalitarian regime depends; in other wordsf **tartureproduces the truth for it produces painf and pain is certain presencef'*@&stein 87, mdf in SC~XTY@S wordsf "physical pain is so incontestably red that it seems to confer its quality reality" on that power that has brought it into being. It isf of of @'incontestable coursef precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestablef the regime so unstable, that torture is being usedTf(90). These statements accurately reflect the designs that inform JoUfs character and Jd's Empire; they do not, howeverf justxfy Eckstein'~claims xegarding the nature of the tortured Barbarians and barbarian girl- In fact, Eckstein misreads or reads into the novel that which is absent when she asserts that JoU "destroy[s] the world, the civilization, of his prisoners- pain and his voice make them baxbarians, people who live only on the level of
sentience'' (80). Though the barbarians do fill the role of the Other in the Empire's economy of seu-dewtion, the magistrate's account provides no information that would validate any reciprocity in the relationship; both
barbarian ontology and epistemokqig remain an absolute mystery, and this
fact is in keeping with the motif of ' % ~ ~ w ~hic sh sp e' ~~a d e sihe magistrate's account- The *'civihaiionr'of the nomadic barbarians is never represented by the ma@bateneiha their language nor their culture- The closest infomation we get as to their mentality or intention comes through when the magistrate addresses the new officeresquestion, "what are these b a b d a n s dissatisfied about? what do they want hom us?" (50). His answer is that the barbarians consider ihe Empire a transient and xnhidormed nuisance trying to impose its will on a desert land fated to remain wild: "they
still think of us as visitors, transients...At this very moment they are saying to themselves, "Be patientFone of these days their aops will start withering from the saltf they will not be able to f e d themselves, they will have to go.'' That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast ust' (51). This evaluation shows on the one hand that the Empire is regarded as an enterprise that is doomed by the very territory it needs to domesticate as proof of its colonid conquestf and on the other hand, that the barbarians have not in any significant manner been Co10&edF perhaps as a necessary coroUary of
their contiwing nomadic life. Lronicdy, Ecksteids &representation of the effect of the JoU experience an the barbarianis being-that Joll destroys the barbarian's civilizationf reflects her imposition of an ontology where there isn't any (least of all a Self/Other) and thus unwittingly allies her with the colonial barbarity she elsewhere decries: "Coetzee indicts colonial barbarity, indeedf all interpretation of "barbarians"by bmbarow authority and its ideology of othernessft(Eckstein 88). If anythingf the barbarians that are captured and tortured by Jollseem dueless victims of the procedure; the Empire exists monolo@ticdy in the territory it has annexed, it has no dialogue of any kind with whatever civilization the Barbarians comprise.
At the base of the barbarian world-view that is proHered by the magistrate lies the only indicator suggesting that the barbarian ontologyf whatever eke it may be, is a function of cyclical and seasonal h e ; their nomadic Eves and migrations born the flat lands to the mountains and beyond and back are dictated by the change in seasons and the interdependence of l i v e s i d and vegetation. It would be no exaggeration ta assert that the cyclicaf barbarian time represents a f
d
e alternative to the
masadhe cosmoIogy of Empire?the latter arguably being psychopathic in its severance from and need to impose its will on Nature. The magistrate? whose actions in the ksefra demonstrate the rejection of the Self/Mer dialectic?condemns the h e a r and teleolo@caltime of Empue and its virulent History: What has made it impossible for us to five in time like fish inwater, like birds in air?like childxen? It is the fadt of Empire! Empire has mated the time of histary. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the season but in the jagged time of rise and f d 8 of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire d o o m itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era (133). Colonel JoU's mission under emergency powers seems no more than just such a panic ploy of pro1ongation.
The novel's time is carefully set-up to undo the totalizing and hear h e of Imperial history* The narrative is framed within one seasonal cycle: Jo1I1sadvent upon the scene is concomitant with winter8 the ma@batets
expeditian to return the girl to the barbarians takes place at the cusp of spring
and the first sighting of the barbarian horsemen occurs on the first spring day-''warmer air, dearer skies, a gentle windtt(681,the period of his incarceration and torture coincides with the most mcodortable part of a scorching summer?JoKs h a 1 exodus marks an attempt to outride the onset of winter,
and the novel ends with the onset of a new winter which £indthe magistrate feehg confused about We in general. The attention paid by the magistrate to the cyclical time of natural events Imds a mytholo@cd aspect to his story, and
supports his anti-imperial desire: '7 wanted to Eve outside history. 1 wanted to live outside the histov that h p i r e imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects- 1 never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire Iaid on them'' (1%).
Considering the eventual fdure of
JoU's enterprise to subdue the b a r b ~ a n sand the barbarians' trimph is retaining their nomadic invisibility, it can be said that the novel ceiebrates the victoq of cyclical time. The magistrate's tale is a postmodem allegory that u s noncenfxdizes the h e t i o n of storytehg as a s e l f ~ o n s u ~ and authoritative discourse and, as Susan Gallagher suggests, the "ability to tell stories, stories that contain unheard voices and work on an emotional and evocative level, provides one way to battle the monophonic and autocratic discourses of historytf(48). Linear history is subordinated to the cyclical time
of eternal recurrence, as is evident in the magistrate's s d s e , among f&e ancient ruins, that history is repetitive and not telecdogical:
Perhaps ten f e t below the floor lie the ruins of mother fort, razed by the b a r b ~ a n speop1ed , with the banes of folk who thought they would find safety b e h d the high wak. Perhaps when 1 stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, 1stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, mother gray-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face with the last Barbarian? How will 1 ever h o w ? (15-16) The novel's deconstruction of historical ceriitude is most strongIy
expressed in the mobilization of various semiotic system with an intent of exposing the arbitrariness of aIl sipdication. Most important amongst these are the slips of poplar wood that the magistrate has discovered amongst the
ruins. The magistrate has recognized what seem to be four hundred
characters of an unknown &ptf which he has ~ u c c e s s t~rieyd for yeass to decode. h fact, he is not even sure if the characters represent elements h a
*'syllab~,'' they might even be a pictorial representation "whose outline would leap at me if 1 struck on the right arrangmenk a map of the land of the barbaxians in older times, or a representation of a lost panthean" (16)-h a later momentf the current h p e r i d enterprise of mapping is shown to be inaccurate as the magistrate's expedition finds out that what appears to be a lake-bed is not so: "we have not left the lake behind, we now realize: it stretches beneath us heref soznetirnes under a cover many feet deep? sometimes a mere parchment of brittle salt" (60)*= The poplar slips figure in the semiotic c3i.m~ of the novel?a scene in
which Colonel Joll questions the magistrater at this stage an accused traitor and barbarian conspiratorf regarding their meaning. The magistrate's interpretations are p q o s e f d l y ironic and mock the epistemolo@cal
certitude of JolI's Empire. Joll draws the "reasonable iderencettthat the slips contain i'messages'tpassed between the magistrate and barbarian parties. Despite his initial reaction?"I do not even how whether to read from right to left or &om left to r i g h t J have no idea what they stand forti(llO)? the
magistrate plays dong and '*reads8' out a message which conforms with JoUts expectationsfa message horn a barbarian father who sends his love to his daughter. He then picks out another slip and reads a si.rniJar message?and another in which he deliberately exposes the fictive status of his reading, by
citing one of the earliest "accidents1'of Joll's torture hvestiga~on:"We went * s ~ e r e , the two dimensional map praves incommensurate with the threedimensional reality of the land in space-time. It is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Barges's story, "The Map of Empire," about the perfect map which literally covers the entire temtory to be mapped, and thus exists on a perfect 1:I scale with that which it represents. Even such a map, in the context of the layered invisibility of Coetzee's landscape, would prove to be inaccurate and incompLete.
to fetch your brother yesterday. They showed us into a room where he lay on
a table sewn up in a sheet" (111). Subsequently, he works his way through other slips, making each sign the site of a multivalent messages; his manipulation of the signs, then, signals his disaffection with the rule of
Empire by evoking the atrocities against ethical standards committed by Joll
and by, quite literally, flipping on its head the exercise of ascertaining the truth through the process of significatory systems: "It is the barbarian
character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no
knowing which sense is intended (112). There are, of course, other moments where the insufficiency of signsystems undo the dominance of one particular semiotic regime, and show the innately misleading desire to "read" certifiable meaning or truth into signs.
In competition with the semiotic regime of Empire, with its ledger of History and its Self/Other polarity, exist other domains and sites of signification, all of which prove equally inefficacious in imparting certainty of any kind. The magistrate regrets not having learnt the barbarian language when he has to
rely on the girl's interpretation of the barbarian chiefs speech at the moment of her return; having naively asked her to tell them the "truth," he catches part of their conversation but "cannot make out a word" (71). In his ritual
washing of the girl, he inspects and re-inspects the scars on her body, the marks of Empire's torture, with the hope of deciphering some truth "with his blind fingertips" about the event but remains unable to do so (45). He returns to the torture room after the first series of torture and examines it thoroughly
for signs of any kind and finding only "a mark the size of [his] hand where soot has been rubbed into the wall" (35). Later, when he is imprisoned as a torture-victim in the very same room, he hopes that his gaze, if intent
enough, will reveal "the imprint of all the pain and degradation," and that his hearing, if attuned finely enough, will detect "that infinitely faint level at
which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall"(7980). Later, in the same room, he notices three specks on the wall and
wonders for the thousandth time, "why are t h y in a row? Who put them there? Do they stand for anything?" (84). What becomes dear from these various expositions of the arbitrariness of semiotic systems is their inadequacy to signify the "truth." The truth that is sought by the magistrate is one that will recuperate ethics from the
inhuman abyss of a torture sanctioned by the Imperial regime of Self and Otherness. Early in the narrative, the magistrate shows his aversion to torture and his interest in the notion of truth. In his systematic torture of the prisoners, Joll tries to extract the "truth." The magistrate finds out that Joll's truth depends not on the extraction of information per se but on the hammering out of the right "tone." The first torture sequence involves an elderly man and his grandson, who are not barbarians but belong to the fisherfolk who do not even share the same barbarian language. Joll ignores the magistrate's plea that the couple's ignorance with regard to the purported
barbarian revolt against Empire is a foregone conclusion, and instead assures
him that he will sound out the "tone of truth:." "I am probing for the truth, in
which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see-this is what happens-first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth"
(5). In a realization that echoes Elaine Scany's discussion (above), the magistrate realizes that "Pain is truth. All else is subject to doubt" (5). Penner
does a disservice to the barbarians when he suggests that "these actions reveal -
Joll's barbarian character" (77), for there is no evidence in the novel to suggest
that the barbarians in any way ernploy a JoEan philusophy of truth, nor does the accepted definition of '%arbariadrconvey any sense of Statesmctioned and organized tortwe; Jell is the devil-&Id of the State as Empire and his crimes against the ethical sanctity of human relationships i s in no way "barbarian." What may safely be asserted with regard to JoWs actions is that he "is ethically b h d , as is the empire he represents" (77). Dick P m e r has likened the magistrate's incessant g u - q u e s ~ o ~ and g h p e r c o M o w awareness of his o m contexts to what ''Prince M y s W of
The Idiot c~s...l'doubl~~ought,*' literally, *'a doubling back of thought." This double&ought is compIemented by an over-riding will to the truth wihuui which the magistrate would remain paralyzed and unable to htewene at the risk of his Me against the cruelty of the Empire. Cruaal in the magistrate's search for the
truth is the realization he makes as to the
possibility that the ''truth" he searches for, the truth that would reconcile his Me and his ethics with the inhuman aspects represented by JuUrs regime of torturegis most Uely beyond rationalization and beyond language* h a moment which invokes the nun-discursive as the domain of truth and livedexperience as that which exceeds language, the magistrate experiences the dissipation of linguistic meaning: "or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put." 1 think My lips move silently, composing and recornpasing the words. "Or perhaps it is the case that o d y that which has not been articulated has to be lived through." I stare at this last proposition without detecting my answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words grow mare and more opaque before me; won they have lost ali meaning. (6465) David Atwell refers to Kermodefsperipetei~to suggest that what stares the magistrate in the face--"There has been something staring me in the facegand still I do not see it" (155)-is "history itseM, history as something brute,
impenetrable, and ultimately m e p m s e n ~ b l esomething ~ that wiU not be possessed by his efforts to produce a historical discoursett(76-77)-261 wodd argue that it is not simply history but &cowse's b c o m a u r a b f i v to
contain and represent experience and also the invisible ''truth" of the ethicd suciality of the Self that stares at the magistrate.
The theme of sight and blindness also serves to unde-e
the
%&Other dialectic, for the final implication is that the vision of a l l characters is identically distorted. This is reflected in the moments when the magistrate stares into the basbarian girl's eyes, only to find in them his own gaze: ''I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes, fiom which tmin reflections of myseZf stare solemnly back" (41, my emphasis). In a later momatr after he has yet again searched her blank face for an answer to his inchoate obsession with hert he makes the horrific reahation that '?theanswer that has been waiting d l the time offer[s] itself to
me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes fium which there comes no reciprocal gaze bat only my doubled image cast buck at metr (Ufmy emphasis). In the economy of this reflection, the magistrate doubles
as the inquisitor as J~llrhe doubles too as the girl as tortured victirn staring
back at herself in the lens of the torturer, and, importantly, the girl too doubles as the inscrutable torturer as JoU; the girl's blinded eyes are a version
of JoIIfsdark-glasses reflective eyes, and so she too mirrors the inquisitor- All thxee share the same problematic of vision, and the one doubhg that
remains absentf that of Joll doubling as the victimf is figured near the end, when JoU makes a pit-stop at the garrison before fleeing back to the Center-
2 6 ~ e eFrank Kennode in The Seme of GTZ Eading. Peripeteia is "the equivalent in narrative, of irony in rhetoric," where naive expectations of closure aredisconfirmed, leading to more complex, if unresolved, versions of the "truth" U8)F
This t h e , it is JoKs eyes that are naked and his mien vulnerable?and he remains enclosed in the dative safety of his carriage. The relationship here is properly inverted-it is he who tries to read the magistrate: "he looks out at
me?his eyes searching m y face. The dark lenses are gone" (146)The T o m e r / t o m e d dialectic, then, is dismantled by this strategic and visionary doubling that defies reductive and static bharism. This destruction is an essential aspect of the ethical force of Coetzee's narrative and the
magistrate's self-revision that refuses h e Imperial mistake and peril of
Othering. Our access to the h e t m or field is through the magistrate's being.
What is the Prakriti or Name that traverses the magistrate's being? To
answer this question, we need to consider the Gunas or qualities that inform his natural constitution, and then, both the contours of the knowledge the
magistrate has of his ksetm or field and the knowiecige he has of himself as
Ksefragya or knower of the field. At the onset of the story, the magistrate has a prepondermce of Tamas with a quickening saftwic inchation. Through
the course of his actions, he develops and subsequently foUows a Sattwic path
in which he is able to effectuate an ethically viable response to the events of torture. The end of the novel leaves the magistrate back where he began?
with a tamask anxiousness towards the uncertain hture. Let us consider below some of the indices of the magistrate's Prakritic constit~tion.2~
The magistrate's proclivity is towards maintaining the status quo; he has lived for thuty years in the remote outpost of empire?has become a slave
2 7 ~ u r o b i n d otells us that the three qualitative modes of Nature are inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence; "On their psychuIogiea1 side the three qualities may be defined, Turnas as Mature's power of nescience, Rajas as her power o f active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion, Sartwa as her power of possessing and harmonizing know1edge" (EG 413). For an extended discussi~a*see chapter 1.
to habitf a.1~3 doesn't welcome the idea of any change or disruption to his routine, least of all the m m b r m c e of Colond JoLi's visit. His initid reaction to the fact of unjustified torture is couched in ignorance and escapism: he regrets the fact that his "easy years," when he codd f'sleepwith a k m q d heaxt bowing that with a nudge here and a nudge there the world would stay steady on its coursef'' are corning to an end; he wonders if he should not do the "wise thing" by escaping to his 'Iunting and hawking and placid concupiscence wMe waiting for the provocations to cease'' (9). He more or less hopes h t Joll is a nighmare that will saon go awayf and that everything will xeturrt to what it once was- This tamasic desire, of wishing for a retum to a past state of affairs, is perhaps the most significant trait of the magistrate's Prafitic being, and dictates h e course of his relationship with the barbarian girl, who appeaxs on the scene immediately after his resolution "to restore the prisoners to
their former lives as soon as possible as far as
possibletr(25). He is unable to comprehend that his partiapation in the web of events is a foregone condusion; in an ironic moment, a guard he questions
regarding the treatment the barbarian girl received at the hands of her torturers echoes his wisM denid of complicity: *'Therewas nothing I could do, I did not want to become involved in a matter 1 did not understand!'" (37)-
The magistrate feels f'relievedttat JoKs temporav absence from the fort; that Joll has gone out on the hunt for more prisoners seems not to impinge on the magistrate's conscience or Tamas-having seen off Joll,he rides back "relieved of my burden and happy to be done again in a world I know and understand-..I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any pricefr(14). The price he pays for his tamasic indulgence is announced by the return of Joll
and his fresh batch of river people-and not even barbarians-as prisoners. At this point, the magistrate demonstrates a streak of rajas-he gets angered at
J o b callous brutality, anci finds himself aroused to indipant action: "I write
an angry letter to the Third Bureauf ~ I e e p h guardian g of the Empire, d e n o m ~ the g incompetence of one of its agents" (20)f and wonders if he can sneak out the prisoners without drawing attention to himself. Of course, in keeping witti the dictates of his dominant Tamas?he ''wiselyrttears up the letter anci subdues the urge for action-"But 1do nothingft(20). His tamasic streak persists to dominate his desires even as he returns from his expedition to reunite the barbarian girl with her people; when the fort becomes visible in the horizon?he yearm for "the f d a r routine of @xis]duties, the approaching summer?the long dreamy siestas?conversations with friends...with boys b ~ g h teaand g the eIigible girls in twos and threes promenading before us on the squaxe in their finery1'(75). In the first movement of the book which culminates with his reception as traitor to the Empire, we are shown a magistrate who refuses to acknowledge the fact that the "familiar world'' has been transformed and needs for him to adapt if he is to find ethical justification for his life.
There has, of course, been a sattwic idding asserting itself throughout the course of the magistrate's actions in the ksetra, signaled by the fact that he can neither escape in placid concupiscence nor ignore the goings-on initiated
by JoIl. Faced with JoWs interrogation, his sizftwic nature struggles against his habitual Turnas as he firtds his eqtdibrim disturbed. He finds himself unable to simp1y ignore the cries of pain and escape on a hunting trip. Instead?he is compelIed to action which he h u w s is an interference on JoUs work; however, in *'@espasshg ...on what has become holy or unholy gromd? if here is my differencef preserve of the mysteries of the State" (6),he shows a desire to attain howledge of what is happening in an effort to regain his
peace of mind, his fading equanimity. Once he takes up the lantern and goes
to investigate first-hand the scene and victims of torture, a satfmic rise against his tamasic turpitude is declenched, that is, "the principle of understanding, knowledge and of according assimilation, measure and equilibrium" takes up its struggle against "the forces of inertia and nescience" (EG414). As a result of examining the torture victims, one a young boy with a hundred
knife scars, the other an old man who is dead as a result of his experience, the magistrate realizes that he cannot condone Joll's regime: "I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down againi' (21). His ambiguous relationship with the barbarian girl is prompted by his search for a knowledge that will provide an ethical justification for his life
and, as noted earlier, by his misconstrued desire to restore things-and in this case her body-to their condition before the torture experience. It is clear that torture represents a crime against humanity and the magistrate seeks to recreate an ethical and/or social bond that has been annihilated by Toll's
efforts. The ethical crisis in his life manifests itself even at the level of the hunt; whereas he once could hunt with rajasic satisfaction, feeling "enabled to live again all the strength and swiftness of [his] manhood [feeling] a pure
exhilaration" (39), he now has the sense that the hunt "has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to
death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim" (39-40). The hunt as ritual has lost all its meaning as rite or "formal procedure or act in a religious or
other solemn observance" (OED). It is not surprising, therefore, that he initiates a new ritual for himself, one that entails the ministration of caress
on the barbarian girl.
The magistrate's relationship with the girl marks the site where discourse proves insufficient for meaning and for generating the "truth;" additionally, the relationship shows the efforts the magistrate makes to reinvest his actions with an ethical imperative. Though most critics have
taken the relationship to circulate around the ambiguous sexual desires of the magistrate, I think that the ritual of "purification" carried out by the magistrate concords not with a lover-beloved bond, however perverse, but with a mother or caregiver-child bond. This revaluation explains the
inchoate desire of the magistrate's actions, which in the final analysis are not the yearnings of a libidinal sexual drive but the restoration of sociality as
primary ethics through the extra-discursive and erotic gestures of the caress. The magistrate's experience with the girl is both erotic and sensual, and yet it is marked by the repeated failure of discourse and sexual desire. The entire
episode is an enactment of the regeneration of the originary caregiver-child social bond that has been mutilated by Joll's regime of torture, and this
originary social bonding is achieved properly in the domain of kinesthetics (touch, smell, sound).28 In this respect, I take issue with Doveyfsjudgment that "the magistrate's ritual of washing the girl's feet implies the fetishising of the suffering victim in liberal humanist novelistic discourse" (CPC144); indeed, one of my primary arguments is that the novel takes us beyond the
^MY discussion of the mother-child bond is influenced by Cynthia Willett's important feminist contribution to the philosophical discussion of originary ethics. I do. however, feel that she limits the impact of her argument by remaining uncritical of the Self/Other dichotomy. For instance, she proposes that "the infant is neither identified with the Other in an anonymous or collective existence nor alienated from the Other in the abstract constructions of a private subjectivity but is always oriented toward the Other through kinesthetics..." (16). As I have argued in chapter 1, the Self/Other model does not account for the urge towards sociality, that is always already there. The Hindu ethics of the self/Self encapsulates and explains both maternal ethics and social ethics.
Western ramifications of such discourse by performing a self/Self ethical revision which celebrates the truth of the eternal mystery. The barbarian girl, who has been deformed in her encounter with JoU, is found begging on the streets by the magistrate. He offersand nearly coerces
her to serve as a concubine and domestic in his house. As soon as she is installed in his room, he makes the sattwic realization that "the distance between myself and her torturer, I realize, is negligible; I shudder" (28), as a consequence of which he never allows himself to hate the emissaries of the Third Bureau as satanic and inhuman Others and tries to understand the
defective constitution of their ethical being. He, then, is also searching after the "truth," though of a different kind, and it would seem that he first attempts to do so by looking for it in the scars of her experience. He has her unwrap the bandages on her feet, and examines her ankles: ""Doesit hurt?" I say. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing. "Not anymore. It has
healed"" (28), the girl replies. Her response shows importantly that she is not suffering at the moment. Here, Dovey again misreads the magistrate-girl relationship when she asserts that the magistrate represents the liberal writer who attempts to give meaning to the suffering of the victim: "in bearing witness to the other's suffering, and ultimately claiming an equivalent suffering for him/herself, the writer casts him/herself in the role of the seer, truth-teller, blameless one,
and perhaps even tragic hero or scapegoat" (CPC 144). To the contrary, the magistrate feels equally victimized by the experience of the Third Bureau, and as victims what both of them suffer is no longer, as the girl makes explicit,
physical pain but, arguably, the outrage and incomprehensibility of Joll's torture and its contradiction to ethical being.
The magistrate's ritual of washing her is an action that is rhythmic, caressivef and f i b Jxis being with "an intense pleasure" and '*ab h ~ f d giddiness" and a "rapturef of a kind'' (28-29). What begins as a foot wash soon turns into the caress and washing of her entire b d y , and the magisfmiters
description of the ritual suggests nothing other &an a cae@ver-Md bond,
an intense and rejuvenating eroticism that is in no way linked with a libidinal sex drive:
First comes h e ritual of washingf for which she is now naked. I wash her fet, as beforef her legs, her butt&. My soapy hand travels between her thighsf irtcuriouslyf 1 h d . She raises her m s while I was her armpits. I wash her M y f her breasts. I push her hair aside and wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her. She lies on the bed and 1rub her body with almond oil. I dose my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the ~ b b i n g . ~ . 1feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us. (30). The magistrate and the girl participate in a n o n 4 k m i v e ritual of rhythmic caresses. Try as he willf the magistrate cannot find a conscious reason for his actions and for the intense pleasure he derives from it. This is because he as caregiver and the girl as infant participate at the most fundamental level of comtmication, that of the erotic maternal caress. The ritual demonstrates Willett's assertion that "our most fundamental level of c o m d c a t i o n is, like artistic expressionf beyond intentionalityf causal explanation, or any literalistic verbal account. We express much more than we codd ever sayrf (91). The ritual rejuvenates for the magistrate the ethical bond severed by
Jo1l1storture, and inasmuch as his caresses succeed in getting a response from the girl, in terms of a c c o m o d a ~ o nand adjustment to his touch (what WiUett c d s "dance") we can say that she, tmf is replenished.
Finally, the magistrate's maternal action in its unique specificity demonstrates his satfwic-famasic qualities. The sattwic component manifests
itself in the fact that he seeks knowledge from his actions and that he enjoys
his act of pursuit of his knowledge. It is most significant in this respect that he foregoes discourse in his search and becomes intent on the information provided primarily by tactile exploration. This search polarizes his other search-one which desperately seeks to subsume truth as a h e t i o n of semiotic signification ( m s e d below). The tactile search as maternal ethics of the %If exists in counterpoint to the semiotic search as Imperial ethics of the %lf/Other. The experience witkt the girl shows us a magistrate who is urtdeaded about which system beckons his actions?not least because the truth of the tactile pursuit remains a Thdc"b to him and is visible only in its silence throughout the text-it is h t which figures the mystery that the magistrate is yet unable to comprehend. Finallyf the magistrate is stdl in the grip of Tamas as an equally complemmtq effect and desired goal of his ritualf his oblivious deep being the prime example: "often in the very act of caressing her 1 a m overcome with sleep as if poleaxed?fa into oblivion sprawled upon her bodyft(31). The barbarian girl's behavior as described by the magistrate points to a
sattwic-rajasic character. She seem reconded to her experience in life?and performs her duties to the best of her abilities; the magiskate can't help being s v r i s e d by seeing her vibrant? tahtive and happy in the company of other domestics as she helps with work in the kitchen. She expresses a rajasic
maxim when confronted by the magistrate's f d w e in the hunt: "If you want to do something, you do it..if you had wanted to do it, you wodd have done itf'' and even chastises the magistrate for his tireless and empty flow of words-""You wmt to tak all the timert' she comp1ainsf'(40). Pemer remarks quite correctly that the barbarian girl is not s u b s e ~ e n tand ? "stoicid" in her
reaction to We around her-giving "no sign of rejoicing'' when Wormed that she will be taken back to her people. Furthermore, Pemer concludes, in her physical blindness, she retains her manner of seeing: she is direct, m c o m p l a g , independent even in s e ~ t u d productive, e~ stoicd, convivial, and above all, accepting of things as they a t r e torturers and lovers, pain and p ~ e s ~ ~judgment~ ~ o Asu Jane i fiaxner aptly obsemk, She $dds to everythini wihaut yielding herself. (79) "
The barbarian girl's P r a ~ t i constitution, c it can be argued, exemplifies the state of being that has managed to reconcile itself to an existence above the lower Pramti, nature with the bondage of its Gunas. The following description by Awabinda of a person having achieved the state of tripnatita or mgdbhaua in action resonates t e h g l y with the nature of the barbarian
girl: The sign [of such a person] is that inwady [slhe regards happiness and sfiering alike...[she] initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the Ggnta5 of Nature* S a t m Rajas ~ ~ or Tamas may rise or cease in [her] outer mentality and her] physical movements with their resdts of d g h t e m e n t , or impulsion to work or of inaction-..but [she] does not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does she abhor or shrink from the operation or h e cessation of these things(419). The magistrate's encounter with her is &o crucial to his movement towards attaining a similm state; alreadyf in her presence, he gets the intimation of the
etemd mystery of life or uttammam rahaysam, the highest secret, which is all important and which cart never be known: "1feel a dry pity for them [the torfurers]: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other" (43). Without this satfwic knowledgef the magistrate would not be able to perfom his act of self-sacrifice later in the story It is surprising that none of the critics have addressed the empowering aspects of the re1ati~nsh.i~ between the magistrate and the barbarian
Attenfiat has mostly been paid to the magistrate*^ desire to read the scars on her body, but her body is aka the site of eras as is their relationship+The act of washing, anointing, massaging, and caressing the girl's body b described by the magistrate as a blissful experience; as I have axwed abovef this points to
the rejuvenation of primary sociality thxough the tactile registers of the maternal caress. This consideration is &-important to the celebration of "xnamaese'*hom which Coetzee's novel ultimately draws its strength. Susan Gallagher makes a c ~ c i point d whm she suggests that "the magistrate's nmative voice again is "femininet' in its focus un the language of the body and its inclusion of uncertainty and b l ~ e s s ("124). Broadly speakingf Waiting fur the Barba~ansdramatizes the cruelty and ethical failure of a world governed by the rationalist discouses and actions of Empiref and against it evokes and celebrates the all important experience of that which lies beyond discourse, beyond rational and ephtmalo@cal certitude, that is, ethics
as primary sociality of the %If.
In two words, mamaese recuperates the
failure of papaese. The concern of the moment thenf becomes the reinvestment of ethical '@truth'' to the domain of the mamaex. Cynthia Willett's exploration with regard to redefking ethics in the prehguistic significations between mother and W d echoes Chetzee's inquiry in Waiting fur the Barbarians:
This redefinition of the self as social and participatory rather than as private and self-generated is, moreoverf critical for feminist ethics. As Adrienne rich explainsf often enough history has mandated that the "identity, the very personalityf of the man depends on power? the consequence is a society that values technical skills over social skills and that allows "the spectacle...of bloody struggles for power..., [with] their impliat sacrifice of human relationships and emotional values in the quest for dominance.'' (24) Though Coetzee's novel critiques the technologies of masculine selfdefinition through a poetic narrative that is a mapping of blanksf his
"marnaeserfis visionary rnamaese in the
sense that what he effects here
surpasses h e SeIf/'Wer rhetoric which remains central to f
a
t
fomtdations such as WiUett's.
The magistrate finds himself Iiberated when he becomes a prisuner of the Empire. His reaction is one of endtation and elation-his "false
fimdship with the Bureau," his *'a&a.nce with h e pardim of the Empire is over'' (78-79). His iricarceratian provokes a sa@apahic reflection about the ethical nature of
his duties- He realizes that there is nothing heroic in his
opposition and that the 'Tkeedorntthe enjoyed recently as magistrate was bereft of purposive duty; in conthu.ing to disburse his office with the knowledge of J o b torture meant that his continuing participation condoned
and succwnbed to the Law of the Empire as represented by the Tltird Bureau.
The Third Bureau's law transgresses the h u m d t legal process which defines the magistrate's human ethicality: "they will use the law against me as f a r as it serves them, then they will tun to other methods. That is the
bureau's way. Tu people who do not operate under statute, iegd process is simply one instrument m a n g many" (84).He c m o t morally remain an accomplice to such a system: "from the oppression of such heedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?" (78)- His oppositian to the Empire echoes Mahatma Gandhi's sentiment that? "we are sunk so low
that we fancy that it is our duty and our refigion to do what the law lays
down. If man will only realize that it is u n m d y to obey laws that are unjustg no mads tyranny wiI1 emlave h i d ' (247).
More importantlyf the magistrate adopts the way of passive-resktmce as his means of opposition. The latter half of the novel shows his pointed
r e h a 1 to blame JoKs re@eq'whaiever it was that had happened...1 was to bime for it1' (95), his reconciliation with death and his quest for an ethical
knowledge as Ksetragya-'T. truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I
shrink from,I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am" (94). To this end, the statement he makes at the moment of his (ultimately
faked) lynching is a soul-searching request for his "torturer" Mandel to address the issue of ethical sociality as eros: "I[would] appreciate a few words from you. So that I can come to understand why you devote yourself to this work, and can hear what you feel towards me, whom you have hurt a great deal and now seem to be proposing to kill" (118), and later, his question is more pointed, "How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been...working with people?" (126).
Joll is supervising a public beating of the barbarian prisoners with
whom he has just returned from his expedition. The magistrate watches the horrific show with a sense of defeat and wonders time and again whether it would not have been better for him. not to witness this cruel act, whether he should do best to return to his cell. But when Joll brandishes a hammer as a
sign of the torture to ensue, the magistrate renounces his role as mute spectator and unwilling participant, and intercedes with the cry, "Look!" I shout. We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How-! Words fail me. "Look at these men!" I recommence. "Men!" (107, emphases mine). This is a decisive action performed by the usually vacillating magistrate, and it shows him at his
Sattwic best, having at least for the moment, shed his tamsic stupor. It is important to remember here that the magistrate undergoes torture of his own person as a consequence of his interference, but he interferes regardless of the consequences he knows await his action. Without this moment of ahimsa and satyapaha on the part of the -
magistrate, the novel would remain mired in the pessimism of the failure of
a moral universe. To the contrary, then, the magistrate's story carries a powerful and hopeful ethical message, but it is one that does not make its meaning felt in discourse.
The failure of discourse that the magistrate encounters here reinforces the dharmic-ethical emphasis of his exclamations. He directly invokes the
miracle of creation, "the miraculous body," in other words, as "a marvelous event occurring within human experience, which cannot have been brought about by human power or the operation of any natural agency, and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the Deity or of some supernatural being" (OED). The fact that at this point he is all but unable to articulate, to put into words, into discourse and logic the ethical implications of such a miracle shows that dharmic-ethics lie beyond the realm of words, and in the realm of faith and spirituality, both of which rely principally on diminishing the distance between the Ksetragya and the divine mystery. This rapprochement is effected beyond words, for it is not the (biblical) Word that is at the beginning but the (Hindu) self/Self.
This leads us to the other important dharmic-ethical moment, one reflected in the magistrate's use of the first-person plural nominative pronoun "We." By equating himself with the barbarians, he points out that the Other for Empire is dearly not so for his self. This self-address destroys
the &&/Other dialectic and in doing so invalidates all ethical action that is premised on the ethical standards of the religions of the Book in which ethics derives in response to the judging gaze of the Other as God (see Chapter 1). Arguably, if the Empire in barbarians relies on the dialectic of the Self and
Other, then its justification as Imperial enterprise echoes historical Imperial colonization and proceeds from the principles (albeit misread) of the Book. The magistrate's horror at the brutal Othering of his fellow humans-the
b m b ~ m - c m o tbe expIained simply in terns of a traditional EberaI
humanism, for such a conditioning still relies on the Western postEdghtement suppositions of the superiority of rationality and its coherent subject or individual marching dawn the road of eivikational progress. Rovey is partially correct in suggesting that the magistrate's sto4ryaddresses two major areas of failure in liberal hum-t
&course: "first of all its failure
to interpret and of%kr resistance to the militarized totaIitarian phase of colonization and, secondly, its failure to interpret mci artidate the history of the colo&edP*(CPC141). The magistratersactions in the ksetra or field demonstrate both an interpretation and a resistance against JoH's t o t & m m but not in tern of a binaristic opposition; that is, the power distribution informing the dialectic or binary of coIa&er/colo~ed, tomer/tomed, d m e d l b a r b a ~ m is not reversed in a meaningless flipflop. Elis actions reflect a refusal uf & such dialecticism that relies on the
essentiality of the difference of the Other, and tries ta comprehend the events
through what is dtimately a d h a m i c - e ~ c dhamework, in which neither the girlf nor JoU, nor the barbarianf nor the magistrate himself occupy the slut
of the Other, but are different aspects of the Prakriti or Nature and Pztrzisha or
Witness of existence and being, and in which the magistrate as witness searches for and succeeds in finding an ethical justification for his Me. This quest is not pursued in the r e a h of rational judgment but in the spiritual domain of ethical sociality. Coetzeets novel, then, allegorical and self-
reflexive as it may be, makes a post-modem statement that recuperates a potent ethical message against ~ e n ~ e ~ e c foms e n wof Othering humanity
and its criminal consequences.
Chapter 5
Indian Tension: Salman RushdietsThe Moor's Last Sigh
S a h a n Rushdie's ueunre provides an intriguing instance of the
function of aesthetic negotiation within a world whose primary human condition seem to be that of mipmcy in both the post-modem and postcolonial senses of the tern. As postmodem narrative, Rushdie's work is
often jubilant as xnetafictive k t o ~ a p p h y and , exposes as provisional any
claims to central authority by revealing the contamination of the pure, the contradictions of the unequivocal, the mythology of History, and the difference at the heart of identity. & post-colonid narrative, his work additionally negotiates the formations of nationhmd, of intrinsic hybridity, of consensual collectivity, and of immigrant sensibility* A case in point, of course, is Rushdiets "blasphemous" Satanic Verses and its much publicized political consequences. Rushdie himself views the novel as an attempt to negotiate through the uprooted, disjunctive, and metamorphic nature of the migrant condition a '*metaphorfor a l l h w h w ' '
394). h fact, Rushdie
emphasizes that '*TheSatanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected
combinations of human beings, dtures, ideasf politics, movies, songs* It rejoices in monpebaGon and fears the absolutism of the pure" (394).
It is worth remembering here that India was the first country to ban the Satanic Versesf in response to a vitriolic candmation of the book's antik 1 M c sentiment made by
ii
M u s h Opposition member of parliament, Syed
Shahabuddirt, who proudy asserted the fact that he had not yet read the bookf that to read such a text would be
an act of b1aspherny.D Eight yeas later, The
Moor's b f Sigh was &o banned in India, but this t h e because of its
mockery of Hindu sentiments, and the call for a ban was restricted to the state of Maharashtra* Specifically, it is its mockery of the '*HitlerianCr figure of Bal
Thadceray, the most militantly vocal leader of the so-called h d m e n t - t Hindu parties, that drew the ire of the Thadseray loyalistsf and amusingly
enough, Thackeray himself. h w h g - b e c a w e it is ironic that Rushdie's caricature of Thackeray, as an oversized ' ' M h d u M or frog? should end up
being read htunor1essly by the ex-caricaturist and lmpoanist himself(Hindu Indian society, perhaps) which demonstrates the fundamental nature
of the papulation's psychef one that is aptly described by Moraes Zogoiby, the first person narrator of The Moor's Lasf Sigh, as he describes a facet of the beatings he meted out in his Rajasic phase: We had given much thought to the matter of our masks, finally rejecting the idea of using the faces of BaUywood stars of the time in favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahrupi traveling players, in m i x n i q of whom we gave ourselves the heads of from and tigers and bears. It proved a good decisionf enabling us to enter the strikers' comuousness as my*olo@cd avengers. (306) 2 9 ~ 0 ran excellent discussion of the poIitica1 motives behind Sbahabuddin's engagernen[ with Rushdiets novel, see Vijay Mishra1s "Diaspuric Narratives af Salman Rushdie,'* pp. 32-39. Mishra dissects the substance of Shahabuddin's argument for the banning of the Saranic Verses into three strands based on the Islamic faith, the Indian legal codes, and Islamic tolerance.
Outside the novel and in the "real" worldf it is Tbckeray who has exploited the Indian propensity for proxy-god worship to such an extent that wMe the
hror over the Safmic Vwses was centered around its blasphemous irreverence, the seemingly h o c e n t The Moor's Last Sigh has been deemed blasphemous enough by the militant Hindu right-wing for its mockery of an ascendant political figure. The move for a ban in this lattet case accelerates the m y ~ o l o @ a ~ oof n the figure of BaI Thackeray; it is a double move in
which the ban is justified because the political Thackeray represents the rightfd though rightist sentiments of the m - R a j y & b while at the same fime it is the ban itself which vindicates Thackeray's aspirations towa~ds
avatar-like status. The matter is welI reflected in a recent article by Tony Cliftonf wriiing for Nmsweek (12/11/95): 'Nobody elected Thaclseray, aged t admires HitIer. He is, as he saysf the 6gf a former newspaper c a r t ~ n i swho "remote controI" manipdating the coalition of Hindu zealots who took
power in Bombay and surrounding Maharashtra State in EIections last March." The article discwses Thackeraylsmaniacal '%an1'on the Pakistani Cricket t e r n from playing in Bombay. In this contextf the following description of *'Mainduck's*'political philosophy resonates with an eerie
ofntruth-fiction that can best be called what else but hte~enewa~o Rushdiesque: "In his bizarre conception of cricket as a h d m e n t a U y commtmaIist gamef essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under h e a t from the counhyfs otherf treacherous communities, lay the
origins of his pobtical philosophy..."(231). The sign par exceZZence of this kind of world is "blasphemy.'* The potential for being blasphemous is not relegated simply to the world of religion?as seen above. h the shifting context of newly forged alliances and Loyalties, whether they be of race, religionf sexf nationf capitalismpthe
common denominator remains the sacrosanctity of the Absolute, which parades varhwly under the guise of dturd tradition, dmaL supremacy, or even pluralist homogeneity, and the fearsome suppressionf if only because fearful, of the interstitid, of that culturally migrant "in-between". Homi Bhabha argues, in the context of the Satanic Verses, that "Blasphemy is not merely a &represaia~on of ihe sacred by the sedar; it is a moment when the subject-maiter or the content of a dtwd tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation" (225)- The Shiva Sena effort to label The Moor's Last Sigh as blasphemous, then, indicates the political agenda of legithizing a W t m t version of Hinduism by appealing to the sensibilities of the Hindu population though the exposure of an
already vulnerable and weakened?and much attacked Hindu tradition. Moraes Zogoiby's h a r a d e h a ~ o nof Ramm 'iMainduck" Fielding leaves little doubt about the thrust of Rushdie's critique in his latest novel. The various intolemces which were inadvertently mubiiized 0x1 a globa1
scale by the Satanic Verses are also part of the machinery which dyr~amhes events in The Moor's Last Sigh. The inter-racial and inter-religious themes are ovexshadowed by the competing and often warring concerns of capitalist
corruption and nationaht fanaticism. These latter two concerns are polarized though the figures of ''MainducY Fielding and Moraesr father, Abraham "Mogambo" Zogoiby, through h e ever-imminent war af the worlds between the pro-Hindu h d m a t & t i'Mumbai Axis" and the pro(black) market "Scar-Zogoiby Axisft: "...Abraham would be a formidable antagonist in the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus
profme, god versus rnamtnonf past versus future?gutter versus sky: that struggle between two layers of power in which I...and Bombay, and even India itself would find ourselves trapped?like dust between coats of paintt@(318).
The Bombay part of the novel ends with the portrayal of a city rent apart by the explosive, brutal, and meaningless destruction of property and life, as the two axes collide all too haphazardly for supremacy. And as both Mainduck and Abraham fall casualties, Moraes' impression as he watches Bombay bum from the glass of his airplane suggests that one version of history, of truth, the comforting one in all likelihood, has been permanently snuffed out: "As
my aeroplane banked over the city I could see columns of smoke rising. There was nothing holding me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my Bombay, no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy. Something had ended (the world?) and what remained, I didn't know" (376).
It is this lingering and often pervasive sense of tragic confusion that
marks off Rushdie's latest book from the others. Gone is the magical exuberance of Midnight's Children. Gone, also, is the irrepressibly comic and tongue-in-cheek volubility of the Satanic Verses. Though it would be an exaggeration to assert that The Moor's Last Sigh is more personal than Rushdie's earlier novels, it can be argued that this novel performs a crucial task more fully than the previous novels. Through the indictment of religious and extra-religious bigotry, and the face-off between capitalist corruption and nationalist zeal, it forefronts the nature of ethical justification
and ethical action. Moraes' confusion in his-story, as he negotiates the events of his life, stems not so much from the position of an (exiled) migrant with a home-less world as it does from his inability to discover and understand the ethical import of his tale. If there is a tragic element in his-story, then, it lies in the fact that, having described a new world order world in which the
bigotry is ascendant, in which "the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion" (334), and in
which "the truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and
almost never normative" (331), Moraes is unable to vindicate his life from a moral point of view. What, we are forced to ask, is the moral of his story? The Moor's incapacity steins from being caught up in a struggle that is the hallmark of Rushdie's creative genius, namely, the competition between two ontological determinations of selfhood, of being: The Indian ontology of the self/Self and the Western ontology of the Self/Other. These competing and contrasting world-views with their irreconcilable ethical systems sound the pulse of Rushdie's creativity. The Moor's Last Sigh is a departure from Rushdie's earlier works in which the multi-vdency of "truth" dynamizes a highspirited celebration of life, of writing, and of migrancy. This is not to say that Rushdie's latest writing is prosaic-consider, for instance, the typical Rushdie word-play, for example, the lexical innovation of Vasco Miranda, the "mistakes and the hittakes, the misfortunes and the hitfortunes," and even the hybrid Indish, such as "I-tho." The difference that makes Rushdie's latest novel intriguing is that the concern of ethics has come to the very fore of the novel, and is engaged through the befuddlement of Moraes in his first-person narrative. In recounting a violent family saga that is embroiled in the national politics of a newly independent India, Moraes finds himself powerless to comprehend the moral dynamics of his story. Rushdie's journey has been that of a migrant writer who has been able to criticize while at the same time escape the confinement of the world under his critique, since he is like his principal characters-whether a Saleem Sinai,
an Omar, a Saladin or a Gibreel, or a Moraes Zogoiby-a migrant, on the move, not anchored to the traditional or normative grounds of belonging; if
anything, he clearly admits himself into belonging to the "new type" of human being he describes in "The Location of Brazil":
The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being-, people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves~becausethey have been so defined by others-by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (M 124-125, emphases mine) This provocative description of the "new" being does injustice to the
population that is settled, has not migrated, or at least, has not migrated in recent times. Are we to understand that the non-migrant population roots itself predominantly or exclusively in place and in "material things?" And when Rushdie says "otherness," it is obvious that he refers to and abets a sense of Western homogeneity which has been premised against the essential otherness of the Other. So when the migrants have come in and defined themselves according the otherness defined by their others-properly speaking, the Western non-migrant population-all they have done is dressed themselves up in the preexisting garb of the Other and played out the preassigned role of non-belonging. In such a case, it is not dear how a "new type" of human being has been created. What, then, can be the "strange
fusions" that occur in their deepest selves? What is meant by the "unprecedented unions" between what they were~non-nugrantswith a complete sense of belonging-with where they find themselves~excluded
from the Same by playing the role of the Other? In calling this a transformation worthy of undivided attention, Rushdie-among others-is seduced into sounding the trumpet of the Same through the mouth of the SelfIOther dialectic. What occurs in such a case of homogenization, that is, of *
occupying the prescribed slot for the "migrant," is not really a "fusion" nor a "union" but a decapitation, in all senses of the word. The problem here, of course, is that Rushdie's rhetoric engages the Self/Other dialectic. It would be no exaggeration to state that his work is pretty much sold on this Self/Other dialectic as he tries to negotiate the migrant experience. What makes his aesthetic endeavor interesting, however, is that there is a nagging tension, an Indian tension one might say, that comes from the elements of an Indian ontology, one which is incommensurate with the Western dialectic of the Self/Other. Of course, in keeping with my dissertation's central thesis, I must say that the rhetoric of
migrancy, especially in its current academic circuit, ignores the fact of dhrmic-ethical being, which does not undergo a radical transformation at the moment of dislocation or migration. Or if there is a transformation in the practical sense, it is one at the level of ontological determination, a
transformation signaled by the switch from an espousal of the self/Self to that of the Self/Other. If such is the case, that is, a movement that others the self,
then it must be added that the transformation signals a fall into the illusion of Maya, which is the condition of determining being and action through misleading polarities and binarisms. It is notable that with regard to the trope
of the fall, Kathryn H u e , even though she too is uncritical of the Self/Other dialectic, points out a central thematic of Rushdietswork: If, as Rushdie concludes, humans have no core capable of guaranteeing continuity, then this fear of disintegration is the logical anxiety for us to expect in his fiction, and Rushdie projects such a fear through his symbolism. A duster of images embodies threats of dissolution, chief among these being void, hole, mouth, and vortex into which the self is sucked or explodes or falls-and downward plunges are very prominent in Rushdie's fiction...Rushdie's characters have been plunging in one fashion and another for some timewsucha fall betokens the anxiety one experiences when facing the lack of a personal center...(215, emphasis mine)
.
Though Hume's' point about the motif of falling is well taken, I would not be
hasty to assert that Rushdie or his readers may conclude the absence of an essential self. In fact, it is this very tension-between an essential dhamicethical self and a miiyasic-illusory Self/Other which motivates Rushdie's fiction. From the purview of dharmic-ethics, the essence of being lies not in its transitory, impermanent body, nor in its cultural location but in the three Gunas or qualities of Prakriti (Nature) which inform and traverse our being
regardless of where we are or where we go. The Gunas are complemented by the conscious self as witness and as the partial manifestation of the universal and eternal Self. Granted, there occurs in the migrant world a dislocation and an estrangement of habitual being. This does not mean, however, that being
itself undergoes transformation. In the dharmic context, the selfs ethical imperatives remain constant, and the goal of all action is prescribed as the holding together all human action as an inexorable march towards 'embracing a Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself and itself in all and makes itself one with all beings":
Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole government of all the relations of man with other beings, with Nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, forms of the inner and the outer life, orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dharma is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our inner and outer activities-there is the divine nature which has to develop and manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the inner workings by which that grows in our being. (Aurobindo 162-63). In this dharmic light, Rushdie's creative work reveals itself as the site in
which a world-view of Indian determination-which forefronts the spiritual mystery of life itself-is constantly challenged by and embroiled with the exigencies of a twentieth century life with its techno-rational dictate. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that the Indian, properly speaking, in
Rushdie's texts is that which challenges and destabilizes the operations taking place within the pale of a Self/Other universe with its techno-rational pulse. Predominantly, Rushdie criticism is mired in seeing and reading his world through the Self/Other dialectic, and the resulting discourse ignores that radical charge of Rushdie's work which is generated by a struggle
between a spiritual (Hindu)ethics, through the discourse of the mamaese,
and a technological ethics, whose discourse represents a rational papaese dominion. This tension comes to the fore in his latest novel, The Moor's
Last Sigh, in which Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby finds himself non-plussed by the events in his life, and is finally unable to latch on to an ethical vindication; Moraes does, however, leave a testament of his life, a writing which can be seen as a yagna or sacrifice performed in the face of the life which remains a mystery and whose secret he is ultimately unable to decipher. The movement in Moraes' story runs almost contrary to Rushdie's description of the migrant above. Moraes is the first-person narrator, a putatively decentered being who seeks to discover the meaning of his life by
writing his-story. The narrative unfolds from the end, where as readers we find Moraes resting in a shady spot within sight of the Ahambra in Spain,
and in reading the ensuing pages we figuratively trace the route prescribed by
his having nailed the sheets of his story at various spots-"a story I've been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olivetree," a self-conscious reference to Martin Luther's act in Wittenberg- and are led to the "treasure" of his self (3), whose value is ensconced in the fatalistic assertion that the map of his journey, the story of his life and actions could be no other than what they are for who Moraes is: "When my pursuers have followed the trail they'll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn't've done it differently" (3).
As readers, then, we are engaged in a treasure hunt whose object is known-the Moor-but whose value remains to be ascertained. But there are two readers of Moraes' story that precede us, though their journey ends before ours be*.
They provide starkly contrasting reader-responses of the story
being written by Moraes. There is Vasco Miranda, Moraes' imprisoner and on whose command Moraes begins to write his-story as a postponement of his execution: ""Let the last Zogoiby recount their sinful saga." Everyday, after
that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had made a Scherezade of me. As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live" (421). There is also, and more importantly so for the ethical import of his-story, the Japanese lady named Aoi Ue, whose name "wasa miracle of vowelsÑth five enabling sounds of language..."ow+ oo-ay"" (423), his fellow-prisoner in the tower of Little Alhambra. Between the two of them they rejuvenate an ethics of
primary sodality through tactility in an effort to defeat the dehumanizing conditions of their captivity: "thus,we dung to humanity, and refused to allow our captivity to define us...often, without any sexual motive, we would hold each other. Sometimes she would let herself shake, and weep, and I
would let her, let her. More often she performed this service for me" (424). It is this "formidably contained woman" with her routine, discipline, and self-
possession that become Moraes' mainstay, his "nourishment by day and [his] pillow by night" (423). It is this self-same woman, however, whose composure is destroyed by reading the Moor's tale: What did scare Aoi Ue? Reader, I did. It was me. Not by my appearance, or by my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper-Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited it away, learning the hill truth about the story in which she was so unfairly trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another down the ages was the greater because it showed her what we were capable of doing still; to ourselves, and to her. (427)
W e Wanda's seeks solely for entertainment valuef Aoi Ue ends up being horrified by the ethical violatiom in the Me. Two readers and two contrasting r e q o e s ; the question of the moment is what kind of reader does the text d m m d of us? Stated otherwise, the necessary task at hand is the determination of the nature and vdue of the treasure? of Moraes Zogoiby
and his story. The themtic of migration itself is given a new twist in The Moor's Last Sigh- The arena of the story indudes Spain and India, md the characters'
ethnic backgrounds are informed variowly by Judaism?Islamf Christianity, and Hinduism, ar a mongekafion thereof* Moraes the Moor's saga is shown to originate in the fifteenth century in Moorish Sp& at the time of the moor Abu A b d ~ a h ' sexpulsion, the last of the Nasricis
and h o r n as
Boabdil el zoguzhj (the misfortunate)rby the Catholic conquests in 1492. In a climactic moment when Abrahm, Moraes' fatherf codionts his mother with
his desire to marry the Catholic Aurora Da Gma, it is revealed that his heage goes back to the 'r&cegmation'' between the Arab Moor babciil and an ejected Spanish Jew. The i m p ~ ~ 5 of t y the Indian Jewish population is
even traced back by Abraham to the first Jewish migrationf the "Black jewst* who escaped from Jemsdem fleeing "from Nebudahezza's armies five hundred and eighty-seven years before the Chistian era'*(711,and who intermarried with the locals. There isf in addition to this beme of the contamination of *'pure" migancy, h a t of a (eternal) return, one which provides a mythoIogical flavor to The Muor's
Lasf Sigh and to Moraes' history. The beginning of the tale
begins at the moment which is the end of Moraes' storyf and the end of his story finds him where it all began-in Spain. The proper end of the novel,
then, h d s Moraes the Moor posturing as Boabdil the Moor, whose
dkpos=ssion from Alhmbra by the Spanish Catholic reconquests marks the launching point of both the story and the Iineage that is d h a t e l y Moraes Zogoiby's ("Zogoiby" which means "misfoftunate" is the epithet attached to
BoabcU after his loss). A sipart of five hundred years separates the two Moors but apparentIy the song of exile remains unchanged. While Boabciil the Moor
"turned to look for one last time upon his loss?upon the palace and the fertile plains and all the concluded glory of h d d u s...at which sight b e ] sighed and
hotly weptf' (M), Moraes the Moor looks upon the same AJhambra thinking, ''The AIhmbra...that monument to a lost possibiiity that has nevertheless gone on standing..&ke a testament*..to o w need forflomiag tugether, for putting
gn
end to fionfiersFf ~ the r dropping of the boundaries of the sev ..I
watch it vanish h the tw@ht, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyessr (433#emphasis mine).
In this thematic of the story, it seems that there is
ultimately no rnigancy that is not also a process of making a cyclical return. FurthermoreFMoraes' desire to erase frontiers and boundaries? of the self as
much as of culture and geography, indicates an Indian ontological prerogative whi& does nonetheless remain unfuWed or unachieved in his tale. Thus the novel ends with the Moraes' desire to f a asleep "andhope to awaken,
renewed and joyfd, into a better b e t '(434). What a l l this goes to show is that migrmcy in the Indian context is old as history itself, and provides an interesting counterpoint to the trope of mipancy as it is espoused as the privileged paradigm of p o s t c o l o ~ ~ sin m
he metropolis. Why is it that the heme of migmcy, of migrant sensibility is given such weightage not only by Rushdie's erstwhile critics but by Rushdie
himself? And what does it mean, in counterpoint, that The Moor's Last Sigh shows h a t migrancy is not a recent phenomenonFnot a defining condition of twentieth century Me, but one of the facts of history and a perennial aspect of
existential accomodatiun? h ibis regardf consider W h s w m y ' s questionf "has the mythology of a t i ~ c provided y a pruductive site for pmtcolonial resistance or has it willy-nilly become campfiat with hegemonic theorizations of power and identity?" (127). One can suggest that the latter dtemative suggests itself as the compeUhg choice, that keeping the migrant occupied with playing the role of the 'rsadicaUynew type of beingt1(Rushdie) and expending his energies in m d e r s t m h g his own "newnesst1perpetuates his mar@&ation
&om he hegemonic power center, which is and which
remainsf after all, the reserve of the non--gm&.3Q
In the Satanic Verses Rushdie negotiates the meaning of Koranic injunctions by reworking than in a novelistic context which allows him to perform "the subversion of its authenticiv through the act of cultural trm1ationt' (Bhabha 226). This subversion is aided by a Rwhdiesque device of h e travel in dream sequences: The historic inception of Islam takes place in the d r e w of Gibreel Farishta a a b i h g London in the 1980's. This
narrative collapse and concentration of various plmes-Kstoricd, hear, realistic, ontolo@caI-properly complicates the nature of the "rniganttl experience. In The Mour's h s t Sigh, however, Rushdie's treatment of the diasporic and migrant space of the present seems at first glance to k the repetition of a d H m & h g
history. The most telling sign of this
seemingly passive historicity is the palpable lack of renaming. X n the Satanic Verses, for example, Mohammed is called "M&ound," and the prostitutes
j o 0 f course, one might ask, what about the political history of Rushdiets Verses? It did, after ail, have the most dramatic political consequences. But what is the Iesson one has learnt from the fatwah incident? That the fundamentalist Is Iamic bigotry and censorship of art is condemnable. The power structure of the West, of England in this case, has come away unscathed. The migrant Rushdie has proved to be troublesome to the order of things and has irked a "third worldn country into proving to the worid at large that it is intractable with regard to religious tolerance and free intellectual expression. Satuoic
assume the names of Mohammed's wives- That history has proved
Rushdiets renaming to be a transgressive mis-namhg ( K b m e ~ htwah) s does not alter its creative intent "to violate the system of naming is to make contingent mci hdete-ate
...~e
institutions of naming as the expression
and embodiment of the shmed standpoint of the c 0 m ~ t y its r traditions of belief and enquiry'"' (Alisdair Macintzye in Bbbha 225)- 'This act of creative re-naming is what The Moor's Last Sigh lacks and as a result it fails to
demonsizate "how newness enters the world: "For the migrant*~ survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on discovering "how newness enters the world".
The focus is OR making Iinlcages through the unstable eIments of literature and Me*..rather than arriving at ready-made names" (227). The generative possibility of Rushdie's novel clearIy lies elsewhere than in the pervasiveness of the ready-made name of the Moor and his inevitable Iast sigh; it lies, arguably, in the added Indian tension in this t e h g of his tale.
h reading Moraest stmy, we h c ithat he is firmly rooted in the places where his life unfolds; in factf he consciously divides his narrative according to the foUowing centers: "Cabrd kIa.ridrthe first of
my story's four
sequestered, serpented, E d e d c - ~ e m dprivate universes- (My mother's Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father's sky-garden, the third; a d Vasco Mirancia's bizarre redoubt, his "Little Ahambra'' in Benengefi was, is,
and will in W teliing become my last)" (15). In so rooting himself in the places of his life the Moorf though he migrates, doesn't become a "new type" of human being at all; in fact, it can be argued that the Moor's Prahitic
constitution remains h d a m e n t a y the same regardless of the location in which he finds himself-
Rushdie has used an aging device for Moraes Zogoiby: he ages twice as fast as ordinary human beings. W m e m that he was born four and a half
months after his conception andflconsequeniiy, dedicated his Me to slowkg d o n "Cursed with speed, 1put on slowness as the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Determined to decelerate my evolution by the sheer force of my personality, 1became ever more languid of body, arid my words learned how to stretch f?temselves out in long sensuai yawns. Slorno... was one of my secret identitiest' (153). This ttzmasic slant becomes a dominating character trait in
his We, and most likely impedes him fiom any attempt at action to rescue Aoi Ue when she is about to be shot by Vasco Mirmda. Moraes realizes at this point that he wants to live and is thus u n w i h g to sacrifice himself to save another's life; ''how we cling to We" he thinks (431). Elis attachment to
the physical manifestation of life makes him cowardly, a trait which he shares with his namesake Baiibdil the Moor and which Vasco Mirancia taunts him wi*
"A true Moor...would attack his lady's assailant even if it meant his
certain cieatL0 false and cowardly Moorr*(431). This fear of death reflects the confusion that marks Moraes' thoughts throughout the novel; his vain
search for true gU-howledge remains unfuEUed as his tamsic inertia dictates the movements throughout most of his Me. He is dismayed when he is cast out of his parent's home Elephanfa and likens his state to a fall into
Pandemonim: "The gates of Paradise were opened...I sturnbled through them, giddy, disoriented, lost. 1was nobodyFnothing. Nothing l had ever l a t o r n was of use, nor could 1 any longer say that 1 knew itt' (2?8)* His
intense discomfiture and la& of certitude with regard to his howledge stern from the fact that his habitual tamsic Life has been forced into an abmpt end.
His attitude here is clearly one h a t we can expect of the tamsic man who "seeks only somehow to swive?to subsist so long as he may, to shelter himself in the fortress of m established routine of thought and action in
which he feels himself
to a certain extent protected
from the battle, able to
reject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him" (Aurobindo, 49).
There are three significant moments which prove to be exceptions to Moraes' Tamos dominated life. The first of these ensues upon his liberation by Raman "Mainduck" Fielding &om imprisonment at Bombay Central. He learns that Mainduck's motive in aiding his release is simple: Moraes is to perform in a team of elite enforcers of the Mumbai Axis, a team he calls "Hazar&'sXI," whose task is to terrorize and beat into submission those who are brave enough to dissent from Mainduck's Hindu Ram-Rajya program. At this point, Moraes exhilarates in the knowledge that he can finally give vent
to his true calling which he has always suspected is associated with his deformed right hand-a pugilist's dream, a deadly weapon: Something that had been captive all my life had been released-something whose captivity had meant that my entire existence up to this point all at once seemed unfulfilled, reactive, characterised by various kinds of drift; and whose release burst upon me like my own freedom. I knew at that instant that I need no longer live a provisional life, a Me-in-waitmg; I need no longer be what ancestry, breeding and misfortune had decreed, but could enter, at 10% last, into myself-my true self, whose secret was contained in that deformed limb which I had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing. No more! Now I would brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my fist, a Hammer, not a Moor. (295, emphasis mine) This release marks Moraes's entry into a rajasic living, in which his actions become dominated by a passionate desire for satisfying his egoistic impulses.
He relishes the bearings he and his team mete out to those who protest and agitate against Mainduck's cause, and embraces the lifestyle enforced by Mainduck on all his followers, one which includes late-night semi-nude drinking and wrestling bouts, culinary delights, and even a host of "peripheral" women. Moraes realizes that his true nature, his "secret" self, delights in the pursuit of carnal pleasures: "Can you understand with what delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new life? For I did; I revelled
in it. At hst, 1told mydfr a iittle s b ~ @ ~ o w ~ h eatslast ; you are what you were born to bei' (305). But his is the basest mdesiation of the rajasic nature, one which doesn't have a sattwic indination towads seeking true ~U-h~wledg and e ~towards according asshilatian, measure and e q a b ~ in w and though all action; whereas in his earlier famasic state
Moraes*paralysis was complemented by a yearning far m d e r s t m h g , in this rajasic state of s e ~ t u d to e Raman ''M&du*
Fielding, he gives himself up
to a ''thirst for unpossessed satisfaction [and]is therefore full of w e s t and fever and lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions'' (Aurabindo 415).
This rajasic phase lasts a decade, at fhe end of which Moraes finds himelf spent, "whenI turned thirty,my body turned sixty, and not a
particularly y0uMi.d sixty, at that" (311), and relegated to working in Maindu&s secratariat. It is at this point that he receives a secret note fkom Abraham which leads to a sequence cxdnhaag A the murder that is h e pivotal moment of the Moures k t Sigh. Upon finding the note under his
pillow in Mainduck's house, Moraes marvels at "how great [Abr&mfs] power had grown; m d tenses himself for the inevitable collision of the Mumbai Axis and the Scar-Zogoiby Axes of power. Upon reuniting with his father, the prodigal sun retumed is @vat a glimpse of the power-hungry and corrupt Zogoiby empire which has a hand in, among other things, running a
vast international heroin bade and in technology espionage and funding activities for the construction of an Islamic Hydrogen bomb in the Arab world. As Abraham describes the H-bomb project to him, Moraes finds himself undergoing the second change in his self-he reacts in an mprecadented and completely unanticipated manner by refixsing to abet or participate in Abraham's m ~ - h m d t h m scheme whose sole impetus
seem to be ~ E - a g g m a a e neven t at the cost of wreaking destruction and havoc on a global scale. Abraham's entqxise is deaxly adhamic and a s ~ r i c
in principle; his actions demonstrate the asuric qualities of wrath, greed, c d g , the wWul injury to othexs, pride md excessive self-esteem.Thus
Abraham thunders upon being confzonted by Moraes: 'We was God in his
paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. "I an a business person," he said. 'What there is to do, I do." Y W H . 1 am that 1 amf*(336). Awobindofsdescription of the deluded selfaggmdkement of the asaric man rings true of M ~ a h a mZogoiby's Praktic constitution: "The asuric man becomes the center or instmment of a fiercef Titanicf violent action, a power of destruction in the worId, a fount of injury and evilf'(457). Faced with this asaric tyrant, Moraes surprises himself by f e e k g an h v o I m t q and intense recoil: 'rAt that moment something changed within me. It was an involmtary alteration, born not of will or choice but of some deeperf unconscious function of my self" (335). This response indicates a flash of Satma in an attempt to stand up for the dbamic law of the universe with its goal of holding together dl of humaniv in a
movement towards harmony and sU-re&ation.
The voice that Moraes
hears-"I heard a voice within me making an absdute, non-negotiable refusal'' (336)wb the call of Dharma which dictates its primacy over "the
bounds of what was required of b] by family loydty'' (336). This sattzuic moment isf unfortunately, short-lived. Moraes succumbs to the manipulation of his father, who reveals to him that the murderer of his mother is none other than Raman *'Mainduck FieIdhg. Of the several murders in the novel, that of Raman ''Mainduck" Fielding by none other than Moraes Zogoiby is of crucial sigmficance. Moraes bashes Mainduck's
face into a pdpf ostensibly avenging his mother Aurora Zogoibyts murder,
which Abr&m reveals to have been orchestrated by Mainduck in a jilted lover's rage. It is out of a sense of f d y loydty with revenge as his motive that Moraes decides to murder Mainduck. He is successfid in his task but his world literally blows apart. h terms of the dhamic-ethical thematics of the novel, this explosion signifies that Moraes' act is adhamic, that it tears apart
his world. It is in keeping with the narrative's logic of layered
omatio at ion that Moraes finds out much later, in Spain and in the company of another one of his motherrsjilted lovers, the pop artist Vasco Miranda, that the murderer is none other than Abraham Zogoiby himself. That this last is p~ovedby a tell-tale palimpsest in which Abraham's portrait is buried under Aurora's Zogoibyvslast and unfinished painting entitled *'The
Moor's Last Sightris yet mother example of the codation and dissolution of conflicting versions and dissolving verities, a strategy incessantIy at work in the novel. (31 le-g
the ''truth,'' Muraes regrets "pounding [Mainduck's]
face mtd there was no face there" (4181. In committing the murder, Moraes acted upon false information received fkom a contamhated source-his faher
Abraham. In the dharmic-ethical economy of the story, then, Muraesf rajasic act is performed in a famasic ignorance, artci even though he is willing to
sacrifice himself in attaining his god, there is nothing saktzuic in his action: "I realized with a kind of abstract surprise that I was ready to die, as long as Rmm Fielding's corpse lay close at hand* !So I had become a murdering
fanatic, tao. (Or a righteous avenger; take your pick.)" (365). The logic of the story dictates our pi&--Moraes falls into the aspect of nothing other than a murdering fanatic acting on incomplete and erroneous knowledgeAs such, any stable point of reference in the novel vanishes with the
erasure of Raman Fielding's face. h what seems to be an anti-thematic movement, whatever anchor to reality and a sane world Moraes has left
hinges on the preservation of Mainduck's faaality. The episode which leaves Mainduck dead and faceless and which accurs towards the end of the novel is followed by h e cinematic description of Bombay blowing apart, as seen by Moraes horn his airplane, and taking with it the lives of dl the major piayers* The conduding segment of the novel, a brief section of hforaes's visit to Vasco Mirmda in Bmengeli, Spainf is marked by fuzzy indeterminacy as the moor finds himself in an unfamiliar culture whose apparent manipulation
of himelf he can o d y belatedy rationalize as either mass conspiracy or delusiond paranoia. It isf then, not by chance that the erasure of Mainduck's face triggers the coUapse of the narrative's center of signifiance. It can be said hat the polar opposition of the Mumbai h i s and the Scar-Zogoiby Axis acts as the
organizing principle for meaning in the novel, somber as this may be. And at the very center of these axes, at their intersection can be seen the twin faces of
R a m Fielding and Abraham Zogoibyf Mainduck and Mogmbo. For it is their t'faci&ty" which allows the sipifjchg s i p to stabilize and emit unequivocal meaning. Deleuze md Guattds discussion of "faciality" rings true with regard to this pivotal point in The Moor's Last Sigh:
The face...is a whole body unto itseE it is like the body of the center of signifimce to which all of the detemtofi&ed s i p affix themselves, and it marks the Iimit of their d e t e m t o ~ m a ~... onn e face is the Icon proper to fhe signdying regimef the retemton&a~on internal to the system...when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more hpercep~ble ...(W 115). This is indeed the general movement of detemto~alkationwhich occurs in the h a l pages of The Moor's Last Sigh. the Bombay of "mongrel joy," of
poh~co-econohcalliances and allegiances centered around Mainduck and Magambo is consumed in flames. Moraes zog~ibyrealizes that Me, howeverf
flcontinue and new faces will appear, not Ieast of ail ex-Miss hdia Na&a
Wadia's disfigured hce: "The end of the world is not the end of the world. My ex-fimcf5e, Na&a Wadia, appeared on television a few days after the attacks, when the scars across her face were still livid, the permanence of the
&figuration aU too evident" (376). Na&a Wadia's e h e e ~ message g b that "the city will survive. New towers will rise... the future beckons. Hearken to its caW' (377). Z'?ze Maur8s Last Sigh indicates Rushdie's
attempt at negotiating an
ethical vindication for the so-called migrant whose cosmo~ogy,or indeedf ontologicd make-upt is the result of the conflict between an Indian and a non-Indian universe* The hteqenewa~onand eventual ascadance of the hdian over the Western is dearly suggested through the musings of
Reverend Oliver D'aeth. Although portrayed as somewhat of a comical figure, Reverend DraeWs realization in his & e m echoes Moraes Zogoiby's sentiments at the end of the novel: ""We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins." M e n he woke he was not sure whether the dream had been inspired by his faith in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia that made his ski^ torment so: whether it was a heroic vision or a banality'' (95). Reverend D'aeth also comes to the condusion which will torment
Moraes throughout his Me-that "India was uncertainty. It was deception and illusian" (95). The events in the novel are framed by h e thematic which pits
Western religion against Indian rekgionf the Biblical theme of the FaU against the Hindu theme of Ganesha, the West against hdia. With regard to this
pervasive strugglef Francisco Da Gamagstheory of The Transfomati~~al Fields uf Cunscie~cecrystallizes the scope of the ethical crisis which informs Moraes's life and actions. The TFC theory cmked up by Francisco is motivated by Mahatma Gmdhits "insistence on the oneness of aIl of hdia's
widely differing millions" and the search for some "secularist definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word the soul" (20). Though the TFC theory is shown to be the butt of jokes and the ruination of Frandsco Da Gama's political career, its emphasis on ethics-"the fields acted ethically, both
defining and being defied by our moral alternatives" (20)-cannot be underestimated insofar as it concerns our appreciation of the value of the treasure signified by Moraes Zogoiby. The transformational fields theory, inspired also by the Theosophical Society, reflects an Indian take on the matter of ethical being through its conception of a single, interconnected, and all-pervasive "ethical nexus" within which all existence resides: "these "fields of conscience" were nothing less than the repositories of the memory-both practical and moral-of the human speaes, that they were in fact what Joyce's Stephen had recently spoken of wishing to forge in his soul's smithy" (20). In its suggestion of a cumulative memory informing all action, the TFC theory
echoes the concept of Karmic balance in Prakriti or Nature as suggested in the
[Will] is created and determined not by its own self-existent action at a given moment but by our past, our heredity, our training, our environment, the whole tremendous complex thing we call Karma, which is, behind us, the whole past action of Nature on us and the world converging in the individual, determining what he is, determining what his will shall be at a given moment and detemiiung...even its action at that moment. The ego associates itself always with this Karma and it says "I did" and "I will"and "I suffer," but if it looks at itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of man as of the animal, Nature did this in me, Nature wills this in me..." (Aurobindo, 211).
Clearly, then, the TFC theory is based on a self/Self ontology in which there is no space for the Other of the Self/Other dialectic. Rushdie's aesthetic
enterprise is saturated with the Indian experience whose polytheistic culture has assimilated, through the ages, various immigrant religions with their "Western" Self /Other dialectic. The illusion and the uncertainty that
characterizes Moraesl experience with India? with his Indian story, stem horn a cansaence that struggles hcortdusively with the hdim and the
Western conceptions of being, knowing aII dong, as Reverend D'aeth knowsf that India's "ethnic universalismt' (Nandy) will asimiIate an: '*OliverD'aeth
knew enough to be s u e h i t the frontier between the English enclaves and the surrounding foreigness had become permeable, was beginning to
dissolve. India wadd redaim it dl" (95).
h The Maarts Last Sigh, Moraes the Moor's world falls to pieces when he transgresses the ethical injunction against killing other fellow humansf when acting upon fahe infomatian he pexfoms an act that is adhgmic to the core. Though the novel is peppered with muders-EpSha Menezes's by
Aurora, Aurora Zogoiby's at the behest of Abrahamf Philomina Zogoiby's mysterious death which a h implicates Abraham, even Aoi Ue's by Vasco Wanda-its major theme is dearly that of individual ethical respomibav: it is the Moor's storyf recounted by the Moorf and its action or denouement
shows quite clearly that his murderous act is not to be condoned, and it gives + the lie to his seU-jwacation for and trividkzation of his act of murder: "My assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though inspired by my mother's deathf this was scarcely a recurrence of characteristics that had skipped a few generations! It might more accurately be termed a sort af in-
law inheritance'' (364). The Moor's confusion in the novel a.rises not least from the fact of
being incapable of latching on to an unequivocal ethical determination for his existence and actions. An aspect of essential Nature infarms his mderstmdhg of human being and action; md in his attention to secret identities what is revealed is nothing other than the Gunas or quaiities of Prizkritic or nature which inform the ''true'' constitution of the various
charactets under his scrutiny. A tiger can't change its stripes but it can hide
them seems to be the maxim that concurs with Moraes's assessment of humans in general: ''Iff in the matter of Raman Fielding, I took it upon myseIf to be judge,jury and executioner, it is because! it was in my nafzire to do st?. Civilization is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ousselvesl' (365, emphasis mine). Rushdie's novel reflecfs the struggle Moraes ascribes to Kipling's "schizo-stories" in which llhdiannessesl' struggled with t l b g b b e s s s f in one aspect of the struggle, the hciian reliance on Gwms as essential quaIities of Prakritic being is processed and
presented through the British (and heze read Western) attention to "secret identities.'*~lIt is not by hazard, then, that MoraesFinitiation to the d t of secret identities o c ~ through s the murals painted in his childhood room by Vasco Wanda, m u & which depict an intriguing aspect of the Western
Imagination's obsession with rde-playing and with the superhero: Who was that maskd man? It was from the walls of my childhc~odthat I fist leaned about the wedthy socialite Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, beneath whose luxurious residence lurked the secrets of the Bat-Cavef about d c i mannered Clark Kent who was the s p a c e W g m t Kd-El kom the planet Krypton who was Supeman, about J o b Jones who was the Martian J'onn Jtonzz and Diana King who was Wonder Woman the Amazon Queen.--.Leabg from the Phantom and the Flash, from Green Amow and Batman and Robin, 1set about devising a secret identity of my very o m . (152)
This obsession with seaet identities will continue to idurn riot only Moraes' mderstmdhg of his seU-camtih~onbut also his understanding of others3 1 1 would say that Rushdie's Indianness versus Englishness echoes that of E.M. Furster's? especially ins~faras A Passage ?a M i a is concerned. The most teIling resonance is at the level of the Indian (Hindu) festival, which remains mysteri~usand unexamined? and exceeds the economy of both novels. In T h e Maar's Lasl Sigh, a case in point is Aurora Zogoiby's annual dance looking over the Ganpathi Chaturthi celebrations taking place on the beach below Elepharz?a. This echoes the festival towards the end of Fosteri s novel; in both cases, the Hindu festival remains unexamined, unprocessed by the witnessing subject.
Abraham thus becomes the ''M~gambo'~ who runs the mderworId dong
with the M u s h gang-boss "Scar." Abraham as Abr&m suggests the mildmannered nature of a Clark Kent; Abraham as Mogamgo, however, is dearly rajasic-asuric, pursuing power and wealth with mcomaonable zed, trading in h m a n flesh and drugs, making his way through threats and coercion.
Likewise, Vasco Mirancia's ostasibIy h d e s s cartoon-like character which nevertheless is rajasic in the extreme-with his 'legendary heAawtibfiq, as
ef5ective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and squash-bids as of Iove" (155)-aemp& in vain to contain the asuric monster seething within his being; Moraes remembers the disturbing moments when "we who loved
him would gloss over the times when an agpssive fury would pour out of himf when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up"
(165). Though Miranda recedes into the background of Moraesi story soon after the independence of hdia (among other related events) "destroy[s] the
fraple equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set[s] the madman
free" (165),he and his madness becomes pivotal in the fourth and find section of the Moor's tale; as an authorial strategy this facilitates or puts in relief the ethical dimension by pIayhg out Moraes story by and through the
person of a family hider/outsider who tums out to be a cold-heartedf demented murderer. It is in this section, of course, that we find out that the entire narrative has Vasts stamp on it-it has been comksioned albeit as extortion horn Moraes the Moor.
In terns of secret identities, it is significant that the two characters who are depicted without one are Ramart " M ~ d u c kFielding " and Aurora Zogaiby. Mainduck is the unabashed Ieader of the pro-Hindu Mmbai h i s , and wears his program on his sleeve. AI his rajasic energies axe directed
towards self-*ent
and gff-aggm&ement; his pursuit of Miss India
Nadia Wadis, for example, has as its motive not love but conquest and image*
His hunger for power is u
n
~ and~his delusion d that he is doing the
right thing is unmitigated. Moraes notes more than once a HMerian rnegalomea in Mainduck but is at the same time histent about t these MainduckMahduckts hm&v: "the paint is they are n ~ irthuman, style little Wtlers, and it is in heir humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for hman beingst misdeeds; for if they are just monsters...hen the rest of us are excused" (297). The ethicid message
here, which is suspiciously akin to an authorial intrusion as it contradicts the operative ethical uncertainty in Moraests character, is nonetheless important mci one that invokes both a dharmic-karmic and even a Levinasian
SeU/C?ther ethics.3~But the power of Mainduck lies in the fact that he is able to let others reveal and revel in their "true" selves: There was a thing that Raman Fielding h e w , which was his power's secret source: that it is not the civil social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-born&-for that by which our wiId potency may be unleashed. We crave permission openly to became ow secret selves. (305)
Finaliy, it is notable that in the economy of murders in the story, Mainduck remains on the receiving end of things. Abraham Zogaiby, Vasco Ibfiranda,
and even Maraes b e l f tum out to be more asuric in their willful murders
32~evinas1attempt at resolving an ethical imperative in the aftermath of the Nazi experience remains in most instances incornpatibie with the Hindu dhizrmic-ethics. However, there are significant echoes in this particular instance, that is, the case of being always responsible for the Other's actions: "La relation intersubjective est une relation non symmi5trique. En ce sens, je suis reponsable dlautrui sans attendre le r&ciproque, diit-il me coilter la vie...je suis responsabIe des pers6cutions que je subis. Mais seulement moi !...Puisque je suis respansable m&ne de la responsabiliti5 d'autrui'* (LtErhique et l'infini, 93-96).
than Mainduck, whose atmaties in the quest fur power remain a hazy
suggestion and escape Maraesrdepiction.
Xf there is one dement that makes The Moor's Last Sigh d i k e any of Rushdie's previous novels#it is its inordinate attention to Axt* This is facilitated by the fact that Moraes*mother Aurora Ra Gma-Zogoiby is among the leading dite uf India's modem painters* Her life's work comprises a series which pardeIs and reflects the main events described by Moraes in his literary narrative. The title of Rushdie's novd-me Moor's Lasf Sigh- refers to not one but two paintings of crucial importance in the novel. The fixst painting0 entitled "?'he Ariist as BoabdiZf the Unlucky (el-Zagoybi), Last SaZfan of Granadaf Seen l3qaeing from the Alhambra...Or, the Moor*s Last
Sightt(160),is created by Vasco Miranda and portrays himself as Boabdil. This painting forms a palimpsest over Mirandais originaI p h i h f g Oa portrait of Aurora sitting cross-legged on a @antbardf under a "chhatrifsr her left breast exposed, and her arms cradling empty space instead of a baby (Inamorata). The iconography of this painting is suggestive of the depiction of a Kindu goddess0and Moraes remarks an its universal appeal: "her arms [were]
cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasca, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody's mother she indeed became the mother of us all'' (160). This sentiment echoes Moraes earlier comparison of his mother with the movie Mother I ~ d i a in , which a "stoicalf loving, redemptive" mother can also become '*anaggressivef treacherous, annihilating mother" (139). Aurora's image becomes0 in all subsequent Miranda work, a miniaturized icon which is then painted over by the larger scale commercial artwork that is the source of Miranda's wealth and success. The second painting entitled The Mour*s Lasf Sigh is Aurora's last painkg before her murder. In a reconciliatory gesture towards her estranged and
banished son, Aurora depicts him as the Moor "lostin limbo like a wandering shade" and herself as the Moor's mother "looking frightened and
stretching out her hand (315-16). This painting, found on her easel at the time of her death, also turns out to be a palimpsest whose dark secret-a portrait of Aurora's murderer: none other than Abraham Zogoiby-is revealed to Moraes by Vasco Miranda in Benengeli, Spain. Why does Rushdie turn to this visual medium in his latest novel? Is
it true here that "when a writer considers painting and painters, he is a little
in the position of readers in relation to the writer, or the man in love who
thinks of the absent woman" (Merleau-Panty, 94)? hi other words, what is it that Rushdie wishes to evoke by referring to painting, what ineffable truth is it that makes the yearning of his own artistic medium incomplete, that needs
to invoke this indirect complementation of another medium of expression? Rushdie's attention to painting is given a very dear emphasis right from the
very first artwork created by Aurora: it is an impossible mural composed by the child Aurora in the week of her having been grounded in her room:
Every inch of the wall and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red ofthe earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Carnoens with a proud father's bursting heart found himself saying, "But it is the great swarm of being itself." [She] was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral Island was an illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly metamoyhic line of humanity was the truth ...(59-60, emphasis mine). This first artistic attempt is a veritable masterpiece which depicts all of
human and natural history, ancient and modem Indian history, the imaginary world which lies beyond the bounds of rational history; but what
strikes Camoens enough to make him tremble is the vision of Mother India-
presented in the stead and glaring absence of any of the Western icons of divinity (no Christ8no cross, no angel, devil or saint):
Mother hdia who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children.--who stretched into great mountains Eke exdamations of the sod and dong vast rivers full of mercy and &swe..Mo&e h&a with her oceans and coco-palms and rice-fields and btdlocks at the water well...a protean Mother India who codd f u n xnonstrous... who codd turn murderous, dm&g cross-eyed and Kditongued while thoumds died...(6 0-61).
This amazing description of Aurora's painting crystdizes the secret of
rush die*^ creative genius. In tern of ontologicd and ethical determination,
we see that the Western and the Indian are very much the issue here- From a Western perspective8how does one reconde the image of the Goddess KaEwho wears a necklace of hesMy severed h w a n heads, who kills m d feeds in frenzied cannibahtic f i q 8 and who is mu& revered and worshipped in India-with a Western ontology of divinity? h d if, ulthnateIy, ethics demand a recourse to the Absolute, as either an Absolute seIf/Self or an Absolute %If/Otherf two mutually exclusive choices, what is the imperative choice dictated by the Western imagination? There is, arguably, no resolution
in fhe Western imagination of the SelfIOther which does not perform an Othering b e t i o n - d k t m h g it8 making it phmtasma~c,alien, unknowable, irrational-an such a fact as the Indian Kali. The Indian imagination premised on the seIf/Self, on the other hand, accommodates the Self/Other in alI its pemutations, but always on the plane of Maya.33 There is one
common denominator in these two universes, howeverf and that is the agency of a t i s t i c expression, be it I i t e r a ~ or e painting- Xt is not surprisingf then, that in a nave1 whose center of signifiance colIapses momd the protagonist's ethical failure and hespomibZv, his inability to Iatch on to 3 3 ~ o ra more extended discussion of the Indian and the Western conceptions of ethical responsibility, see my first two chapters.
ethical vindication in a world "swept with confised alarms of struggle md flight'' between competing ontoIogies, Rushdie has tuned to the stabiU~hg
medium of painting. For8after
if the painting is that which gives
m e d i t a t e d access to the essence of Being, what kind of Eking is it? Here8Merleau-Ponq's essays on the activity of artistic vision are invaluable in coming to terms with Rushdie's literary attention to painting as a source of a certain kind of ethical evocation. He undertakes a vindication of the artist's vision against the Cartesian certitude of mind; against the
Cartesian faith in the connective act of thinking that spins the fabric in which ressemblmce comes to be recognized, Merleau-Panty proposes the primordiality of a vision in which being or the self is caught up in the continuous fabric of Being, a vision which moves through the eye and mind
and body in space-time, preceding the artist from both ends of eternity. His vision of the function of artistic vision is appropriately mystical as it returns time and again to see, tracing the movement it seeks to describe in words, the order of the one eternal Being, the mystery of an eternal, mdtipficitous yet indivisible SeIk
as a texture8[vkion] is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one sole Space that separates and reunites, fhat sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and f&ttue8since there wodd be no such cohesion if they were not essentially parts of the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is8functions idso as a dimensionF because it is given as the result of a deshiscence of king. (147)'This deskcent Being has a distinctly Prakitic shading to it and echoes the
"greatest secret of all" evoked by Moraes: "that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they [the b e s ] . And the trees8whose leaves we eat, whose bark we
gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once" (319). Merleau-Pony's words ~g true not only for the painter, but also for Moraes8and for hirnseu as well: "only one emotion is possible for this painter-the feeling of
s&mgmess-md only one Iyrieism-that of the conthud rebirth of existencet*
(a) *
The painter's destiny is to m a k e the w d of the separate Me of each cansciousness by recapturing and converting into visible objects the "vibration of appearances'' (68). Merleau-Ponv*s"vision1*implodes the SeM/Other dialectic by coUapshg the distance in space-time between the various rndestations of Being in the miverse: "vision alone teaches us that beings that are Werent, "exterior," foreign to one anothert are yet
absolutely tugether, are "shdtaneity~'which is a mystery..." (146)-His concept of vision and its correlated Being bears a stunning resemblance to Hindu conception of Being, of the sel.f/&lf as portrayed in the Bhapada Gita. The artistic gesture or Will gains in Merleau-Ponty a definite Karmic determinism (see Aurobind~,211-above): 'TfI am a single project from birtht the given and the created are i n d k ~ w h a b l in e met and it is therefore
impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary or hate-..but &a impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of
being in the worldt which &om the very beginning?is myself'*
(71). Literature as well as art, then, h e a r b to the mmaese and forefzont the ineffable spiritual reality of Being: "there is a power of words because working against one axtother, they are attracted at a distance by thought, like tides by the
moonf and because they evoke theis meaning in this tumdt..."(81). The
a d y truths are those which can be evoked, glanced ihrough the body's vision, but which cannot be captured in s i e c a t i o n ; and thus modem painting, Merleau-Ponty tells us, "obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things?which is without my external model and without my predestined instruments of expressionf and which is nevertheless the truthr' (94).
Art as the inartidate cry that ttawakenspowers dormant in ordinary
vision,. a secret of prewktencef "Art as a system of eq~vaIencesra hgos of hes, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses-a non-concephd presentation of universal Being'' (142). Axt as yaptz or sacrifice, an act of spiritual worship performed to ihe e t d mystery of the Self. Clearly, the artistic activity rents the mayasic &sue--that fabric of SU/mer-md reveals a glimpse of the W i e and eiemd Being. Merleau-Ponv's hdian vision is
clearly artistic, Merleau-Ponv's artistic vision i s dearly Indian- It is not surprising that it aids us in appr&a&g Rushdie's Indian tension as
reflected in his concern with art in ?'be Moor's Last Sigh. The value of the treasure we are seeking in the person of Moraes the Moor rests,.finally, in our apprehension of his Me, of the story of his life, as a yagrza performed in an ethical evocation of the eternal mystery of the Self.
Chapter 6 Ksetra and Kisetrajna The Zone and the Knower of the Zone
Gmuify's Rainbow is a @omdebrefig instance of literature which accomplishes at least one goal with certitude, namely, a cefebration of the Zone. This novel, which has been critically hailed as one of b e central texts
of (American) post-mode-t
fiction, decomtnacts traditional modes of
literary represatation and the hopes of te1eolagicd closure associated with it. It isf among other things, its explosion of teieology which makes the universe it describes exceed the bounds of Western metaphysics and consequently
perplexes attempts at deriving ethical base from which to measure the value of all action (and by action here I mean not simply physical but also
emotional, imaginativef and menid action). From a dharmic-ethical point of view, however, one can see that Pyn&onts miverse in Gravity's Rainbow is traversed by the three Gmas (qualities) of Prakriti (Name). The novel is a
poetic celebration of life, an act of Wihesshg to the great Eternal Mystery; this aesthetic presentation is the instance of a y a p a (Works or Sacdice)
performed as a raucous and 10vefiUed celebration of Me. Perhaps the most telling sign of this yaps is the fact that Graaity's Rainbow performs within its death-obsessed cosmos the negation of death itself, that is, the negation of teleological Western death. Instead of death as terminal, it celebrates death as the marker of an energy transfer, a aossing-over. Gravity's Rainbow is a
yugm that exernp1ifies the fundamental ontological truth in Hinduism, a
truth succinctly expressed in the Bhaguada Gila: that which exists, exists; that which does not exist, does not exist-nasato vidyate bhvo / nabhuvo vidyate satah...It is found that there is no coming to be of the non-existent; It is found
that the not nonexistent constitutes the real...@-16,
WBG 101).
The Zone delineated in Gravity's Rainbow owes its startling nature to the following negations of conventional fiction: there is no central or hero character amongst the novel's vast cast-over three hundred characters circulate within its novelistic zone; there is no central plot or thread which weaves the narrative into a prestidigtable pattern and it thus defies habitual consumption; there is, seemingly, no normative ontological base upon which epistemological networks can come to hierarchize themselves to generate definitive truths. The narrator crystallizes the dominant authorial strategy in the following (characteristically parenthetical) remark which also is, of
course, an admonition to the paranoiac reader: "those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens,cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (582). Complementing these and sundry destabilizing strategies is the attention given to Technology, to the technological transformation of lived experience, which makes Gravity's
Rainbow a truly a post-modem novel. The modernist categories of an autonomous ego, of an alienated inner self, of a subject of coherent and unified intentionality, and the corresponding textual strategies of metalinpal
skepticism and epistemological doubt become outdated in the face of the proliferating technologies of (howledge-)production which put under erasure the fundamental aspects of the constitution of "human"reality.34 ^see Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Post-modernism and Brian McHa1ers Postm o d e r n i s m for excellent discussions of the theoretical differences between modernism and postmodemism evinced in literary writing. S e e especially
h historied terms, the primary operative Zone of the novel is set towar& the end of the World War II in Europe, a time in which nothing less than a destruction of Old Europe becomes forcefully evidentf dong with its
sirndtmeow reconstitution by forces whose controlking agents remain k z i l y dehed-iced more ofien than not by "Theyf""Them," "the
FM-but which are propelIed by an unabashed drive and commitment towards Technoiogy and Cartebation. The Rocket, in d its phallicf rationalf
and teholo@cd glory, becomes the monmentd due to a global coUusion
amongst vested p ~ e - m e g a c m e kwhose constitution makes the category of nafionhood obsolete; TchitCherine, for exmpief finds himself being addressed by a "veq large white finger" which points his attention to ''A Ruckt-cartel. A structuse cutting across every agency human...a State begins
to take form in the stateless Geman night, a State hiit spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its sod. IG Raketen'' (566). Yet, the novel sets up against the nascent throb of the Raketenstadt a host of non-rationai, non-linear knowiedges and modes of being, not least amongst which is Mother Earth with her etemai natural cydes of creation m d destruction, a vibrant? WWUI
Earth with its quality of Gravity whidt?''taken so far granted, is r e d y som&iting eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody..."(590).
Most importantt then? for the significance of G r ~ u i t t j sRainbow, is the fact that it presents a universe in which the binary identities and opposites-
such as ra~anal/krationd,teholow/name, North/Southf Us/They? masahelfe-e,
etc.-are made to coilapse towards each other though
m implosion in which the inteface between them sweils to become the Hutcheon's discussion of "historiographic metafictian" and McHa1e1s explanation of the epistemoIogical versus the ~ntological dominants characterizing, respectively, modernist and postmodernist fiction.
effective Zone of all action and meaning- This results in an intimate imbrication between oppositesDone which destabilizes dl identities based on a system of anthmnid reciprocity. In this regard, the ubiquity of Kekd6's &earn and its repermsiom in aU facets of the Zone is crucial for coming to
terms with the nature and qualities of Pynchonrsinterface. As architect turned chemist, KeM6's visual mind discovers in a dream the structure that organizes the benzene rn01ea.de c6H6. This "dream of 1865" is crucial as it not only revolutionized chemistry but also "made IG possible/ that is?the world of polymers and plastics whose scope in the arena of Gra~ity'sRainbow is vast enough to induce the paranoid xemark that Kekd6's discovery has led
to an edifice so large that it can be contained "not just under the aspect of IG,
but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh, h e h (411). Specifically, Kekd6 dreams of the Ourobouros serpentD"the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouthf h e dreaming serpent which SWOLUI~S the world*'(412). The serpent's obvious Christian assoaation with evil is explored through PokIerls dream about a h l a Jamf lecture in which the professor ash, "who sent this serpent to our minous gardenDalready too
fouled, too crowded to qualify as any l o r n of
(413). Of course, in
keeping with the novel's logic of multiple and mutually destabilizing
ontologiesf the Snake is not merely a Christian symbol. As the ~ o u b o r o s snake encircling the world, it refers to a Norse cosmologyf and invokes also the snake Ananfa of Hindu my&olow which,equally tail-in-mouth,
symbokes the nature of an infinite universe- h the novel, Kekule's dream is a visitation sent by the bureaucracies of the Other side and ushers in the era
of aromatic compounds "so that others might be seduced by its physical
beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprintDa basis for new campomds,
new anmgements...so there would be a German dye industry to become the
IG...lt (412). It is these plastic tedmologies which threaten to lay waste to the rest of the Natural World comprised of animd, vegetal, and minerd life. That the cyclical structure of a Cabon cornpound should lead to the technoIogies of plastic fabricationf and help in creating an organization of resources polarized according to the dictates of the Carte1 with its logic of System and profit-making is centrd to the novel's obsession with the nature
of the interface in d its various mdestatiom. The serpent itselff that isf the nature of the chemical bondf becomes the interface between the Cycle and the h e a r System; it proposes both alternatives in its bi-valent form-in its zone it bears the potential or valence of both cycle and system. "They"have decided to pursue the h e a r alternative promised by the %rpent: The Serpent that announcesf "the World is a closed thhgr cycLica1, resonant, etemauy-re-g; is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to ~ioZatethe Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivitygrand "earnings"keep on increasing with time, the System removing horn the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fkactian showing a profit...The System may or may not understand that iits only buying h e . And that time is an artifiaal resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the Systemf which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply...No return, no sdvationf no Cycle-that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Keh16r have taken the Serpent to mean. (412013) This new technology allows for the creation of hipolex-Gf a heterocyclic polymer which is 'the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under suitable
stimuli, the chains grow ~ r 0 s s - W which ~ stiffen the moIecde-.-from h p rubbery morphous to perfect tessellation, hardness, b f i a n t transparency"
(699). hipolex-G is most probably what lies behind or b i d e Slothop's inexplicable erectionsf and his seas& for the v l ~ t hforms ' ' one of the more developed narrative threads in the novel. hnipolex-G is ihe interface between nature md artifice through its simulation of sexuality* Porn star
Greta E r h m vividly recalls her sexual arousd during her Gsit/abduction to Bficero's Castle: "they took away my dothes md dressed me in an exotic costume of some black poIymer..~"Thisis hipolex, the material of the futureF* ...The moment it touched them it brought my nipples up swollen and begging to be bitten. 1wanted to f d it against my mt...Drohne had strapped on a gigantic h i p o l a penis aver his o m . 1rubbed my face against itf it was so deficious.~~" (488).
Surely a cybernetic era is at hand. Yet, the Zone is infused with the f d a r tones of reckless, joyfisl abandon and celebration. Traveling through
the Zone in his "quest," Slothop finds himself involved in a series of adventures whose authorial renditions approximate buoyant Vaudeville comedy and in which he is time and again stripped of his nominal identity; Slothop is also Ian Scuffling, Max Wezpig, Rocketman, and Plechauzunga. Despite his shifting roles, what remains constant is his u e & g
abWy to
survive, to find shelter and c o m p ~ o m K p the : narrator assures us that
"helUfind thousmds of arrangementsf for warmth, love, foodf simple movement along roads, tracks and cmals...S10hop~haugh he daesngth ~ w it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days"
(290-91). These "simple movemerits" of human relationship are intimately intertwined with the vast and often confusing gamut of militarized
deployments rampant in the Zone: Carbon as the Cycle of Nawe and,
equally, as the Systemic march of Plastics. Griz~ity'sRainbow is a poetic work which unabashedly celebrates Me in all its potential and competing
mWestatiom, life with its grand Eternal Mystery: Pynchon's work seems nothing more than the squirming fragments of a dozen bright ideas until we read it as poetry, as images and meaning rather than as narrative investigating personality. Ppchanfs characters move through time and event, but the central mystery of
their world is outside tiate and event, and words cannot describe it. Tchitcherhe finds the Krghiz Light, but Pynehon cannot t d us what it is. "Theyt*disintegrate Slothop, but we never learn haw or why..--Visible effects, invisible causes; not a single, haman-sized plot, but mimy little ones leading off into the supernatural where words cannot follow than. (Fowler 66)
Fowler's evocation of poetry as the expression and celebration of the ever unknowable rightly contradicts an element in Lyotard's famous maxim about post-modedm, "[it] denies itself the solace of good formsf the consensus of
taste which would make it possible to share coUectively the nostalgia for the
them but in oxder to import a stranger sense of the mpresmtabletT(emphasis
mine, 81). Enjoyment is the strongest element of experiencing the unattainable mystery celebrated by Gravity's Rflinbow. I would like to pursue
the mystery further and read the novel as a yapa8a gesture of sacrifice, to the eternal mystery of Me. The Zone is the site of the effacement of the Other. As 1 suggested above, not only is death conceived of as an energy t~mferand a crossing-
over but it is also represented as an untolo@cd reality, a part of the ''Other side,'*a side which is an equal partiapant in the Mt+processes of the Zone. h negating death in its traditional Western sensef the Zone also negates the metaphysical Other. It performs a destruction of hierarchy-no one ontological version, description, or conception of reality can be said to be the nornative one. The Zone is an m d g m of various alternative zones? the site of multiple realities all of which are seU-cantabed and in a state of interaction: "Each alternative Zone speeds away from all he others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center...Once it was necessary to know unifoms, insignia, aiqdane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made...each bird has its branch now, and egch
one is &e Zone" (emphasis b e , 519).35 Boundaries age dissolved not merely on the physical and geographical planes but on dl planes where kheir
om entrenchment defined the constitution of "Old E ~ o p e ' ~ 4 k ~ c t ibased on binaries and dialectical oppositions have lost their poles. As a result, the Other is that which has been erased in the Zone because there is no longer a
normative ground from which to other the Other; we have, instead, a universe of the Self that approximates a Hindu cosmology and oni~l~gical determination of the self/Self. A simple yet not so minor example is that of the "Hund-Stadt," a
village in M e c k l d u g h a t has been taken over by m y dogs (614). Thaugh it may be seen as a parody of d Mensckstadte, the Hund-Stadt is ontolu@cdy
speaking a reality in the Zoneit exists inasmuch as any of the variously strange villages of the Zone exist. Killer Dobemans and Shepherds popdate this dog-city and constitute a threat to the life of anyone except their erstwhile
trainers, who are either dead or lost in the Zone. They form an autonomous state that thrives on the cornuption of various resources in the zone. The narrator acknowledges ignorance when it comes to specifics of their sacial system: *'if there are lines of power amongst themselves, loves, IoyaIties, jealousies, no one knows.'' The Hmd-Stadt has proven impregnable and attracts sociologists who, dong with the "bodies of the neighboring
vdlagers...b ~ e rall the approaches1'to it. From the little information provided, one can see that the dogs are of Kihatriyic (warrior)aspect and that
3 5 ~ h eterm "red-shift" refers to the currently accepted scientific theory for the creation of the universe, the Big-Bang theory. Weisenburger explains that the theory describes how light waves from stars in rapid motion away from the point of observation '*shiftw to infrared color spectra (193). This is proof of an expanding universe since a11 stars observed from earth show the infrared shift, therefore, a11 stars are moving away from the earth. We must keep in mind that this scientific story of the universe is merely one among others in Gruviry's Rairzb~w,it is not in any way privileged.
their Prakrific constiiution or nature seems to be dominated by the p i r ~of
Rajas; that is, they willingly w%g themselves into the batik and attempt to slay, conquer, dominate, enjoy" (EG 49). Xn the Hindu cosmology, the anhmdlife f o m is & a a d e ~ ~ c &bLind y to its Sattwic potential; indeedf
Rajas prevails much more against Tamaspbrings wiih it its developed power of Me,desire, emotion, passion, pleasuref sdering, while Satfwa, emerging, but siiU dependent on the lower action, contributes to these the first light of the conscious mind, the mechanical sense of ego, conscious memory, a certain kind of thought, e q & d y the wonders of instinct and a n h d intuition. But as yet the Buddhi, the intelligent will, has not developed to the full light of consaousness; thereforef no responsibiIity can be attributed to the animal for its actions. (209) Whether the energy deployment in the Hmd-Stadt is purely mechanistic or whether it is the result of ccmscious reflection remains unclear in the narrator's description. On the one hand, the dogs "may be Iihg entirely in the light of the one man-instaIleci reflex: K U The Stranger. There may be no way of d k k @ b g it from the other given quantities of their Eves-from hunger or thirst or sex" (614). On the other hand, perhaps their b~ddhihas developed to an extent considerable enough for them to entertain heretical
ruminations: "if there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careM..But .
in private they point to the image of one h man...in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate..."(614). ln the former possibility, the actions of the dogs remain mostly on the Tamsic plane, and "whatever soul is in it...is as mu& passive in its passion and activity as in its indolace or
inaction. l l ~ animal e like the atom acts according to the mechanism of its Prakriti or Nature" (EG210); whereas in the latter, the dogs have begun to achieve a sattwic illumination, a conscience of Self, which means that each dug must " h o w more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his tamesic -
and rajasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his
n o m d humanity" (211). The term humanity is used here for any manifestation of Me which has a sattmic awakening.
From a Hindu point of view, then, the Hmd-Stadt represents one possible mMestation of Prizbiti. The Dog-City does not transgress nor t r m c m d the cornpass of being and becoming. Nothing "new" is r n a e s t heref simply the innate qualities of Prakriti are revealed in an unexpected or unusual form. Men Jarnf describes the nature of the Eon to P6kIerf he emphasizes a rajasfc s h g 1 e d d e h e s s as weU as a mapsic ignorance in the lion's m t r e n h e n t in bharism: "the lion does not know subtleties and halfsoh..~tiom ...He wants the absolute. M e and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy, the leap, the roar, the b10oC (577). And as with the Hmdtstadt and the lion, sitniIarly with the plastic hipolex G: h e fact that it is a new compound, that is, a new arrangement withirt Prubiti, and that it can simuIate a hman erectionf does not support knessemts assertion that "the invention of plastics is thus the final state in the attempt to control any physical as well as psychicf mental substance: matter and subjectiviv...W i h the help of Mpolex G it becomes possible to create a perfect simulation of the human" (137). Beressem does not elaborate on what he means by the '%mant' that Mpolex "simuIates," unless we are to
In the understand that a gmd erection is enough of a criterion for ''hmmgtt Hindu conception of "hman,"there is a dear distinction between Prizkriti with her Gunus and energies and the Conscience as the Witness of aU
Pr~kriticaction, the human being the s u m thereof. In inanimate objects toof such as the plastic hnipolex Gf Prakriti is present in its entirety but Tamas
reigns supreme, and beings at this levelf such as the atom or plastic have not liberated their witness or comdenc+of-%k
There is a will even in the atom, but we see clearly enough that it is not kee-will, because it is mechanical and the atom does not possess the will but is possessed by it. H e e the budithi...is actually-..jadiz, a mechanical, even an inconsaent principle in which the light of the conscious Soul has not at a l l struggled to the surface: the atom is not c~nsdousof an inteiligent will. Tamas, the inert and ignorant principle [sic], has its grip on it, contains rttjas, conceals Satfwa within itself... (EG 209)s Pyrtchon*~ universe presents us with a mdtifariaus assortment of LSe in
which plant, minerd, animal, and '*artificial'' forms compete and interact in a Zone that doesnetfavor any conventional Western hierarchies. The category of man, of humanity, becomes one of many equally irnporimt or valuable in the M e c o n ~ u m of the Zone. If there are various planes of teality-
perception, they, too, are given equal significance. The point is that the priviIeging of the empiricdy verifiable reality as the normative one for our existence is negated. It is with these t h e e negations in mind-af death, of the Otherf of normative redityethat one can see that Gruvify's Rainbow
surpasses the limitations of a traditional Western universe, it tears the veil of Maya.
In doing so, Granity's Rainbow is best understood as m instance of a
literary and aesthetic y a p a that demolishes binaristic, teleological, empirical
justifications and celebrates the universe of the seE/%lf. In this sense, Gravity's Rainbow is hij$dy moral but only in the Dharmic-e%cd sense. As a yagm, it dtimately celebrates the Dhama that binds all existence and if it
teaches us anything, it is the howledge "to see all beings in the one impersonal selff for so we are liberated from the separative egesmse, and
3 6 ~ o ra listing o f the various manifes~tions of the Supreme Self in Prukrifi, see chapter X of the Bhagvadu G i t a Krishna emphasizes the following: "Whatever manifested being exists, glorious and vigorous, indeed* understand that in every case he originates from a fraction o f my splendors* (X-41* W G 451). Also* see x-29: "Ananta I am* of snakes..." (WBG 439)* which resonates* as pointed out earlier, with Keku16's Ourobouros snake.
hen through this delivering impersonality to see them in this Gad, utmani atho mayi, '*inh e Self and then in Me-l*"(EG124).
h the context of '%nowledger" it is notable that Grauity's himbow 's dharmic explorations mcur in the '*Zone." The B h p a d a Gita is also situated, as a chapter in the great Indian epic the Mahabharafa, in the kefra or "zone1'of the ultimate war. The Gita is one of the core texts in Hindu philosophy which exphim the dhumic constitution of and the ethicd imperatives in Me. In doing so, the Gita ,Iike Gravity's Rainbow, is an aesthetic yapu-a formal poem which elucidates the parameters of an ontaIogicaI conception of life, knowing all dong that it is merely a gesture in
the direction of truth, that the greatest secret lies beyond the compass of its discourse. The Gita is situated in the Zone of life, the KSekra of Dhama: "Dhamaksetre kuruksetre / samavefa yuyatsauah / mamakah pa~dauas caiva
kim ukzimata samjuya?// When in the Zone of Dharma, in the Zone
of K w , assembled together, desiring to fight, What did my army and that of
the sons of Pandu do, Samjaya?" (GI, WBG 391.37 The very fist words af the Gifa, thenr situate LIS in the Zone. The speaker is Dhritarashtra, "the b h d
Kum king to whom the Bhapada Gifa is to be related by Samjaya, his minister*'( W G 39). Significantly, the Gita, the discaurw given by Krkhna to Q u a , is a reportage made by Samjaya, who is not on the scene but has been granted what we can term in today's technological t e r n a Eve television broadcast of the War but what in the dynamics of the Mahabharata is one of
the many h t m c e s of super-natural powers. The warozone is named not
o d y dharmaksetra but also Kuruksetra after h e clads patronymic Kitru: the war of all wars takes place within the same family, a strategy that emphasizes 3 7 ~ h etraditional translation for ksetru is "field;" however, I believe that zone approximates the meaning better--regardIess of the fact that this makes it more congruous to my discussion of Pynchon's zone.
the oneness of all humanity-there is no Other against whom one wages war, but only multitudinous incarnations of the Supreme Self.
Krishna's revelation makes true knowledge a function of both knowledge of the Zone and knowledge of the knower of the Zone: not only the knowledge of Prakriti and her Gunus but also knowledge of the Purushottama, the universal Witness or Conscience. Knowledge of either
one is an insufficient knowledge; knowledge of the knower of the Zone
signals a dharmic-ethical knowledge of the self/Self, a spiritual understanding of the Being of all existence. What is reinforced time and again is the conception of an Other-less universe which is the sum of the Processes + Witness, Nature + Conscience, Prakriti + Purushottama. In direct terms, "the Gita explains the hetram, zone, by saying that it is this body which is called the zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who
takes cognizance of the zone, ksetrasyam, the knower of Nature" (EG 398): Krishna tells Arjuna, "know also that I am the knower of the zone, in all zones, Descendant of Bharata; Knowledge of the zone and of the zoneknower; that is considered by me to be true knowledge" (Xffl-2, WBG 5301.38 Krishna goes on to describe the nature of the zone (see especially Xin-5) and
also the ultimate object of all knowledge: "it is the beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor non-existent" (Xin-12)-
What, subsequently, can be said of the nature and quality of the knowledge that is broached by Gravity's Rainbow, both at the level of the zone and at the level of the knower of the zone? As far as knowledge of the zone is concerned, we have already seen above how "Kekule's serpent," as a ^Elere, Ramanuja's explanation is helpful: "Sages who possess exact knowledge o f the body call it experiencing-atman's zone of experience. A person who knows this body and, because of this very knowledge, must be different from his body which is the object of his knowledge, is called a ksetrajaana (knower of the zone) by these sages" (in WBG 529).
metaphor for the P l s ~ & v - C k d of ~ the v Carbon ring functions as an
interface between opposites8erases binary ~~1arity8 and makes a poste f i g h t m m t humanist concept of SIfhwd inadequate to understanding the motive force of the novel. Its universe defies a ethical code that depends on binary absolutes, such as gd/evi18 natuxe/dture, Me/death8 !%lf/Other8 femme/mw&e8
rationd/ha60nd8 and so fortbit is veritably "a great
frontierless streaming out theretq(543). As the dissipation of absolutest
GraaiQ's Rainbow becomes a highly impemond work in which one is hard put to decipher the desire motivating the novel. If it is indeed the case that
the novel does not8in the h a l d y s i s , abet any one of its narrative threads or fictive characters8then it is so because as a
a h e novel transcends fhe
domain of the mutable, the finite8and the personal; it opens up and opens itself up to the impersonal and the infinite8'*tothat which is pure and high
and one and c o m o n in all things and beings8the impersonal and infinite in Prakriti, the impersonal and idhite in life8 the impersonal and infinite in his o m subjectivityt'(EiG 121). It is for this reason that even as it situates itself at the cusp of one of the most violent and horrifying moments in human historyt World war n8the novel transcends the world of transience
and suffering-for it r e h q a h e s the ego-sense a d the c ~ n c ~ ~ tdesires ant and demands of Me conceived of in any M t e way; it exemplifies the Hindu
credo that "life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite*'
(121). It performs the real renunaation8that which transcends the bondage of the Gunas of nature8nut by describing a universe in which action ceases8but
in which ego and desire are slain (122). My argument for an essentially Hindu character to the Zone and the
novel as a whole shodti not be misconstrued either as mystical or religi~us.
If there is one point 1 am emphashhg in my dissertation, it is h t the Hindu
description of the universef of being and becomingf of ontology and thereby of epistemologyf is h c o m a m a b I e with any Westem4ike version in which Death and the Other are given overarching prominence in the determination of ethical being and fiving (seechapter 1). Critics who axe perplexed by Ppchon's imaginative genius, which "creates multiple dtemative realitiest and several times b ~ g back s the dead to coment on the blindness of the
living to the true nature of realityf' ( H w e 213)? have tried to resolve the text's inherent "mysticism" according to various Western traditionst such as the Orphic tradition (Bass) or Gnosticism (Eddins). Kathryn Hme, on the
other hand, points out connections not only fium "spirit~~aIisrn and theosophy to rilkean &acendmce, "eIec&omys~~~m,~' the IGrghiz Lightf [to] Pan and Wdpm@sna&tt' but aIso to BudWm-'*some&g
like the
Buddhist ffpureIight of the void recurs as a form of the ultimate in the textt' (21415).
My interpretation pushes the Buddhist comection to its mother Hindu d t u e in an effort that counters a Western trend in interpretations regarding Slc~throp'sseE-dbhtepation in the Zone. 1 agree with Hme's proposition that his d i s h t e e a ~ o nsign& "a thorough renunciation of control and hdividuav" and "strikes at the very root of Western consciousnessf'(216);it should be no surprise, thenf that its interpretation
shauId appear tinged with negativity fiom critics who are unable to admit or are simply ignorant about the possibility of the Hindu cosmos of the self/Self. Slothrop's dissolution marks not simply the fact that he ceases to exist nor that he ceases his actions in the Me-rhythm of the Zone#but that he ceases to do so in arty egoistic manner-as an individual. His disintegration, his
becoming "a cross hhxIff a living crossroads'' (625) is a metaphorical marker that sigxufies that Slothropfsself has harmonized itself with the Me-processes
of Nature: ''he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain,
(623). As getting to know the shrikes and capereaillie, badgers and mannotsS1 a *lcrossroads"Slothrop becomes the interface between culture and nature, technology and spiritualism, and even, This side arid the Other side. James Earl mistakenly asserts that SIothrop*sfreedom excludes his liberated self from society-"our solitary return to freedom is experienced both by society and ourselves as a dissolution-a lass of the self that is, paradoxicallyf an act of
identification with the world and of aU of those who constitute the very society we cannot belong toftEarl
in H m e , 216); in a similar vein, Siegel
remarks, "his fate suggests the htemela~amfipof societal man's fate and his t e ~ o l o g yfor , in order to escape that technology Slohop must abandon society1'(46). Both statements demonstrate an understanding of society solely as society of the System; it is paramount to remember that Slothrop's Iiberaied being or disintegrated self participates not only in conventional systemic socieq
''some part of Slothrop.*.in the heart of downtown Niedershamdorf* (742)but equally in the social Self of the Cycle.
There is a cosmological code in Gravity's Rainborn which has been given a significant prominence by Ppchon and which exists in a polar opposition to the Western codes premised on rationality and linearity* I refer, of course, to that belonging to the South-West M c a n Herero tribes who
inhabit the Zone as the *'s&w~zkommdosl' and are led by Enzian on a mission, ostensibly, of txibal suicide upon the location of the "lX0cket-"3~The 3 g ~ o s e p h Slade finds the Hererosr inclusian in the novel as signifying the very creative kernel of Pynchon's opus: "The inception of Gravity's Rainbow probably occurred on the day that Pynchon, while searching for infomation on Malta for V., stumbled across a New York Public Library "pamphlet vofume*' containing reports on both the Maltese and the Bandelawarts o f South-West
Herero universe is pantheistic and admits a cydical regeneration of Wedeath;
af interest, in this regard, is the Herexo belief that inhabitants on the "othert' side, those who have been &osm for death, have the ability to influence events on this side. In a highly poetic description of a lover's tryst between Captain Bficero and the boy Enzian, the narrator offers us the following
insight into Herexo metaphysics: "to the boy Ndambi K m g a [he Herero God] is what happens when they couplef that's d:God is creator and destroyer, sun and darknessf d sets of opposites brought together, hdudhg black and whitef mde and female...and he becomes in his innocence Ndambi K m g a q schild'' (GR lCW).40 The Hereto universe maps onto a major aspect
of Hinduismf as is evident in the foUowing explanation by Slade: "the preliteratef precolo~&ed, preration&ed Hereros view the world as a metaphysical whole. Within that world paradox is the law of experience: opposites can be reconciledf stones can be inhabited by so&, men can be individual selves and yet parts of the larger self, members of a cosmic and a
hmm community1'(29). Taking the Hereros as emblematic of paradox and cycl.icafityfSlade sees the Herero/Geman colonial history as "typical of every encounter between West and non-West" (29). But what both the Herero and the Western vision lack is an accoxxunodation to each other in their world+iewsf for "where the Herera see cyclical paradoxical nature, westemers see only metaphysicd void which they have tried to "rationalizef'by displacing nature with institutions,
bureaucraciesf systemsf networks of power" (Slade 30)- This seemingly Africa. After that fortuituus accident, Pynchon wrote to Thomas F. Hirsch in 1968, he could not forget the Hereros" (29). 4 0 ~ a~ ruseful explanation of Ndjainbi Kamnga, see Weisenburger 101-02. The mythaIogica1 traits attributed to the Herero creator resonate with the Hindu conception of the nature of the Piirushottama: "the god is also bisexuat ...while he is thus "the gad ~f life,'* he is also "the master of death"...
inherent opposition is contained by the interface of Hinduism, a highly literate tradition which has both extensively chuted rationad and d ~ ~ t i c systems, for instance in the Sgm&ya, Nyaya, and Vaisesika philosopKes, and also a conception of paradox, of circular infinity, of Prizkriti and Purushottama
which callapse all oppositions without losing any of their Gunas.41 There is a
and the non-teholoecd Me in the proliferation of both the te&nol~@caI Zone created by Pynchon which defies understanding premised on either the Hereretype or the Western-type of cosmoIo@es. The yizgnic aspect of the novel is undeniable, its god can be s e n not as "an injunction to subordinate the individud to suciety and humanity or immolate egoism on the dtar of the human coIIectivity, but to fdfU the h&vidaaI in God and to b a p ~the ]
ego on the one true dtar of the d-embracing Divinity1'@G 128). It is not surprising, then, that Mark SiegeI's outhe far mderstmdhg the novel
proposes nothing other than an investigation of both h e ksetra and the
The only thematic perspective which accounts for all the events in Gravity's Rainbow is a three-fold examination of the problem: fixst, an exanhation of the possibilities for persona1 sdvation, in the sense of freedom from and transcendence of the individual's paidid and d i s h m o ~ o u existence, s as exemplified by S ~ o ~ and o p Tchitcherine; second, an examination of the s o c i d t u r d movement toward apocalypse, as seen in the history of the rocket and in the political and economic activity of the novel; and, third, an attempt at divining what lies in the h t w e for both individuals and for society by examining the available patterns of political, economic, tedmoIo@cal, dturd, and psy&oIogical lines of force..."(46)
h the language of the Gita, the first step is knowledge of the fietrczgya or knower of the Zone, the second step is knowledge of the ksetra or Zone, and
4kF0r an excellent introduction to these and various other schools of thought in Hinduism, see T.M.P. Mahadevan's Outlines of Hinduism (1956)-
the third step is that of true knowledge: knowledge of the ksetra
+ knowledge
of the Ksetrasya.
Is the true knowledge that the novel gestures towards one of "transcendence?" hi other words, what is the nature of the level of being that
has been attained by Slothrop? At one level, we are told that Slothrop's disintegration consists of shedding the "albatross of self' (623). Fowler is correct in pointing out that "the albatross is Pynchon's negative code-term for the Western man's individual ego" (55): ultimately, "Slothrop has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell, stripped. Scattered all over the Zone.
It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained."" (712). The emphasis on positive ID. hearkens to Foucault's discussion of the modem technologies of the Body, which Slothrop finally exceeds. In Foucauldian terms, Slothrop's scattering is an extra-disciplinary phenomenon as it slips through the methods (disciplines) which have, in modem society, made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, being able to impose on it a relation of
docility-utility. In this sense, if Slothrop's body is scattered, it is so only because it cannot be made to coalesce in the form of verifiable documentation
and subsequently lacks use-value.42 This type of "transcendencef'is one operative prominently in the ksetra or zone-it tells us nothing about fltranscendencer'for the Ksetragya, the knower of the zone. "Transcendence"is a complicated term. Its meaning varies depending
on the tradition in which it operates. For example, Slade uses the term "transfiguration" to convey what happens to Slothrop: "only Slothrop achieves transfiguration. He may or may not be illuminated by radiance
4 2 ~ e eFoucault's discussion in Discipline and Punish, especially the section entitled "Making the individual."
when he sees the rainbow, but he has lost his self in the All of the universe.-To be subsumed by the AU, without being able to maintain the integrity of the self, is to lose the joy of paradox, according to which the self can be part and wholeff(36). Slade's "integrity" is a Western one, which accounts for his use of the term "subsumed"to explain the process of
conjoining with the "All." In another context, Oldeman critiques Siegel for employing the terms "transcendence" and "transformation" as though they were synonymous, and proposes the clarification that Tynchon connects the urge to transcend with violating earth cycles and life cycles. In Gravity's
Rainbow, wanting to transcend dominates some people's spiritual conceptions almost in proportion to the degree that rigid mechanistic order
dominates other people's concepts of rationalism" (505). Whereas Siegel finds Slothrop to be a failure, Oldeman urges caution lest Pynchon's "radicality" might be misunderstood. In a Hindu reading, Slothrop's "transfiguration," "transcendence,'*or "transformation" does not lead him beyond the life cycles of the Zone, nor does it exclude him from participation in the Systems of the Zone. Instead, it signals Slothrop's conscience of the
Self according to which all his actions are judged and from which all his actions emanate. The essential proviso for such y a p i c action is that it is very
much paradox that is realized in such a state, the paradox-secret of "the beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor nonexistent." Slothrop's increasing depersonalization is a uni-directional vector
in the novel and can be understood as the result of his gradual rise towards a state of being beyond the bondage of the Gunas of Prakriti, that is, towards the state of tremtita. In such a state, Slothrop continues to be the "enjoyerof the Gunas, as is the Brahman, though not limited by them...unattached, yet all-supporting...the action of the Gunas within him is quite changed; it is
lifted above their egoistic character and reactions" (EG 222). He begins to recognize the Self in his self as well as the Self in all other beings, and demonstrates the first two types of yogas, the Karmayoga in which the
which there occurs a realization of the Self and of the true nature of the Self and world. It is as a jnanayogi that Slothrop begins to listen to what the trees have to say: Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down-.-They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. (552-53)
The one yoga which Slothrop does not attain, for which Pynchon provides no detail whatsoever, is Bhaktiyop, which is the state of performing all Works in devotion to the Divine, the Lord of Works.
The Hindu reading provides one possible meaning for "the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly-perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly-and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, scattered (738). Whose plan went wrong? Their plan went wrong, They screwed up. If They lost control, then who is he being broken down by instead? He is being broken down, as an. "individual," by the dominating trigunatita in his being, by the awakening of the Self, the Purnsha within him. Sladefsconjecture concurs with the Hindu thrust being made here: "Pynchon makes much of
Slothrop's paradoxical behavior in the presence of the Rocket, since it offers if finally unsuccessfully-a charismatic counter to a rationalized world"
-
(emphasis mine, 33). In relation to Slade's terms, my Hindu interpretation provides a framework in which to understand the contours and constitution of the "charismatic counter." It must be pointed out, however, that my interpretation sees Slothrop's disintegration as nothing less than a success but in no way an escape or a "transcendence."
Slothrop's ultimate impersonal self is presaged by his propensity for slipping into different personae, such as British ace reporter Ian Scuffling,
Max Schlezpig-the name which belonged to Greta Erdmann's deceased lover, comic-book character Rocketman, and folk pig-hero Plechauzunga. Slothrop does not don the roles of Rocketman and Plechauzunga because of any egotistical motive or forethought, but simply because he participates as a doer of Works in the arena of action in which he finds himself. He becomes
Rocketman on the insistence of Saure Bummer, who costumes him, dubs him Rocketman, and sends him off on a comic-hero adventure to recover hidden dope. Slothrop also becomes Plechauzunga, a pagan pig-hero on
whose presence the annual festival hinges, for no other motive than the insistence of preterite German-village children. Ironically, it is for his lack of sepishness that Slothrop is criticized for his role-switching, especially as this is seen as non-conducive to his "questF'for the Rocket, for the schwartzgerat, for the "truth" that is supposed to connect Imipolex G with his inexplicable erections associated with the V-2 and that defines his "individuality." Slothrop's "quest" is not the only incomplete story in Gravity's Rainbow that frustrates closure-minded Western readers; there are also significantly "the failure of Enzian to clash with Tchitcherine, the offstage death of General Pudding, the uncertainty of Blicero's fate, the inconclusiveness of Pirate's relationship with Katje, Pokler's unresolved search for his daughter and
wife," etc. (Fowler 54). This characteristic of narrative dispersal and open-
endedness supports the fact that linearity and teleology are undermined by
Pynchon in favor of a Zone of cyclical, unending tran5fomations. Consider the epigraph to the first section of Gravity's Rainbiw, which is taken from Werhner Von Braun and which situates us smack in the heart of Hindu
cosmology: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death" (I). In such a cosmos of Prakrific energies, it is fitting that stories mingle, criss-cross and connect, and are transformed before their prefigured telos. hi such a nonWestern cosmos, it is tempting to appreciate and consequently dismiss the nature of "Slothrop's Progress" as comic-strip realism and Vaudeville
comedy worthy of Abbot and Costello. But a dismissal on such grounds, however, reflects little or no appreciation of the important non-Western gesture of yagna that permeates Gravity's Rainbow. Slothrop is not the only character to demonstrate impersonality in his
actions. Enzian and Tchitcherine demonstrate to varying degrees an impersonality in their actions in the Zone which points to a liberated state of
being defying expectations or judgments premised on the finitude of the traditional Western fictive character with a coherent ego-bound personality. Tchitcherine and Enzian are half-brothers; on his way to a siege of Fort Arthur Tchitcherine senior left behind a pregnant Herero woman in South-
West Africa, and was never to return, either to Russia or to South-West
Africa. Tdutcherine is described as a cybernetic organism more than as a
human, "more metal than anything else" (337)' and thus marks a compelling interface between technology and nature, Them and self. For example, Tchitche~e'sdoes not dearly know the source of his obsession to kill -
Enzian. Though he uncovers "evidencet' that the obsession has been visited
