Give them good memories to find strength from!

PREFACE

A Preface is placed first, written last and read last.

Here, in this report, I’ve made an attempt to collect the required information, edit them carefully, arrange it in a sequential and meaningful manner while presenting it creatively on the topic ‘Chennai Book Fair 2019'.

Hope you like it.

Thank you.

Location.

A taxi ride of 50 minutes from Anandapuram in East Tambaram that would cost you somewhere around Rupees 198 if it is Ola and then also, a kilometer’s walk inside the gate was the Y. M. C. A. Pavilion in Nandanam that hosted the 2019 Chennai Book Fair.

Crowd Present.

12th of January, 2019.

I reached the location at 10:30, not because I was not aware of the timing that is 11:00 but because I have O. C. D. And the neurons in my brain are always bursting into a loud choir singing ‘Hallelujah’ except with the words ‘On time is late.’ but let’s leave that topic for discussion some other time, most preferably never.

Although I was early, there was still a long line in front of the ticket counter and by the time I finished walking through the entire fair, which is constituted of 8 columns that took two hours of my life and also, some of my body fat, the crowd was big enough for you to smell the perfume of the person next to you or worse body odor.

Top Five Stalls.

Somewhere around the second column I was suddenly hit by a truck of Philosophy related book stalls in Parimal Publications. Soon after, I reached the Book World’s stall and saw this collection of not just Haruki Murakami’s works but also, Kazuo Ishiguro’s works and I think that that was the moment when my eyes started tearing up when I realized that how unfortunate it is to be born in a family that is financially doing well and not great. The struggles of a self-centered teenager is real!

Now when you are in a Book Fair with no money with you and with the sole aim of completing your English Assignment, you start walking faster and stop at only those stalls that can pull some of the remaining few dried up and for most part of it – dead emotional heartstrings of your heart. The entire column of Goosebumps collection in the Scholastic Publication Stalls, Amar Chitra Katha stall and that stall that was selling Bestsellers for just Rupees 100 whose name I don’t remember because I was too busy drooling all over it, was just it.

Then, there was Oxford University Press that every pretentious and actual Philosophy student like alike, Osho Glimpse, Penguin Publications who have published so many great books but all I could remember is how they were on the verge of bankruptcy because no one reads anymore in the Bojack Horseman Show et cetera, were the few of my favorite amidst many others.

Unique Stalls.

What actually fascinated me were not Stalls related to the books but the beautiful Carina Yellow bus of the Lions Blood Bank, the food stalls that looks so temptingly delicious but serve horrible food inside (about which you are probably already aware due to my classmate Monica’s assignment), a stall with no name that had so many telescopes that no customer went there because in all fairness, believing in a flat earth or planet is more convenient than the actual reality, the stall filled with work related to B. R. Ambedkar that also had various sculptures of him with such scary hollow eyes that I just took the photo for the sake of the assignment and ran away and Notion Press Media’s stall, especially, with that wall full of writers that inspire young writers to publish their work as well. Not to forget the Kraftoons stall that had Olaf (from Frozen) on their front desk that almost made me call my mom and sing ‘Do you want to build a snowman? Then, kindly send me some money!’ but the biggest fascination for me was the store outside in the street (not part of Book Fair 2019) that had the entire, although worn out, collection of the Moscow trials.

The Plus With the Minus.

The only positive that I could remember from the Book Fair was the overwhelmingly large number of books available.

Now, when everyone around you has always despised you for having a strong personality and you also enjoy insult comedy, noticing the negatives become very easy.

When they say that one should drink a lot of water what they don’t tell you is how it will urge one’s body to urinate every other hour. On my arrival, the first thing that I wanted to do was pee and the moment I entered the bathroom, it was as if I was in the real life version of the ‘Goosebumps ‘ book because there were no flush, no mirror with the added bonus of cobwebs that had spiders as large as your palm all over it. If you are hosting an event on such a big scale, at least you should put in some effort in the bathrooms.

Guest Speaker and the Message.

My plan originally was to go with two of my friends who being as sweet as they are cancelled the plan thirty minutes before we were supposed to leave. Now, if you know me you would know that by that time I was completely dressed. Since, I had an assignment to complete, I decided to go on my own. The second worst decision of my life, the first one of course being the decision to come out of my mother’s womb into this dying planet alive.

Some thirty minutes after my arrival there, some red uniform schoolboys started following me and saying things like “Headphones azag!” I started walking fast and I thought that I had lost them when some blue uniform schoolboys started teasing me the same. So, in order to lose them I went to the third column, only to find the red uniform schoolboys waiting for me like Lord Voldemort did for Harry Potter in Deathly Hallows Part 2. I started walking as fast as I could, clicking away but after a few columns it was all well and good again, as the kids left the moment an uncle started creepily following me.

I was terribly scared that I booked an Ola right away, went to a nearby restaurant and ate till I cried my eyeballs out but the staff there was so kind that they made me sit in one corner comfortably and took care of me like Winnie the Pooh and his friends.

It was only after I finished my meal that I realized that I forgot to attend or even search about the Guest Speaker session. By that time, my legs had no strength and my body was shaking uncontrollably due to excessive crying to go back to that place.

Lesson Learned.

What I learned from Chennai Book Fair 2019 is that no matter how many times you have travelled alone, no matter how many battles you have conquered alone or for that matter no matter how many times you have been eve teased, you still cannot be numb to such an inhumane behavior. There is no manual on this planet that can ever prepare you for this. Most importantly, you could be mentally strong enough to just shed a few tears and shake it off but what if there is someone else who is not as strong as you are mentally and would end up taking home with them a traumatic experience, instead. It is our responsibility to be like the staff members, to be like Winnie the Pooh and his friends and help those who need it. Be there for them and increase the number of good people in their life.

Give them good memories to find strength from!

CONCLUSION.

I have tried to the best of my abilities to present the content in the most honest and apt manner but if I committed any mistakes, I would hereby like to apologise for it.

Hope you liked my point of view of the Chennai Book Fair 2019 and found it as exhilarating while reading as I did typing.

Thank you.

- Megha Liz Varghese

'At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.'

“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.”

From the concept of the Self, that we’ve been discussing for quite some time now, let’s move ahead gently, to make further inroads into the concept of the ‘Individual’ in relation to his/her society! This let’s do, dishing out the dough on a set frame of texts from yonder worlds and wonderlands of all hues, hoping for some real insightful case study of sorts!

Bella Akhmadulina would then be our first anchorage on this sojourn! And as always, quotes and citations are in italics.

Well, Bella’s been part of the Russian New Wave literary creed of the 1960s, that waved a vigorous banner of support to Western ideology and all that it stood for! The Beats [or the Beatniks] who come from the same time period, make a very interesting parallel reading of sorts in sync with the New Wavists!

Google's doodle tribute to Bella on her 80th birthday, 10 April 2017

The renowned Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky famously christened Bella Akhmadulina, as the ‘lone heiress proper to the Pasternak school of thought in Russian poetry, and the crowning treasure of Russian poetry’.

The Hopkinian streak abounds in her tryst with poetry, in her inventive ways and pioneering styles in rhyme, diction, syntax, etc. Human relationships, the individual in relation to society, love, and friendship are some of the predominant themes in her poetry.

In one of her oft-quoted poems, “Fever,” the speaker’s soaring poetic inspiration is compared to a quaint sickness that in turn results in making her a social outcast of sorts! So much for the artist and her place in society! 

[Well, again, this holds true for a host of writers from the erstwhile Soviet Union, including the likes of Joseph Brodsky, her contemporary, who had to make the decision of crossing over to America because of the soaring hostilities on his artistic sensibilities back home, and who eventually went on to become the Poet Laureate of the US!]

However, Bella's feelings are assuaged, and her artistic sensibilities get the much needed ‘shot in the arm’ even as she is coaxed into a cuddle in her next poem, “Fairytale about the Rain!” wherein, the narrator depicts the Rain as following her wherever she goes, alluding much to the muse within her, or the poet’s creativity that’s been welling up within her, and that’s been sincerely and passionately following her 24 x 7!

The 'Rain' here, metaphorically, acts a naughty child to her, and so she says, “It tickled my ear with a child's finger”!

“It was dry all around. Only I was drenched to the bone”

“The passers-by were frightened by the look of my misfortune.”

In her descriptive passages on how inspiration works, which are so akin to Ben Okri’s, she says,

And further—you fly above and below,

Smashing your elbows and knees until they are

bloody,

On snow, on air, on the corners of Kvarengi,

On bedsheets of hotels and hospitals.

Do you remember that sharp cupola

of St. Basil's, with jagged edges? Imagine—

Against it with all of your body!

Poems keep coming to her in myriad forms – like in the form of dreams, in the form of airplanes, and nip at her nose the way that ‘fish tickle the toes of children’!

Although the narrator yields to an impulsive desperate voice, when she finds herself singled out as an artistic individual, she soon regains her composure and cool when she finds a group of her friends striving and working hard to get rid of the rain! This makes the speaker joyfully embrace her artistic identity in society. However, the fact remains for Bella that, although artistic creativity has a transformative power and a liberating effect on society, still, the artist is the receiving end most of the time, by the same society, especially in dictatorial regimes!

Let’s now move over from Akhmadulina to Arnold!

Well, to John Donne, the famed Metaphysical poet, human beings are essentially gregarious beings and social beings by nature! And hence in his prose piece, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” he reasons out on his much-renowned dictum – ‘No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.’

But but but, with Arnold, it’s almost and always and altogether the other way round! In his poem, “To Marguerite—Continued,” he alludes to life as a boundless sea where people are all separate islands contained within it!

“We mortal millions live alone.”

How much this dictum holds true in today’s technological era!

At the same time, he also seems to highlight the fact that we as human beings must have once been ‘a single continent,’ living together in such harmony and unison, before the waters could have their sway and make islands of our harmonious lives! There is hence an ardent longing and a sincere wish on the part of the poet that this ‘waters’ that have come in between, and made us all islands would somehow recede, so that, the land meets up all over again, and we could start living the harmonious lives we once lived!

Although it is a highly symbolic poem with layers of interpretations beneath its structure, Arnold seems to be basically focusing on the religious skepticism and the dwindling faith that had by now gripped the English psyche very very much! Hence, it is against this backdrop, that Arnold expresses his anguished note that, every human being suffers from some isolation of sorts!

I quote furthermore from the poem –

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!

Now round us spreads the watery plain—

Oh might our marges meet again!

Added, this feeling of isolation of humans from each other, and their earnest longing for solace is further explored in his poems like “Dover Beach” and “Rugby Chapel!”

His dramatic poem, “Empedocles on Etna,” depicts yet again the feeling of human isolation, through the character of Empedocles, a man who can no longer feel joy, as he feels quite much about his predicament!

Well, from Etna let’s now move on to Edna, or Edna Pontellier the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening who also experiences a similar feeling of intense isolation.

In fact, she experiences a deep identity crisis, as she’s been enslaved and bogged down heavily by her societal roles and familial roles, that act a burden on her free spirit as such! In short, this short novel is a powerful depiction of an individual’s fight against societal normatives that fetter the free spirit within an individual!

As explosive as Ibsen’s The Doll’s House that had shocked audiences just two decades ago, [in the year 1879,] The Awakening, published in 1899, proved yet another shocker of sorts to a patriarchally-conditioned or a patriarchally-benumbed audience! The novel was heavily condemned, and banned from bookstores and from libraries as well, and the novelist passed into complete oblivion soon! But thanks to a host of feminists who have resurrected this text, and made it a hugely acclaimed feminist text today!

The novel’s opening lines are so symbolic! And I quote –

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:

        “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!”

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.

Snippets from this short novel that have enthused, motivated and energized people all over! These quotes are such high-octane energy for every soul, I bet!

'At Oxford, I noticed how much people play out a comedy of Englishness!'

Literary Musings on the Concept of the Self – 5

From Ben Okri’s glorification and celebration of the Self, let’s now move ahead with gusto onto our next author on board – Hari Kunzru, in whom there’s a celebration of his concept of Self, of a special ‘Self’ – of himself – of something that he was so very proud of, as a guy from a mixed heritage! This celebration of his mixed identity makes him cultivate an openmindedness that’s very accommodative and quite inclusive in its appeal! 

Hari vouches to this aspect of celebrating the ‘inclusive self,’ in one of his interviews to the London Independent Sunday, where he says, ‘I’ve always been very scared of people who are certain. . . .Nothing terrifies me more than a religious fundamentalist who really knows what right is and is prepared to do violence to what they consider is wrong!’

Kunzru’s The Impressionist follows the experiences of the protagonist, a young man of mixed heritage, by name Pran Nath, and his constant efforts at making a place for himself in the world! Travel hence becomes a predominant marker in the novel! Interestingly most of his works have the theme of travel as a pertinent marker all along!

The beauty about his travels is that, to every place he goes, he becomes a ‘Roman in Rome’an kinda guy! This makes him shed off his previous identities and cloaks whatsoever, and take on the newy identity of the place onto which he is currently placed, thus enlarging his perspectives and widening his horizons to be as inclusive and as accommodative as could be!

His descriptive passages in his The Impressionist real make such an impressive impression of sorts on the reader!

Giving y’all just a sample from the book, from off the narrator’s intensely descriptive sketches on an Agra of the past, of an exactly hundred years back!

In 1918 Agra is a city of three hundred thousand people clenched fist-tight round a bend in the River Jamuna. Wide and lazy, the river flows to the south and east where eventually it will join with the Ganges and spill out into the Bay of Bengal. This, one of countless towns fastened to its banks, is an anthill of traders and craftsmen which rose out of obscurity around five hundred years before, when the Mughals, arriving from the north, settled on it.

If, like the flying ace Indra Lal Roy, you could break free of gravity and view the world from up above, you would see Agra as a dense, whirling movement of earth, a vortex of mud-bricks and sandstone. To the south this tumble of mazy streets slams into the military grid of the British Cantonment. 

The Cantonment (gruffly contracted to Cantt. in all official correspondence) is made up of geometric elements like a child’s wooden blocks; rational avenues and parade grounds, barracks for the soldiers who enforce the law of His Britannic Majesty George. To the north this military space has a mirror in the Civil Lines, rows of whitewashed bungalows inhabited by administrators and their wives. The hardness of this second grid has faded and softened with time, past planning wilting gently in the Indian heat.

Agra’s navel is the Fort, a mile-long circuit of brutal red sandstone walls enclosing a confusion of palaces, mosques, water tanks and meeting halls. A railway bridge runs beside it, carrying passengers into the city from every part of India. The bustling crowd at Fort Station never thins, even in the small hours of the morning. The crowd is part of the grand project of the railway, the dream of unification its imperial designers have engineered into reality. 

The trails of boiler-smoke which rise over heat-hazy fields and converge on the station’s packed platforms are part of a continent-wide piece of theatre. Like the 103 tunnels blasted through the mountains up to Simla, the two-mile span of the Ganges Bridge in Bihar and the 140-foot piles driven into the mud of Surat, the press of people at the station proclaims the power of the British, the technologists who have all India under their control.

'There was Now in my Memory a “Before.”

"As regards fear of traces, fear of memory: We are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: we are terribly afraid of looking at it… and at the same time we are perhaps the one person capable of looking at it. What do we fear?" - Helene Cixous

Amongst a host of psychoanalytic feminist theorists on the Lacanian mode, the fabulous four of Simone De Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray stand tall, strong and striking in their profound takes and pronouncements! For a reason at that! 

On an aside: Well, to Psychoanalytic feminists of the Lacanian order, the analysis of self-construction through discourse occupies very much a pivotal and a predominant place over and above the biological, and hence they are vociferous in their decree that, gender relations cannot be altered, unless and until the discursive frameworks based on language undergo a drastic transformation! So the urgent need and the dire demand for a changed language or an altered language! Yesss! Language in particular, since, these oppressive gender and sexual constructs, or rather these coercive gender and sexual constructs that were hitherto subtly woven, enmeshed and encoded within language, serve as strategies that still subordinate the woman in the scheme of things!

An insightful study on these fab four sure has the potential to yield forth a good dividend on their 'any many' convergences, and divergences as well!

This post would focus on just one such common point of reference that binds these fab four!

And that would be, the domain of Memory proper!

With Simone de Beauvoir, the senior most of them all, let’s start on our Memory sojourn!

Simone with Sartre!

We take off from her The Second Sex, where she alludes to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in her memory!

That whole night I tossed and turned in my bed. It was not possible. I was going to wake up. Mama was mistaken, it would go away and not come back again … The next day, secretly changed and stained, I had to confront the others. I looked at my sister with hatred because she did not yet know, because all of a sudden she found herself, unknown to her, endowed with an overwhelming superiority over me. Then I began to hate men, who would never experience this, and who knew. And then I also hated women who accepted it so calmly. I was sure that if they had been warned of what was happening to me, they would all be overjoyed. “So it’s your turn now,” they would have thought. That one too, I said to myself when I saw one. And this one too. I was had by the world. I had trouble walking and didn’t dare run. The earth, the sun-hot greenery, even the food, seemed to give off a suspicious smell … The crisis passed and I began to hope against hope that it would not come back again. One month later, I had to face the facts and accept the evil definitively, in a heavy stupor this time. There was now in my memory a “before.” All the rest of my existence would no longer be anything but an “after.”

In Letters to Françoise, Married, Marcel Prévost describes the young woman’s dismay upon her return from her honeymoon:

She thinks of her mother’s apartment with its Napoleon III and MacMahon furniture, its plush velvet, its wardrobes in black plum wood, everything she judged so old-fashioned, so ridiculous … In one instant all of that is evoked in her memory as a real haven, a true nest, the nest where she was watched over with disinterested tenderness, sheltered from all storms and danger. This apartment with its new-carpet smell, its unadorned windows, the chairs in disarray, its whole air of improvisation and haste, no; it is not a nest. It is only the place of the nest that has to be built … she suddenly felt horribly sad, as if she had been abandoned in a desert!

How much these ‘memories’ of her mother’s apartment, remind us of Kamala Das’s reminiscences on her grandmother’s house on a similar contextual background as such!

This concept of 'memories,' is dealt with in much detail, in her novel, The Mandarins!

The novel deals with the postwar France, after the Nazi occupation of France had ended! It’s liberation day for everyone in Paris as the Germans were chased out, in toto! Although Simone De Beauvoir herself denied with such an 'impish' vehemence that the novel was NOT a memoir at all, critics could easily see through the thin-veil, where Robert Dubreuilh stood for Sartre, Henri Perron for Albert Camus, and Anne Dubreuilh for Simone herself! And yesss! The novel deals with issues of false memory, as much as it does with issues regarding memory and forgetting! But some of the insights on memory worth a ponder are, to what extent should there be the impact of the 'pastness of the past' on the present, and on the future?

Well, to Simone De Beauvoire, if the ‘Past’ must needs be erased or destroyed with the avowed aim of saving the ‘Future,’ then it’s perfectly acceptable, and there’s nothing wrong to it at all! And with the existentialist streak innate in her, she is of the firm opinion that, only the person who makes the choice has the right and the liberty to determine its validity and its appropriateness based on the given situation!

Over to Julia Kristeva who comes second in line, on the fab four! 

Julia Kristeva

The term abject occupies a significant claim on her theoretical postulates! The very idea of the term abject, is something that is rejected by social reason, because of the communal consensus that underpins a social order!

To Kristeva, within the boundaries of the subject – to mean a part of oneself,  – and object – to mean something that exists independently of oneself – there resides pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one's identity that has since been rejected, and that is called the abject. I quote from her book, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, on the concept of the abject, which, to Kristeva is ‘a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.’

Again, in her voluminous text, titled, The Sense And Non-Sense Of Revolt, translated by Jeanine Herman, in the very first chapter, she opens with a wonderful postulate on the roots of memory, which, according to her are nothing other than language and the unconscious! How much a role language plays in memory, as much the unconscious does!

I quote –

The title of this book is meant to evoke the current political state and the lack of revolt that characterizes it. I promise not to elude this aspect of the problem, but I will approach things from a bit of a distance: from the roots of memory, which is nothing other than language and the unconscious!

Simple and sweet! That makes her lines simply sweet!

And oooh boy! What a critique on culture she’s got on her! You cant help give a standing ovation to her way with words where she makes such an intense and raving sweep on culture, operated with vigour by power, thereby giving us all a falsified normalization! Wowww!

And this normalizing order, threatens its citizenry with a loss of memory!

I quote –

... the threat of the loss of memory that the normalizing order imposes on us.

It is not at all certain that a culture and art of revolt can see the light of day when prohibition and power have taken the forms of falsifiable normalization that I have described or when the individual has become a patrimonial ensemble of accessories with market value. If this is the case, who can revolt, and against what?

Can a patrimony of organs revolt against a normalizing order? How? Through remote-controlled images? If we want to talk about art and culture in this context, clarification is necessary: what culture are we talking about?

I do not have the answer, but I propose a reflection. I submit that past experience, the memory of it, and particularly the memory of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the fall of Communism, should make us attentive to our cultural tradition, which has advanced a thought and an artistic experience of the human subject. This subjectivity is coextensive to time—an individual’s time, history’s time, being’s time—more clearly and more explicitly than anywhere else. We are subjects, and there is time. From Bergson to Heidegger, from Proust to Artaud, Aragon, Sartre, Barthes, different figures of subjectivity have been thought out and put into words or given form in our contemporary culture.

Thirdly, let’s move on to Helene Cixous, the third amongst the fab four!

Helene's book, titled, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, translated with such profound and passionate vibrancy by Eric Prenowitz, is such a treat to read! It’s a medley of all hues and colours in 263 pages of insightful wisdom! I could see streaks of a Jidduji in her words and phrasings! The book opens with a candid interview of sorts that she does with Professor Calle-Gruber! Snippets from which I reproduce below -

Over to Helene Cixous for us all -

On the importance of life writing, and the boldness one needs to write one’s life, she has this to say –

As regards fear of traces, fear of memory: it is clearly a fear in the present. We are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: we are terribly afraid of looking at it…and at the same time we are perhaps the one person capable of looking at it. What do we fear?

These fears can be understood and they can be not understood. They are what engenders a retreat, a flight before reality insofar as they are harrowing. And sometimes, in fleeing, it is life that we lose. We believe we’re saving our life, but we lose it. Because all the harrowing events are an integral part of life. And they constitute it. Julius Caesar: ‘Cowards die many times before their death’—and this is true. You die a thousand deaths before your death if you are afraid. And yet, everyone is cowardly!

To write only has meaning if the gesture of writing makes fear retreat.

Pain is always, unfortunately, stronger than everything. What happens is not the jubilation of writing; it is the strange feeling, the outpouring of joy we can have when we discover (and not only in writing): I ought to be dead and yet I am not dead. Or else: this death which ought to kill me did not kill me. It is the jubilation we feel to be still living, the excitement without pity of the narrow escape!

We ought to have the courage to tell ourselves something which can be disturbing: there is an infinite difference between brushing death and dying. At the moment when you cry out, when you say ‘I am going to die’, five words that belong to the always saved register of writing appear. It is to avow—to avow life. Let us say that I bear witness to it; that others bear witness to it.

For a long time I wondered what became of this in the concentration camps, when there is really every reason, every circumstance to be without hope, does there still remain this triumphant feeling—because it is a triumph! And then, meeting Resistance fighters and discovering works, I saw: yes, there is triumph up to the last minute. Up to the last second. Our true nobility: there is a resource in us, even when we are reduced, when we are crushed, when we are despised, annihilated, treated as people are treated in the camps, a resource which makes the poetic genius that is in every human being still resist. Still be capable of resisting. That depends on us!

‘If I am not already in my coffin,’ one says to oneself then, ‘it’s because my pain is not as great as I think it is.’ Not at all. It’s life which is greater than we think it is! In these moments, in any case, we are not the masters of writing: but the passivity comes to its limit: which is to say that we are in a state of activity. And furthermore, when we write in these circumstances, it’s because we are another person, we are the other. Perhaps I am going to die: but the other remains. In this situation, it is the other who writes.

Photo of a dream: Dream is capable of flashes of lightning—I would like to be able to take a photo of a dream.

After all, what do we do? We live, but why do we live? I think: to become more human: more capable of reading the world, more capable of playing it in all ways. This does not mean nicer or more humanistic. I would say: more faithful to what we are made from and to what we can create.

Yesss! Helene Cixous is a firebrand feminist of the psychoanalytic school! And not without reason!

Hail Helene! Hail her ilk!            

Next comes the fourth in line on the fabby four!

Luce Irigaray!

Luce Irigaray

To Luce Irigaray, within every individual is contained a genealogical sedimentation with its past, present, and future!

Gender or sex as a generative need!

Gender or sex as morphology and identity!

Thus two memories are in tension!

Genealogical memory, always bisexual,

Individual unisexual memory!

'You begin to liquidate a people, by taking away its memory.'

Of ‘Milan’s plenty’!

Milan Kundera is a writer who has the charm to make you empathise with his profound and impactful thoughts and reflections to life, with such eloquent ease!

After reading through some of his delightfully gripping reads, one cannot but fall for the marvellous ways in which most of our thoughts on life and literature, sync to a tee with this legend’s and his oeuvre’s as well! 

And there are vistas from Milan's myriad musings, that throw up a shocker to us all, on a diverse range of subjects, especially when he dabbles with gusto on the labyrinthine lanes of memory(ies), history(ies) and forgetting(s)!

And it’s like, whenever there’s a wonderful observation that he so wittily puts forth, you feel like nodding your head to it, by default, albeit in absentia, all glued, blued and wooed to this legend’s luminous lines!

He’s just turning 90, and lives life in all its lustre, with such immense zeal and zest for all things bright and beautiful, that he always dons the ‘incognito’ mode and quietly goes ‘off radar’ for days and months in a row! 

What a sweet attitude to celebrating a sense of the joi de vivre! 

A guy, with such a heideggerian streak to him on the aspects of looking upon life as one grand celebration, - incognito mode - far from the madding crowd and their ignoble strife - far away from the clutters, far away from the congestions that always try to have a grapplehold on us all - free beings, chirpy beings, ethereal beings - that we by default are!

In this little post, I just wanted to take some little time to get into the life and works of this wonderful writer, who’s got such a passion and a zest, a zeal and a joy for life!

His first book, titled The Joke, written in 1967, was based on a real life incident that had happened almost 17 years ago, when he along with his friend Jan were expelled from the Communist Party for having ‘worked against the interests of the party’! 

Through this novel, Milan underlines the danger and the doom of living in a humourless world!

It indeed is damning to live without the ‘dominant rasa’ of humour, which has the charm and the charisma, the appeal and the allure to make life and all its burdens light, ain’t it!

To Milan Kundera, thence, humour is so much an integral part to one’s life, a key ingredient that gives added flavor, added aroma and added spice to our lovely lives on this ‘dwelling’ of ours! So much for the power of humour in our lives!

One reason why he’s so wary of being part of a society that lacks a sense of humour! I’m reminded of Woody’s lines – ‘It takes a worried man to sing a worried song’!

In the novel, Jahn reminisces on that one joke that had turned his life by 360 degree-sweep way back in the early 1950s. 

Jahn, a vibrant, scholarly and popular student, while in an impish, bratty, playful mood, writes down a postcard to one of his classmates, - a girl – during their routine summer holiday time! 

On the postcard he writes, “Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” However, his friends and party members of the Communist regime who did not have a fine sense for humour, as he did, couldn’t appreciate the lightness n the jollity behind the whole thing! They straightaway expelled him from their party and from his college as well!

Well, then, to put it on a lighter vein, his writing career began with ‘a joke’!

From a joke, he takes us on to ‘laughter,’ with his impactful read of sorts – Laughter and Forgetting!

This read would make a perfect launchpad for anyone who cogitates on plunging full throttle into his readscape as such!  

The Author’s Notes, serve much to assuage our feelings on the impactfulness of the translated version of this delightful read on his avid readers of all hues!

Milan Kundera writes, and I quote –

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written in Czech between 1976 and 1978. Between 1985 and 1987, I revised the French translations of all my novels (and stories) so deeply and completely that I was able to include, in the subsequent new editions, a note affirming that the French versions of these works "are equal in authenticity to the Czech texts." 

My intervention in these French versions did not result in variants of my original texts. I was led to it only by a wish for accuracy. The French translations have become, so to speak, more faithful to the Czech originals than the originals themselves.

Two years ago, when Aaron Asher and I reread the English language version of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we agreed on the need for a new transla­tion. 

I suggested translating from the authentic French edition and urged Aaron to take it on himself. Following his work very closely, I had the pleasure of seeing my text emerge in his translation as from a miraculous bath. At last I recognized my book. I thank Aaron for that with all my heart.

- Paris, December 1995

After these reassuring lines on the translation, from the author himself, the road to the read is just a breeze!

The novel has got seven parts to it, and I would give some highlights to the first part alone!

Kundera’s obsession with history and memory is strikingly obvious in this very first part to the novel! 

It reiterates the importance of memory, as he feels that it is only through ‘memory’ that people stand to get a better or a more authentic view of themselves!

In this regard, I would so like to quote from Astrid Erll’s poignant take on memory and memory studies, that’s been such a profound, impacting take, in the burgeoning field of ‘memory studies’ or what AE herself would call, ‘memory industry’ today!

I quote from Astrid – (again a blessed translation, and how it helps!)

Astrid Erll

Memories are not objective images of past perceptions, even less of a past reality. They are subjective, highly selective reconstructions, dependent on the situation in which they are recalled. 

Re-membering is an act of assembling available data that takes place in the present. Versions of the past change with every recall, in accordance with the changed present situation. 

Individual and collective memories are never a mirror image of the past, but rather an expressive indication of the needs and interests of the person or group doing the remembering in the present. 

As a result, memory studies directs its interest not toward the shape of the remembered pasts, but rather toward the particular presents of the remembering!

Remembering and forgetting are two sides – or different processes – of the same coin, that is, memory. Forgetting is the very condition for remembering. 

Total recall, after all, the complete memory of every single event in the past, would amount to total forgetting, for the individual as well as for the group or society. 

Friedrich Nietzsche had emphasized this as long ago as his 1874 critique of historicism, On the Use and Abuse of History. Forgetting is necessary for memory to operate economically, for it to be able to recognize patterns.

It is true that memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting. In processing our experience of reality, forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception. 

I’ve never seen a better take ever on the concept of memory and memory studies! Hail Erll and her tribe!

And I’ve appended Astrid Erll here on purpose, to see how she syncs to a tee, with Milan’s read here, in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting!

[The above excerpts are from: Memory in Culture by Astrid Erll & Translated by Sara B. Young]

So much for the power of memory over our lives!

Well, in the opening part to this novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we have a citizen of the nation, by name Mirek, who is being followed by the government, or rather hounded by the government!

I quote from Milan’s book –

It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do. He says to them: 

We're not doing anything that violates the constitution. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.

A week before, at work with his crew on the roof of a building under construction, he looked down and was overcome by vertigo. 

He lost his balance, and his fall was broken by a badly joined beam that came loose; then they had to extricate him from under it. 

At first sight, the injury seemed serious, but a little later, when it turned out to be only an ordinary fracture of the forearm, he was pleased by the prospect of some weeks of vacation and the opportunity finally to take care of things he had never found the time for.

He ended up agreeing with his more prudent friends. The constitution did indeed guarantee free­dom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security. One never knew when the state would start screaming that this word or that was an attempt on its security. So he decided to put his compromising papers in a safe place.

But first he wanted to settle the Zdena business. He had phoned her in the town where she lived, but was unable to reach her. That cost him four days. He got through to her only yesterday. She had agreed to see him this afternoon.

Mirek's seventeen-year-old son protested: Mirek would be unable to drive with his arm in a cast. And he did have trouble driving. Powerless and useless in its sling, the injured arm swayed on his chest. To shift gears, Mirek had to let go of the steering wheel.

In the rearview mirror, he noticed a car persistently staying behind him. He had never doubted he was being followed, but up to now they had behaved with model discretion. Today a radical change had taken place: they wanted him to know they were there.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Well, the novel has seven stories to it, and each are so gripping in their descriptions, all the way! The pages, as they say, turn themselves in to us, so spontaneously, that there needs no nudging from your index finger on them anytime! Power to Milan!

Now, taking y’all over to Part Six, titled, The Angels

It’s sure throws a shocker on the reader, to see the history of memory in totalitarian regimes go through a concoction of lies, deception and deceit all along, best explained through the story of Tamina! Indeed, of more special merit is the case of Tamina’s, who the narrator foregrounds as an indispensable frame of reference throughout the novel! 

“It is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent, it is a novel for Tamina!” So trueeey! Once you read through Tamina’s tryst with her past, you get to understand the way memory is erased off a person, and how! So gripping and riveting a read, by all means!

Milan’s lines tug at your heartstrings for ends on! Please do read the book, and I’m sure you’ll understand the whole politics that goes behind the memory-history combo through the ages, especially in totalitarian regimes! 

Just snippets, for y’all, and I quote –

Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. 

In his novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name. No one there remembers or recalls anything, and Josef K. even seems not to know anything about his own life previously. 

No song can be heard there to evoke for us the moment of its birth and link the present to the past.

If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Husak is its builder. 

After T. G. Masaryk, who was called the Liberator President (every last one of his monuments has been destroyed), after Benes, Gottwald, Zapotocky, Novotny, and Svoboda, he is the seventh president of my country, and he is called the President of Forgetting.

The Russians put him in power in 1969. Not since 1621 has the Czech people experienced such a devastation of culture and intellectuals. 

Everyone everywhere thinks that Husak was merely persecuting his political enemies. But the struggle against the political opposition was instead the perfect opportunity for the Russians to undertake, with their lieutenant as inter­mediary, something much more basic.

I consider it very significant from this standpoint that Husak drove one hundred forty-five Czech historians from the universities and research institutes. (It's said that for each historian, as mysteriously as in a fairy tale, a new Lenin monument sprang up somewhere in Bohemia.) 

One day in 1971, one of those historians, Milan Hubl, wearing his extraordinarily thick-lensed eyeglasses, came to visit me in my studio apartment on Bartolomejska Street. We looked out the window at the towers of Hradcany Castle and were sad.

"You begin to liquidate a people," Hiibl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster."

"And the language?"

"Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death."

Was that just hyperbole dictated by excessive gloom?

Or is it true that the people will be unable to survive crossing the desert of organized forgetting?

None of us knows what is going to happen.

In his next important novel, titled, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan continues on this concept of memory, alluding to the hugey burdensome ‘‘heaviness’’ brought about by memory, while harping on the unending feel of ‘‘lightness’’ that is brought about by forgetting!

Well, next on his publication is his most important nonfiction read titled, The Art of the Novel. This book puts forth his theories on the novel, that have helped shaped generations of readers and writers!

Some delightful, perceptive quotes for us all from this lovely non-fiction text of Milan’s!

“We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. 

We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.”

“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

“[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”

“The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.”

Man is a child wandering lost - to cite Baudelaire’s poem again—in the "forests of symbols."

“The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.”

Milan is a melange and a medley! an awesome assemblage and an amazing assortment of sorts, whose oeuvre can never ever be pigeonholed into one single mode of reasoning!

Of such mettle is ‘Milan’s plenty’!

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