DIALECTICS OF MODERNITY: A STUDY OF AMIT CHAUDHURI’S SELECT FICTIONS

Abstract

The whole experience of the Western modernity may be seen through the binary of societal modernization and cultural modernity, through ‘the dilemmas of Western Modernity’ (D. P. Gaonkar). Societal modernization, a set of cognitive and social transformations, forms the basis of understanding of bourgeois modernity associated with the development of capitalism in the West, which is marked with a distinctive mode of production and a new type of subject, free from the constraints of the tradition. Cultural modernity – the cultural response to societal modernization – may be put in opposition to this modernization process itself. The cultural modernists, avant-garde writers and artists, starting with the Romantics in the late eighteenth century to the proponents of Modernism, in opposition to the reason based societal modernization process, emphasize on imagination and emotionalism as their primary vehicle to delve deep into the inner realm of the modern self. While the unifying narratives of rational modernity promise a perpetual linear development in terms of the materialistic production processes, they point out to the ‘disenchantment’ of modernity such as to disintegrating self, fractured social relationships, the alienation of human labor, an emotional vacuum, a limited scope for human imagination and the destruction of whatever ‘irrational’ and ‘idiosyncratic’, that cannot be logically explained. The modern existence, as a cultural and aesthetic experience, seems to sway between the two poles: enthusiasm about the rational progress, and a melancholic human condition as a result of that process. Living in a modern world is wrestling inexhaustibly with its ambiguities and contradictions – the ironies and inner tensions becoming the primary source of the creative power. The primary objective of this thesis is to enquire into this dialectical modern existence – a continual tension and associated circumlocutory anxiety – through the select fictional corpus of the post-liberalization Indian English writer, Amit Chaudhuri. The novels taken for the current study include: A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), Afternoon Raag (1993), Freedom Song (1998), A New World (2000), and The Immortals (2009). Theoretically, the opposing poles of modernity are analyzed to explore how both are intertwined with each-other and create the grey, unknowable in-between space for the phenomenon. In my thesis, the modernity’s location is neither here, nor there, but in an elsewhere, which can be intuited but can never ever be adequately expressed. The ambiguities and contradictions of the modernity are not ‘essential’ features of modernity, but symptoms of its ever ungroundable locale. ii Chaudhuri’s conception of modernity simply lies beyond any kind of categorization rather it resides in a ‘zone’, which is more anterior than could be grasped by rational consciousness, which he calls “secular unconscious”. (“Travelling between genres”) This phrase is Chaudhuri’s metaphor for the accidentalism and (un)knowability in whatever ‘out there’, including his literariness, sense of modernity, persona, fictional acumen, and his critical stances. He is in a relentless critical search for an elsewhere, where ‘being in the world’ is found in effervescence, in a state of always already becoming, but irrationally, even irresponsibly. His ‘secular unconscious’ is consciously aware of the ‘paradoxes’ and the ‘reciprocity’ at the heart of Indian modernity, which does “not only involve the beginnings of secular ‘culture’ in a nationalist project, but make the nation, once and for all, a cultural one. It’s a reciprocity that’s given our democratic and daily lives in India their recognisable texture. . . .” (“The Flute” 21) This thesis has formed ‘frame’ theoretical spatio-temporalities, by taking recourse to chiefly, the ‘hermeneutic circle’ as proposed by Martin Heidegger, and further explored by Hans George Gadamer, as opposed to the vicious circle; to the formulations of the ‘negative dialectics’ as proposed by Theodor Adorno, as opposed to the kinds of ‘reconciliatory’, ‘synthetic’ or ‘deterministic’ senses of dialectics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or classical Marxism, or their ‘mainstream’ variants; and to finally, a revision of Heideggerian existentialism, or fundamental ontology, proposing the ‘double movements’ in Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy, like ‘singular-plural’, or ‘spatio-temporal’. This frame also refers to the basic ‘fracturedness’ in a dialectical process, which declares such a process ‘open’ as in the sense of an ‘enunciation’, which should not cover itself up, which will eventually ‘close’ the dialectical process, but as in sense of such an ‘openness’, which is both an ‘enunciation’ for the sake of enunciating, and also a ‘renunciation’ in putting no faith in such ‘enunciation’. As far as the ‘embedded’ theories in each chapter are concerned, they have been explored chiefly on the contextual basis depending on that paradigm of modernity, which the chapter seeks to explore. In the second chapter, “Being at the Edge of Chaos: The Game of (Im)Mortality in The Immortals and Freedom Song”, the ambiguous and split selves have been explored as beings, continually swinging between the theoretical formulations of ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ of ‘Dasein’ by Martin Heidegger, which have been seconded by such related theorists of modern existentialities like Søren Kierkegaard, and Jean Paul Sartre. The third chapter, “A Theatre Called Spectacle: Phantasmagorical Urban Space and Flâneur’s Gaze in A Strange and Sublime Address and A New World”, analyzes, through iii the theories and conceptualizations of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georg Simmel, Jacques Derrida, Georg Lukács, and Ranajit Guha, how the narratives of these novels militate against all that is ‘spectacular’ in the urban modernity/modern urbanity, and brings into a play of ghostly with that to resist and impede the former’s unquestionable progress. This ‘progress’ both originates and gets dissolved in such ‘spectacular’/‘spectral’ urban space. This chapter also analyzes how this space is simultaneously addressed and redressed by the flâneur’s, a casual city stroller’s, observations, which are always already informed by a double vision – seeing yet disbelieving. In the fourth chapter, “Image(I-Nation): Representing the Denizenry of the Post/Coloniality in A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag”, the thesis has focused on the historiographies of coloniality and postcoloniality through the continuous and unstoppable dialectical double movements of the post/colonial images/imaginations vis-à-vis the notions of the nation in a more personalized Indian contexts of those people of the nation, who are yet to become full-fledged citizens, expressed in the term ‘denizenry’, through mainly the theoretical deliberations of the school of subaltern historians like Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, of postcolonial thinker Homi K. Bhabha, of alternative modernity thinker D. P. Gaonkar, and also of the Indian Marxist literary critic and political commentator, Aijaz Ahmed. The first chapter, “Introduction: Clearing a Space for an ‘Open’ Dialectics of Modernity’, tries to deliberate on the ambiguous and contradictory nature of modernity, both in the West and the rest through a kind of ‘open’ dialectical structure, in which the supposed ‘oppositional’ elements of a ‘closed’ dialectics, like self/other, subject/object, thesis/anti-thesis etc., are inevitably bound to each-other, thus become like, self-other, subject-object, thesis-anti-thesis etc. It also offers justifications for the creation of ‘frame’ theoretical discourses, as the thesis calls them, vis-à-vis Amit Chaudhuri’s literary-critical stands, which have been discussed in brief above. It also states the objectives of and further scopes for this thesis. The second chapter attempts to formulate a thematic and attitudinal proximity between Amit Chaudhuri and Martin Heidegger, and examines how Chaudhuri’s ‘self being in the world’ is eternally suspended in the in-between space of Heideggerian in/authenticity as proposed in the Being and Time, where both of these existential categories not only remain incomplete in themselves, but also create a pattern of what the study calls ‘dialectical circularity’. iv The third chapter deliberates upon the modern urban space split in the discourses of what Guy Debord calls ‘spectacles’ or the grand, majestic, decorated expressions of the imperial/capitalist progress that signify a modern metropolis, and their spectral counterparts emerging out of themselves as in Benjaminesque phantasmagoria that finds expression in Parisian Arcades. It also discusses how, in many cases, these fetishes produce a psychopathology, what George Simmel calls a blasé attitude, marked by indifference, irritation and superficiality. A flâneur is, probably, one of the greatest examples of this urban type, whose ‘double gaze’ is symptomatic of the spirit of an ascetic roaming within the jungle of concrete spectacularities. The fourth chapter seeks to re-define a postcoloniality by both ‘thinking through’ and ‘thinking against’ (D. P. Gaonkar) the notion of modernity travelling from the West to the rest, which is both ‘inevitable’ and ‘inadequate’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty) to the formulations in the making of nationhood in the ‘Global South’. It shows how modernity, both at the colonial heartland of Britain and at a postcolonial margin like India, is fractured. It also discusses how through a continuous dialectical tension of post/colonial images/imaginations, alternative spirits of nationhood, primarily based upon the more personalized experiences of the people as against the grand narratives of nationalisms, could be found in piling up ‘norm exceptions’ as against ‘normative expectations’ and ‘norm deviations’ (Partha Chatterjee), also through interrogating into the formulations of svadeś and svadeśī samāj proposed by Rabindranath Tagore. The last chapter both summarizes the theoretical stands taken and arguments made in this thesis and reiterates the prime objective of this thesis as foregrounding anti-totalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism and freedom by resisting any interpretive attempts with the purpose of “socializing of arbitrariness” (Achille Mbembe).