Malay Roychoudhury’s novella ‘Arup Tomar Entokanta’ : The relational orientation between body and mind
Tanumay Goswami
Every writer has a unique way of the looking at the world, and this is the civilization’s centre of gravity, is a cluster of ideas which define the goal of human existence, the ways to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided and the obstacles to be expected on the way. This view interprets central human experiences and answers perennial questions on what is good and what is wrong/ evil, what is real and what is unreal, what is the essential nature of men and women and the world they live in. It is now generally assumed that people are basically selfish, and that fellow feeling is either a weakness or a luxury, or merely a more sophisticated form of selfishness. In this picture kindness becomes something we are nostalgic about, a longing for something that we fear may not really exist.
Aesthetically, Psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defences are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed the history of Psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and then gratification, or to other peoples ? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean ? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships ? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose ? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more obscure, least articulated forms. It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
Our psyches and the social world are inestricably linked. Whether we consider the social world is composed of dyadic relationslips, or the nuclear or extended family, or the larger community, we know that the psyche is formed by internalization of the external world, while the external world is always perceived through the lens of the internal world, the psyche. As a dyadic practice, psychoanalysis naturally focuses on the vicissitudes of dyadic relationships both in the external world and as represented internally.
An enigma, hackneyed, an author par excellence, cliché, one who speaks the last word on sexuality, an empty boast. He is the ultimate, the pioneer of a genre, hitherto not fathomed by any Bengali litterateur, what with his slang, his colloquial dialects, his candid confessions of his eccentricities and HIS never say die attitude on the face of odds, which would have dictated anyone to hang up his boots. He is essentially a diaspora and he loves it that way. He has qualms on joining in the milieu of the so called mainstream sheep following the financially rewarding balderdash of literature.
In this novella, author trying to emphasis on the eroticization of kindness in the psychoanalytic account. Rousseau, as we have seen located the psychological birth of kindness in the outset of puberty. It is sexual maturation that opens the fictional Emile to the feeling and sufferings of others, ‘bring[ing] to his heart the first compassion it has ever experienced.’ Rousseau intimated, and Freud showed so clearly, ambivalence is key to human sexuality, and if there is one thing that exposes this ambivalence, tests human kindness, it is the experience of human jealousy. The ambivalence exposed so vividly by sexual jealousy- that where we love we always hate,- has something important to tell us about the complexity of our emotional lives. We are always tempted to simplify our emotional lives in order to diminish the constant conflict we are in, in sexual jealousy we can no longer keep our conflicts hidden. We hate intensely where we once loved, our dependence on the person we need. Sexual jealousy- the ambivalence that explodes out of it, invites us to ask our questions the other way round. Why are we ever unkind ? And one answer would be to secure, in so far as it is possible, our emotional (psychic) survival. In a lecture on sexual jealousy delivered in Paris in 1929, Ernest Jones argued that what we call love is very often simply the way we manage stronger than love was old hat, atleast in psychoanalytic circles.
In this story, we observes relational orientation is also congruent between body and mind. In the Indian view, there is no essential difference between body and mind. The body is merely the gross form of matter, just as the mind is a more subtle form of the same matter. Both are different forms of the same body- mind matter- sharira. The emotions that have come to be differently viewed because of the Indian emphasis on connection. As cultural psychologists have pointed out, such emotions as sympathy and feelings of interpersonal communion. Eros not in its narrowing meaning of sex but in its wider connotation of a loving ‘connectedness’ (where the sexual embrace is only the most intimate of all connections), then the relational cast to the Indian mind makes Indians more ‘erotic’ than many other peoples of the world. The relational orientation, however, also easily slips into conformity and conventional behaviour, making many Indians psychologically old even when young. In a post modern accentuation of ‘fluid identities’ and a transitional attitude toward relationships, of ‘moving on’, contemporary westernman (and the modern upper class Indian) may well embody what the Jungians call puer aeternus- the eternal youth, ever in pursuit of his dreams, full of vitality, but nourishing only to himself while those around him.
Let us again emphasize that the relational orientation, the context sensitivity and the lesser sexual differentiation that go into the formation of the Indian mind. They are continents of an Indian’s psyche. Our sexual desire is far more selective than our kindness- our preconditions for excitement are much narrower than our preconditions for sympathy. The mental representation of our cultural heritage, it remains in constant conversation with the universal and individual aspects of our mind throughout life.
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Tanumay Goswami
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