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A Contract of Loyalty “Narrative contract”, “Always historicize”, “A truth universally acknowledged”, “Dedoubling as a literary technique”…the voices merge and coalesce among similar other whispers inside the head.
Disclaimer #1: All the novelists, poets, critics, teachers and students mentioned in this paper are ‘real’ people. Any resemblance with anyone fictional is completely coincidental. “Plain Jane” never dreams of a handsome man: the moment she sets her eye upon the cranky Rochester she knows that this is the man she must be with. Browning’s Duke kills his wife who smiled at her attendants and then candidly reveals the “half-flush” along her throat to an outsider. The Lady of Shallot falls in love with images and shadows. While Jane is deemed to be caught in a limbo between the ‘Realist’ and the ‘Romantic’ movements (like her creator), Browning’s Duke wears a “double mask” and the Lady of Shallot is “a portrait of the artist”. Terry Eagleton is right: “In everyday life, talking about imaginary people as though they were real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as literary criticism.” Of course, this confession too, is an exemplary moment of “self-reflexivity”. Of course, Bakhtinian terms bring the inaccessible literary heights down to the “polyphonic” ground-level of the common-man, through the jargon of “heteroglossia” and the fun-filled “carnivalesque”. A man of the people, Bakhtin sees the masses subverting the dominant ideology in most Russian texts. Here he has a friend in Germany whose ideas on sub-structure and super-structure has complicated our understanding of literature forever. Therefore the modernists are “bourgeois” and the realists are the “proletariat” even though the reality being portrayed is one of bourgeois reality. So what if the writer himself is a bourgeois ‘raising a voice’ for the proletariat? As long as he is “organic” to the class of his new allegiance, nothing can deter him, ever, as Gramsci would tell you reassuringly. Organicity therefore, tends to become central to any claim of authenticity- what about us then, we who sit here with our books torn between “sympathy and judgement”? The subaltern and his voice enter the fray- is the subaltern only a body whose physical presence suffices for all the inarticulation; or does he have a voice and language? Oh and did I say “he”? My apologies for the Freudian slip: gendering this piece was never the aim. Gender is a relation to power and power is a silent presence and gender is also about performativity- building up knowledge is an exercise in power, and therefore knowledge, gender and power are all “do-ing” words that they never taught us in school as such. We learn now, as we will continue to learn forever.
Disclaimer #2: All the novelists, poets, critics, teachers and students mentioned here are people I am in complete awe of. Any trace of irreverence is completely unintended and gravely regretted.
Bullshit Night in Suck City. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. You
