Aestheticism, Postmodernism and Displacement in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction: A Novel View of the Search for Fulfillment by Obliviating the Past
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Summary
This research explores how the desire to break with the barriers of tragic past and seeking survival in another world gives a new perspective to Diaspora. It is not the existence in the new world which causes the disaster of individuals; rather it is the tragic past which destroys their lives totally. Moreover, the rejection of old habits, traditions and conditioning, and a merging with the culture of the new context is an existing issue of the postmodern transcultural world. The feeling of home is like something haunting and dark which frightens the people. Their quest of survival in a transcultural world, and their will to sacrifice their relations for that reason is an insight into situations of fast changing social fabric in India. The male and the female agency works in order to build an individual identity, and it constructs individual realities based on personal experiences. the old world and the changing perceptions of the new world.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
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Lahiri points out that, it is not the existence in the new world which causes the
disaster; rather it is the tragic past which triggers this disaster. The characters do not face
cultural shock, but they suffer due to the tragedy that is associated with their native land, and
has shattered their lives totally. This study explores the keen desire to mingle personal self
within a new world, rather than discussing any psychological-cultural issues.
Aesthetic experience does not seem to develop "organically," on a field of its
own, but to progressively expand and maintain its area of meaning at the
expense of bordering experiences of reality, and this by usurpations and
compensations, the crossing of boundaries, the offer of competing solutions.
(Jauss 112)
In the postmodern world there is no fixed meaning and reality, and the world can be
constructed and interpreted in different ways according to individual perception. There are no
boundaries between facts and fiction, and one person's fiction is another person's reality.
"The Simulacrum is never what hides the truth----it is truth that hides the fact that there is
none. The Simulacrum is true" (qtd. in Baudrillard 1). The reality varies from person to
person. It is through their perception and experience that individuals construct their own
reality. And, moreover, the perception of the world is not dependent on observation, but on
the experiences of relationships between people; "Truth and reality are products constructed
between people within relationship" (Sim 112). In Lahiri's fiction the characters' individual
perception of the new culture makes sense to them. In The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism, it is stated that "Sense-making is perceived as a process through which
people reduce the complexity of their environment to a level which makes sense to them"
(Sim 113). Their "rejection of old habits, traditions and conditioning, and a merging with the
culture of the new context" (Joshi 84) is an existing issue of the postmodern trans-cultural
world. For them, "home is a contradictory site of nature and also dark" (84). It is surprising
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that they prefer their American present upon their Bengali past. The new world not only
"offers professional opportunity and financial betterment," (84) but an opportunity to
reconstruct their social world by obliviating the haunted memories of the tragic past. For them
immigration or displacement is a kind of rebirth in a new culture, and the feeling of home is
like something haunting and sinister which frightens them. Their quest of survival in a trans-
cultural world, and will to sacrifice their relations for that reason is "an insight into situations
of fast changing social fabric in India" (Jain 2312). Displacement is an attempt to construct
individual reality. The new world gives the opportunity to get freedom from the old traditions
of Indian life. As, in his article "That Third Space: Interrogating the Diasporic Paradigm",
Satchidanandan argues that "the social articulation of difference, from the minority
perspective, is a complex on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that
emerge in moments of historical transformation" (53).
In The Lowland, Subhash's experience of the subaltern in Indian postcolonial society
wheedles him to raise his voice through mimicry. He leaves India in quest of identity. He
adopts the new culture as if he has always been a part of it. He does not want to remember his
past and refuses to go back. He adopts new cultural practices, assumptions, traditions and
morals. As, a critic Catherine Belsey defines a human being as; "not a unity, not autonomous,
but a process, [is] perpetually in construction, perpetually contradictory, perpetually open to
change" (qtd. in C. Butler 53). In a new culture he feels free of any social and ethical
constraints of the old world, and the cultural hybridity is a source of alleviation, enchantment
and self transformation.
Lahiri's characters perceive America as an idealized promised land which will cure all
their wounds of the past, and fulfill their dreams and desires. Living in America is like a new
birth for them. "As the statue of liberty proclaims so eloquently: `send me your poor huddled
masses yearning to be free.' It is the nation created as a refuge for all the world; and a nation
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made up of immigrants" (Sardar 16). They perceive displacement as an opportunity to start a
new life on the other side of the world by rejecting the values of the old world.
What immigrants know is that wherever their parents or grandparents came
from was nasty, brutish and tyrannical--that's why they made their way to
America. So the rest of the world by definition is inherently flawed, unable to
compare with America, and is, in a fundamental way, not worth knowing.
(Sardar 16)
The title of the novel The Lowland is also symbolic of the above statement. The Indian
land is represented as muddy low land which is reflective of colonized Indian society. This
perception of the old culture motivates them to live in a new world with courage and
determination by breaking with the barriers of past.
In the postmodern world "the self is an ever-changing and flexible entity, especially in
feminist circles, where the notion of an essentialist self is regarded as part of the system of
patriarchal oppression" (Sim 230). So in Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction displacement, as seen from
the female perspective, is a chance to get freedom from the patriarchal Indian values. In The
Lowland Gauri, being a widow, was oppressed by the society, and her in-laws as well. She
gets freedom from the patriarchal Indian values when she marries to Subhash, and enters into
a new culture. Again, when she leaves her husband and daughter, it is a sign that she wants to
break with the barriers of past in order to merge herself into a new world. She seeks pleasure
in dislocation. She becomes more an American in her manners and living style than a Bengali
when she crosses the national boundaries. "America, for example, began as a declaration of
identity: a new world emptied of meaningful past and ready for migrants who would build an
identity based on the power of a new territory" (Sardar 96).
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In The Lowland the relationship between Subhash and Gauri is destroyed not due to
`the psychological cultural issues', as, "several diasporic novels have focused on the failure of
the marriages to indicate the failure of the immigrants to integrate into the new life" (Joshi88).
It is all due to Gauri's great desire to get rid of her past, and to absorb the new culture for self-
transformation. In The Namesake Moushumi's denial to marry a Bengali man is an expression
of her desire to get rid of traditional authority, or a denial to accept the Indian patriarchal
values. Her involvement in American, German, Persian and Italian men indicates that she
wants to take refuge in other cultures. "The clash between traditional patriarchal Indian
values, and the more emancipated needs of the younger generation influenced by western
view; the clash of opinions between older and younger generations of immigrants is a familiar
theme in Indian fiction" (Joshi 85).
Colonialism, obviously is an enormously problematic category: it is by
definition trans-historical and unspecific, and it is used in relation to very
different kinds of historical oppression and economic control. Nevertheless
like the term `patriarchy', which shares similar problems in definition, the
concept of colonialism ... remains crucial to a critique of past and present
power relations in world affairs. (qtd. in Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 170)
`Colonialism' and `Patriarchy' from the above stated explanation are similar in their treatment
of their subjects. Both cause `oppression' and `exploitation' of the subaltern, however it
seems clear from the history of popular revolts, that "exploitation and oppression have been a
perennial source of revolts" (Ludden 46). Gauri's character in The Lowland truly represents
the feminist circle in postcolonial India where the women are doubly colonized. Their
oppression by the colonizers and Indian patriarchy inflicts them to break with the barriers of
traditional authority, and to take refuge in another culture. In a new world they construct their
own social network or agency. "The notion of agency is defined as initiating an action by
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one's own choice... a continuous flow of conduct or a stream of actual or contemplated casual
interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world" (Jain 2312).
It is through this individually constructed social world of a woman that one can see
her potential and abilities which remain hidden under the patriarchal oppression. The women
create a space for themselves in a new culture or society by building up new relations and
adopting new language. As, Shobhita Jain has discussed in her article "Women's Agency in
the Context of Family Networks in Indian Diaspora" that she knows about such women who
come from rural parts of India, they usually migrate to Australia after their marriages and try
to adopt English language in Australian accent. According to Jain this act is an indication of
their repressed desire to mingle themselves within a new culture by communicating in the
language of that culture. By adopting the new language they actually want to construct their
own individual social world and new relationships. "Aspirations and the capacity to aspire for
a better future may be thwarted by constraints that restrict the capacity to aspire, whereas
equality of agency, which is built on equality of opportunity, has to consider the outcome of
interaction between individuals within the socio-cultural settings of their operation" (2314).
So this `desire' or `aspiration' has changed the whole meaning of dislocation or displacement.
Instead of transforming their identity they build up a new identity in a new world which gives
them an opportunity to show their hidden talent which was suppressed by the Indian
patriarchy.
Previous research on Lahiri's fiction has been limited to the exploration of the themes of
Migration-stress and psychological trauma in result of dislocation or displacement. It
highlights the difficulties in building up new relationships and immigrants' inability to
integrate with new cultures. As;
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Some studies have shown that language barriers, disconnection from family
and friends, and exposure to new and different customs and tradition can lead
to difficulties in adapting to a new country: Difficulties acculturating can, in
turn, lead to low self esteem and increased self doubt, with additional
psychological stress. (qtd. in Joshi 85)
Marginal Value of the Study
This study is unique in its treatment of Lahiri's fiction that it looks at Lahiri's works
through the lens of postmodern aesthetics. In the postmodern era there is no fixed reality and
truth, and meaning of everything has been changed, thus the individual perception of
dislocation and displacement has taken a new dimension. The universal concept of looking at
displacement as a painful and haunting experience has been deconstructed by individual
judgment and will. Moreover, individualism has taken place of universalism; "In postmodern
times, the idea that has acquired universal connotation is individualism" (Sardar 239). In
postmodern world dislocation, according to individual perception, is not a cause of
psychological trauma, but a source of free will and ecstasy. Instead of feeling alienated and
alone, the individuals socialize in the new cultures or societies to build up a new identity.
They feel happy in a new world because it is free of the social and ethical pressures which
they face in the old world; "the universal entitlement of individualism is the dream of personal
ideal utopias, without the need to recognize constraints, boundaries, taboos and social
acceptability" (Sardar 240). So it is the existence in a new world which provides an
opportunity to the individuals to break with the barriers of past in order to seek survival in a
new world.
From the female perspective displacement or dislocation is an attempt to get rid of old
patriarchal values which oppress and exploit them. Dislocation is a form of refuge for them in
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another world. The new world gives them an opportunity to construct their own social fabric
and show their abilities which were suppressed by the old traditions of the previous world. In
Lahiri's works there is no `lurking nostalgia' for the past traditions and relations, rather it is a
great desire to give up old world with all its fears and constraints. There is an optimistic and
celebrative attitude towards the new life in a new world. "Under the new conditions of
technological change, which opened to human perception undreamed-of areas of experience,
the ambivalence of aesthetic experience, so familiar from an old tradition, takes on a new
form" (Jauss 62).
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Chapter 2
Postmodern Aesthetics and Lahiri's Fiction
Reviewing Lahiri's works through the lens of Postmodern Aesthetics is complex to
say the least, as there have been few studies to date that explore her fiction using this
approach. There have been many studies that focus on the themes of migration-stress,
psychological-cultural issues in her works, and the way Lahiri attempts to write about the
effects of displacement, sense of alienation, and the immigrants' inability to amalgamate
within new culture. However, very few studies have actually attempted to work out the way
Lahiri describes the individual experience and perception to look at displacement in a positive
light. Lahiri explores the way how colonial experience of individuals has changed their way to
look at the world in a postmodern context.
In the Routledge Companion to Postmodernism Stuart Sim has described
postmodernism as deconstruction of modernist principles. A fundamental thought of the
intellectual movement of postmodernism is its elimination of an "ultimate truth or grand
narrative" (109). Furthermore, postmodernism shores up the idea that the future is not
predictable. It is fickle and always receptive of human influence, and postmodernism castoffs
the postulation that meta-narrative has the potential to contain all knowledge and meaning.
"Postmodernism also rejects the notion of the existence of a social world which awaits
discovery and argues that it is merely what society perceives it to be" (109). Postmodern
thought has given way to innovative methods of conceptualization by challenging some of the
more traditional and stiff "modern epistemologies" (110). Postmodernism puts across the idea
that there is no fixed meaning or reality, meaning is ephemeral and transient. It is always in a
flux and therefore has no solidity or substance. Instead, meaning is achieved through the use
of language within human interactions. "The world can only be perceived through the forms
created by a shared language, and the difference in meaning from one language to another
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reflects a difference in a perception of the world" (111). In postmodernism storytelling is an
approach which is able to restrain a plurality of "voices and realities" (111).
Niall Lucy, in his book Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction has drawn a
parallel between romanticism and postmodernism. According to him romanticism is defined
as "the production of something entirely new", while on the other hand postmodernism is
defined in terms of "working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have
been done" (64). Lyotard is one of the key proponents of postmodernism who has devoted his
writings to challenging the domination of extensive viewpoint or meta-narratives. According
to Lyotard `little narratives' have the capacity to represent society, and `meta-narratives' are
incapable of holding that multiplicity of many `little narratives'. For all that Lyotard is "on the
side of difference and diversity" (Lucy 71). He promotes the necessity of responding to every
phrase or language-game in its own stipulations, according to its own rules and statements, in
order to prevent the `injustice' of an appropriate response, his "insistence on the ethical nature
of heterogeneity turns out to be indistinguishable from the sort of statements he regards as
totalizing and therefore unethical or unjust" (71). In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard
offers a definition of postmodernism. According to Lyotard, postmodern is the
`unpresentable' aspect of modern presentation; that is to say the postmodern defies definition
and refuses to be clothed in `good forms' (Lucy 63). As Lyotard sees it, the postmodern has,
unlike the modern, an abhorrence for the collective nostalgia of the `unattainable'. The
postmodern condition then is constantly on the lookout for new ideas that symbolize the
aforementioned `unpresentable' aspect of the modern. For Lyotard the postmodern artist or
writer holds a status of a philosopher. His/her work can be judged and interpreted in multiple
ways. It cannot be determined or be judged by pre-established rules and conventions. The
artist and the writer then work without predetermined rules (qtd. in Lucy 63-64). Aesthetics
are at the apex of postmodern theory in contemporary times. In his book, Nail Lucy has put
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forward Baudrillard's argument that "we live everywhere already in an `esthetic'
hallucination of reality. The old slogan `truth' is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded
to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete" (53). The postmodern world
is truly dependent on individual experience and perception having no ultimate truth and
reality, "reality has become unreal" (53). It is a relationship between different people which
construct their truth and reality. According to Baudrillard, "today it is quotidian reality in its
entirety--political, social, historical and economic--that from now on incorporates the
simulatory dimension of hyperrealism" (53). The perception of the world is not dependent on
observation, but on the experiences of relationships between people. For Baudrillard "there is
no more fiction that life could possibly confront, it is reality itself that disappears utterly in
the game of reality" (53).
In Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutic, Hans Robert Jauss has mentioned
that under the new circumstances of technical transformation, which open up to human
perception "undreamed-of areas of experience, the ambivalence of aesthetic experience, so
familiar from an old tradition, takes a new form" (62). Nonetheless, it is most easily
discovered in the medium of aesthetic experience that "we can still find out about the past and
the historical change of human sensory perception" (64). The chronological transformation in
"the receptive aesthetic experience" will be elucidated by a number of textual analyses (63).
"This hermeneutic function of aesthesis is due to the fact that the human glance is interested
by its very nature. It is not satisfied with what directly presents itself, is lured by what is
absent, and reaches out for what is still hidden" (64). Aesthetic perception animates this vigor
of the glance, sublimates the desire to see and be seen to a "poetics of the glance," and thus
continues the process that "led artistic aesthesis from discovery to discovery" (64). The
`aesthetic attitude' organizes or strengthens an individual to form a model according to his/her
own perception and experience rather than just adopting a model which is set by religion,
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convention, or culture (93). Aesthetic experience does not come into being as an isolated
entity. On the contrary, it is imbued with meaning by a host of different experiences that can
be complimentary or competing. As a result, the aesthetic experience celebrates the
commonplace and the extraordinary alike, a phenomenon that ultimately results in the
aesthetic experience becoming richer and more significant itself (112). Jauss has talked about
John Dewey's view that a pioneering achievement in the field of aesthetic experience is the
aesthetic familiarity that is the foundation of all elevated purposes which are necessary in the
progress of human life, and the circle of life, "basically experienced as a constant fluctuation
in the interaction with the environment, acquires an `aesthetic quality' with the moment of
recovered unity" (112). With the introduction of the concept of aesthetic function, the
seemingly unbiased purposes of aesthetic quality are seen as flowing from human activity.
"The work of art loses its character as thing; as `aesthetic object,' it requires the human
consciousness to constitute it. Being a dynamic principle, the aesthetic function is potentially
unlimited: it can accompany every human act, and every object can manifest it," (115) and its
limit lies in the fact that it originates from the dialectical repudiation of a sensible, useful and
communicative function. And because "the phenomena it produces in the constant renewal of
the aesthetic experience are subject to social judgment, i.e., must find public recognition
before they can enter the tradition-creating process as aesthetic norms" (116).
In Jean Francois Lyotard: Aesthetics, it is illustrated that the aesthetic of the sublime
and of the experimental that Lyotard sketches in The Postmodern Condition and attendant
articles is precisely an attempt to situate art as the field of resistance to meta-languages.
Lyotard appeals to the aesthetics in order to change our perception towards "cultural
transformation". For him aesthetic is the site of discovery and innovation where desire works
freely without any "rules of truth". The important thing now in aesthetic is the "kind of
invention of which art is capable". This is a kind of development which displaces the rule of
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truth, instead of originating the new "truer truths" (Taylor, Lambert 224). "If early modern
aesthetic innovation sought a new truth to the experience of telling, postmodern art does not
seek a truth at all but seeks to testify to an event to which no truth can be assigned, that cannot
be made the object of a conceptual representation" (226). The aesthetics of postmodernity
assert that "the art-work" has the status and ability to displace "both the historical assurance
of classicism and the historical adventure of modernism". "If classicism offers a description
of the concept that would not itself be an event, whereas modernism offers to represent the
concept of the event, postmodernism seeks to testify to the event without recourse to the
concept that would reduce its event hood to unity and fixity" (226). Lyotard persists that
justice should not be reliant on truth. It must have independent status, and judgment should
not follow any fixed criteria. "Narrative pragmatics differentiates narratives without grounds
because they do not refer narratives to either referential truth or the truth of a just model of
narrative. The analysis of narrative is a matter of performance, not of truth. Nor is this a
criterion of performance in the sense of maximum efficiency" (229). Lyotard's interest in
Kant is precisely for the way in which the Third Critique sketches the terms of indeterminate
or reflective Judgment in ethics or in terms of the aesthetics of sublime (230).
In Jean Francois Lyotard: Politics and history of philosophy, Scott Lash argues that
the groundwork for a postmodern aesthetics as a "figural regime of signification" is provided
by the distinction between discourse and figure. According to Lash, the modern sensibility is
mainly rational that privileges "words over images, sense over nonsense, meaning over non-
meaning, reason over the irrational, and the ego over id". The postmodern sensibility on the
other hand, is figural, and it privileges "a visual over a literal sensibility, figure over concept,
sensation over meaning, and immediacy over more mediated intellectual modes" (275). Lash
suggests that "Susan Sontag's `new sensibility' and championing of an `aesthetics of
sensation' over an `aesthetics of interpretation' anticipates a postmodern aesthetics which can
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be conceptually grounded through Lyotard's distinction between discourse and figure" (275).
Victor E. Taylor and Gregg Lambert have mentioned that Lyotard follows Kant in his
argument that the fields of theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgment have their own
independence, policies and standard. "In this way, he rejects notions of universalist and
foundationalist theory, as well as claims that no one method or set of concepts has privileged
status in such disparate domains as philosophy, social theory, or aesthetics" (247). Lyotard
insists that in any case justice will be an issue of a "provisional judgment" which does not
allow a generalization of universal rules or principles (261).
In Theory after `Theory', Cary Wolfe has talked about Rorty's concept of truth and
justification. For Rorty the only condition which is applied to the word "true" is
"justification," and justification is always interrelated to an audience. "So it is also relative to
an audience's lights--the purposes that such an audience wants served and the situation in
which it finds itself". So in this way the question "Do our practices of justification lead to
truth?" is unanswerable as well as unrealistic or nonsense (Elliot, Attridge 39). Rorty further
argues that "one should not raise the question...of whether there are things in the world which
make algebraic and moral truths, or aesthetic judgments, true" because there are reasons to
believe things , and reasons to maintain a change in that beliefs, but at the same time there are
no grounds for the "truth of beliefs" (41). According to Rorty, people's beliefs and values are
in a constant state of evolution, change and interaction, much as the neural synapses in their
bodies are continuously interacting with each other sparking electrical charges. A human
`self' then does not have within itself `beliefs and desires', but is simply a `network' of them,
much like the human brain does not have such synapses, but is simply a network of the
synapses (41).
In the same book by Elliot and Attridge, a critic Linda M.G. Zerilli explains that for
Arendt, political judgments and aesthetic judgments have the same structure. For him, "both
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political claims and aesthetic claims are practices of reflective judgment, that is, a form of
judgment according to which, in contrast to what Kant called a determinative judgment, the
rule is not given" (122). In Arendt's views, "wherever people judge the things of the world
that are common to them, there is more implied in their judgments than these things" (123).
Arendt asserts that the meaning is not specified to the nature of things, the formation of the
world or the impartiality of the history, rather it is a creation of significant relations which
engender our wisdom of the reality and moreover, meaning is revealed through our judgment.
"Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is
unascertainable'. Meaning is what we produce when we judge the objects of the common
world apart from their function or utility or necessity" (129). While talking about the logical
truth, Arendt says that "it is the only reliable `truth' human beings can fall back upon once
they have lost the mutual guarantee, the common sense, men need in order to experience and
live and know their way in a common world". But this "truth is empty or rather no truth at all,
because it does not reveal anything that is not already given in the premises" (129). Arendt
writes that in order to discover similarity in multiplicity our receptivity seems to need
imagination, and this imagination is also an aid to knowledge. "As such, it is the condition of
all knowledge: the [in Kant's words] `synthesis of imagination prior to appreciation, is the
ground of the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience" (127). In Theory after
`Theory', according to Beiner, reflective judgment means focusing on the unique aspects of
the `particular' and the `particular within particular', rather than accumulating all such
`particulars' under some common umbrella or "universal formula" (122). Ardent refers to the
process of judgment as "attending to the particular as an end in itself", something that is not
forfeit to a universal cause (122).
In
Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology by Naill Lucy, Jean Francois Lyotard
in his essay "Something Like: `Communication...without Communication'" talks about
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aesthetic reception and judgment of taste. He says it is not possible to say that a feeling must
congregate the approval of everyone without negotiation or, "without presupposing a sort of
community of feeling such that every one of the individuals, placed before the same situation,
the same work, can at least dispose of an identical judgment without elaborating it
conceptually". While analyzing the aesthetic feeling, "there is thus also an issue of the
analysis of what goes on with a community in general, in the reception of works of art, what
is involved is the status of sentimental, aesthetic community, one certainly `anterior' to all
communication and all pragmatics" (60). The feeling is instant convivial of what is given
(61). According to Lyotard, regarding the trepidation of form the aesthetic feeling is divided
into two categories: "the feeling of the beautiful and the feeling of the sublime". He argues
that the aesthetic of sublime, whose logic is introduced by Kant, is "without any sort of
justification, contrary to rule, has the interesting property of including no immediate
communicability". The feeling of the sublime becomes discernible in the absence of free
forms, and it is attuned with the form-less. "It is even when the imagination which presents
forms finds itself lacking that such a feeling appears. And this latter must go via the mediation
of an Idea of reason which is the idea of freedom" (62). While talking about the uncertainty
between passable and passive, Lyotard argues that these two problems are different and
passivity is not opposed to possibility as it opposes the activity. "Even further, this
active/passive is opposition presupposes possibility and at any rate is not what matters in the
reception of works of art. The demand for an activity or `interactivity' instead proves that
there should be more intervention and that we are through with aesthetic feeling" (65). In
present circumstances Lyotard disdains the idea of finding sentimentality in the slightest
sketch by a Cezanne or a Degas, it is rather that one who receives should not receive, "it is
that s/he does not let him/herself be put out, it is his/her self constitution as active subject in
relation to what is addressed to him/her: let him/her reconstitute himself immediately and
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identify himself or herself as someone who intervenes. What we live by and judge by is
exactly this will to action" (65).
Lahiri's fiction throws light on the above discussion in a subtle manner. The
individual perceptions of the world, the construction of reality in multiple ways, and the
workings of desires and agency in postmodern arena, are beautifully delineated in Lahiri's
fiction. Lahiri's novels talk about the individuals' aesthetic feelings and receptivity towards
displacement. The functioning of desires in order to build a new identity in a new place, and a
yearning to change the old traditions and values.
It is quoted in Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies that it is quite easy
to tag Lahiri's stories as another modification of immigrant fiction, combining relative themes
of cultural hybridity and up rootedness "in a crowded intellectual mart with their genre café",
but at the same time "the universality of her themes and emotions they conjure up lift them to
a much larger dimension of human experience of finding kinship and beauty in unexpected
places". In other words, these stories, which disdain the attraction of being anything other
than stories well told, "could be located anywhere and speak not just to those who are familiar
with the culturally schizophrenic world of immigrants" (Dhingra and Cheung 9). In their
introduction Lavina Dhingra and Floyed Cheung describe that Lahiri's stories do not transmit
a "radical or transformative political edge",...on the other hand they express with dignity,
gracefulness and feeling, the numerous and different problems of "rooting/rerouting" from
one family to another, from one culture to another, and the difficulties of concurrently
"retaining and forming communities" (xxi). It is quoted in Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons
and Controversies that "In Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, shuttling between three worlds ---
born in Britain, raised in Rhode Island and taken on long visits to India---has made Lahiri all
too aware of "intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new"
(12). Lahiri's "sensitivity to the nuances of first-generation experience is also exemplary in
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her awareness that immigration itself---ostensibly (but not always) a choice---augurs the
existential condition of inhabiting a terrain over which the immigrant lacks control" (9).
Conceivably The Namesake is successful because it beautifully and thoughtfully highlights
both "universal dimension of human experience and late twentieth-century post-colonial and
Asia- American politics" (30).
In Between History and Identity: Reading the Authentic in South Asian Diasporic
Literature and Community, Tamara Ayesha Bhalla has quoted the views of Ranjan and
Sharma about Lahiri's abilities as a diasporic fiction writer. According to them, "In the realm
of South Asian diasporic fiction published in the U.S., on one author can currently lay as
much claim to the imprimatur of renewal and reinvention as Jhumpa Lahiri," and moreover,
"Lahiri has been championed in the international critical arena as the quintessential `new
cosmopolitan,' purveyor of an `ethno-global vision,' interpreter of `immigrant angst,' and
creator of a `different type of expatriate writing' whose work goes `beyond labels' such as
`ethnic' or `diasporic'" (181). Bhalla argues, in her book that critics extol Lahiri for her
"revision to common representations of traditional Indian culture that they identify in South
Asian diasporic narratives" (181). In this way, comparisons between Lahiri and her
predecessors, such as Bharati Mukharjee and Salman Rushdie, most effectively comment her
status as a new, progressive, and innovative South Asian writer (182). While talking about
The Namesake, Bhalla describes that the romantic relationships in The Namesake, particularly
the failed marriage, presents a "powerful critique of South Asian cultural insularity; as Maira
explains issues of inter and intra racial romance in the South Asian American community
mask politics of displacement and desires for belonging" (208). Bhalla illustrates that Meera
shares her views about The Namesake. Meera said Lahiri's novel;
articulates [...] this identity crises that does exist for I think the majority of
South Asians that I know [...] It's coming to terms with the world that you live
25
in, and the household that you grew up in, and you have this tie to your
relatives there [in South Asia] that don't completely understand your life here
[...] So you are constantly playing multiple roles at once. (216)
According to Bhalla, Lahiri's supremacy in the South Asian American strain of this literature
participates in the circularities and ambivalence of "pluralist multiculturalism", and in her
book Bhalla puts forward Elaine Kim's definition of multiculturalism as being the great
leveler of conflicts within and among different ethnic minority groups. Multiculturalism
incorporates the idea of pluralism that puts forward American culture as a democratic dream
land where all minorities, ethnicities and racial groups have equal right of representation
"while simultaneously making the existence of exclusion by recuperating dissent, conflict,
and otherness through the promise of inclusion" (183).Bhalla argues that both in intellectual
and "lay reading" communities, an eagerly wish for a reconsideration to the trope of arranged
marriage, which Gogol and Moushumi's failed romance quite arguably offers, and encodes
frustrated desires for South Asian assimilation in the U.S. And to validate her point she
presents the views of Maira. For Maira: the obsession of mainstream media with arranged
marriages in the South Asian community perfectly fit the idea of an exotic, oriental Asian
culture that has no qualms over the sacrifice of individual liberty to the upholding of ancient
patriarchal traditions. This of course is in stark contrast to the individualist liberty of the
"rational and enlightened West". However, as Maira sees it, the particular trope of arranged
marriages is specifically reserved for South Asian Americans, as if to act as a binary to the
"hyper-sexualized land of the Kama Sutra" (208). Consequently, discussions of dating,
marriage and sex among young Indian Americans resonate with the politics of belief systems,
generation and ethnicity.
In Lahiri's fiction America is delineated as a land which is generous and flawless. In
The A to Z of Postmodern Life, Ziauddin Sardar, affirms the same conception. In his article
26
`Americana,' he has clarified that in 20
th
century America is also considered as a different
world. It is a common perception that America is a nation that is created as a refuge for all the
rest of the world; and moreover, it is a nation that is made up of refugees and immigrants (16).
It is a familiar perception of immigrants in 20
th
century that their native lands to which their
parents and grandparents belong are horrible, uncivilized and autocratic places, and that is the
reason "they made up their way to America". For them the rest of the world in its
characterization is intrinsically defective and imperfect, and it cannot be compared to America
and is not worth knowing in any elemental way (16). In his article `Identity' Sardar describes
that "America began as an assertion of identity: in a new world there is no significance of
past", or in other words it is "emptied of meaningful past" and ready for migrants who want to
build an identity in a new territory which is free from the oppression and has the power to
grant freedom and independence (96). Sardar quotes an American scholar Cornel West who
has suggested that individuals construct their identities according to their desires and
experience. It is their desire for appreciation, quest for identification, the sense of being
accredited, a deep desire for alliance which invoke them to have a desire of belonging to that
new world by building up a new identity. (100). Identity invokes the desire in the individuals
to look and live differently, but at the same time it also directs the objective to articulate
resemblance. Certainly, "there can be no difference without similarity. But similarity is
always seen as the opposite pole of difference, as appeals to making everyone the same. It is
often posed as `our' similarity against `their' difference" (101). Identity is linked to history,
"but is not fixed to a limited, unchanging set of traditional signs". We cannot buy or choose
an identity. And at the same time we cannot impose an identity on others; identity is
something which taught us the art of living, and through identity we discover "what is worth
buying", and appreciate the difference and diversity (101). "Living identity, as opposed to the
fossilized to die for variety, is always in a constant flux. It is an ever-changing balance, the
27
balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth
living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world". It is a challenge of
postmodern time "to transcend difference and thereby enable it to fulfill its real purpose"
(101). In his article "Universalism" Sardar suggests that in postmodern times, the idea of
individualism has obtained universal acknowledgement. In postmodern times it is common
conception that though "European values and experiences were the epitome of human
existence", but at the same time "the idea that the individual is the starting point and source of
all human actions" has secured a significant status. But to sum up, in one way or the other
"this individual is still largely a specific European construction" (239). "In the universe
defined by personal choice anything and everything can at some level be reduced to special
pleading deemed good for some individual". And moreover, "every act of special pleading is
an absolute individual justification for utilizing the ultimate extreme of human imagination
and inventiveness to perfect, the unacceptable or the damage in an individual life" (240). The
dream of "personal ideal utopias", without a consideration to distinguish restrictions,
limitations, prohibited norms and "social acceptability" is the worldwide acknowledged claim
of individualism. "But such personal utopias have consequences for us all and for all our
futures" (240). The idea of "Postmodern individualism" forms the world for all of us and
besides that, it also try to figure out a "universal morality" to control us. The basis of this
"morality of individualism" is the idea that "every act or behavior contains its own moral
logic outside the domain of prescribed practices" (240). So, "as a vision of the universal
freedom to have and consume all and everything, to be free to do and behave as desired,
postmodern individualism is the true inheritor of all universalism that ever existed" (241).
Now the innate and moderate aspiration of all the people is the absence of any constraints and
barriers. "In postmodern times we can recognize nothing that is worth anything because good
is as good as bad is bad, and both are indistinguishable". So, it depends on our personal
Details
- Pages
- Type of Edition
- Erstausgabe
- Publication Year
- 2015
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783954899241
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783954894246
- File size
- 354 KB
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2017 (May)
- Keywords
- Postmodern Aesthetics Displacement Notion of Agency Individual Perspectives Cultural Hybridity
