This amorphous ‘self’

The gloomy verdures, the hodgepodge in rooms that barely fit the description of a nook, the painting on the wall tilted almost to take the form of a rhombus, the beetle crawling atop the foot of the bed, the bland fields that lie scorched – these are the scenes that dot Don Palathara’s frames. A breakaway from the mainstream anthropocentric focus on the supposedly autarchic ‘self’ with its endless conflicting passions, to an archaic canvas of a socially constructed self, placed within surroundings that intimidate one of undulating terrains, matte and dull homes, is what best characterises Palathara’s takes in his films – to quote an exceptional one, ‘Central Travancore, 1956’, – and this to some extent also surfaces a mirage resplendent in a post-modernistic evanescent lustre, a reminder of its looming influence which could metastasise to many popular culture arenas before long. 

The ’subject’ and not the self, was the postmodernist’s reply to Kantian notions of individualist rationalism. A fluid subject that rills through the turbulent sea that replenishes waters with changing discourses of power. Doused by the muddy waters of the larger patriarchal discourse is the unbeknown male they say, who is nothing but a mere epiphenomenon of everything that girdles him, the plaits of which he hesitantly hopes to untangle. The postmodernist fiction too reflects these sentiments – the deconstruction of the ‘unified self’  that lays bare-chest much of the humanisms, the Panglossian teleologies, larger-than-life autonomies and unbreakable homogeneities we took for granted. In its own right, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a prescient archetype of the post-modernist novel. As Peter Currie writes in Contemporary American Fiction (1987), ‘the focus of attention has shifted from the psychology of character..to a recognition of subjectivity as the trace of plural and intersecting discourses’. The protagonist herein is nestled in a blank cosmos that is perpetually expanding, without the knowledge of the character or the writer. The reader too glissades through cascading glaciers of linguistic constructs, that melt, metamorphose, and solidify, all at the same time. 

At the stroke of the midnight hour, India woke to freedom, and so did Saleem and other children of this petite midnight hour (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). In fact, Saleem purports to be a marginal figure, more so a human – if an anthropocentric view is what you wish – yet the peripheral significance of his, to use a popular terminology, ‘angst’ in the grand scheme of things that were to engulf India at the time is so emblematic of the travails of that infant nation. The illogicalities of his sometimes insipid sometimes ornery emotions, that criss-cross discordantly, the existential quandaries – to use an overblown pop-philosophy chestnut – is a mirror to the identity crises the decolonised nation grappled with. So does Saleem share his fate with all who had born alongside him at numerous nooks and crevices of India – but temporally they were all suspended in the same plane; their minds were forged in one whole, their bodies mere contoured forms, at best misrepresentations of that unified hope that was India. Now that we are armed with the persepectives of a post-modernist, we discern a subtlety in their identities, a curious amalgam of the expressions of the time, shuttling between miscibility and immiscibility in the anxious discourse of power that bubbled all over the country. For the post-modernist novel, the action takes place in the fluid backdrop, or in the unidentified minds of the sometimes nameless discourses that surround us, or in the psyche of the protagonist, in a catch-22 herself, struggling to write the story that is before us, or to put it rather abstrusely, in everything we were so blind as to catch a sight of it. 

How much ever gendered, racist, classist (and so on) we may be, the semantic, generic sobriquets we bequeath our-selves and to the other ‘selfs’ we interact with assumes an identity which nevertheless is the most unfathomable, phantasmal entity ever. Much of our politics of difference, antagonisms, superficial alliances are moulded on fragile foundations, which the sooner we become cognisant of, the earlier it crumbles. Saleem Sinai was a compounded obscurity, stuck together by irreconcilable atoms, that lend no electrons to each other, but unified by dint of the inviolable force that swirled around the floating discourses of the time. And to that extent, I, this amorphous self feels it benign to say, no less are we.