Re-reading Jathaka stories

Behind the Mask:

Saman Wickramaarachchi

LITERATURE: In my first article I discussed creative new readings of critics like Roland Bathes about the gap between the work and the text. This, I believe as far as Jathaka Stories are concerned is an attempt to clarify the narration, the source of the work and the text itself.

Jathaka Stories had attracted the attention of Western intellectuals. But, what is happening to the Jathaka Potha. It is still supposed to be the Poth Wahanse or the Sacred Book of Buddha's birth stories.

The Buddhist Jathaka Stories and Russian novel by Martin Wickramasinghe was published in 1956. But even after 50 years it was written, Jathaka Stories have not changed their structural aspects of teaching the theory of karma. For Wickramasinghe Jathaka Stories are a collection of the oldest short stories of India.

Wickramasinghe never deviated from analyzing the Jathaka Stories from the realistic style of Russian novel.

Thus his critique of Jathaka Stories is not a re-reading in the light of Freudian psycho analysis. But he found in these tales a Dostoyevskian type psychology.

What Wickramasinghe had done in the history of Sinhalese literary criticism was that he put an end to the practice of treating the Jathaka Potha as merely a work but not a text, in Poth Gul (Libraries) of the Buddhist temples.

According to Wickramasinghe some Jathaka stories reveal the activity of the unconscious. In that context his attempt was a reading of these tales in some sort of Psycho analytic Perspective.

But we need a science, in which, the limits of Dostoyevskian realistic aspects of the Russian novel would be surpassed. This is never intended to under value Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Great Russian novelist.

But, I believe, in the psycho analytic perspective of the process of forming the human subject, re-reading Jathaka Stories, Lacanian theoretical concepts would be the most appropriate scientific way of assessing them.

We are standing on a treasure trove. But the treasure of Buddhist literature has to be dug out. The Western philosophy and Freudian psychology were successfully able to dig their treasure troves.

Thus Oedipus, the protagonist of Sophocles' well-known Greek drama is still acting a "theoretical role" even today in Freudian psycho/analysis. Freud's interpretation of the tragedy of Oedipus is peculiar.

Oedipus' search for truth, for Freud, is likened to the work of psychoanalysis. His persuasion for the truth of his identity was itself tied to the scope of desire and sexuality. In that context, Freud's interpretation of Oedipus is a study of how our subjectivity is entwined with sexuality.

And Freud, in same way, reading Leanado Davinci uses myths of Egyptian deities to make known in detail the connection of homosexuality to femininity. Our Jathaka Stories demand in searching the process of forming human subject, a relentless survey of itself.

We must not forget those stories had been written in a feudalist social background. I quoted from Bathes in my first column to assert that Marxists were able to interpret even monistic works in modern way.

But those so-called Marxists who have become Marxists by wearing false masks of socialism in our country are feudalists in thought. Reading Jathaka Stories in the way I propose would be a reading of those masks themselves.

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