Behind the mask

Nalini Jathaka and conventional literary elitism

Saman Wickramaarachchi

LITERATURE:I write this column to challenge conventional literary criticism which has been elaborated and ascertained. In such context of reading my last essay was written to prompt readers to read Jathaka stories in regard of relative importance of post modern aspects in literary criticism.

In fact, my purpose was to discuss, what contribution Lacanian psychoanalysis has given the study of Jathaka Stories.

Here I deal with Nalini Jathakaya. I believe, it is an articulation of psychoanalytic reading. But, I emphasize, this reading is different from that innocent reading which depends entirely on the author's intention.

In that context it is not rejectable that the purpose of religious writing is to give a message which is not concerned with the affairs of the secular world. As the intention of the religious texts are aimed mostly to search for the truth the women portrayed in them are found only in outdated feudal system. But in my re-reading of Jathaka stories, I violate relentlessly every aspect of such intentions of the story tellers.

Femininity

Thus, Nalini Jathakaya, is illustrative of seeing that there is no such thing as femininity which could be taken as an essence. And in the same way, we would deny that a natural form of sexual relationship.

The Jathaka Story is woven around an ascetic called Isisinga who lived in a jungle. He had never seen a woman in his life. Isisinga, for the story teller, was not born from a human mother. A young hind after eating the grass the ascetic's father urinated on had conceived and given birth to Isisinga.

As he was brought up in the jungle by his ascetic father he had no opportunity to encounter any female. That was his problem. In the story the jungle is a metaphorical signifier which had the authority to navigate the life of Isisinga as well as his ascetic father.

The jungle is the place, which symbolized the primitive stage of society. The civilization damaged when man renounced the jungle life.

Femininity or masculinity, is ascertained by the language or culture. That was the factor which Isisinga missed in the jungle. He was growing, in the jungle not solving his problem of identity whether he is a male or a female.

Isisinga's primordial jungle life was real. Thus, in interpretation of traumatic experiences he met, he follows his own fantasized vision. He sees princess Nalini, in his fantasy as a devil that was ordered by her own father king to kindle lust in Isisinga and drag him to the world of sensuous desire, regarded as sinful.

It is, in fact, a traumatic experience for him that was real, but far from symbolic reality. Thus, he identies her with a devil that was believed to be living in trees of the jungle.

Isisinga

The most appropriate way of understanding Isisinga is to assess his life, if he had been born to a normal human mother in a civilized society. It would be different if his desire for women in civilized society is greater than in the jungle.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the process in which how the human subject was developed is explained in three registers called as real, symbolic and imaginary. The primary stage, for Lacan is described as mirror stage. This mirror stage represents a fundamental element of the structure of subjectivity.

A child, at six months, still looks coordinative; before a mirror sees its own image as a whole or a gestalt, identify himself with that image.

But he would realize, eventually, this Narcissistic experience falling in love with his own reflection. The image in the mirror is not of him but only a reflection. That is the starting point where the subject becomes alienated from himself.

But a day will come when his attachment to the mother (real) would jeopardize the child. He would be separated from his mother and introduced, essentially to the cultured world.

Being a motherless child, with a primordial uncivilized father who had no language for his son, Isisinga was governed by the jungle. Why couldn't he identify princess Nalini, in their confrontation in the jungle? It is due to his lack of language.

..................................

<< Artscope Main Page