Abstract:
 |
| Guni Vats |
Keywords:
Language, Myth, Truth, Metaphors, Illusions.
Introduction
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the
fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in
thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. (Nietzsche 7)
Language is not merely a
medium of communication but an expression. And if mankind has ever evolved its
aesthetic of expression, it is best served with the sophistication of poetry.
The arrangement of words designed to satisfy the appetite of human need for art
convey more than what is reflected by the black ink. They open a realm of free
play of meanings. The words were designated fixed meanings to construct a
social order that must rely on a scientific system of existence. An existence
where the stimuli were designated sound and visual symbols. These symbols do
not attempt to sing the universal truth but only simplify the riddle of stimuli
and the overused words automatically assume the shape of truth making the case
for scientific evidence. Myths in Hindu mythology hold a sacred place as they
are not dismissed as the lies told for satiating the hunger of belief but are
celebrated as the subjective truth. Myth is the truth told from a frame of
reference, it is not universal but fixed and limited. Language and myth could
thus be both understood as metaphors, metaphors that have been used repeatedly
to earn a place of truth.
What then is truth? A movable host of
metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human
relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred,
and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed,
canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained
of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered
as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche 4)
Jayanta Mahapatra is a
celebrated poet known for the ‘difficulty’ of his poems. Critics agree that his
poems are not meant as mere appreciation of language or the scenery but convey
much more that surpasses the limited understanding of a literary piece. His
usage of language and selection of diction sets apart his poems as they paint a
canvas with the precision of a painter and hides the bright light of a star
under the darkness of night sky using best the aesthetics of an artist. His
work hardly offers poetic relief; it taunts the reader and evokes him to
scratch his senses to the best of his ability to decipher what hides beneath
every word and the space between words. Truth in art is a fairly subjective
concept and it could be argued that the aim of a work of art is never to
establish a universal truth but to deconstruct the rigidity that forms a truth.
Mahapatra’s poems shatter the established images beautifully. They offer a
piece of satisfaction for every curious mind; his poems unwind in layers and
with every depth they take on a new meaning. My paper attempts to dig in the
layers of his poems by freeing the words of their rigid and limited meanings. I
attempt to peel the layers of his words by finding metaphors and not meanings.
The poems without the rigidity of literary forms and meanings take the form of
myths, the subjective truths that are expressed by the metaphors of his poems
and their significance in the culture we live in.
Truth and illusion play a
confusing game. The deciding verdict stays with belief. Words together only
create a myriad of illusions and its deliberate usage and decided presence
establish the paradigm of truth. Mahapatra’s poems oscillate between illusion
and truth. He writes what he experiences and to understand his poetry is to
walk in his steps through the sceneries that he has been in. The language he
uses in his poems could be taken away from the accepted meanings and provided
with the less obvious interpretations and when this happens they can be seen in
absolutely different light; poems that may not be social documents but a
narration of pain and anguish, the process of creation of a myth. His poetry
breaks the ‘forms’ and thus enters in the field of free play of signifiers.
Looking at his poems with this point of view would not require a detailed study
of his experiences but only the portraits he sketches through his words. He
discloses the metaphorical lives we all lead in the mythic society only to create
the comfort of a permanent truth but that only ultimately unveils the vulgarity
of illusion hidden under every established meaning.
A
Missing Person is the saga of a woman in three crisp
stanzas. An onlooker expresses the plight of ‘a woman’. Her actions coincide
with the play of light and darkness and burn her passions at the end. The title
declares a person that is missing, it neither is the appeal of finding the lost
nor is it an admission of what is lost. It is the plain acceptance of a person,
and not a woman, who is missing. A missing person who could be any among the
billion faces populating the world. The three stanzas could be read as
transcending the fetters of time and space. The first stanza establishes the
dark room as the site of action but the third line shatters the admission when
the mirror seems to consume the space. The darkness of room merely becomes an
instrument while the scene of action transcends to the mirror that fails to
reflect the woman. The second line establishes ‘a woman’, the woman that
stands, the only truth that seems existent in the dark room. The stanza
probably plays with the sentiments of academicians sympathetic to the woman.
The play of metaphor could be enjoyed when the woman could be established as
present and the mirror unable to reflect her existence. The instrument meant
for reflection fails to act on its truth and what is left is a mere illusion.
The next stanza shifts the time frame when the woman ‘waits’ at the ‘edge of
her sleep’. The edge of sleep establishes the illusion further where it points
at a transitional stage from wakefulness to sleep. The state of consciousness
that easily gives way to hallucinations and maybe that is what she is waiting
for. After the failure of mirror to reflect her, she turns to her
hallucinations to find her, to reflect her. The failure of an established
scientific truth leads to the onset of an illusion, a myth that for her seems
to be the ultimate truth. The third stanza illuminates the darkened room with
the ‘oil lamp’. The shift from darkness to light might have provided with an
image in the mirror, which she no longer needs. Her reflection does not depend
on the truth of light and mirror but the illusion of a source of light in her
hand, the truth in her hand that may find the illusion in her. The stanza might
just be an extension of the hallucination where the ‘drunken yellow flames’
dance to reach out to her body, her passions and find in her the body she
hides. She does not need the truth of a mirror to find her but the illusion of
drunken flames and the poet shows how:
in her hands she holds
the oil lamp
whose drunken yellow flames
know where her lovely body hides. (The Lie of Dawns 89)
Her
Hand
resonates like the apology that is an expression of a sorry and a guilty nation.
The title does not disclose the horrific act or the plight; it only unveils her
hand, the hand of a rape victim. The first line declares that the hand of the
girl is ‘made of darkness’ and the very second line discloses the hypocrisy
with the question, ‘how will I hold it?’ (Mahapatra 20) The intention is to
provide support then why does the darkness matter and why is there darkness?
The ‘how’ speaks for the inability of a hypocrite society that only talks of
sympathy but in return only designates the victim with profound darkness. The
second stanza paints the image of hell; the ‘decapitated heads’ of streetlamps
appear to be the hung heads that decorate the gates of death and the ‘blood’
that ‘opens that terrible door between us’ appears to be the Miton’s gate to
hell. Could the ‘I’ in the first stanza be the dilemma of the lord of death who
has come to take the ‘little girl’ while the ashamed inanimate streetlamps,
meant to give light, stand in shame on witnessing the gruesome act of cruelty.
The third stanza screams of the country, whose mouth is ‘clamped in pain’, the
country that fails to even cry at the pain of its residents. ‘While its body
writhes on its bed of nails’, creates the image of a nation lying on a bed of
nails, writhing but unable to scream of pain because of the brace that shuts
its mouth. These two lines shred every piece of sanity in the unashamed nation
that is unable to even cry for the pain of the little girl that lies unattended
on its street. The ‘raped body’ of the girl is only that is left for holding;
her soul might have departed when the act of rape was committed. The body lies
on the street in darkness but the resistance is so strong that even the ‘guilt’
of death fails to ‘hug her’.
This little girl has just her raped body
for me to reach her
The weight of my guilt is unable
to overcome my resistance to hug her. (Mahapatra 20)
The poem might have
taunted the Gods or spat at the country that unashamedly resists holding the
raped body. It uses the hand as a metaphor for support and shatters the
illusion of a country believing in myths while abandoning its own. The image of
the body of nation writhing on bed of nails might bring back the memory of
Bhishma from Mahabharata. The
grandfather of both Pandavas and Kauravas, who lived his life proving true to
his swear but then fell at the battleground on the bed of arrows. While he lay
there awaiting his death he witnessed the bloodshed where his family fought
against its own blood. The Bharata we
live in today could be disillusioned with this myth, when the act of Dharma and
Truth have reduced to mere myths and the truth stabs the illusions so cruelly
that we end up killing our own and then fail to merely hold her hand.
Hunger
is
the vulgar narration of a stance of hunger and its satiation. The poem opens
with the confession of the narrator’s hunger, ‘it was hard to believe that the
flesh was heavy on my back’. (The Lie of Dawns 41) It might have been hard for
him to admit to his humanly hunger of satiating the need of his flesh but he
walks through the poem as if in trance and narrates the events that opened the
door to a hunger that his hunger might satiate. The fisherman’s casual
proposal, ‘will you have her’ and his careless trails of his nets and nerves
lead the narrator to a home that whined with pangs of hunger. The narrator
followed the ‘sanctified’ purpose but is almost immediately shocked with the
consequence of proposal, ‘I saw his white bone thrash his eyes' (The Lie of
Dawns 46) the father might have sanctified the arrangement of offering his
daughter as he would offer her in the act of a sanctified matrimonial
arrangement. But his body could not comply with his mythic sanctity and the
truth of his vulgarity thrashed through his eyes leaving his hunger vulnerable
to the customer of his daughter.
The path that narrator
follows the fisherman is depicted with the beauty of language where even the
grains of sand accuse him of the forthcoming act, ‘I followed him across the
sprawling sands’. The word ‘sprawling’ sing the abuse where the daughter might
lie with her limbs spread out just like the sand does when the two men tread
over it. ‘Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in’, the only hope in
the scenario comes with burning down the house, the metaphorical body that the
customer resides in and thus ending the prospect of any hunger. But ‘silence’
grips him when he looks at the body of the fisherman that ‘clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the sea’. The froth that demarcates the
hunger in absolute colloquial of the word, the mere froth of hunger and no fish
to satiate that hunger left burning in the house.
The third stanza raises
the act to the epitome of cruelty and vulgarity when even the poet stammers,
‘In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound’ (The Lie of Dawns 46)
the gates of the hunger stuck house are opened like a wound, a wound in the
hunger stuck body. The following lines mark a tone of existentialism in the
poet which brings across him not as an animal who would hunt to feed but a
human who would self-analyze and ultimately give in to the hunger of his body
and his passion. ‘In wind was I, and the days and nights before. Palm fronds
scratched my skin’, at witnessing the opened wound, poet becomes a part of the
wind and the days and nights that preceded the moment when the palm fronds
scratched his skin, agonizing his hunger. Once inside the shack, Mahapatra
describes the dimensions of mind and space using the absolute genius diction
that set a tone to the act that is to follow. ‘an oil lamp splayed the
hours…over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind’ (The Lie of
Dawns 46) the truth of time and space has merged with the metaphors of splay
and sticky soot and has created an illusion of the act of satiation of hunger
that might have occurred in the shack over and over again on the days and
nights before. Here the poet shows:
I heard him say: My daughter, she’s just
turned fifteen…
Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at
nine. (The Lie of Dawns 46)
The ellipses in the first
line shake the truth and unveil it in its most ugly form. The daughter who has
just turned fifteen is offered in exchange for satiation of hunger. Although
the customer’s shock is expressed with the dialectic use of Hindi saying, ‘The
sky fell on me’ but his act is then justified by the ‘exhausted wile’ of the
father and he ultimately decides to proceed. ‘long and lean, her years were
cold as rubber.’(The Lie of Dawns 46) the girl’s fifteen years of hunger only
gifted her rubber cold life. ‘She opened her wormy legs wide’ is the only
action that the girl undertakes but it conveys much more than is expressed. The
manner of opening her legs give the act a kind of repetitive brilliance, like
this act was not her first, she is accustomed at soliciting men like the
narrator. ‘I felt the hunger there, the other one, the fish slithering, turning
inside’, the final line gives words to the inherent tale of hunger, that of
existence and of passion and both make men their slave, both demand satiation.
The poem does not hide its motive under ornate metaphors but breaks the myth of
father as the savior and mocks at the illusion of human goodness. The poem does
not advocate the truth of suppressed women or establishes the myth of father’s
protective haven for his daughter. It breaks through the shackles of a
sophisticated society and bares the basic human hunger; the hunger that
swallows all myth and illusions to satiate it, the only truth is uncovered.
Conclusion
Jayanta Mahapatra sculpts
his poems with the precision of an artist and with the innocence of a soul that
has lived on these experiences he depict. His poems and his experiences could
best be stated in his words, in an interview Mahapatra said, a poet is a poet
by virtue of what he or she sees or hears, and that itself begins the
mystifying process of the poem’ (Ten Writers in Interview). He breaks apart
from every convention to convey his mystic experience and thus his truth often
germinates from the myths of his land and he often layers his myth with the
truth of his experiences. By studying his language as myth and appreciating the
metaphorical existence of his works, I tried to celebrate the free play of
truth and illusion that his poems create. They offer something for everybody,
they are the poems that germinate from the soil and the soul and they sure
reach where they germinate from, thus completing its cyclic existence.
Mahapatra is sure not easy to be read or to be deciphered but then that might
be his exact motive. He frees the spirit of his work by wrapping them in a
language that does not bind them in the strict cages of meanings and truth. His
poems are not meant to be understood or be broken; they are the paintings that
need to be appreciated by the aesthetic of art native to every soul. They sing
of a melody that might hurt some or offend others, but they never fail to touch
the tune of every soul that is exposed to his work. His poems hide tales within
tales and only the eyes looking for breaking the fetters of intellectual knowledge
may enjoy the nectar of his writings and get drunk on his sensibilities that
evoke the worst of us to stare at us in our nudity and then move towards the
better. He might not be sketching a myth or telling a truth but he is singing
to the few who want to experience what he has experienced. The discussion can be summed up with these
lines from his Genesis:
Maybe nothing came from anything,
A long drawn-out yawn from nowhere. …
The myth has its head stuck in the form of a tree.
And the spirits of knowledge won’t let it pass. (Mahapatra 17)
WORKS CITED
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Cassirer, Ernest. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume
One: Language. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Virginia: Yale, 1980. Print.
Evans,
Vyvyan. The Language Myth: Why language
is not an instinct. United Kingdom: Cambridge, 2014. Print.
Ganguly, Suparna.
“Reflection of Mystical Philosophy and Reflective Psychology in the Poetry of
Jayanta Mahapatra.” Galaxy 1.2
(2012): 1-8. Print.
Mahapatra,
Jayanta. The Lie of Dawns. New Delhi: AuthorsPress, 2008. Print.
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Poems. Poemhunter.com, 2012. Web. 15 Mar. 2018. <
https://m.poemhunter.com/jayanta-mahapatra/poems/>
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm. Of Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense: CreateSpace Independent, 2012. Print.
Rao,
Raja. Ed. Ten Indian Writers in interview.
Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1991. Print.
Sharma,
Priyanka. “Mahapatra’s Relationship and its Dimension.” Zenith 6.3 (2016): 60-66. Print.
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