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 Psychological Conflicts in the
Fiction of Anita Desai is reminiscent of many such books which
appeared in the 1970s and 1980s on Indian authors. Like its
predecessors, it attempts to scrutinize the three selected
novels of Anita Desai — Cry, The Peacock, Fire on
the Mountain and Clear Light of Day — with the idea
of unveiling the various nuances of the human psyche. Usha Rani
centres her analysis on two facets, "the psychological
conflicts of principal characters" and "stylistic
analysis of the language through which these conflicts have been
portrayed". The book discusses the oft-covered territory of
the conflicts and the psychic ordeals of the protagonists.
Tracing the graph of the tribulations of the characters, the
author throws light on the escapist and existentialist attitude
of Desai’s characters. Usha Rani draws the usual conclusion
that they tend to withdaw from the outside world into their
private domains of isolation, often resulting in the
disintegration of the self. There is a constant struggle for
acquiring a self-definition. However, according to Lacanian
theory, there cannot exist an autonomous self and the identities
are formed in relation to others. Thus, individuals vacillate
between the "past and present", the "outside and
inner world" and the "conscious and subconscious"
which only ends in further fragmentation of identities.
Emphasiing the
significance of the role of language in bringing across the
world crafted by the author, which to some extent is a
representation of the real world in which we live, Usha Rani
brings together the psychological strains and the expression
through which the same is conveyed in her study. she charts out
the lexical items and stylistic details, insisting that the
reader should be wary of not only what is put in words but also
that which is implicit. Although, Rani scarcely touches the
surface of contemporary literary theory, the book would profit
if it were to use Edward Said’s theory of "contrapuntal
reading" that suggests a reading against the grain in the
attempt to look for the ideology behind every piece of art.
Usha Rani also
explains the methodology of her analysis and the manner in which
it has been carried out. The book touches upon the various
themes and features of Desai’s novels, highlighting the use of
the stream of consciousness technique and striking a similarity
between Virginia Woolf and Desai.
Another important
subject dealt in Desai’s novel is that of feminist
emancipation. It is usually argued that the protagonists of her
novels are more often women than men and, unlike Sara Suleri,
her women characters are identities that rebel against the
patriarchal oppression even if it is only a silent upheaval.
Once again, Rani
does not study the psychological conflict of the women
characters within the feministic paradigms amply available
today.
Usha Rani may have
made attempts to woo students of literature, but the book does
appear to be an example of ‘vanity publishing’ which is a
usual trend among academics who indulge in such practices for
the sake of professional promotion.
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THE
literary scene in the last decade seems to have been taken
over by the south Asian writers, especially Indian authors
like Arundhati Roy, whose The God of Small Things earned her
the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997; Rohinton Mistry’s A
Fine Balance; Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies
which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 are some of the applauded
works. Against the earlier argument that as a result of
literary and cultural hegemonisation the Indian novelists were
merely imitators of the English tradition of novel writing, it
is now alleged that the art of novel writing was, in fact,
employed to subvert the process of colonisation. Novel that
was used as a cultural apparatus by the colonizer for the
promotion of standardised and essentialized beliefs regarding
the orient is now manipulated for the purpose of resistance to
colonialism and neo-colonialism and at the same time for
rejuvenation of a national identity.
