POSTSCRIPT, 2009

The Bogey Men

- Sridala Swami

The One in the Photograph
That you could use up
someone’s life
by sucking it out
through the lens.
They may live forever
on your film,
which might be just as well
because soon you’ll need
something to remember them by.
The One on the Page
Who absorbs with the ink
every characteristic of your loved one
until a point when both
are equally corporeal.
This is where you should stop
recording a life
if you want it to continue.
The One Who Walks Always Beside You
You can do nothing about.

OF White Lies and Black Truths :

Some reflections on the war of words around

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the wind

and

Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone

- Tapan Basu, Professor, Hindu College


I shall begin this paper about the battle between two books – namely Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind (1936) and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), the latter a ‘sequel’ to the former, with some observations on the status today of African - American literary discourse within the discipline of American literature. These prefatory remarks will, I believe, serve to put in perspective the issue, dramatically foregrounded by the above –– mentioned conflict of interests between a white American text and a black American text, of whether the American literary canon has been necessarily democratised by the admission into its premises, in recent decades, of ‘minority’ texts, including, most notably, a host of texts by African-American authors.

While the exaltation of many an African-American author by the literary establishment in America through the turn of the century has been no doubt a welcome development, it has been also a development fraught with certain pitfalls. The pitfalls of literary exaltation, or to use the more technical terminology, literary canonisation, have been indicated by the theorist. Aijaz Ahmad, in an essay printed in the Economic and Political Weekly in June, 1991 :

The axiomatic fact about any canon formation, even when it initially takes shape as a counter-canon, is that when a period is defined and homogenised, or the desired literary typology constructed, the canonising agency selects certain kinds of authors, texts, styles and criteria of classification and judgement, privileging them over others which may belong to the same period, arising out of the same space of production, but which manifestly fall outside the principles of selection enunciated by the self-same agency; a certain kind of dominance is asserted and fought for, in other words, and is in turn defined as the essential and the dominant.1

The process of literary canonisation, with its inevitable logic of preferentiality, is thus not a value-neutral exercise. The exercise is marked by its own politics, a politics which gets successfully obfuscated as a given canon of literature becomes naturalised into a list of the ‘great books’ of that literature. In the case of a once-upon-a-time counter-canon of literature, such as African-American literature, the naturalising tendency can be immensely disabling as it deprives this literature of the very subversive edge vis-a-vis cannonical European-American literature which had brought this literature into the limelight in the first instance. With the setting up, since the 1960s and the 1970s, of African-American Studies programs/centers/departments in the universities of the United States of America and even elsewhere, the African-American identity movement has no doubt found its moment of self-fulfillment (at least in the academic domain) but has simultaneously been relegated to one of the numerous identity movements that inhabit the ever-expanding mosaic of American multiculturalism. To put it succinctly, African-American cultural/literary discouse is now represented (and represents itself) as being distinct either from the many, many identity discourses that have of late (over the last two-and-a-half decades or so) proliferated in an academic universe (the American academy) increasingly taken up with the study of not so much the expression of dissidence but the expression of difference. In the words of Maxime Rodinson, “The ideology [of difference] always goes for the simplest solution. It does not argue that an oppressed people is to be defended because it is oppressed. On the contrary, the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect of their actions, their culture, their past, present and future behaviour is presented as admirable. Direct or indirect narcissm takes over and the fact that the oppressed are oppressed becomes less important than the admirable way they are themselves”.2

The American literary marketplace has operated in sync with these developments in the American academy. Publishers and promoters of books, not to mention book-sellers and book buyers, have all become cheerleaders of the latest African-American literary renaissance which has witnessed (perhaps not surprisingly) the spawning of several celebrity African-American writers –– National Book Award winners, Pultizer Prize receipients, Poet Laureates and, the ultimate, a Nobel Laureate too.

Amidst this climate of euphoria, reinforced by the high visibility presence of African-American cultural icons in the ‘real’ world beyond the world of books, it is indeed sometimes difficult to remember that African-American literature had its beginnings in the articulations of the most disadvantaged members of a national population, in the shape of the narratives of African slaves employed as chattel labour in the plantations of America, and that but a little more than half a century ago, African-American manuscripts, including those penned by talented writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, could not be guaranteed an entry into the literary marketplace. In this context, the not-yet-distant controversy generated by the announcement of the release of Alice Randall’s novel, The Wind Done Gone, in March, 2001, was salutary reminder to all concerned of the fact that the lines of racial discrimination dividing black from white in the United States of America remain as firmly etched today as always.

In this paper, however, I shall not focus only on the controversy surrounding the launch of Alice Randall’s novel. I shall touch upon some of the relevant aspects of the controversy before I proceed on to an examination of the battle of the books itself, that is, Alice Randall’s self-proclaimed endeavour to take on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind by writing The Wind Done Gone.

Both Randall’s novel and Mitchell’s novel are set approximately around the same span of history, the years spanning the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, arguably the most crucial phase in the history of inter - racial relations in the United States of America. Mitchell’s novel, as is well known, thrives upon white American yearning as against black American loathing for an age gone past during which blacks and whites apparently lived (at least in the American South) in a state of harmonious co-existence as slave – holders on the one hand and as house and field slaves on the other hand. As per Mitchell’s lore, it was the cooperative enterprise of the two races that moulded the Southern states (the warp and woof of the Confederacy) into a civilisation whose way of life was the envy of the other nations of the West. It was Randall’s deliberate intention to write back at Mitchell’s lore through an account of her own, foregrounding the images and issues of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that Gone with The Wind had chosen to elide. In The Wind Done Gone, therefore, Randall aggressively highlights the mulatto/bastard complexion of Southern civilisation –– Other alias Scarlett, the protagonist of Gone With The Wind, and Cynara alias Cinnamon, the protagonist of The Wind Done Gone, half-sisters, the progeny of Planter alias Gerald O’Hara by Lady alias Ellen and Mammy alias Pallas respectively, are both the by-products of miscegenation, Ellen being as much of Negro stock as Mammy. The anxiety for whitenness in all the European – American characters in The Wind Done Gone derives precisely from the fear of the blackness which insidiously lurks outside them (as the desire for trangression) and very often inside them (as the fruit of transgression) as well. The African-American characters, Pallas (Mammy) and Garlic (Pork), and Cyanara herself, are quite in control of their lives in contrast to the whites who are shown in Randall’s novel to be bumbling, fumbling parodies of what they are in Mitchell’s novel.

No sooner had the release of this African-American parodic text been announced by Houghton Mifflin Company, the Sun-Trust Bank, the owners of the copyright of Gone With The Wind and the trustee for Margaret Mitchell heirs, moved the Federal District Court in Atlanta, and sought an injuction against the marketing of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone alleging that, as The New York Times reported it, the parodic text had been guilty of “unabated piracy” in borrowing fifteen characters, some famous scenes and even a few dialogues from the original.3 (Interestingly, the copyright possession had been waived by the Margaret Mitchell estate, in 1990, in the sanction accorded by it to Alexandra Ripley, a white woman, to author the authorised sequel to Gone With The Wind, eventually brought out under the title Scarlett). The plea for a ban on the marketing of The Wind Done Gone by the copyright owners of Gone with the Wind was upheld by the District Court presided over by Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr, but later struck down by the Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, enabling the marketing of the text from June, 2001. In the application to the Appeals Court for removal of the District Court Order, Houghton Mifflin Company maintained that Randall needed to build upon Mitchell’s plot to counter Mitchell’s vision effectively, “to undermine its myths and make readers question its word.”4 Furthur, the company attempted to interpret this matter as a matter of the right to freedom of expression guaranteed to every citizen of the United States of America under the First Amendment to the country’s constitution.

The matter of safeguarding the First Amendment attracted many, many well-known literary figures including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Charles Johnson, Harper Lee, Shelby Foote and Nell Irvin Painter who signed a joint declaration of solidarity with Houghton Mifflin Company. In the opinion of the signatories.

The discussion of the painful legacy of slavery is ongoing among American citizens across the nation... Because of the extraordinary popularity of Gone With the Wind and its unique mythic status, Mitchells’ novel has become a prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of mainstream America. Now is the time for the American public to hear another perspective on this legacy.5

The “unique mythic status” and “extraordinary popularity” of Gone With The Wind referred to by the signatories was certainly no exaggeration. Since the inception, within a few years of each other of the book and the film versions of Gone With the Wind (1936 and 1939 respectively), Gone With the Wind has been consumed by more than one hundred million people, its dialogues, scenes and characters have continued to hold sway over the popular imagination, at least in the West, to the extent of becoming part and parcel of Western folk-consciousness, and its title itself has acquired cultural significance far in excess of its literal signification.

It is the hegemonic influence of the text on an enormous number of readers that makes a deconstructive exercise on it, such as that of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, so very important, according to critics like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Pat Conroy, both of whom submitted individual affadavits in defense of the parody by Randall. “Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is a parody and a grand send-off of Gone With The Wind”, wrote Conroy. “She is uncommonly talented and great welcome to American letters. If you censor her work, then Saturday Night Live has no right to exist, nor does any comic strip, or late-night T.V. show, or any writer who makes fun of another writer...”6. Gates Jr. remarked in the same vein, “Scholars have long established that parody is at the heart of African-American expression, because it is a creative mechanism for the exercise of political speech, sentiment and commentary on behalf of people who feel themselves oppressed or marginalised and wish to protest the conditions of oppression or marginalisation. The African-American tradition abounds with examples of parody, and The Wind Done Gone is only the most recent example of a long and humorous tradition”.7

The defence of parody was not new to Gates Jr. In his 1988 classic called The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Gates Jr. has affirmed that the essence of African-American writing is its parodic dimension.

Black writers.... learn to write by reading literature, especially the canonical texts of the Western tradition. Consequently black texts resemble other, Western texts. These black texts employ many of the conventions of literary form that comprise the Western tradition. Black literature shares much with far more than it differs from, the Western textual tradition, primarily as registered in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. But black formal repitition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself in specific language use...8.

Gates Jr. designates this revisionary practice as “signifyin.”9

The revisionary impulse is apparent in The Wind Done Gone, not only in the title, but also throughout Randall’s narrative. The narrative begins with a testimony to the importance of writing (re-writing) for the African-American subject.

Today is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty-eight years. This diary and pen I am writing with are the best gifts I got –– except may be my cake.10

But the revisionary impulse is not limited to “specific language use” alone.

Randall’s re-writing project in the The Wind Done Gone covers all aspects of Gone With The Wind. She was deeply disturbed, as she told an audience at the Chicago Historical Society on July 20, 2001, by Mitchell’s mis-writing of Southern history of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, “Reading Gone With The Wind was an injury to me...” Her efforts to heal the wound prompted her into the re-writing project.

...Writing as a therapy is a theme of my book and a theme of my life. The other half of that theme is that reading can be injury...11

The injuriousness of Gone With the Wind was spelt out by her on numerous occasions. Answering questions from an interviewer in the wake of the legal tussle with the Sun-Trust Bank, she said that the South depicted by Mitchell is a South.

without miscegenation, without whippings, without families sold apart, without blacks striving for their education.

In other words, she said, “Gone With The Wind depicts a South that never existed”.12 At the Chicago Historical Society function, she dubbed the book as a dangerous production,

far more dangerous now because books have a way of moving from the world of unreality into the world of creating our understanding of what I perceive to be a racist text.13

In her opinion

Books that hold within them a great deal of racial lies, racial misreading, racial stereotyping, are far more dangerous out of the time period in which they were written than in the time period in which they were written. If you were living in 1937 when a book was published that was racist, that provided stereotypes of black women, you had opportunity to know other black women of that time period and have a sense of whether the book was true or not, whether it was fantasy or not; but if you are living in 2001 and you read a book about an earlier period, say Mark Twain’s Hucklebury Finn, for good or for bad, Jim is what a lot of people know of a black man of that time period. Jim could be a complete fantasy, I am saying that he has come to represent the enslaved man looking to freedom in the minds of many Americans and many people over the world.14

In her own “text-on-text response”15 to the racism she detected in Gone With The Wind –– Mitchell’s inability to describe African-Americans as agents of their destinies –– Randall interposes the absent African-American agents of Mitchell’s narrative into the narrative, with highly startling results. With most of the primary agents of Mitchell’s narrative, Gerald, Ellen, Melanie and Scarlett, all white of course, either dead or dying, the African-American survivors, Pallas alias Mammy, Garlic alias Park, Miss Priss alias Prissy and Cyanara, the narrator, occupy centre-stage in Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. But if these invisible or less visible presences in Gone With The Wind have at last come into their own, Randall makes explicit that this is not because of the passing away of their white mentors. Rather, in Randall’s interpretation of events it is Garlic and Pallas who have all along “owned” Tata (Tara’s substitute name in The Wind Done Gone), each of them having manipulated situations so as to secure the inept reign of the loveless couple, Lady and Planter, over the prize plantation. Garlic had swapped his old master for his new master by judiciously lacing the white men’s drinks during a gambling game and cleverly casting his lot with the goofy Planter. Ellen, forlorn after the loss of her fiancee Feeleepe, had been persuaded to wed the Irish immigrant farmar, “a man on a lonely plot, a man with no people”,16 by Pallas, her nurse, who saw in this match the path to her own empowerment. The triumphant saga of Pallas and Garlic, the ‘chronicle’ of their capture of Tata, is recounted to Cyanara by the not-to-be-put-down Garlic after Pallas’ remains have been interred forever.

Mammy and me rode wid ‘ em up country. It was me and Mammy up front with Lady and Planter behind.17

It was Mammy who had ruthlessly snuffed the life out of each of the three sons of Planter and Lady soon after each was born.

What should we done with a sober white man on this farm?18

If the fate of her brothers had not been visited upon Other, it was because Mammy “used her, used her to torment white men.”

Other was Mammy’s revenge on a world of white men who would not marry her dark self and who had not loved her lady. Did Other see how she had been weaned to pick up hearts and trained to dash them down, both with casual ease? Who convinced her to conquer?19

Mammy could not but have been pleased to see Other meet her nemesis in R alias Rhett. Had not Rhett alias R deserted Other to court Cyanara who was Mammy’s own flesh and blood?

Randall’s Mammy, is anything except Mitchell’s Mammy. In Gone With the Wind, Mammy is imagined to be “the faithful black slave who persists as a faithful black slave in spite of the official abolition of slavery and the stark reality that most slaves on the most Southern planatation have now pronounced themselves emancipated.” 20 The re-imagined Mammy of The Wind Done Gone is redeemed from such selfless servitude. The spectacle of a Mammy who has not attractiveness of either mind or body and who is defined essentially by her elephantine proportions had outraged Randall after she had read Gone With The Wind. After writing The Wind Done Gone, she felt

.... less like I need to hold on and identify with Mammy’s weight, and I feel that I am ready to let that go, now that I’ve had my say about it.... I had to protest that image, and I think it was much healthier for me to protest in words on paper...21

Mammy’s subversiveness in The Wind Done Gone is paralleled by the subversiveness of Garlic, the ‘faithful’ valet to the master he has selected from among two to serve. Garlic’s master, it turns out, has been no more than a puppet on a string, dancing to the tune of Garlic, the puppeteer. It was Garlic who

chose to work for Planter because Planter was an impotent man... Planter was a man without position or land who Garlic manipulated with his black hands into winning his land and position from another white man in a card game. Garlic the poisoner.22

But the most noteworthy tale is that of Cyanara herself, the teller of the tale in The Wind Done Gone. Written out of existence by Mitchell in Gone With the Wind Cyanara is elevated to the pedestal of the protagonist in The Wind Done Gone by Randall. In Gone With the Wind blacks and whites inhabit discrete and disparate zones in society, notwithstanding the touted amity in inter-racial equations. Cynara’s sheer existence destabilises the balance of forces in the Southern ‘idyll’ by introducing the possibilities of duplicity, hybridity and liminality into this straitjacketed environment. The rags-to-riches rise of Cyanara, via R., her lover and the husband of her half-sister, Other, further rolls the Mitchell planet upside down, while Randall revels in the fall of the mighty Southern ‘civilisation’ of yore.

Cyanara proves to be shrewder still to Garlic and Mammy in promoting her own interests. Having achieved upward social mobility through her liasion with R., she deserts him in favour of a member of the Congress of the United States of America who happens to be a person of color. Through the social network of the Congress member, Cynara learns to hob-nob with the elite of Washington D.C. Although she ultimately cannot marry her black mentor (being publicly recognised as R.’s mistress), she bears him a surrogate baby with his consent and that of his wife (his wife being infertile). This baby’s baby, the postscript to The Wind Done Gone proudly proclaims, grows up to be (like his grandfather) a Congressman too.

The Congressman’s son, Cyrus the second, never made it back to Congress, but his grandson, Cyrus the third, did. Today Cyrus represents a district near Memphis in Tennessee. He married a Nashville girl who practises law to support her horseback riding. They named their first-born son Cyrus, Cyrus the fourth, but added Jeems in honor of one of her ancestors who had helped train the first American grand national champion. Little Jeems, as he is called, has his eyes on the White House.23

The America of the future, as Randall sees it, unambiguously belongs to the people of color, to the mongrel races and to the mixed breeds. Correspondingly, the dictum of racial purity –– ‘... one drop of blackness in the entire body of a man makes him black’ – that dictated the past of America must stand invalidated.

All said and done, the face-off between Alice Randall and Margaret Mitchell, between Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone epitomised the conflict about, as Toni Morrison was to sum it up, “Who controls how history is imagined? Who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves?24

Ludmila's Broken English

- Arjun Rajkhowa, English-II


For her, it was the longest, most scary journey. She had traveled so far away from home, without anything well-planned or corporeal awaiting her at the other end. It was such a long way away that all she could think of were the people she had left behind; the innumerable times she had said goodbye to her friend; the most reticent last mornings with her parents, who, though they felt she needed the journey, didn't quite comprehend her anxiety, her ineffable need to be near them, when every day and every night, her existence ostensibly precluded them from its rigors and its daily hazards. To them, it was very important. They wanted her to discover and reaffirm her roots – the events, and people, and places that her parents said were the entirety of what made them who they were, their Identity. They said it was the very ground upon which they lived their lives together. Living in the Montreal was only a demarcation, an accomplishment of geography. It had nothing to do with the place they grew up in, occasionally reminisced about, sometimes derided, but always used as a point of reference; like a thermometer that measured their sensibilities and judgment, what their values essentially were. And like a thermometer, it drastically altered its readings, oscillating vertiginously between extremes of affection and hate, contentment and disgruntlement, hope and dismay upon the slightest provocation. She needed to return to the city of their birth, to join college there, not so much as a excuse to let the her inculcate what was theirs as young people in their own times, but as a means of letting her know that it was okay to have values that differed from those of her friends back home, that it was all right to have obfuscated and incomplete ideas about what the native people thought acceptable and normal, and that is was, in fact, acceptable to be someone born of parents like hers: Workers, immigrants, people who lived in one city, one country, and performed the daily life of another.

In college, finding people to spend time with was the easiest thing. She would never have thought that, but it was the least enervating thing. Erstwhile caricatures, hitherto images of crazy people in her head, suddenly become full bodied, fully intelligible beings, people she identified with and looked up to. They impressed her with their sociability, their astounding intellect, their grasp of her feelings and emotions, the ways of their world. She was made to feel like she needed to step up and invigorate herself, to keep up with them and their keen sense of living. It was almost ridiculous but she felt a vague kind of repentance about the way she had thought they were, about the exaggerated fear and resentment she had thought she would feel. She didn't feel like that at all. It was very different.

At home, however, everything seemed to made to dissuade her from liking her what she had. The family she lived with, her own as per the directions left to her by father, were inestimably far removed from the people she met elsewhere. They were reticent, disengaged, snide and very often plain stingy and reluctant to share their home with her. They didn't quite know if they felt they were obliged to keep her. Possibly they were, and possibly she felt it too. But everyday, with every little encounter in the house, at the dining table, in her room on the top floor, through the door as she quickly rushed past them in the morning on her way to classes, everything felt laden with a quiet kind of anger. An unspoken antagonism only she could articulate, not them. A silent kind of loathing that made her want to scream at them and tell them that they were insufferable.

But she could never do that. The place, the family, the arrangement, everything had been ordained by her parents back at home. She couldn't try and find other means of dissociating from them. Everything was already decided, she only had to play along and uphold the delicate balance that their respective feelings were predicated on.

In the afternoon, she went to the Ridge, where she sat and watched people as they went by. She had always learned to sketch her visions, people and places she saw and contemplated. She wanted to sketch them too. These people that walked in the park and along the road so purposefully, so determined to reach somewhere, to find something Important to do. She liked looking at them. She felt a sense of relief, that she wasn't them, she hadn't the need to briskly walk and find someplace to be. She knew that at the end of the road, they wouldn't find anything Important to do, that they would silently, lugubriously go back home and surrender to their empty beds. She wanted to sketch them.

They were not difficult to draw. Most of them had some remarkable features – long chins, heavy beards and mustaches, long, pointed noses, thick, hairy arms, and the women had prominent chests, and thick legs and strong arms. They were like the figures that the famous Latin American painter made, whose name she could never recall. The figures were huge, larger than life and bulky out of proportion, they were fat and so big that frightened the imagination. She liked the figures because they abjured all that was acceptable and skinny and emaciated. But she couldn't remember his name. Another thing about the people here was that they were very proficient with names. She saw the people that crossed the place where she seated herself and felt them marching their way into her sketches – big, lusty, amply-fleshed figures with swarthy shading that covered their skins. It would be perfect.

She drew them and kept making additions to her book. Everyday, after class, she singled out someone to draw and mimetically placed him in her notebook, until eventually she had a whole tome of them. It was an accomplishment, and a certain contentment crept into her daily that she knew none of her subjects ever discovered at the end of their brisk march to Importance. She felt that she knew that she had got what they were looking for. And oddly enough, it was something her parents would never understand either. That sending her away and designating her place in this new world would not be the beginning of a new-found empathy, but, instead, the conclusion of an old rectitude to say that she was different.

Bartleby

- Ankan Kazi, English-III

As if balancing the fly on his nose, a bit of lather stuck under his ears, he walked down the steps and stared at the gaping crack in the wall opposite. His landlady heard his stare and came out with her hair undone. That dress, he says, don’t that look a bit previous, love? conscious of an identity early in the morning. Why don’t you eat with us, I’ve been frying all morning, she says, slightly hurt by his attack. He grins at her and says that he has to work on this thing he’s planning to write. Why do I think I’ve heard that before? she wonders aloud.

Opposite his small window, hangs the picture of a whale. His desk is extremely well-kept. Three rows of books, a picture of himself taking a picture of a fort, a desk calendar which only says 17 and a box of writing materials. A pigeon squats outside his window and grunts. The sill is already caked with shit. He takes out a small pad and writes down a few lines he thought about, turning in his bed, while sleeping. The first one is a general insight on life, like Life is like a… but he doesn’t know how it fits into anything. It definitely doesn’t fit into the half-dozen ideas he has for a story. Nor is it good enough to be an opening for a poem. It’s trite and useless, he decides and scratches it out. The other sentence he writes down could be the beginning of a novel. It does not reveal anything about any plot or character, but looks like a whole. It looks like it could encapsulate any story, location or even emotion. It lends itself to a structure, he says aloud to himself, smiling. He chews the end of his pencil for a minute and then thinks that if it indeed reveals so much, it’s possible that it may also not reveal anything. Seven years of exercise and trying to think literarily has taught him to think like this. One of the problems with writing early in the morning is that it’s antithetical to whatever I think of at night. He hates himself for thinking up such childish aphorisms. He decides to keep the line, however, and gets off his bed.

He peeps inside Padma Pickles Fresh (in blazing red) and sneezes at the dust. I have always wondered, he tells Padma, if it’s pidgin or present continuous. Shut up and come back later, yells Padma. She is wearing a bad temper on her eyebrows and a yellow shawl over her head, which she takes off and beats violently on the rickety counter. Small jars of pickles, arranged neatly around her, shudder for a moment. Padma, he says, emotionally, I’m hearing voices- so many voices- inside my head. I am not falling for that again, she says irritably. I meant it when I said you're nothing but a numbskull. I’m going to be a writer, he replies, I just need you to tell me- but Padma has had enough. She pulls her hair back and tries to jump at him.

He drums his fingers on the desk and begins: It was a dark and stormy night… no, that’s too easy. He looks at a brooding pigeon outside his window and begins: You are reading the latest novel by so-and-so… Is that a good reference or too recondite? Re-con-dite, he says slowly and twirls his tongue around the word. Con, he says. A low whistle escapes from his lips. Suddenly, he is blinded by sleep.

His friend and poet, who likes to call himself The Faun, encourages him to expand his horizons. There is literature outside literature, he says and pauses tritely. Why don’t you watch art films? I have been greatly inspired by- and he reels off names from east Europe, central Europe and east Asia. I have been greatly influenced by Mallarme, but no less by this excellent Swedish filmmaker (have you heard of him?) and so on…

He goes for a session of world cinema at a small, sparse theatre. He falls asleep in the first half hour of almost every film. He tries to look interested and awake, he reads up on concepts but fails to relate to most of them, including the nudity, which he thinks is uncalled for in a serious film. Finally, after three months of wading through incomprehensible slush, he watches a striking film that arrests him completely.

It was also slow, but I was getting used to that, he tells Padma. This average guy- since he is bored- lets himself be used as a double for a film shoot. He has to pretend he’s dead and lying face down on this dirty, big river in Taipei or,… I forget, anyway, so the river is dirty, very dirty- but he does it anyway and they pay him off in a way… although, before that I think he meets this girl who takes him to the shoot in the first place. After the shoot, however, he comes down with this massive pain in his neck- which completely throws him off- and his parents- it’s a nuclear family- come together and it was touching how the father… no, I can’t say that- that’s a plot give-away. But the pain is the focus. It was beautiful.

Why can’t you tell a coherent story? Padma asks. I still have no idea what you’re talking about. He mumbles something about his pain. Her hair shines light brown in the sun. If you want to write, why don’t you do it? Padma asks. I don’t want to be a stupid scrivener, he says, haughtily. I hate to quote him, but Faun says: man is poem: you’re either a verse, /or averse/ to it.

What wonderful role models you have.

This reminds me of you, he says and reads:

‘Anglares began to tell a moving, stupid and somber tale. A man enters a hotel and asks for a room. He is given room 35. Coming down a few minutes later, he tells the clerk: I have a bad memory, so every time I come in, I’ll tell you my name… Mr. Delouit… and you say my room number. The clerk agrees. Shortly after, he returns and says: Mr. Delouit. -Room 35. –Thank you. A moment later, a man, extremely agitated, covered in mud, his face bloodied beyond recognition, stumbles in. ‘Mr. Delouit’, he says. ‘What? Mr. Delouit just went up’, says the clerk. ‘Yes, but I fell out the window. My room number, please?’’

She doesn’t say anything.

He tries to pretend he is in great pain. It is a strange affectation. He twists around in his bed, clutching his jaw, or his ears. He grimaces to himself. He lies still for a minute and starts twisting again. He could have sworn his tooth grew up into the roof of his mouth. Is that blood, he shrieks.

…at any rate he lifted his feet uncommonly high, and _______ was dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles… the beetle’s soft, warm body was pressed on the cool glass.

Can I write something as monotonous and beautiful as this? he asks himself. Did Sara not write because of her father?

He developed a habit of talking to a picture called Rrose Selavy. Did you know, he tells Rrose, that Kafka is my direct predecessor? Rrose snorts and flicks his fur over his shoulder. No one, not even the rain has such small hands, he tells Rrose. Rrose pouts and looks away.

“On reviewing my earlier childhood I find the predominant reflection. . . .”

Most of her life was spent under the shadow of her father. Like most of her father’s works, she was also a fragment. Or perhaps even- a figment. As if something to work himself in opposition to. When she was just a baby, her father wrote about her: “Send me the very feel of her sweet Flesh, the very look and motion of that mouth—O, I could drive myself mad about her.” She was a delicate creature, as Griggs informs us, dressed in lace and muslin. She hated growing up in the rude farmhouse, being bathed in a room where men came in and went out. Her father wanted her to dress in white, although his more famous friend insisted on colourful dresses. Sara’s father loved her very much and told her fairy stories when he slipped into her bed at nights. In spite of all this, when her mother came visiting, she flew to her and wished never to be separated from her. Her father was hurt. As he fought with imaginary visions of splendor and decay, he also fought against this separation from his flesh. Like most of his works, she was also a fragment. A figment that floated far away from him.

At the age of twenty, she came to visit her father again at Highgate. Griggs, in his dramatic prose, writes that nobody was prepared “for the dazzling vision of loveliness which stepped across the threshold one cold December day”. Her father was left spellbound. He was also crossed with deep agitation when she took up with a cousin who had written a stupid book on the West Indies. Griggs allows us to interpret this agitation as ‘jealousy’. Jealous about what? Another masterpiece being snatched away from him? Another masterpiece like Christabel, also unfinished? Caught in this spell, anxious to bat it away, he talked to her. Or, as Sara says, he discoursed. For she did not remember a word of it. He traversed “the star–paved road, taking in the whole heavens in his circuit”. The erudition of a man of letters or the desperation of a drowning castaway clutching at the stars?

Sara intended to end each section of her autobiography with a reflection- usually of a moral nature. After about twenty-six pages, she wrote “on reviewing my earlier childhood I find the predominant reflection. . . .” and stopped. She never wrote anything after that.


So that, in the end

So that, in the end, he doesn’t know how to end. He sits up and stretches. A pigeon squats in his window sill, caked with shit, dozing. There is nothing to write about, except this obligation to write, he murmurs to himself, petting his dutch wife. Did this need any utterance? Was this not, perhaps, filtered through the ages until spoken out loud? He looked out of his window through a tea strainer. A gimmick he picked up from a film. He heard an ambulance in the distance, shrieking at the night, shot through with pain.

Poesy

- Shamik Chakravarty, MA(First) Philo

Sincerely yours, dear octagon, sincerely

Soiled are your creases
Great Octagon,
Soiled and sallow in surrounding laughter;
Honorary annotations have defiled you.
But have you not realized your third-man-destiny,
the morrow where you can never be inside?
your eight edges will never be engulfed, dear octagon,
they will never enter their resting place;
their shape will always wave like weasels in dim water
murky in their onslaught of pears and fruits and other bananas,
making horrific fruit-baskets
to wake up the dead.
No dear octagon
Cezanne never loved you
and never will.

Him

"Nothing really belongs to us but time- which even he has who has nothing else." -Source Unknown


Past the haunting winds in my mind
Is a vast expanse
A desert hitherto unnoticed.
Ahoy! I see a man sing
His favourite 'Clementine'.
"O you clamorous fool
Thirsty and sick
Why do you fart through your mouth?"

My dear sir, oh sir,
A creaking door slammed on my face
I found myself in this dark place.
What was it?...
Ahh a grave-

There I saw this lovely sand,
Glittering in the melting light
And in the crystalline grains
I saw my lineless face.
I'm a ghost.

Your Man only said
"There is no joy but calm."
Time is mine.

The poet

He thinks disconnected thoughts,
Under a disconnected bower:
A master of the poetic condition.

Pristine rays of slanting sunlight engulf him,
As he overcomes...

Overcomes hesitations.

The stark rendition
Of overlapping glades,
Harmonizes pastel shades
And crayon colours,

And the wilful pessimism of sounds engraved
Upon his epitaph.

"Here lieth the man
Who hoped to transform
An apple and a worm
Into metrical verse."

He grips his pen and writes
His own fate
And ends
A thousand misfortunes
Abruptly.


Oh Jealousy!

O undesirable desire,
unwanted thought
Let me parody you.
Let me count the ways
and shine its sonnet rays
o let me, lemme please
fathom the height the length
the breadth the depth
or whatever barrett browning said
and find my sodding way.

O gratuitous tumult
green eyed monster
cliche ridden beast,
tickle me till I rot
and let me laugh, caterwaul
till I reach elfin grot.

On Pedagogy

In the deep sleep of the concrete-
layered class
abutting some abounding gargoyles and translucent brick-colored fantasies
Was a collective bench of imposers from within-without.
Grass-tinged and fine-leaved,
they accessorized the summer.
And perhaps their pied lines could've told you stories from your grandmomma's womb,
or a few remaining bildungsroman narratives;
and if you believed that people can or could be educated
or fermented in between layers of cut glass,
if you believed indeed that some dear rascals of yesterday could've
bounced off wall and clip-board spaces,
to reveal a non-water, non-coded non-buff coloured precipitate,
you could've
(perhaps with a balloon-holed shirt
and darned unholed tweed socks)
you could've gone up like, like
some duck man,
some duck in some penny-pudding world who wasn't merely some semi-flying
now turbulent and now rippled skygazer.

Winter Musings

- Sarah Farooqui, English-I

Slowly. Softly. As light as the drizzle on grass, she twirled and pranced. Her salmon-pink chiffon-skirt swayed in ringlets and the gold embroidery shimmered unevenly. Her whole body moved rhythmically. Her arms curved gracefully. I knew there was music inside the room. The finesse of her movements made me hear the instruments. Standing outside on the road, surrounded by the blaring traffic and harsh neon lights, I was staring at the small girl in a dance studio practice. She must have been 10 years old. The main room of the dance studio faced the road. There were large glass-windows open to the world. Soft gold and bronze light washed the wooden flooring. The whole room from outside looked like a gold and brown nest. Bare and spacious, yet cozy and comfortable.

If only I could be 10 again. Not a worry. Not a care. A simple life, but a precious life. As she twirled to the unheard music, I felt jealousy trickle down my body. She was so unaware. So unconscious. Her only source of consciousness was her movement. Suddenly, I wanted that. I wanted to have that one thing to concentrate on and loose myself in for just a moment. She never saw me. Or I don’t think she did. She was so engrossed in her movements that I could have stood there all night and she would not have seen me. I don’t know what form of dance she was practicing. But she was so astounding that I stood there on the road, at 6.30 on a winter evening mesmerized. Suddenly she stopped and looked at the door in the opposite side of the room. Her back was facing me. I noticed her tiny shoulders. Her small hands and her skinny legs. She was such a small person that suddenly her size fascinated me. Was I ever that tiny? I wondered as I stared at my own plough sized hands. Suddenly she stopped. She looked behind and ran through the door into the next room. Within a second the lights of the studio were switched off. I stood there for a second and then started to walk. The cold air was biting my face. I wrapped my hands around myself and looked down as the wind blew in my direction. I had just spent half an hour of my life musing and staring at a little girl dance.

The street lights were switched on. The benches on the side of the pavements stared longingly at passersby. Nobody stopped. Nobody noticed. Who was she I wondered. What was her story? Where did she go… what did she do? She was just a little girl I saw but she was in my story. I looked at the rows of neatly kept houses. The perfectly manicured lawns and the gleaming cars. I wondered if the little girl lived in any of these houses. Who were they, the ones inside? We all exist together. Yet what did we know about one another. We walk pass each other, we see each other, we live together… then why are we so alone? Introspective moods. A sudden longing for importance. Random musings on a winter night.

In my story, she is a little girl who I had watched dancing on a winter evening. She fascinated me. Not just because she was so good at it, but because she made me think about something I would never have thought had I not seen her… or felt. We can go on living our whole lives without feeling so much. Think of the many possible feelings out there waiting to be felt. Can they be listed? The thoughts that we may never think…the sensations that we may never experience. The empty possibilities. For half an hour that evening she made me feel. She made me think. In this world of lonely empty benches and un-walked streets, one should be grateful for a thought, a sensation. We should look at those strangers who are nameless and whose faces we don’t remember a second after we pass them, and realize their importance in our life. So many of them make us think. They don’t need to look at us. They don’t need to even feel us. But they are there. Unknowingly, unnoticing they make differences in lives. As I arrived at the bus station I looked at the glowing windows of the houses. So many people. So many possibilities. We all exist together, but what do we know about each other? I unconsciously stared into a window of a house a few paces away. My bus came. I sat and looked back at the window. A man was standing. I did not concentrate on him enough for his presence to enter my consciousness. The bus moved. My thoughts changed. The man at the window was looking at me.

Cold, Ash and Dust

- Indra Shekhar Singh, BA Prog-I

It takes a moment to realize keywords like location, time-frame, socio-cultural halves, etc. They are one of the few foundations on which the modern world still functions. Ironically, these pillars of our social stability change very quickly when applied to individuals. 'Who' becomes 'what' and the 'what' becomes 'how' and it goes around in cyclical rotations that go beyond the numerical range of man. Again, addressing the question of this essay, where is the 'I'?

College, yes, that is my location. It was a much-awaited location before this, with respect to the general time-frame of life, but what about the time I got here? It was a shock. The experience was like waking up from a sweet dream into cold, numb and noisy misery. The very pillars of existence built by hardened experience seem to question existence itself. People so completely morph into something very vaguely not-them. It is confusing, I must say. People prey on innocence and celebrate death.

It's never too late to grow out of the pond and into the ocean, but I didn't expect reality to be this harsh. Life did now start to feel like harsh winter winds depositing dust on me. The very ideals of my life were where the dust settled. The dust coated new experiences on my life and slowly, I started feeling different under these heavy layers. I felt burdened and was slowly losing myself.

Realizing the difference between the traditional, prevalent atrocities and modern righteousness is not a tough task. Most people with beautiful blindfolds accept the earlier, rejecting and crushing the righteousness to the core. 'My father discriminated and so will I', 'My family exploited women and so will I' and the tradition of sadistic acts continues with yet another generation. I stand at that deciding juncture with choices laid out on two platters. The first, the silver one which serves violence in silver packing, and the second, the mud platter that serves nothing but old righteousness. We are conditioned to take this decision. So what do I pick: the 'hard right against the easy wrong'?

Winter has come and the cold reigns. The cold now preserves the dust. It perceives the wounds of innocence, stopping the healing and preserving it for the start of the spring of decay. The dust and spilled blood blend into a colour that is not even seen, but felt. I guess the dust is still settling on me and the cold enforces it. At the start, I was lost in this rusty illusion, fighting enemies that outnumber and out-smart me even now. All the enemies want one thing, and I fight to be myself and not transform into them.

The term 'One World' seems to be flashed around a lot. As soon as we hear the phrase, our 'idealist caps' come out and the world of wisdom dawns. But rationally analyzing the term 'world' with subjectivity conveys a different meaning. People with sensitive words fail to feel pain even after they see atrocities. People have become narrow and so has their world. It is a selfish world, in a cut-throat age. The peripheries of our world have come closer. Only things that we relate to are 'our world' and the things we don't relate to become blanked out spaces on a dark canvas. Delving a little deeper on this, for most people writing similar or copying similar essays doesn't really matter if the world goes on as usual - if people sleep abused, underfed, exploited. So the question of the use of 'world' is answered quite simply by the things we choose to see, to feel and perceive.

I can say with some conviction that we all are obsessed with the notion of individual 'backgrounds'. To me, all backgrounds are either biased, oppressive, aggressive or rigid in certain ways. If we only think of and follow the socio-cultural boundaries of life we might take a regressive turn back to where we started. I believe rules and regulations of any kind, whether they be constitutions, laws, religion, or even ethnic rules, are like iron, iron that is necessary for survival, but if not preserved suitably, will rust. It will corrode into a thin sheet of defunct metal. My view of the world today, with respect to my location and cultural milieu, gives me a single line of vision and I see a hard reality. I see too many block, too many iron-headed individuals overrun by their ideas of communism, feminism and these -isms that never end. It's difficult to call these ism-creatures men. They simply feel like heated machines fuelled by their respective -isms. A man fascinated with 'fundamentalism' blows up buildings and people, another one is so fond of 'capitalism' that he eats up two countries and even refuses to burp. We slowly fall to the -isms and blindly start a kind of 'activism in response to terrorism that is funded by capitalism in an effort to check socialism'. The wars of one -ism unto the others are never-ending.

Has the dust here overpowered my whole existence? Am I too late to walk on the middle path? Have the -isms confounded me too? Or is this all a dream? - perception being the only thing that matters. Paranoia/optimism - perceptions of what, how and why things are done. It's like a block dot, constantly stormed by the winds of delusion.

Maybe, Someday

- Shreya Jindal, English-II

Aditya stares at the bathroom door, wondering what could be taking so long. Perhaps she’s nervous that he’ll insist on sleeping with her. Perhaps she wants to sleep with him, and is working up the nerve to ask. She emerges at last, and to his relief, she looks just as nervous as he feels. He half rises, feeling awkward.

“Why don’t you um-” He gestures to the bed nervously.

“Thanks.” She perches herself on the edge of the bed. Her eyes take in the strings of flowers hanging over the nuptial bed and the scented candles burning softly on the bedside tables, and she tenses.

Aditya winces as he follows her gaze. “My sister is an irrepressible romantic,” He explains, gesturing to the candles and flowers, “She insisted on this stuff. I don’t…I mean…It doesn’t mean we have to do anything tonight.” The words leave him in a rush. “I mean, we barely know each other, right?” He laughs nervously. “I can get rid of all this stuff if you want.”

The tension leaves her body at his words. “No, that’s fine. They smell nice.”

Aditya nods. There is a long pause.

“Do you realize that this is the first time we’re meeting each other outside of our parents’ company?” Pavitra says finally.


“We really don’t know a thing about each other, do we?” Aditya says, musingly. “I sort of convinced myself that we got to know each other in the few conversations that we’ve had. But I just realized that all I really know about you is that you did both your graduation and postgradution in Economics, and your hobbies are reading and singing. We couldn’t really ask each other anything meaningful with our parents present. I’ve wanted to ask you something for ages; have you had any…past love interests?”

“If you’re asking if I fell in love with a Muslim and my parents locked me in my room for months and forced me into wedlock with you under pain of death and disownment, then no,” Pavitra replies, amused. “I did date a guy when I was in the tenth, but my parents found out and immediately put an end to it. I wasn’t in love or anything- I was only sixteen. But my parents reacted so badly that I resigned myself to an arranged marriage and stopped looking for love. Were you ever in a relationship with anyone?”

“No.” Aditya replies, “I did have a few crushes over the years- I mean, who doesn’t, right? But I never went on any dates. My parents would never have let me marry anyone non-Telugu, either.”

They share a look of understanding.

“I wanted to ask you,” Aditya says after a short pause, “How fond are you of children? When do you want…?” Embarrassing as it is to ask, he knows that some lines need to be drawn as soon as possible.

“As soon as possible,” Pavitra replies immediately, and Aditya looks at her in alarm.

Pavitra starts as she follows his train of thought. “I don’t mean that we should, you know, start sleeping together immediately,” She says quickly, blushing. “I just- want kids. That’s the one thing that I’m prepared to demand of you if you refuse to give it of me. I mean- not that you would refuse, it’s just- God, this isn’t coming out right.” She takes a deep breath, trying to compose herself. “It’s not that I’m especially fond of children or that I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I’ve always had this dream, that I could work and have financial independence after postgraduation. But I was raised to be a housewife, and I know your parents won’t allow me to work, either. But after our honeymoon, you’ll be at work, and I’ll be alone with nothing to do but watch TV and read and lie around like a couch potato. Raising children would be something meaningful to do, you know? And I’d have all the time in the world to do it right. If I can’t be anything else, I can at least try to be the best mother I can be.”

Aditya stares at her, his heart constricting with sympathy for her, although that is as far as he is going to go. Ashamed as he is to admit it, he won’t go up against family and society for someone he barely knows. “You know,” He says, “I would have liked it if you could have worked too. But my parents-”

“No, I understand,” Pavitra interrupts, “Our parents shouldn’t have put us through free thinking, progressive, educational systems if they wanted our thoughts to conform to theirs. We’ve both grown up with people who have a higher ideal for married life. We’re never going to be fully satisfied with this.”

He nods somberly. He has had the same thought more times than he can count. They are silent for a while, and then Aditya asks, “What do you want to do on our honeymoon?”

“You mean apart from the obvious ‘getting to know each other?’” Pavitra replies.

“Yeah. Goa might get a bit monotonous, there isn’t much to do there apart from swim and look at beaches. Do you swim, by the way?”

“Yeah. And I love seashells.”

“Well…good. You’ll certainly find a lot of those in Goa.”

Silence falls again, but this time it is not as uncomfortable as the previous ones. Both of them have become more relaxed over the course of the conversation.

Pavitra yawns suddenly. “I’m kind of tired,” She apologizes.

“Yeah, so am I.” He lies down. “Goodnight, Pavitra.”

“Goodnight.”

They lie in silence for a long time, listening to each other’s breathing. Aditya is just drifting asleep when he hears Pavitra’s voice.

“Aditya?”

“Yes?”

She finally voices the question they have both been skirting around the entire evening. “Do you think we can ever learn to love each other?”

Aditya is silent for a moment. Then, he whispers, “Maybe, someday…”

The Absurd Man

- Aadarsh Chunkath, History-III

Every human being, at one juncture or the other, comes to face the often unfathomable and mysterious visage of the universe. A simple gesture, a word or thought reveals that which defies all logic. A glance at a building while waiting at a street corner , brings to mind the irony of an inanimate object built by man’s hands, outliving generations of men. The sheer waste of human talent and potential in natural disasters often strike us while glancing through the morning newspaper. Fate or God often seems to be playing dice, thwarting all attempts to achieve happiness or destroying that which already exists. A hunger to achieve some physical or metaphysical goal haunts man even when he enjoys social and material success; yet the precise nature of this quest is not clear to him. Each new day is a chance to live happily; yet death just crept a little closer.

It is this enigma and how we choose to react, that makes the human condition absurd. And of all the people who have pondered on the absurdity that defines us all, the French writer-philosopher Albert Camus, takes the limelight. In his celebrated works, the characters are affected differently by the discovery of the absurd. Herein may lie a clue to unravel the puzzling human reactions when facing the absurd cosmos.

When a basically noble and sensitive individual is pitted against an invincible and inscrutable order, the result is often a metaphysical tragedy. It is in our own moral space, the inner sanctum, that this unsuspenceful but elegant struggle takes place. This battle is not turbulent but perfectly still, consisting of a certain mood, a certain gaze, a metaphysics. Le Mythe de Sisyphe(1940) opens with the line ‘ There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’. In this highly original essay, Camus rejected the two conventional responses to the discovery of the absurd. (1) Physical suicide: term A (the self) is suppressed to ensure that term B (the universe-irrational, illogical) is maintained. In this unbearable relationship, the self capitulates to the absurd. (2)Philosophical suicide: term A takes the leap of faith, by seeking solace in religion rather than intelligently scrutinizing term B. So term B is negated and term A appears to be fleeing from it. Camus found both these two reactions unsatisfactory. He advocated a third possible reaction. It required both the terms to be maintained in equilibrium; ensuring that a thread of tension exists between them. The absurd is preserved and the self, by living moment to moment, finds fulfillment .The absurd man has courage and clarity of vision in the face of ultimate meaninglessness and the finality of death. He is free of all illusions and so can greatly enjoy the here and now.

A perfect example of someone not able to maintain the tension is Mersault, the protagonist in Camus’ L’Etranger(1940). When undergoing trial for the murder of an Arab, Mersault believes that he will be punished in society, primarily for not adequately mourning his mother’s death. He is asked by the judge, why he committed the murder. Mersault replies that the sun made him do it. As outrageous as it seems, there has to be an element of truth in this statement, for at the moment of the crime, the harsh African sun had dizzied him and distorted his vision.

A fourth and the most lethal reaction to the absurd was explored by Camus in the play Caligula (1940). The Roman emperor Caligula has a sudden revelation of the absurd after his sister’s death. Being intelligent, he is transfigured; his conventional sensibility shattered. He wants to posses the moon, hold it in his hands, share his bed with it. This is as impossible as it is for man to evade death. Caligula, deranged, rebels against this certainty and Camus makes him the first man in history to do so. He unleashes a reign of debauchery and decadence. He wants the whole world to discover the absurd and being the emperor, he has the power to do so. He does all this in the hope that it would confer freedom on him, but only later does he realize that one cannot be free against other people. Just after four years, Caligula is stabbed by those patricians who consider him a lunatic absolutist. The self in Caligula’s case, not only attacks the absurd cosmos but also allies with it to universalize the awareness of it. Such an attack would only leave a trail of chaos and destruction with the self finally committing suicide. Camus was well aware of how an abstract interpretation of the absurd, like the Nazi ideology, can cause human misery on such a grand scale. Alternatively Caligula is a dramatic symbol of the blinded dictators, who derived their political logic from the absurd and the unleashed violence and the suffering in the Europe between 1939 and 1945.

How can any human being revolt against this seemingly all powerful and incomprehensible cosmos? Does he have a weapon or an instrument? The revolt that Camus advocated was one of a genuine humanism. This idea of revolt emphasizes human nature, the warmth of human concern and understanding. Camus was clear when it came to distinguishing his moral revolt from a political or religious revolution. Such a revolution, he felt, purposely bend human nature to suit an existing intellectual or dogmatic framework.

What Camus did was to identify the major problems of his age and try to fashion what he called ‘an art of living in times of catastrophe’. He had personally felt the ravages of the two world wars and so throughout his brief adult life, he passionately defended the claims of justice and human solidarity. In L’Ete, Camus drew up the mission he set for himself: “We must put together what has been torn apart, make justice a possibility in an obviously unjust world, render happiness meaningful to peoples poisoned by the suffering of our age. This is of course a superhuman task, yet what we call ‘superhuman’ are simply those tasks which take a very long time to accomplish.” This is the calling of the absurd man; the mission that drives his life.