Salesian Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, (December 2017)

 ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.8.2017.v-viii | Page: v-viii | Section: Editorial

Pen, Pain & Writing: (Re) Thinking Links, Connectives And Negotiations| v

EDITORIAL

Pen, Pain and Writing: (Re)Thinking Links, Connectives and Negotiations

Rafat Ali is  Assistant  Professor  at  the  Department  of  English,  Jadavpur  University.  He  completed  his  early education  in  Kalimpong  and  Sikkim  and  higher  education  in  Kolkata. Under the supervision of Prof.  Supriya Chaudhuri,  he  obtained  his  PhD  from  Jadavpur  University  working  on  the  representation  of  Islam  and  the Muslim  world  in  medieval  and  early  modern  travel  writing. He has since  then  contributed  to  this  area  of  study through  various  publications  and conference  papers  at  national  and  international  conferences,  panel discussions,  special  lectures and  as  resource  person  at  several  Refresher  Courses  and  workshops.  In  2010  he received a Short  Research  Visit  Grant  from  Charles  Wallace  India  Trust  and  was  also  invited  by  the St.  Philips Center  for  Inter-Faith  Relations  at  Leicester,  UK  to  deliver  a  talk  on  ‘Crusades, Conversion  and  Co-existence in  Medieval  Travel  Writing‘.  His  recent  publications  include,  ‘Islam  and  Early  Modern  Orientalism‘  in  JUES vol.22  ed.  Ananda Lal  and  ‘On  the  Road  to  Dar-al-Shahadah‘  in  Believing  and  Belonging  ed.  A.  R.Kidwai (New Delhi:  Viva Books, 2016).

Subro Saha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Amity University, Kolkata. After completing his M. Phil from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, he is now pursuing his PhD from Utrecht University, Netherlands. He was a former Assistant Professor in the English Department of Salesian College, Siliguri and was also associated as a faculty with colleges like Scottish Church College, S. A. Jaipuria College, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College and City College, Kolkata.

The concept of writing, be it in the Indian or European context, has gone through many significant changes since its inception and so its role, significance and relation to society has also altered. Similarly, its conceptual relation to the use of pen has also changed. When writing was seen as an attempt at creative act(ion), the pen was considered to be the enabling medium through which one achieved such creational power. However, with the shift from the humanist trend towards post-structuralism the concept of such creational power has come under critical enquiry and the same concept of writing has emerged in newer ways, altering the concept and role of the pen as well. The meeting of post-structuralism and feminism has enabled the pen to be seen as a metaphorical phallus, and such writing has come to be seen as a creational act(ion) through which autonomy of self-expression is claimed beyond the phallogocentric structures of literar production. Thus, the French feminists were able to develop the concept of ecriture feminine with the aim of shifting the focus from the structures of male literary production and claiming an autonomy of women’s writing; the same pen is now being used to disrupt the phallocentric values associated with it. Similarly, with the move towards postcoloniality, writing comes to be seen as inextricably linked with the dominant power structures, the circulation, recognition and dissemination of which, remain linked with the empire itself. Thus, ‘writing-back’ becomes a crucial concept and a strategic move for the postcolonial nations as an attempt at re-defining, re-framing and re-claiming the canon itself. The entry into the neo-capitalist structures of global market economy enabled one to view writing and pen in terms of the concepts of ownership, property and consumption, whereby the creative act(ion) of writing was also seen as a part of production, inextricably linked with the dominant reiterative structures of market economy. In the contemporary times also, when the boundary between the real and the virtual seems to have been blurred, writing has shifted into a realm of hyper-real simulative act(ion) where the pen itself has been digitized into mouse, pointer and keyboard. Writing in such a new world of techno-science and cyborgs thus becomes a problematic memory to be re-membered in the sense it was conceptualized in the previous ages, since it suggests a future too alien to be anticipatable in the here-and-now. The continuously shifting trajectories that the history of writing reflects, thus problematizes any attempt at writing about “pain”, since the concept of “pain” also emerges as something which cannot be limited within any singular definition but remains always shifting, always contingent.

Any attempt at thinking about “pain” always remains linked with the thinking of “body”, and the thinking of body remains an attempt that is always eluding. Thinking of “pain” also involves the thinking of “experience” that comes to signify the pain in terms of the specificity and expectations of “what matters?”. “Experience”, when seen as a decisive category in terms of reflecting the specificity and immediacy of “what is” here-and-now, comes to acquire a force of the visible and normative that shapes the “real” itself. However, “pain” remains operative with a certain invisibility. As such how can one re-present the invisibility of the experience of “pain” through the structures of visibility and intelligibility that shape any attempt at writing?

Such contingencies and paradoxes, that any attempt at re-presenting “pain” through writing always involve, thus raise certain crucial questions, some of which can be partially framed in the following manner: How can the concept of “pain” be (re)presented? Can the concept of “pain” be seen as enabling, as something positive, or as something which can also be desired? How can writing, with its own structure, rules and regulations, capture or reflect the experience of pain? What are the limits of such conceptualizations, links, connectives and negotiations?

Such questions, which always haunt the inquirer and emerge from within any  discourse involving “pain”, thus not only forces us to re-think the links, connectives and negotiations through which writing and pain are brought together, but also to re-think the structures of our thinking itself. Such call for re-thinking, reflecting a search for newness, alterity and difference, not only forces us to re-consider the existing structures of thinking but also cautions us with the paradoxes such attempts at re-thinking may involve.

In  the  inaugural  paper  titled  ‘The  lady  Vanishes:  Sexual  difference  and  the  Politics  of  Writing  Pain’  Anirban  Das   interrogates  into  the  possibility  of  graphing  pain  in  writing, which  is  the  central  concern  of the  journal. Das, investigates  into the  ethics  which  are  functional  in  the  representation  of  pain  and  tries  to  discursively  formulate  a  methodology for  graphing pain  while  being  aware  of  the   problems  which  are  faced  by  any  instance of  co-habitation  of singularity  of  pain  and  the  politics  of  representation  in  writing.  He investigates  into  the  politics  of  feminism  and  talks  about  “pain  as  a  metaphor”  for  an alterity.

Subro  Saha, in  his  paper  attempts  to  trace  the  genealogy  of  scientific  discourse  in  the  western  metaphysics  and   understand  the  pain  as  located  in  the  liminal  space  in  between  the  idea/ matter  binary.  His  paper  tries  to problematize  the  relationship  between  pain  and  act  of  writing  it  down  through  an  understanding  of  the  idea/matter  binary.

Exploring  the  poetic  output  of  Thom  Gunn  particularly  his  1992   anthology  The  Man  with  Night  Sweats ,  Niladri  Chatterjee  in  his   article  explores  questions  such  as:  Is  there  any alternative  to  phalogocentricity  apart  from  ecriture  feminine ? Does  gay  male  writing  also uphold  patriarchy?  What  are  the  literary  expressions  of  pain  experienced  by  homosexual  men?  Is  the  very  acknowledgement  of  pain  a  mark  of  effeminacy ?   Homosocial  tactility along  with  homosexual  desire  is  an  area  of  great  anxiety  for  patriarchy. Chatterjee  also  explores  the  performative  politics  of  homosexual  men, against  patriarchy.

Amrit  Sen  in  his  article  titled  Widows  and  the  Pain  of  Indenture: Writings  from  Mauritius  makes  a  historiographical  study  of  colonial  space  of  Mauritius  in  the  late  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  century.  His  paper  explores  narratives  of  migrant  labourers as  well  as  those  women  who  experienced  widowhood  post  migration.  The  paper  not only  tries  to  wrestle  with the  various  socio- political  reasons  of  migration  but  also  tries to  understand  the  effects  of  such  migration  on  the  cultural  event  of  widowhood. The paper  discursively  explores  how  migration  altered  the  state  of  widowhood  in  a  liminal migratory  space.

‘In  Qur’an  and  Divine  Writ:  Islam  in  the  Writing  Process’  of  Contemporary  British  Muslim  Fiction’,  Rafat  Ali  takes  as  his  primary  text  various  contemporary  British  Fiction. Through  a close  reading  of  texts  such  as  Satanic  Verses(1988)  and  The  Road  from  Damascus(2008)  he  seeks  to  explore  the  Kulturkampf  between  the  West and  Islamic  world. At  the  same  time  he  suggests  in  agreement  with  Claire  Chambers  that  the  emergent  sub-genre  of  British  Muslim  Fiction  challenges  the  strereotypical  views  concerning  Islam  and  Muslims.

Pratibha Biswas in the paper titled ‘Signifying Pain, Signifying Self: Reading Autobiographical  Narratives  by  Dalit  Women’ attempts  a psychological  reading  of  the  autobiographical  narratives.  Engaging with   by  Dalit  women,  namely  ,  The  Prisons  We Broke (2008) by  Baby  Kamble ,  Urmila  Pawar’s  The  Weave  of  My  Life (2008)   and  Bama’s 

Sangati (2005)  Biswas  attempts   to  articulate  how  experience  of  stigma  , oppression  and  pain  are  reprented  in  these  narratives .  Biswas  also  tries  to  elaborate  how  the  act  of  writing  mirrors  the  process  of  erasure  yet  also  allows  for  an  emancipatory  space. Saunak  Samajdar’s  short  outline  of  a  presentation  ‘The  Kathartic  Pen:  Writing  And  Painlessness’    is concerned  with  ontology  of  writing  as  a  process  and  possibilities  of  Barthesian  joissance  it  holds.  Strategically  engaging  with  Shakespeare,  Joyce  and  Keats  he  hints  at  the double  intent  of  pleasure  and  pain  operational  in  writing.

Paromita  Sengupta  through   her  reading  of  Revd. Lal  Bihari  Day’s  novel   Bengal  Peasant  Life  tries  to  examine  the  relationship  between  the  author-language-subject-reader. Her  paper  is  an  attempt  to  engage  with  the  narrative  formulations  used  by  a  colonial  subject  using  the  language  of  the  colonized  , to  write   about  the  pain  of  colonial  lived  experience.                 

The  central  thematic  of  Surojit  Kayal’s  paper  is  to  explore  the  possibilities   of  visualising  history  or  rather  historiography  as  a  spatial  discourse  ,particularly  engaging  with  J.M Coetzee’s  novel  Disgrace. His  paper  offers  an  alternative  mode  of  engagement  with  history  ,  exploring  the  fissures  of  history  and  identifying  them  as  the  channels  through  which  the  pain  of  the  marginal  identities  flow. His  paper  explores  the  white  marginality  as  depicted  in  Disgrace  in  post  apartheid  South  Africa.      

In  their  paper,  Pain,writing and the problems of Thinkning Time,  Bedika Rai  and  Swagata Singha  Ray  critically  engage  with  writings  of  Virginia  Woolf  and  Jane  Austin  and   trace each  character  in  Emma  and  Mrs.  Dalloway  through  the parameters  of  changing  time and  how  they  act  out  in  his/her  own  pace,  and  the disparity  in  the  occurrence  of  events between  them  that  would  contribute  to  a  fresh  perspective,  hitherto  overlooked  by  the  critics.

Racial  mis/representation  and  the  pain  of  such  an  epistemic  violence  on  the  figure  of  ‘the  Jew’  in  Marlowe’s  The  Jew  of  Malta  concerns Bhaskar  Lama.  In  his  paper  Lama tries  to  understand  the  politics  of  representation  in  Marlowe’s  drama  and  tries  to  unravel the  dramatist’s  inner- self .  He  suggests  that  the  Marlowe  mitigates  the  pain  of  mis/representation  of  the  jews  by   conceiving  the  act  of  writing  as  a  painful  act.

In  her  paper  ‘Exorcising  Pain  Through  Pen  And  Writing:  A  Case  Study  of  Anne  Rice’s  Vampire Chronicles’  Kasturi  Ghosh  explores  creativity  as  a  therapeutic  process.  Through  her  reading  of  The  Vampire  Lestat  by  Rice  she  examines  how  the  authors  own atheist   tendencies   are  reflected  in  the  textual  space  along  with  the  trauma  such  view lead  to  in  a  postmodern   Godless  world.  

The  last  article  of  the  journal  brings  the  pain  of  writing  closer  home  with  delineation  of  trauma  of  Emergency  imposed  by  Indira  Gandhi  from  25th  June  1975  to  1977  . In her  paper Gunjeet  Aurora  explores  the  trauma  of  emergency  through  a  close  reading  of  texts  like  Midnight’s  Children,  Rich  like  Us ,  A  fine  Balance  and  Infinity  of  Grace.  Her paper  reflects  on  the  contemporary socio-political  trends  and  manners  during  the  period of  emergency  using  such  readings  as  subtext  to  read  the  literary  representation  of  the  trauma  of  Emergency.