'മൂസയിലെ കുതിര മീനുകൾ' : മുക്കുവന്റെ പ്രണയ കാവ്യവും ചില ചോദ്യങ്ങളും

'മൂസയിലെ കുതിര മീനുകൾ' കണ്ടു. അജിത്‌ പിള്ളയുടെ ആദ്യത്തെ സംവിധാന ,സംരഭം. ലക്ഷദ്വീപിന്റെ ദൃശ്യ ഭംഗി നന്നായി പ്രമേയവുമായി സമ്ന്വയിപിചിരിക്കുന്നു.  കഥയിലെ വിവിധങ്ങളായ സ്ഥലകാലങ്ങൾ യുക്തിപൂർവമായി ഭാവങ്ങളുടെ ഒരു തുടര്ച്ച സൃഷ്ടിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നു.

എന്നാലും ചില വസ്തുതകൾ പറയേണ്ടതുണ്ട്. കുതിര മീനുകള എന്ന സങ്കല്പത്തെ അതിന്റെ പൂര്ണമായ ശക്തിയിൽ പ്രയോഗിക്കാൻ കഴിഞ്ഞിട്ടില്ല. കഥയിലെ നായക കഥപാത്രങ്ങളുടെ സ്വഭാവ വിശേഷങ്ങളായി കുതിര മീനുകൾ  അവശേഷിക്കുന്നു. അത് പോലെ തിമിഗല  വേട്ടയുടെ ചിത്രീകരണവും അതിന്റെ സജീവതയോടെ ഉപയോഗിക്കാൻ കഴിഞ്ഞിട്ടില്ല.

കാല്പനികതയുടെ ഒരു വ്യഗ്രത ചിത്ര  സന്നിവേശത്തിൽ തെളിഞ്ഞു കാണാം. എന്നാൽ വ്യഗ്രതയോടെ പ്രണയത്തിന്റെയും സമാഗമത്തിന്റെയും പരിസമാപ്തി സൃഷ്ടിച്ചു കഴിയുമ്പോൾ പിന്നെ ഒന്നും പറയാനില്ലാത്ത ശൂന്യത നമുക്കനുഭവപെദുന്നു.

ഇതു പുത്തൻ സിനിമകളുടെ ഒരു  പാരിമിതി ആയിത്തീരുന്നു.പുത്തൻ സാമൂഹ്യ അന്തരീക്ഷം ഉള്ളപോഴും പുതിയ സങ്കേതങ്ങൾ ഉള്ളപോഴും പഴയ ചോദ്യങ്ങളും പഴയ ഉത്തരങ്ങളും ഒട്ടുമിക്ക ഉദ്യമങ്ങളിലും പ്രതിഫലിക്കുന്നു.

അങ്ങനെ 'മൂസയിലെ കുതിര മീനുകൾ' മൂസ എവിടെയാണെന്നോ കുതിര മീനുകൾ കണ്ടാൽ എങ്ങനെ ഉണ്ടെന്നോ പറയാതെ, ചൂണ്ടി കാണിക്കാതെ ഒരു മുക്കുവന്റെ പ്രണയ കാവ്യം സൃഷ്ടിക്കുന്നു. 

Constructivism and the world of art: Beyond the noise

Investigations on the major milestones of Russian formalism took me to the foundations of constructivism. I found the following books informative on the historic role of constructivism in shaping a social aesthetics of art and literature in the modern times. However my pursuit to find the critical role of constructivism in shaping up a materialist consciousness in the emerging literary groups of Soviet Union needs further references.

In the book: Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in A Digital World, I came across an interesting article by Mayakovsky here: How are Verses Made?. Quite thoughtful indeed. This book mentions that environment design and artifact design need to be worked upon separately.

The same book says about another conjecture that the markets are inherently reflexive when the author is speaking about the ‘open textured’ nature of designs. The rationale is that whenever the interpretations of human action can change the course of subsequent action and interpretation, it is said to be reflexive. While searching online, I could see that constructivism is almost used synonymous with the category ‘social constructionism’ and many authors perceive Marxism itself as a philosophy centered on social constructionism.

Going through one such book, Building Knowledge Cultures, we can see that there is a recent attempt to create mystery around the concept of constructivism. This book presents an argument that constructionism and constructivism are entirely different schools of thought. I will need to examine the authenticity of this laughable proposition.

On going further, the book Unfolding Social Constructionism speaks about a critical approach to cognitive psychology and its representational paradigms. It says that memories, perceptions, motives etc are not psychological entities, rather constructed in conversation.

The book, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 says that constructivism achieved its most complete realization in the early films of Sergei Eisenstein. Another book, Realist Constructivism says that a constructivist will take a clearer position on the ontological role between individual and society than on the questions surrounding the power.

Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera : a Cinematic Analysis has finally landed me on the history of the movement in Russia at least. According to this book, constructivism was famously defined in the ‘Realist Manifesto’ issued by the brothers Naum Gabo and Antonin Pevsner. They wrote that ‘art is the realization of our spatial perception of the world’. The rhythms of the working men and the machines play an important role in the constructivist theater. Constructivist photo-montage is based on the principle of self reference and it precedes the emergence of the self referential cinema.

Like other constructivists, Alexander Rodchenko emphasized the self referential aspect of the photograph achieved through the dualistic relationship between the images content and the means by which the image is constructed. He suggested that the photographer should find the most expressive view point that would alert the viewer of the potential use of the medium. Implicit in this approach is the formalist’s method of ‘defamilarization’. This is an interesting development that constructivism becomes a tool to break the false consciousness.

Novel writing and the Historicity beyond

Novel Typology through Historical Lenses

Points: Abstract Synthesis in writing novel.

Dilthey’s method was having traces of Kantian philosophy.

It showed a kind of inclination towards irrational-ism.

Hegelian influence in theory of novel:

1.     Mode of totality in epic and dramatic art. 

2.     One important legacy of Hegel is the historicisation of aesthetic categories. 

3.     Towards a general dialectic of literary genres. 

4.     Question of life & relation to essence in epics 

5.     World of platonic forms and methodological archetypes. 

Frederic Jameson on Georg Lukács:

• As a cultural object, Marxism returns itself against general activity in general to devalue it and lay bare its class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment. 
• Hegelian Lukács of the Theory of the novel
• The chief conceptual opposition within which all of the examinations of literature have taken place is the famous Hegelian one of the concrete and abstract. 
• Epic, Tragedy and platonic philosophies. 
• Abstract idealism of Novel typology. How Don Quixote differs … Heroes of abstract idealism no longer find their justification in the moment of history, but increasingly to become arbitrary, mere grotesques. Here the external world is merely temporal. 
• Cases in Dickens, Balzac etc – we can see a sort of de-totalized totality. With Balzac novel of abstract idealism has exhausted as a form. 
• Novel of romantic disillusionment. Here the external world achieves temporal qualities. Flaubert’s ‘Education Sentimentale’. Here again novel achieves a sense of unity. 
• Goethe’s Wilhem Meister and in novels of Tolstoy – A third category of Synthesis type.
• Marx dissolved Hegelian series of ideal forms into empirical reality of History. 
• Trajectory from metaphysics to history in Lukacs.
• It is history rather than nature which constitutes the privileged object of human knowledge.
• Class consciousness is not so much an empirical and psychological phenomenon, or those collective manifestations explored by sociology.

Comparing Two Poets: Neruda & Yeats

Comparing Two Poets: Neruda & Yeats

Two greatest artists of 20^th century share a lot of immediate similarities.

It is Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) and Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939). Both were recipients of Nobel Prize. Both of them held political positions. But Neruda could only live two more years after receiving the Nobel.

Yeats: A true National Poet

Yeats saw early half of 20^th century only, seeing two world wars and its reverberations on the Irish nationalism. He could see the imperial royal waves and decolonization spree that happened to British imperialism. But he was deeply affected by the drifting conscience of Irish nationalism alike the personal unfulfilled love towards Maud Gonne. He was influenced by all sorts of knowledge and philosophical systems in history. His sensibility was attuned by the intellectual beauty of womanhood and historical legacy of Ireland. His personal agonies accentuated his poetic sensibility towards a greater national consciousness. It stirred a new spirit in the national arena, inspiring contemporary artists and future ones to come. His poetry was the reflection of the Irish psyche eager to see the dawn of nationhood, above the clutches of British Empire.

Yeats drew energy from the pagan folklores and Gaelic myths. His imagery was full of Celtic threads and had a poetic vision in par with any great national poet. He sensed the troublesome future of nationhood. In the twilight of life he was attracted to the ideals of totalitarianism through Ezra Pound, but regained his senses and became attracted to the republican waves in Spain. He interacted with Neruda through letters about the Spanish Civil war and the dangers of fascism.

Though influenced by all sort of religious myths and philosophies when it came to the cause of nationalism, Yeats fought with Catholic Church for interfering with politics and stirring a divide between South and North Ireland regions. Thus Yeats saw a tumourous period of Irish history.

Thus national sovereignty and personal quest for love were two unflinching ends of a poetic beacon named W.B.Yeats.

Neruda: A true Working Class Poet for all the nations

For Neruda everything was lovable even when it is invisible and absent. He loved abundance of nature and sang like the ancient nomadic tribe free to wander the entire earth.  But he was devoid of any sort of wealth and was accompanied by stark wings of poverty. He had to embrace the wings of darkness to feel the depths of real women. But he epitomized women and craved for uniting with female soul, when he was in exile in Rangoon.  So Neruda started from null and void of nature and traveled through the Asian continent. He invented a new style in Spanish poetry with his The Twenty Love Poems. His poetry captured the attention of awakening Chile. He became a cultural diplomat of a continent rich with myths and human harmony with nature. Neruda was a human being his senses were awakened every time seeing the meta-narratives of life, be absence of love, despair for freedom, and greatness of Inca civilizations. His encounters in Spain with Lorca made his views truly revolutionary. 

May be we can say that for Yeats love and nationalism were inspired by the intellectual admiration for womanhood of Maud Gonne and this sense continued with Yeats till the end of his life. But for Neruda, he was more than a national poet who drew abstract energies from concrete beauty of life. He learned the beauty of things which have been shielded from him, yet he never gave up. He continued to see the matter of things from a labourer’s perspective.

If women’s beauty is not my personal asset, let it be a public asset. He praised women’s private body like the fertile and flowering nature. It was a really provocative and innovative approach.

This aesthetic sense is actually driven by the creative energies of modernist art. It made his poetry really surreal. When he wrote about Machu Picchu, he made the achievements of Inca civilization both aesthetic and poetic material. Thus we can say that Neruda used modernist methods of imagery he absorbed from French and African art in poetry with the best use of Spanish verse. He was influenced by the surrealist imagery of Lorca as well. The anarchist threshold of Lorca ignited Neruda to the pinnacles of poetic astuteness.  Neruda became more and more political and became more and more clear and sharp in his poetic approach.

This transition is not much visible in Yeats and but he continued to write in paganistic vein. His pessimistic melancholy has encompassed more and more humanscapes and became true emotive expressions of a national spirit to the Hegelian scales that Germany had seen in the advent of 20^th century.

So to summarise, we can see that Yeats and Neruda scene the deeper landscapes of human history, through different lenses. Yeats ignited poetry to the fiery ranges through conventional style and diction to depict the deplorable fate of imperialism and alienation of a lifelong lover of feminine energy and intellect. Neruda through the regenerating poetic brilliance spanning mythical human history and natural imagery in the surrealist realms draw a world of monumental scales that has universal reverberations.

@Gokul Alex

Creative Marxist Conceptions

Bakhtin: 
In Context of Literary Revolutions

Many of the biographical sketches about the prominent literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975 ) are branding him as a neo-Kantian philosopher . His friendship with Matvei Kagan who later joined the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, is sited as a reason for this analysis. Hermann Cohen later formed the Marburg school and focused on the problems of epistemology and logic. We can see that neo-Kantians could never resolve the issues of idealist notions on Knowledge and empirical perspectives on the social activity of humans. They never went beyond the idealist architecture of Kantian system. 

Worse to say, neo-Kantianism became a inflated rhetoric over the universal human phenomenology posited by Kant. This sort of ideological position was a reflection of the continuing crisis in the bourgeoisie idealism in the times of World war. It reflected the desperate attempt by bourgeois ideologies to encapsulate the horizons of enlightenment. And many a times neo-Kantians reduced their 'philosophical positions' to mere personal allegations and quarrels. This inevitable locus of events made young George Lukcas to desert his early Kantian notions on the theory of knowledge which is reflected in his early works ( 'Theory of a Novel' ).

Regarding Bakhtinian studies, none of these analysts are showing any interest in seeing the semiotic trajectory of his materialist discourse which traverses the literary works and epistemological structures, toppling the monolithic hierarchies ( and underlying class positions ) and idealist narratives. In Bakhtin's positions, we can see the evolution of a language subsystem with semiotic value system based on the underlying process of historical materialism. He tried to explore the multitude of dimensions of signs and its historic semiotics. 

For him, 'Sign was never arbitrary'. He tried to create new pathways in semiotics by widening the domains of semiosis. Bakhtin was always analytical of the parody in literary works. For him, it was a site of the dialogic imagination. This is the major focus in his doctoral thesis 'Rabelais and his world'. It was a work on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais. Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in this thesis. His semiotic orientation is reflected in selecting a work of Parody as a site of textual analysis. 

A work of Parody and satire with dialogic potential will be imminent in the creation of new cultural signs. This can be attributed in his choice of Rabelais. Bakhtin identifies a rare unity of contradicting discourses in the Political satire of Rabelais, which communicated well with the people of his times. It was rich in folk spectacle, carnival atmosphere and festivity of images. But interestingly this aesthetics was too cryptic for the critics of next two centuries. For them, it was too heterogeneous and in eighteenth century it became too incompatible. 

All these can be traced in the works of his imitators (Des Periers , Noel du Fail) itself. Grotesque was used to convey the contradictory and double faced fullness of life in the works of Rabelais. This became a mere shadow in the works of imitators. Bakhtin identifies the elements of dialectics in the composition of grotesque when he invokes the process of negation of negation to describe the organic birth of anew life from the destruction happening in grotesque.

"Negation and destruction ( death of the old ) are included in the essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image ( food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, increase." 

(Page 62, Rabelais and his world By Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin )

Here we can see Bakhtinian prism traversing through the layers of grotesque image. We have seen similar analysis of archetypal symbols in the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung. But this is evidently more near to the processes of historical materialism. And he identifies the embedded but distorted positivity of primitive life in the compositions and ideological strata of myths. To be more precise, grotesque is materialistic and repellent towards the ideological forces. Always it shows its primitiveness and innate dynamics, even towards much forceful and static lattice of ideology.

If we turn to his notion of 'quoted speech', it throws light on the otherwise cryptic space of our inner speech and on the dynamics involved in the verbal communication. This framework runs through his analysis of the multiplicity of styles involved the discourse of novel. He says that all our communicative acts are reuse or use of quoted speech of others. Thus he locates the dialectic elements of 'I /Other' in the space - time conjecture of speech. 'I /Other ' compound is termed as a dual sign by many Bakhtin analysts. This notion 

is an omission of the historical process behind the dynamics of 'I / Other'. The meanings of the 'I /Other' are positioned with respect to the common material system of language. Hence 'I/Other' cannot exist as independent duals.

Another aspect of debate is about Bakhtin's interest on the folk culture. Linguistic carnival is an essential element in his studies on the culture of the so called lower strata of society. This notion is a negation of the class hierarchies as represented in many of the art works ( Edgar Allan Poe, Doestovsky etc ). And he writes about the carnival atmosphere in the medieval plays. It is deep rooted in primordial order and primordial thinking of man. But he stresses that it is not a literary phenomenon. He annotates it as a syncretic paegentry of ritualistic sort. [Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics ]. He is always careful to say that it can only be transposed into the realms of literature. Here we see Bakhtin traversing beyond the limits of verbal language itself. 

It is also to be noted that Bakhtin's notions about the organics of lower strata of life is quite different from the postmodern notion of subalterns. Bakhtin says that in carnival there are no divisions of performers and spectators. It is not contemplated ; not even performed. In Bakhtin's varied investigations , thus we can see the revolutionary trajectory of a Marxian radiance through the obscure most and primordial terrains of human civilization. Still , a lot to unearth from his theory of discourse and language that spans more than 6 decades of explorations .