When we believe ourselves to be in the depths of life, said Rilke, death ventures to shed tears deep in us.Footnote 3 We live in the midst of death and die as everyone dies. Does every witness to death teach us something about our own death that we didn’t already know? Does the death of the person next to me, my everyday companion—the person with whom I shared the toaster, the toothpaste, the plates, and the cupboard, the person whose death bereaves me—bring to life a part of the death that is mine and that I ceaselessly hide from? Yet my death, every death, is so resolutely singular—the utterly singular “I” that I am in my dying. Although this is so, the opposite is also true: the face of the dead man is the face of every dead man, man’s inescapable finitude. The face of the dead is marked by an uncanny generality. It is the “I,” the common “I” that is also the singular “I”—the radical point of singularity as collectivity. The face of the dead remains always unknown to me. It is the anticipation of a time, beyond which no anticipation is possible. It is the face of void, of aporia.
Death perhaps is most unresolved, most fascinating, when it is voluntary—that is, in the case of suicide. It is infinitely narrated for it is never narratable, never containable. Death by choice is the violation of death itself, of the understanding that life’s course will one day on its own end in death. Therefore in the accepted scheme of things, suicide has to be a pathogenic eruption, a seizure of the cycle that holds life and death in balance. Except when it carries the promise of martyrdom, death in suicide is an invitation to be released from the closet into which life has gotten stuck and what it desperately wants to escape. Here life—not death—is the blindfolded state, an irremediable darkness that otherwise characterizes death. The forced termination of life in suicide, it is argued, is the result of the gross unfulfillment of a particular life or the devastating circumstances in which a particular life was caught. Durkheim called it anomie. Thus the aporia is explained, tamed, made workable, and the essential metaphysics of life restored.
But what happens when there is no apparent reason for suicide, when life for all practical purposes is fulfilling, devoid of any apparent want, not stuck in circumstances for which there is no exit but death? The present paper is about a poem on a suicide of such order. Considered a classic of modern Bengali literature, “One Day Eight Years Ago” by Jibanananda Das (1899–1954) is a poem on individual suicide and also large-scale killing: the suicide of the protagonist without any apparent reason is juxtaposed in the poem with the ceaseless brutality and killings characterizing the world of nature. In the Bengali literary canon, this is one of the most widely discussed poems and has a large history of critical attention behind it. This paper attempts to dislodge the dominant mode of dialectical-humanist interpretation by setting off two readings of the poem against each other: one that privileges self-consciousness and dialectics (the way the poem has been interpreted so far); the other a Foucauldian, archeo-genealogical reading that I am offering, a reading that interrogates (and at the same time seeks a possible recasting of) the Hegelian model and its regional and disciplinary variants. Death is a constant presence in Jibanananda’s poetry; his language is marked by death. But here in this poem, language imbibes the very nonrelationality of death—as such, it is language-contra-language. In our line of thought, negation—far from being a way of achieving reconciliation—is uncontainable and illimitable, always spilling over, always open to possibilities of being otherwise, its trail running in negating, almost inevitably, negation itself, gesturing an aleatory renewal of a space for the political.
Jibanananda Das is widely revered as the preeminent poet of post-Tagore Bengali literature. Buddhadev Bose, probably the most influential Bengali writer of that “bristly, fascinating post-Tagorean generation,”Footnote 4 famously described him as “our most solitary poet, most singular.”Footnote 5 During his lifetime, Jibanananda remained largely a poets’ poet, the most modernist among his contemporaries. He was certainly the most important critical departure from Tagore, one who presented a markedly different texture, mood, and sensibility.Footnote 6 His influence on Bengali poetry has soared over time. The process started in the late 1950s, with the rise of the poetry movement associated with Krittibash, the journal that attributed iconic status to avant-garde young poets such as Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, and Utpal Kumar Basu—all known for their (apparent) resolve to challenge the Tagorean edifice, their closeness to Allen Ginsberg, and their bohemian lifestyle in partition-devastated Calcutta. Jibanananda’sFootnote 7 international recognition, however, continues to remain largely occluded by Tagore’s overwhelming presence. For the West, literature from this part of the world is even now solemnized and largely monopolized by this one presence, which, however, is not the case in Bengal, where the prestige enjoyed by Jibanananda in certain circles stands at par with, if not exceeds, that of Tagore. Engaging in a detailed textual analysis of a single poem of his, this paper in a way also tries to address the continued one-sidedness of international reception of Bengali poetry.Footnote 8
Poetry of Jibanananda: Verdant Nature of Cruelty and Remorse
Amit Chaudhuri rightly claims that “(t)hose who know (Jibanananda’s) work first-hand are convinced that he is among the twentieth century’s great writers, and so the process of recuperation continues, now in English.”Footnote 9 Viewing Das as a “colonial modern,” Chaudhuri identifies “robust” intentionality and ambition in the making of pre-independence Bengal’s mofussil cosmopolitanism in which he locates the poet. Such understanding of the cosmopolitan self goes well with the scholar-writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri and to the educated and professionally successful ancestry of Amit Chaudhuri that he mentions. His nuanced reading of the poems does not allow him to be sure to what measure it applies to Das himself: “Indeed, intentionality, and its robust mofussil cousin, ambition, are never transparent or clearly stated in Das’s life, or in the lives of the drifting protagonists of his poems.”Footnote 10 I contend that Jibanananda Das’s cosmopolitanism is a far more complex and in a way quixotic affair than what the twin registers of intention and ambition would possibly offer. The tactility of “an animal-vegetable-mineral rural Bengal,”Footnote 11 the folk-sacred memories and practices, the kaleidoscopic wanderings into ancient times, the displaced cartographies (both earthly and celestial), the near-constant deathward gaze—at times bucolic, at times ruthless with a point of view shifting between that of the flâneur and the stalker: the poet’s cosmopolitanism is too rhizomatic to have a location, even though what populates and provides content to his work is mostly the pastoral setting of the verdant Barishal in which he grew up. For instance, the oft-quoted, oft-cited poem “Banalata Sen” is like a tableau of ruminations, bringing together in transversal mode different histories and temporalities, a heterotopic assemblage of icons, with no better attempt to make them cohere than phonetically—an extended payar rhyme, not much dissimilar from the one in which rural people read out the epics Ramayan and Mahabharat, and various religious lore.
Jibanananda Das’s oeuvre—in both poetry and prose—is unremittingly autobiographical, narrating desultory journeys into a vulnerable yet stoic, companionless life marked by long phases of unemployment and day-to-day poverty. In the poem “Bodh” (Sensation), he narrates his alienation in the midst of everyone due to his own incommunicable idiosyncrasies (mudradosh Footnote 12 ). This alienation that we all share blocks us from one another. The acclaimed Bengali literary scholar Sibaji BandyopadhyayFootnote 13 has sought reasons for the haunting solipsism of the poet in the collective crisis of Bengali life. He reads the poet’s repetitive death wish as the result of a complex unconscious chemistry of his time. The poet’s obsessive alienation that undoes all sociality, his unceasing meditations on death, cannot be without a social base, although its expression in poem after poem is resolutely singular. Also, if his poetry is an inscription of contemporary crisis, it is not without a distinct tinge of cosmological nihilism: “The many vultures at the listless corner of a Minaret fly past to what death/ Forgetting the birds of this world?” (“Shakun”; [Vulture]) Or “Above the gas lamps and even the high minarets/ I have seen the stars/ Fly towards the south sea like countless wild ducks” (“Sahar”; [City]).
“Forgetting the saga of the state, triumph and empire/ I shall extract the coldness of the wine stored deep inside the earth” (“Aboshorer Gaan”; [Song at the End of Work]). Death is a frequent visitor to the poet’s solitary world—its consummately repetitive outpouring truly remarkable. The resonate cheers of love seamlessly lead to the vista of death: “I have called out for death in the many names of my beloved” (“Jiban”; [Life]). If death is at times the result of a metaphysical angst, rarely is it metaphysicalized. Death in Jibanananda is highly somatic and quite often the act of banal killing: “Like the deer hunted in the moonlit spring night,/ We too lay on the ground with our flesh” [“Campe”; [In the Camp]]. It is not contingent that in the midst of the moonlit spring night when their time of love has arrived, the deer is killed. This abortive end to life is what underwrites the erotic and attributes to the night its strangely baffling quality. To be noted is that the word he uses here to register the fusing of eros and thanatos, bishmay (dismay), will be used again in “One Day Eight Years Ago” to indicate the perilous stream that runs in the human, causing to devastate all domestic bliss and attainments.Footnote 14 In dark remembrance of Haripada Ghosh, the post office clerk immortalized in Tagore’s poem, “Kinu Goyalar Gali” (Kinu Goyala LaneFootnote 15 ), the clerks browse the files in the gloomy light of winter office afternoon: “Dead birds, their feathers like the files or the clerks of those files” (“Keranira”;[Clerks]). The lonely and sad glide unnoticed into the eerie and grotesque, as in the poem “Sankhamala”:
Rarely does the resplendent nature his poems so evocatively portrayed come without a mention of the cavorting, devilish world of thanatos as part of nature’s organic cycle of life and death. Village Bengal in Jibanananda’s poem might be verdant, but it is also the repository of slumber, death, unrequited labor, intense attachment, and a languid peace, which the poet gives voice to with a sense of sojourn, a “disinterested compassion” that is only apparently pastoral. Rupasi Bangla (Bengal, the Beautiful) is like one long mourning, a requiem, not for the passing of this or that aspect of beauty or more generally the retreat of the rural but a mourning that exists and intensifies despite the bountifulness of nature—comparable to what Marinos Diamantides calls, a Levinas-like “quiddity of suffering as a mode of being passively.”Footnote 17 The recurrence of certain motifs—like the mouse, the owl (quite often the two together), the sankhamala, the kite of golden wings, orange sunlight,Footnote 18 kash flower, birds like the shalik and the doyel—pushes nature precariously close to artifice, while an intense but remote subjective presence works to its opposite effect—somewhat like what the Greeks called aphanismos: “to vanish, to escape the self, to wrest the self from the self, to lose consciousness.”Footnote 19 Jibanananda’s romanticism is the product of an urbane transference and quite often carries the musty, saline smell of blood. He knows that the world will come to an end, that soulmates have perished in the mute soils of the earth; regardless, lying on fragrant, dark grass, he keeps staring at the blue sky. The poet’s stoic desires for at once love, life, and death—much like the play of ravenous killing and desperate seeking for life that marks lush, bountiful nature—do not contradict one another. They simply cohabit, constituting a world that allows for no transcendence—its endless, repetitive, banal cycle being the source of its cruelty and vigor.
“One Day Eight Years Ago,” the poem under study, indicates an anguish—far beyond the pale of the cause-effect time of psychological accounts:
Later, and more vividly:
For Camus, life bereft of all dimensions save the prospect of endless repetition is too draconian to live. One day, inevitably, “the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”Footnote 21 This “why” question in the midst of familial bliss and material plenty had arisen for the man epitomizing eastern wisdom, too: Gautam Buddha. One night he quietly left the splendors of the palace in a chariot—the horse’s hooves muffled by the gods—to overcome what plagues humanity: aging, sickness, and death. Buddha’s was a search for light, enlightenment. The journey of Jibanananda’s protagonist is a reverse one, a journey to the immense, unfathomable darkness of aborted life:
Leaving behind the sleeping wife and child, he sets out in the middle of the night and hangs himself from an unyielding branch of an ashwattha tree. Why did he not sleep for long? What tormented him? Why did he prefer to sleep “like a plague-rat, blood-sodden mouth tucked in its neck” on the dissection table of the morgue? Why was the “relentless gravitas of staying awake” unbearable for Jibanananda’s protagonist? Why did the “cursive gush of life” leave him unaffected? The poem leaves very little as effective clues. Did he face, to borrow from Camus, the real possibility that life is meaningless, that life is not worth living at all?
For Camus, life is inherently absurd but absurdity can be countered by living rebelliously. In emphasizing that life, despite its absurdity, is not unworthy of living, what he does in practice is simply to defer the act of suicide. Death as negativity remains the condition for freedom, only that suicide is ever again postponed. This is very much Hegel as interpreted by Kojève: Man is free because he is “death incarnate.” Camus merely dramatized this cycle of death and resurrection by emphasizing the act of living despite life’s inherent absurdity. There can be little doubt that life had become meaningless, unbearable, and oppressive for the protagonist of Jibanananda’s poem. But was this meaninglessness of the same order as Camus’s? Even as meaningless, were they similarly constituted, emanating from similar sources and having similar genealogies?
“One Day Eight Years Ago”: A Theater of Many Voices
The poem is a crisscross of voices. Each voice is like a witness; each act, therefore, is like a rhetorical enactment: an enactment of the art of showing oneself. The poem begins in the style of reportage. Following on the tracks of hearsay, the poet lets us know that the body of a man has been taken to the morgue where it lies on the dissection table, sleeping restfully like a plague-rat with blood-sodden mouth. He describes the condition that instigated the man to commit suicide, which are actually no conditions. The wife was lying next to him, as was the child. Yet what made him startle out of sleep and choose the path of death? The erotic overtones are conveyed by the moonlit night of spring.
This is followed by two short stanzas that rotate between sleep and wakefulness:
A sudden disruption of sleep, a waking up with a start. This eruptive wakefulness is dissolved in the very next line in a slumber that delivers the protagonist from sleeplessness and also from the travails of life. But doubt never ceases to creep in. Would the protagonist’s chosen slumber relieve him of the anguish that caused him to wake up with a start in the first place? Would it release him from the weight of being alive as he “rests” in the morgue? Embodied through such quick shuffling early in the poem between sleep and wakefulness, waking up with a start and lying in restful slumber, the torments of life and the “rest” that the morgue bestows constructs an imbroglio that can only offer aporetic openings.
The narrator reports from a slightly bemused distance the protagonist’s decision to commit suicide in the spectral light of the midnight moon of fifth night, leaving behind his sleeping wife and child. Unlike the Greeks, the protagonist is not trying to master his death. He is merely trying to terminate the deep anguish that living inevitably involves. The bare essentials of the event being conveyed, a new voice emerges abruptly, a voice of nature lamenting—chorus-like—the protagonist’s death even before it happened:
An ominous, wizened silence at the prospect of the looming neck of a camel beside the window brings at one place the spectral and the aporetic.Footnote 22
In the next stanza, the voice disappears as a stark change in gaze and tone is effected through the highlighting of biopolitical ruthlessness of an otherwise bountiful, lush nature. It is the world of the predator and prey—cruel, ever in wait, unforgiving. The owl relishes the anile toad’s lacerated desire for a few extra moments; nonetheless, even in its last gasp, the toad dreams of the intimate resonance of morning that could have driven the owl away. Thus the protagonist’s suicide and the relentless killing that goes on in nature are woven together in a tapestry of eros. Nature is the real source of enigma in the poem, for it is not only death-driven, but it is also where life expresses itself in full glory, thus making a travesty of both cruelty and kindness.
Almost immediately, a shift in gaze takes place as the narrator returns in the first person:
Here the “I” is no more of the narrator who had heard about the suicide from hearsay. Rather, it has moved position and taken an in-between space, one between the protagonist and the voice of nature we encountered earlier. If the previous stanza had situated death in the ceaseless hunt that keeps nature awake, this stanza situates it in the quotidian, ritualized eros of conjugality.
In the next stanza, the narrator directly addresses the protagonist. The strains of killing and usurpation that mark verdant resplendent nature are expressed through a child’s mirthful capture of a dragonfly that fights for its life. This is the ambience in which, once the moon has sunk, the protagonist leaves home with a loop of rope, knowing well that even in his death march, man is destined to remain unconnected with the world of dragonflies, doyels (magpies), and other such easy preys of nature. The nature that empathizes is also the nature that celebrates in erotic mirth:
The expression “radiant life” (bikirno jiban) binds with a phantasmagoric touch the child’s mirthful destruction of the dragonfly and the scenario of suicide. The way the protagonist conducts the act of killing himself proves a self-sufficiency and mastery that evaded him in life. In the process, he culturalizes nature and death, even though both will always remain inaccessible to him.
And in the midst of all this, the ageless, sightless owl makes the aplomb assertion of catching a few helpless rats as the ancient, haggard moon eclipses in the deluge. Thus the act of hanging from a branch of the ashwattha tree by a man driven by an imperative evacuation of any attachment for life in the midst of plenty is implicated in the thanato-political scenario of a ruthless sovereign (owl). The animal world (one that the rats populate) is left completely unprotected from this devouring almighty. As a sign of the crisscross of the world of the human (protagonist) and that of the animals, the body that lies on the dissection table of the morgue is compared, more than once, to a plague-ridden rat—its sheer repetitiveness marks the transaction with an allegorical hue.
The narrator returns to the reader, but the voice is distinctly of a parable as it says that this wasn’t a death due to unrequited love or some worldly unfulfillments. The use of the word tai (Bengali for so or therefore) toward the end of the stanza puts the logic of desire in a causal bind with abrupt voluntary death.
The plethora of conjunctives like tai (so, therefore), tobu (yet), athaba (or, otherwise)—often serving more or much less than their prescribed function—gestures to an undercurrent of a subterranean reality, an eruptive possibility forever postponed. Tai is almost like an erasural bond here. Instead of linking what precedes and what follows, it implicates both in a different theater.
The bind will subsequently be unpacked: It is not feminine love, progenitive bliss, wealth, fame, and splendor that decide our fate. An unknown restlessness rips us apart, plagues us within. It exhausts us, dissevers us, provokes us to the “peace” of the morgue. Yet, night after night, the old, sightless, doddering owl emerges, looking for its prey in the darkness of an eclipsed, timeless moon. The poem ends with the narrator addressing the owl—“O grandmother of the deep ways, is it alluring even today?” whom he joins in the necrological feast, hoping that he, too, one day will grow old, and after dunking the moon in the waters of Kalidaha, in the ensuing murky gloom, together they would erase all traces of life—a perfect banalization of death in what is otherwise a Baroque-like festival of cruelty.
The poet/narrator does not die himself, but embarks on the impossible task of thinking death. His is an Orphic enterprise. The expression “you and I together deplete we shall/ many a repository of life/ and take our leave” indicates to a constitutive equivocity: an emptying out, but also a process of ceaseless consumption (“together deplete we shall”). A destruction of life that’s possible only by living it, an evacuation on condition that the source of consumption remains constantly full. This gives death an unquestioned sovereignty. It is the sign of excess that in order to be excess has to ensure the constant supply of life. Here destruction is not termination; it is a state of being. The act of suicide declares as it were the impossibility of termination, which also in a way means the impossibility of dialectical resolution.
The Nonrelational Sovereign: Self-Consciousness and Negation
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay reads in the poem a ceaseless clash between nature and consciousness. In what follows, I give a gist of his analysis.Footnote 23 In the first part of the poem, the animal world bereft of consciousness seemed preferable to the life of knowledge and consciousness. The obedient, repetitive, law-abiding social self of the human makes life a perilous bafflement amid all worldly pleasures. The conflict between nature and consciousness provides succor but also takes away the spirit that animates life. The protagonist is torn in this conflict. When he was about to hang himself from the branch of the ashwattha tree, perhaps the branch had protested. The ancient, stooping owl or the dragonflies had tried to inspire him through their frictionless relation with life but could not stop the drive of consciousness. In the last stanza, the disguised narrator makes clear that it is not with the life of humans and the bonds of consciousness, but his real friendship is with the old owl and its devilish mode. Even as a partisan of the experience of the tired humans, Bandyopadhyay asks, is it being suggested that he is closer to the senseless, tireless modes of animals? If that is so, the poem ratifies its early preference for a life sans consciousness. A closer reading of the tonality of the poem, however, suggests something different to Bandyopadhyay. He sees an attempt at restoration of equilibrium in the concluding two lines: “And both together deplete we shall/ Many a repository of life.” Bandyopadhyay sees the desire for life getting the better of the poet as he comes out of the self-incurred gloom of the death-wish. What helps Bandyopadhyay to make this optimistic move is a couplet from another poem (“Anupam Tribedi”) where the poet suggests that the key to life is the dialectical tension between the world of consciousness and its absence.Footnote 24
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s analysis is a reiteration of the Hegelian scheme of death and resurrection, the cycle of sacrifice of self-consciousness to nature only to be resurrected in a purer form—in a nutshell, the philosophy of freedom through negation that we discussed at the beginning of this paper. Bandyopadhyay is no lone traveler here. As a matter of fact, his analysis is the most cogent, most comprehensive in a long line of interpretations of this poem over the past fifty years where the trail of the author ultimately leads to the trail of life. Though published recently (2011) in a new edition, Bandyopadhyay’s essay was written early in his career. Talking of Bengali literary criticism overall, however, this trend of dialectical-humanist analysis and the eagerness to interiorize the world has remained a pervasive presence as part of the legacy of India’s incorporation in the Western knowledge order during colonial days.Footnote 25
In Hegel’s distinction between animal and man, what liberates man from animal also captures him in an economy of a so-called higher order, the interior. Man is destined to an inner existence.Footnote 26 Right from Aristotle, Western philosophy has been led by the distinction between the “merely living” (or, what Bandyopadhyay calls “nature” or “inert”) and the life of consciousness. Agamben explains the Aristotelian scheme as a division between zoe (bare life) and bios (good life in the sense, life of consciousness). For Aristotle, zoe is what man as a living animal shares with other living animals, whereas bios signifies man’s entry into the world of ratiocination, of justice. Bios is therefore the sphere of language, which differentiates man from other animals. Reading from the standpoint of Aristotle (a la Agamben), Bandyopadhyay’s conclusion stands for the restoration of the life of consciousness (i.e., good life) from the challenge of zoe (merely living, or bare life). Bare life, in the way Agamben explains, is a necessary part of good life, or the life of consciousness. But this does not work out as a dialectic between two comparable moments of the human. Rather, they exist in their disjunction, in a relationship of domination. Bare life is so called because even as excluded, it is not allowed to move away from the sway of the life of consciousness; it is in Agamben’s apt phrase: “being-outside, yet belonging.” This, for him, holds the crux of modern politics:
There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.Footnote 27
Agamben will call this “threshold,” which is not amenable to any dialectical scheme. Threshold gestures to an evacuation of something that is also constitutive. Hence, here evacuation works as a sign of excess. Modern politics in its ceaseless attempt at inclusive exclusion of the marginal is caught up in its own excess where there is no resolution or redemption.
Integrating rupture into life, Bandyopadhyay much like other critics brings the poem back into the very metaphysical orbit it had rejected. Instead of a dialectical resolution of nature and consciousness, I am tempted to read the poem in its topological displacements and variations. The dialectical enterprise of bringing two entities into one would imply that the opposite is also true: that is, one entity can be broken into two. But this is an impossibility because every time one divides something into two, one merely distinguishes multiplicities from multiplicities, or what Deleuze discussing Foucault calls “the pragmatics of the multiple.”Footnote 28 Foucault: “the opening of an inexhaustible horizon, the constantly unwinding play of an unending unity.”Footnote 29 When history is radical discontinuity, nothing is negated. This is precisely what Foucault’s archeo-genealogical history is all about. The operative figure of opposition to dialectics is what he calls “nonpositive affirmation.” Things emerge and disappear unpredictably, contingently. Emergence is, however, connected with an act of affirmation of the disappearance of their genealogical predecessors and of the space left behind by these. Not the definite negation of something, but the affirmation of the absence of something is therefore the (nondialectical) “act” constitutive for a discontinuous history. Not telos but transgressions.Footnote 30
The theater of different voices in Jibanananda’s poem that I discussed constitutes a matrix of language, which, strictly speaking, is a nonlanguage, articulations that perfectly fold back against one another to implicate in a tautological bind the originary meaninglessness of living and of life’s constitutive cruelty.Footnote 31 The significance of this bind is that it allows the poem to double two apparatuses of capture. One is of quotidian domesticity, where in the very act of offering fullness, life is evacuated internally—in other words, the nothingness of plenitude from which the protagonist suffers (and not the plenitude of nothingness). The other is of ceaseless, banal killing as the defining trait of the cycle of life and living. The animal converts the contingency of everyday life into regulated work through the habit of killing. Therefore at the heart of the continuity of life lies an emptiness, a complete emptying out of itself at every turn.
By making such banal killing (in guise of the owl’s emphatic declaration) clearly in excess of its functional need, the poem opens up an economy where the second apparatic capture (i.e., killing as a mode of living) not only implicates the first (i.e., domestic security) but in the process overdetermines it. The protagonist’s act of killing himself as a response to the repetitive despondency of life thus becomes part of the generalized scenario of necrological rapaciousness. But this overdetermination does not happen, cannot happen, without the moment of madness; hence, the delirious oath-taking of total killing with which the poem ends—killing, and killing till the last vestiges of life remain:
This is not language touched by death (which in a way is a trait of the poet’s entire oeuvre) but language as death, the moment of the nonrelational sovereign, reminding and reverberating in cruel Dionysian laughter the secret of all relationships that Alexander Garcia Duttmann expressed so elegantly: “To that which was never before we cannot relate, just as we cannot relate to that which has always already been.”Footnote 32 The moment we relate to that which was never before, Duttmann explains, we have transformed it into something recognizable; similarly, the moment we relate to that which has always already been, we have made it into something new, something that never existed before.
Just as it is true of its opposite term, dialectical negation, too, denotes a positivity of meaning and has a reality of its own, very much like the negative qualities of mathematics. Nietzsche calls the dialectical encounter “opposition without difference.” In contrast, what is performed in Jibanananda’s poem, I argue, is the pure negation that nonrelationality demands and not the Hegelian notion of negation, that is, a negation that also conserves and retains what it rejects for a dialectical affirmation. Because of this pure negativity, the protagonist’s suicide could be implicated in the larger domain of the “merely living” where one lives by the death of others as a way of life, where death is arbitrary, random, and commonplace.
Perhaps the question to ask is: In privileging pure negation, a space outside of the outside, is the poem then liquidating the political altogether and taking us back again to the originary moment of the primal horde? I would say, no. Negating negation is not the demise of the political, but on the contrary it’s most heightened state, a state that we can perhaps describe as “onto-aporia,” a state of at once total clearing and constituent excess. A close look at the body of the poem, its architectonics, shows that it is actually a poem of threshold. It not only negates but negates negation as well; it not only says that relation is impossible, but puts this impossibility under erasure. When negation negates itself, it faces the challenge of a concept coming out of its positivity. To understand how this evacuation of the interior is performed, let us return to the poem one last time.
In the midst of the distance of the reportage style and the series of eruptive voices that frame the poem, the protagonist—his decision to commit suicide despite worldly fulfillment unexplained—remains a shadowy, obscure presence. What the reader gets to see is him lying “spreadeagled,” cold, dead, language-less—a visible yet unnamable imminence, an uncanny passivity. The figure of the protagonist lying on the dissection table like a plague-rat with blood-sodden mouth is a hyperbolic literalization of what Foucault calls subjectivation—a production of a mode of existence that discharges the subject from all interiority and even from all identity. The poem performs three different sets of negation: the negation of the “contemplative autarky”Footnote 33 of consciousness; the negation performed in the world of animal marked by an instinctive excess; and, finally, negation of negation itself which leads not to dialectical positivity but opens the passage of what Foucault calls the “outside”—not the outside that interiorization requires for its own sake, but outside of that outside:
language (that) escapes the mode of being of discourse—in other words, the dynasty of representation… making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence; and that at the same time stands at the threshold of all positivity… in a word we might call “the thought from the outside.”Footnote 34
Removed from the dialectical-humanist interpretative scheme, the poem can be read as a comment on the crisis of the sign system itself. Because in the sign system everything is immediately transformed into its sign, the “interior” that critics are so keen to rescue in the poem can never express itself adequately, marred as it inevitably is by an incursion of opacity that comes along with transparency. This opacity haunts the sign system and the dream of acquiring a crystalline, transparent form through language. It is eruptive; it is the passage to the delirious, the mad, and the primordial nights. In the long preface to Malabou’s celebrated book, The Future of Hegel,Footnote 35 Derrida repeatedly returns to her epiphanic figuration, “seeing what is coming,” which he explains as the possibility of seeing more than what is coming: seeing what hasn’t arrived, but also what hasn’t not arrived because it is already arriving. Here seeing is hinged on infinity. Similarly, if habit is a system to deal with what is coming, then because what is coming is potentially infinite, it acquires the necessary possibility of overrunning itself, becoming hallucinatory. This as a rule cannot only be true of the animal world’s habit of killing others for one’s survival, but must include the mundane, quotidian habit of the human. Reading against the grain, Malabou finds in Hegel’s systematization and the dialectical quest for identity an incursive excess, a penchant to dwell at the edge of things: a forming that yields no form, yet thinking always goes with this forming. This she calls plasticity. We shall try to show that it is this hallucinatory streak in what is taken as habit, the regular and repetitive, that binds the two registers of killing in Jibanananda’s poem—the killing of the self and the ceaseless killing that marks the world of animal and implicates the world of language.
“Spreadeagled he lies”—a refrain in the poem, as is “burichand” (ancient moon) or the grimy exhortation, “Chamatkar!” (wonderful!)—the strain of black art unmistakable here: these are the different figures of nonconnection linked all at once to silence, language, and death. To put it in another way, the overlapping yet nonrelational doubling and relay of voices, and the two narrative lines—of the protagonist and the world of nature—dispersed yet together, fusing but only like a fractured joint—all these go to implicate the poem in a mise-en-ablime, an echo-chamber, where words, living outside the strict narrative line, are more like an indefinite play of images or hermetic resonances in a void. In this enchanted realm of speech and visibility existing under different registers of circulation, the reader stops asking whose voice it is exactly that erupts at which point in the poem. To see in this poem is to see through shifting voices: apparition, eruption, encounter—a mode of seeing that reveals no transcendent but is caught in its liminal spaces.
The supreme liminal point is, of course, the figure of the protagonist—a figure of complete transparency and strange opacity—whose motivations (life of consciousness) remain unknown to us while the poem is wrapped in a necrophilic desire for his corpse. Because inwardness is what man puts into language; it stares him in the face. The face becomes the unresolved manifesto of man’s constructed inwardness. Hence there is the special significance of physiognomy in modern times that acquires a life of its own. Hegel was one of first philosophers to point this out. The protagonist is the name for radical alterity, both as well as neither identity and difference, referring to an excess or unincorporated remainder, the point of crisis of the representational and resisting the imperious demand of consciousness to interiorize.Footnote 36
After his initial avuncular admonition (“Why do you wrestle so much with language, etc.? You should know, mannerism comes in the way of poetic felicity”Footnote 37 ), Tagore in a letter to Bose praised the pictorial quality of Jibanananda’s poetry. Chitrarupamoy is the word Tagore used—literally: like the beauty of a picture (the ethical register of the visual leading to the point of vision—or, better, realization—is unmistakable). Jibanananda’s, however, is no ordinarily pictorial world. In poem after poem, the poet’s enterprise is much like the way Cezanne characterized his own: “painter of perception and not of the perceived.” In this poem, regardless of the presence of strong visual elements, the pictorial is completely dismembered (and, along with that, the subject of perception). Doubling and inversion induct an anamorphic seeing where what is visible functions as its own allegory, a polymorphic perversity of reality—where, to quote Benjamin on Baudelaire, anything can symbolize anything else. Without much of the exuberance and gore with which the baroque is typically associated, Aat Bachor Aager Ek Din is deeply baroque in spirit and craft.
In this essay, I have tried to be alive to the resistant beauty of the poem’s singularity and at the same time open to the possibility of a philosophical search for the difficult measure of this resistance. To achieve this, I have made the move (with as much temerity as prudence) from the operations of negation to tracing the ontological advent of the “multiple.” My analysis tries to show the poem itself playing that move in many voices and several guises. Perhaps the most vivid and lacerated space of this play is the space of the “in-human”—that of the owl, the plague-rat, the moon, the branch of ashwattha (where the act of hanging was performed). I am tempted to think that this space would also include the multiple anonymous voices of the poem that are as much the voices of the most “im-possible and non-human” Being.
By extending the mundane act of suicide to the world of nature where the right to kill is the order of life, the poem makes defunct the dialectical-humanist project of negation/freedom/self-consciousness and stakes its relevance to contemporary life. But along with this, by negating negation as well, the poem upholds the aporetic as another inauguration of the political. Caught between the unachievable liberation of suicide and the interminable confinement of the self by the self of the protagonist, the poem enacts the impossible extension to the world of nature, marked by both evacuation and excess. Is the apparition that haunted our protagonist and compelled him to leave behind his sleeping wife and child the name of this aporia—an apparition that made him set out on a journey diametrically opposed to that of the Eastern man of light, Lord Buddha? I prefer to end on this skewed note.
Appendix
Reproduced following is the translation of the entire poem, Aat Bachor Aager Ek Din (“One Day Eight Years Ago”) by Joe Winter. It is taken from Winter’s collection of poems of Jibanananda Das, Naked Lonely Hand, with permission from him and the publisher (London: Anvil Press).
