Subjects and Persons
Supriya Chaudhuri In the preface to his late and incomplete novel Jogajog (1929; trans. Relationships, 2005), Rabindranath Tagore attempted to distinguish, in a way that might seem eccentric to European discourses of the self, between subjects and persons. He used the term which I translate as subject (‘bishay’) in the sense of ‘subject-matter’, matter for exposition, which he saw as distinct from persons (‘byakti’), defining the latter as an expressive designation, if such a phrase may be allowed. This is the passage: Proper names are a form of address; subject names indicate nature. When we consider human beings not as persons but as subjects, we title them according to their qualities or states — thus one is called ‘Barabou’ (Elder wife), another ‘Mastermashay’ (Respected teacher). When the time comes for literary name-giving we fall into uncertainty. The first question is this: is the nature of literary composition to do with subjects or persons? In science the thing itself is all, the only criterion is a qualitative one. When we see a work of psychology entitled ‘A Husband’s Jealousy Concerning his Wife’ we understand that the title will be justified only through analysis of this subject. But if ‘Othello’, the play, bore such a title, it would not have pleased us. For in this case it is not the subject, but the play that is important. That is to say, a totality made up of the plot, the style, the portrayal of characters, the language, the metre, the significance, the dramatic quality. This is what we might call the form of a person [personhood]. From the subject we gain information; from the person we gain the pleasure of self-expression. We bind the subject to our minds, adjectivally; we remember the person through her or his name, by addressing him or her. The purpose of this entire excursus on names, whether belonging to subjects or to persons, is to justify Rabindranath’s re-naming of his own work, though in fact the name he chose for it is not a particularly good illustration of his thesis. But what he says has its own interest. The individual Rabindranath identifies as the subject of address through the use of a proper name is, rather oddly, not the fictional person, but the fictional representation as a whole, the text. Persons, that is, are possessed not only of a certain self or identity; they are identifiable, or interpellated, in a social sense. We can, he says, address them. It does not seem to matter to him that the person thus addressed may be a text, a fictional projection of identity which is not so much a matter of linear persistence in time as composite, made up of the juxtaposition of different elements. Relatedness is important, but it is not something that the text can assume as a psychological or physiological given, since textual persons clearly do not exist in real time. Yet European notions of personhood have usually been founded on the sense of continuity or relatedness. Richard Wollheim begins his book, The Thread of Life, by quoting Kierkegaard: It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it – backwards. The problem of understanding a life in time is one that occupies Wollheim too, in a study centrally concerned with the nature of persons and of personhood. For it seems clear to him that persons are being conscious of leading their lives in time, beings whose identities are both subjective and relational – capable, that is, of reflecting upon themselves and the continuity of their physical and psychological experience. This continuity, this sense of an identity conferred upon events, upon the life that is led, is what Wollheim terms the thread of life. In his cultured, humane, philosophically post-Freudian study, he follows this thread, like Theseus in the labyrinth, as far as it will take him, even to the recesses of madness and death. But one classical premise of personhood that he will not abandon is that there is a thread: that persons are, in one sense or another, continuous with themselves, and therefore identities. The narrative representation of persons in European literature has historically been dependent on types of unity-relation established through moral and physical continuities, continuities of experience. But this notion begs several questions, one of the most pertinent of which has to do with the boundary of the self and its event-history. One speaks of persons, and one speaks of them leading lives in time, but is the life led in time – i.e. a relation (in two senses) of events – itself the person, or is there a person distinct from the life that is led? Western metaphysics (contra physicalist interpretations of consciousness from Locke to Dennett) encourages us to prefer the latter possibility, and this is essentialism of a kind, one signally assisted by the triumph of Cartesian philosophy in the seventeenth century. Personhood in the European novel from Richardson to Kafka is located in the indivisibility of the single consciousness, a consciousness attached to a body which acts and suffers, but exceeding that body in its reach and curiosity. In European representations of the self, moreover, identity is doubly constituted: as a sign, a means of being known to others, or identified – and as consistency, as being identical with oneself and one’s event-history. Historically, this double implication of identity is crucial to the political, economic and moral arguments of Western culture, arguments premised on such terms as freedom, knowledge, and responsibility. It is as an identifiable human being who recollects and is conscious of her (more usually his) past actions that an individual can be held to be free and responsible. And as we all know,
Excerpt from The Folded Earth
Anuradha Roy [This is an excerpt from Anuradha Roy’s second novel, The Folded Earth, releasing this week in India. Roy is an editor with Permanent Black. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was published in 2008 by Picador in India and in the UK by MacLehose Press. It was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize, longlisted for the Impac Award and went on to be translated into thirteen European and Scandinavian languages. This, her second novel, is being published by Hachette in India and MacLehose Press in the UK. Both books will be published in the USA by Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Image copyrighted by MacLehose Press] My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas, tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water, magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s. The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and I was late for Michael’s priest. I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund, the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one. “Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on here a single day longer.” * * * Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance was beyond measurement. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The First Strawberries in India
John Plotz Born, bred, and married in India, the octogenarian Harriet Tytler in 1903 still described herself and her fellow Anglo-Indians as “exiles in a foreign land” . That obdurate refusal of Indianness may help explain why one of her most vivid memories is of being taken, at age eight, to see “the first strawberry plants that ever grew in India. . . . Two of the plants had one ripe berry each. Of course, everyone was delighted at the novel sight. No one touched them, but all expressed the desire to be Lord Auckland to have the pleasure of eating the first Indian strawberries. . . . No sooner had my father and his friends gone on, chatting away, than I thought I really must taste the strawberries. Accordingly, I picked and ate them both.” Born in a land she cannot conceive of as her own and raised to idolize a country she knows only through words, pictures, and stories, Tytler cannot resist the chance to ingest England. Tytler’s strawberry theft exemplifies one of the cultural practices that allowed self-styled exiles to think of England as a tangible alma mater rather than a distant speck on the map. Such long-distance attachment allowed Anglo-Indians to overlook their Indian surroundings, and attests to the importance, in an imperial “contact zone,” of what I will call cultural portability. Tytler’s strawberries were sentimental objects in the service of a powerful national ideology not hindered but helped by the fact that the nation it served was thousands of miles away. Amartya Sen has recently proposed dividing European writing on and in India into three categories: “exoticist,” “magisterial,” and “curatorial”, but a fourth category, which might be labeled “willfully inattentive,” usefully describes some of the most memorable and widely circulated pieces of Anglo-Indian prose. These texts—among them Julia Maitland’s Letters from Madras During the Years 1836–1839 (1843); Overland, Inland, and Upland (1873) by A. U.; and Emily Eden’s Up the Country (1866)—helped to establish what might be described as a cordon of inattention, a boundary that allowed English readers to imagine India principally via the sufferings of Anglo-Indians. The writers of these texts feel connected to fellow exiles, and detached from Indians, precisely by their very sense of geographic and social dislocation—the sense that they, like the strawberries plucked by the eight-year-old Tytler, have been transplanted. It is fascinating to chart how certain objects and cultural practices became repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain and so worked to unify an otherwise disparate global community. In an era of iPods, Blackberries, and the omnipresent and endlessly personalizable internet, it may be difficult to think of portability as a Victorian phenomenon. Nonetheless, the vast Anglophone realm that Charles Dilke in 1868 labeled “Greater Britain” was the forcing bed from which portability emerged as a new way of imagining community, national identity, and even liberal selfhood on the move. It was in the Victorian era that William Shakespeare and Jane Austen became reassuring embodiments of “dear old England” for nostalgic expatriates, and that afternoon tea on a foreign verandah came to stand in for Britain herself—although the tea might be Indian and the willow-ware cups Chinese. In evoking the culture sustained by this portable property—at once mobile and durable—one would like to complicate Marx’s account of modernity: the nineteenth-century upsurge in worldwide commodity exchange engendered not only fluidity but a heightened commitment to durable, if moveable repositories of non-fiscal value. All that was solid did not melt into air. Culturally resonant objects and practices preserved—and even produced—a sense of self and community in situations of long-distance dislocation. Indeed, commodity exchanges that seemed to dissolve everything they touched in fact required the hypostatization of an alternative network through which protected objects, practices, and even beings, could move. Like Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds or the “portable property” that Wemmick tells Pip to “get hold of” in Great Expectations (1860–61), these protected, “inalienable commodities” possess the unsettling, often uncanny capacity to travel like any other commercial good, while remaining redolent of a distant place, person, or culture. A particularly powerful piece of culturally portable property might allow one to imaginatively reconstruct an entire absent realm, like the medieval illuminated books from which William Morris felt that all England could be reconstructed, should the world happen to be destroyed. How do such alternative networks develop? How do certain objects and cultural practices become repositories of such mobile memory? How are we to understand the passionate desire to share recollections, aesthetic experiences, sentiments, and even thoughts that drove lovers to make elaborately braided hair jewelry, parents to decorate photographs of far-off children with hairpieces woven from their actual hair, and letter-writers to enclose palpable tokens attesting to an enduring attachment? Recent scholarship on the British Empire has stressed—as Seeley does in The Expansion of England (1883)—how vast and lucrative were the settler colonies where a “virgin-land” myth prevailed and where, unlike India, the virtually uncontested expansion of British culture into a razed hinterland was the order of the day. Some scholars have posited that national identity in such settler colonies arose when settlers appropriated the imperial legacy and proclaimed it the basis for a new autochthony. Janet Myers, for example, has described the transplantation of English middle-class ideology to Australia as “portable domesticity.” The notion that national consciousness on imperial peripheries is principally formed by making smoothly portable an extant national consciousness also underlies a memorable argument by Benedict Anderson. Anderson asserts that the moment when settlers in the Massachusetts Bay colony articulated a distinctive sense of Englishness is retrospectively recognizable as the moment when they became Americans (“Exodus” 315). Such accounts conceive of settler nationalism as the product of a series of transformations that refashion an originally imperial English identity. They accordingly risk overlooking interaction with native culture, as well as the complicated interplay between Irish, Scottish, and English Britons that plays such a large role in Australian history. This theorization of national identity-formation in settler colonies also risks underestimating the role that settlers’ concerted ignorance about native cultures played in
The Second Discovery of America
Eduardo Galeano For Pedro Arsipe, homeland meant nothing. It was the place where he was born, which meant nothing to him because he had no choice in the matter, and that was where he broke his back working as a peon for a man who was the same as any boss in any country. But when Uruguay won the 1924 Olympic title in France, Arispe was one of the winning players. While he watched the flag in sun with the sun and four pale blue stripes rising slowly up the pole of honor, at the center of all the flags and higher than any other, Arispe felt his heart burst. Four years later Uruguay won the Olympic final in Holland. And a prominent Uruguayan, Atilio Narancio, who in ’24 had mortgaged his house to pay for players’ passage, commented: “We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world.” The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity. The authors of these miracles of ’24 and ’28 were workers and wanderers who got nothing from soccer but the pleasure of playing. Pedro Arispe was a meat-packer. Jose Nasazzi cut marble. “Perucho” Petrone worked for a grocer. Pedro Cea sold ice. Jose Leandro Andrade was a carnival musician and bootblack. They were all twenty years old, more or less, though in pictures they look like senor citizens. They cured their wounds with salt water, vinegar plasters and a few glasses of wine. In 1924 they arrived in Europe in third class steerage and then travelled on borrowed money in second class carriages, sleeping on wooden benches and playing game after game in exchange for room and board. Before the Paris Olympics, they played nine games in Spain and won all of them. It was the first time that a Latin American team had played in Europe. The first match was against Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs sent spies to the practice session. The Uruguayans caught on and practiced by kicking the ground and sending the ball up into the clouds, tripping at every step and crashing into each other. The spies reported: “It makes you feel sorry, these poor boys came from so far away…” Barely two thousand fans watched the game. The Uruguayan flag was flown upside down, the sun on its head, and instead of the national anthem they played a Brazilian march. That afternoon, Uruguay defeated Yugoslavia 7-0. And then something like the second discovery of America occurred. Game after game, the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery like squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their fathers’ footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling. Henri de Montherlant, an aristocratic writer, published his enthusiasm: “A revelation! Here we have real soccer. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a school-boy’s hobby.” Uruguay’s success at the ’24 and ’28 Olympics, and at the 1930 and 1950 World Cups, owed a large debt to the government’s policy of building sports fields around the country to promote physical education. Now all that remains of state’s social calling, and of soccer, is nostalgia. Several players, like the very subtle Enzo Francescoli, have managed to inherit and renovate the old arts, but in general Uruguayan soccer is far cry from what it used to be. Ever fewer children play it and ever fewer men play it gracefully. Nevertheless, there is no Uruguayan who does not consider himself a Ph.D. in tactics and strategy and a scholar of its history. Uruguayans’ passion for soccer comes from those days long ago, and its deep roots are still visible. Every time the national team plays, no matter against whom, the country holds its breath. Politicians, singers and street vendors shut their mouths, lovers suspend their caresses, and flies stop flying. Eduardo Galeano is a journalist and writer from Montevideo. This is a section from his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow. adminhumanitiesunderground.org