DR. K.C. BARAL
AND
MRS. C. K. NAIK
The essence of art is to
reveal truth; the truth about the complexities of life, about the founding and
nurturing of individual character. Every creative artist attempts to chart out
human life through ramifications of thought, action, and conflict, what is
according to Geoffrey Hartman: “An intermediate middle between over-specified
poles always threatening to collapse it. The poles may be birth and death,
father and mother, heaven and earth, first things and last things”.1
Evidently, creative art masquerades the complex human nature as the simulacrum
of revealed or natural truth. As one of the leading contemporary Indo-Anglian
novelists, Anita Desai’s claim to explore such truth is pertinent. She says:
“If art has any purpose, then it is to show one, bravely and uncompromisingly,
the plain face of truth...Once you have told the truth, you have broken free of
society, of its prisons. You have entered the realm of freedom”.2
The basic aesthetic concern of Desai is goaded by the said contention in all
her works. She is careful in exploring the inner reality of her fictional
characters, always ill at ease with the outside reality. Between the poles of
“life” and “death”, she probes into the complex inter-personal relationships
vis-a-vis the self’s exclusive yearnings. Desai’s highly acclaimed novel, Cry, The Peacock, (1968) is a work in that
direction. As a complex psychological work, the novel “gives expression to the
long smothered wail of a lacerated psyche, the harrowing tale of blunted human
relationship being told by the chief protagonist herself”.3 As a
very sensitive soul Maya, the protagonist, is caught in a crisis of
irreconcilable realities.
Cry, The Peacock as a novel is both
poetic and intensely evocative. It is the story of a woman in which her
sufferings are very often wrought upon our feelings. The narrative attempts to
unfold Maya’s personality and character through her encounter with realities
both “within” and “without”. She counters reality with reality: a pattern in
which the past mingles in the present and desire into death. While justifying
the title of the novel, the allusion to the mating of the peacocks in the wild
signifies the conceptual dimensions of both “desire” and “death”, and thus sets
the tone and the texture of the work:
Do you not hear the
peacocks’ call in the wild? Are they not blood-chilling, their shrieks of pain?
“Pia Pia”, they cry. “Lover, lover, Mio, mio. I die, I die ...” Have you seen peacocks
make love, child? Before they mate, they fight. They will rip each other’s
breasts to strips and fall bleeding with their beaks open and panting. When
they have exhausted themselves in battle, they will mate. Peacocks are wise.
The hundred eyes upon their tails have seen the truth of life and death, and
know them to be one. Living, they are aware of death. Dying they are in love
with life. (Page 95) *
With extraordinary
sensitiveness, Desai underlines the truth about life and death. What is true in
case of the peacocks is also true in case of the human beings. We are aware of
death while living and are in love with life while dying. Between life and
death, it is love, grounded in the physical and moving beyond, that makes life
meaningful.
“Death” as an inevitable
fact of life is Maya’s truth; her painful reality. She is obsessed with it. The
Albine priest’s prediction of death during the fourth year of her marriage has
become an unconscious fixation threatening her with an unexplained terror.
Gautam’s understanding of death is scriptural and in his actions and relations
with Maya, he projects a counterpoint of view. Having an indulgent and somewhat
over-protective childhood, Maya is an introvert woman. Like the embryo in the
womb she looks forward for a warm and secured habitation after her marriage.
Unfortunately, she enters into a reality that shatters her dream of a
comfortable life; instead plunges her into neglect and tension. Her husband
ignores Maya’s needs and considers her emotions as that of a spoilt child.
The first two unequal
chapters of the novel deal with actual death of the pet dog Toto and of Maya’s
husband Gautam. The novel opens at the death of the pet, the very death that
has made Maya inconsolable as she felt that her last straw of attachment is
snatched away: “Childless women develop fanatic attachment to their pets....”
(P 10) Maya’s childlessness haunts her for which the death of the pet immensely
anguished her. She does not feel the same on the death of her husband, Gautam
who was indifferent to life. There is no real bond between them. Finally, it is
her own disappearance into silence and darkness that puts the lid on all her
physical and mental agonies, thus allowing her to enter into the world of
freedom. Maya identifies herself with the peacocks and experiences life and
death meaning to be the same:
It was I, I who screamed
with the peacocks,
screamed at the sight of
the rain clouds,
screamed at their
disappearance, screamed in
mute horror. (P. 98)
Maya’s scream is not
reciprocated nor heard by her lover. In the absence of love, she becomes
intensely lonely and alienated. Her philosophically detached husband totally
ignores her physical needs.
As Maya demures:
How little he knew of my
suffering, or how to comfort me ... Telling me to go to sleep while he worked
at his papers, he did not give another thought to me, to either the soft,
willing body or the lonely, wanting mind that waited near his bed. (p. 9)
For gratification of
body’s needs, Maya, within the permissible limits of the society, can look
forward to her husband. Gautam’s lack of understanding and viewing love “with
its accompanying horror of copulation” as disgusting, left Maya wanting and
unfulfilled. Both Maya and Gautam are ranged against each other on the issue of
physical sex. When Maya wanted to involve him in her world, she is rebuffed
being considered as childish, boring and distasteful. Maya’s childlessness is
obvious as physical consummation with her husband eludes her. She is not strong
enough to rebel against physical and emotional deprivations. She suffers her
fate and naturally gives expression to the ungratified emotions as hysteric feats what
Gautam considers as the symptoms of madness natural to a spoilt child. There is
no real bond between them as Maya confesses: “Had there been a bond between us,
we would have felt its pull...But, of course, there was none….there was no bond, no love – hardly
any love.” (p. 108). Desai, in fact puts the theme of attachment and detachment
both from earthly and spiritual angles into focus in the novel placing Maya and
Gautam in contrapuntal positions. For Maya, her love is something that Gautam
not only distastes but fears. She says: “I love you. I want you. Because I
insist being with you, being allowed to touch you. You can’t bear it, can you? No. You are
afraid. You might perish”. (p. 113) Like the peacock, Maya wants to bleed and
fulfil her desire in physical union.
Gautam addresses Maya as
“Neurotic”. “Neurotic, that’s what you are” (p. 115) and considers her
understanding of life as fairy tale illusion. It is Gautam who is squarely
responsible for driving Maya mad. However, the novel goes beyond. Desai
attempts to bring into focus what Herman Hesse did in his novel Siddharth, delineating
the physical and the spiritual modes of life’s aspirations. In a subdued
manner, Desai wants to say what had been said by Hesse that the physical aspect
cannot be totally ignored, instead it is the means and the medium for the
spiritual. Gautam who indulgently quotes from Gita and explains the theory of Karma blissfully
ignores his marital responsibility towards his wife: an unquestionable command
of the theory of Karma.
Most critics deal with
the theme of Cry, The Peacock from existential alienation to the philosophical concepts concerning death
and detachment as advocated by Bhagavad Gita. However, most of them
ignore the fact of “desire” and its necessary fulfilment as a process of life
leading to meaningful death. The symbols, images and frequent allusions to the
body and to the needs of the body make compulsive insistence to consider desire
as an important factor. It is “desire” in its physical sense evidently becomes
pertinent and crucial to the overall development of the plot. Maya’s happy
childhood, her marriage with its changed reality and relations are significant
for her suffering and for its resultant effects. The concept of “desire”,
therefore, is interlinked with the concept of “death” in the novel. Because
endless repetitions of desire suppressed by guilt and frustration ultimately
lead to the fantasy of death as absolute pleasure.
“Desire” according to
Malcolm Bowie, is our Natura naturans. 4 Conceptually “desire” has wider implications; described
as the cosmological principle of our secular age. Normally, it is interpreted
at two levels: high moving towards “sublimation” and low representing the
purely physical aspects. However, the physical is essentially important for
generating the possibility of moving towards sublimation. Philosophers such as Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, Foucault and psychologists like Freud, Havelock Ellis,
Kraft-Ebing have variously dealt with the concept. It is only in the writings
of Freud that the subject-matter of “desire” has received serious attention,
particularly in his Three Essays on Sexuality and in Meta-psychological
Essays.
Human action, Freud
believed, is conducted by sexuality. 5 He identified that the
manifest mental phenomenon is to be the expression of a wish or impulse which
is unconscious or repressed. This repressed impulse is identified with the
sexual impulse. “Desire” as manifest sexual impulse and its gratification is
the most important organismic need. Any disruption of the normal course of
gratification results in neurotic manifestations. In the course of the
narrative of the novel, it is clear that Maya undergoes a situation of sexual
deprivation and emotional insecurity. Gautam’s accusation that she is a
neurotic has substance, ironically himself failing to understand the possible
sources of the syndrome. As the rational antithesis of Maya, Gautam considers
her childhood to be a delusion what on the contrary she considers to be her
happiest years. For Maya, her marriage has displaced her from a world of
security and happiness. Further, it has been a perpetuation of a shattered
world where wish fulfilment is denied to her. Husband’s love and sexual
gratification in a normal course would have been the compensation to overcome
the loss of childhood world. On the contrary, Maya’s new surrounding does not
help compensate the loss, instead allows her to drift. The childhood prophecy
of a disaster becomes an obvious point of fixation in Maya’s unconscious: “It
was so clear now, so magically clear, the disturbing memory, half-remembered,
had turned to a vision of albino eyes, of dyed finger nails pointing at my
forehead, at the stars, and its reality was as unmistakable as that of the
white moon”. (p. 32)
Allusions from astrology
and scriptures have strengthened the narrative and have enlarged the
understanding of life and death. Maya’s preoccupation with death is not for
death’s sake, it is understood to be a means to freedom and escape from
suffering. Much as painful, Maya’s neglect has perpetually threatened her
mental stability:
It was Gautam who found
many more things to teach that heart, new, strange and painful things. He
taught it pain, for there are countless nights when I have had been tortured by
a humiliating sense of neglect, of loneliness of desperation that would not
have existed had I not loved him so, had he not meant so much. (p. 201)
Maya has tried her best
to love Gautam but her love never has been reciprocated. Maya’s agony has got
internalised without ensuring a possible means of release. In her agony Maya
can only visualise the shadow of death: “In the shadows I saw peacocks dancing,
the thousand eyes upon their shimmering feathers gazing steadfastly,
unwinkingly upon the final truth–Death. I heard their cry and echoed it. I
felt their thirst as they gazed at the rain clouds, their passion as they
hunted for their mates. With them I trembled and panted and paced the burning
rocks. Agony, agony, the mortal agony of their cry for lover and for death.”
(p. 96) Maya’s emotional and physical frustrations are deep, leading her to a
state of nervous breakdown.
Neurosis as an outcome
of ungratified desire highlights the relation between belief (or amnesia) and
desire. Conceptually, “desire” defines psychic mobility as well as
transformation. According to psycho-analysis, ordinary belief may be related to
desire either in one or two ways. The first is pre-suppositional relation in
which the belief gives rise to or conditions the object of desire. The second
is instrumental relation, where the belief determines how the desire may be satisfied.
Belief, desire and action are ordinarily related so that given the belief and
the desire the action is determined, or conversely, a given action can be
explained by reference to the concommitant belief and desire. The
psychoanalytic explanations are very much relevant in the context of Cry, The Peacock. The Albino priest’s
prediction of death in the fourth year of Maya’s marriage is belief continued
in the state of amnesia in her mind till she feels totally disillusioned in her
marriage with Gautam. The death consciousness therefore is an outcome of her
failure in terms of physical gratification. Apart from the sexual
gratification, it is indeed true that Maya unconsciously attempts to get rid of
her death obsession by reproduction. However, reproduction as a means of
overcoming the death wish is also hindered. The actions of both Maya and Gautam
in their understanding of issues such as life, death, love and above all the
interpersonal relationship opposite determinants without ever having the possibility
of a meeting point. Therefore, the so-called instrumental relation
facilitating gratification of desire could not be concretised in case of Maya.
Normally, in the course
of psychic mobility the incompatibility of reality with our desiring imagination
makes the negation of desire inevitable. But to deny desire is not to eliminate
it; in fact, such denials multiply the appearances of each desire in the self’s
history. In denying a desire we condemn ourselves in finding it everywhere. As
Maya says, “But I cannot, I cannot remember. I place my face in my hands and
try to force my memory. I repeat half-forgotten, nemonic words from my
childhood – ‘It cannot be altered: you must accept’. Those are the only words I
can recall from that period and they pursue me closer to the end of the long
tunnel that I must traverse.” (p. 177) Maya is unable to have her happy childhood recreated in a
house where everything is determined by others for her. She is caught between
two worlds; one lost permanently and the other unbearable, both physically and
emotionally. She is aware of her failing health and pities herself: “My blouses
hang on me, my rings slip off my fingers. Those are no longer my eyes, nor this
is my mouth.” (p. 179) Along with physical deterioration, all order has gone
out of Maya’s life. There is no plan, no peace, nothing to keep her within the
pattern of day-to-day living and doing. Maya has entered into another world,
the world of insanity as she claims.
Repressed desire is
repeated, disguised and sublimated. It’s appearance in various forms at
different levels of mental life create the intelligible structures of psychic
continuities. Either in disguised or in manifested form, desire affects an
individual personality or character. Psychological consequence of sublimated
desire may be transformed into suicidal melancholy. In our sublimations, our
desires never die; therefore death is not only an escape from the present but
also is a form of sublimated desire. Thus endless repetition of desires ultimately
lead to the fantasy of death and to the realm of absolute pleasure.
Both Gautam and Maya
talk about death. Maya refuses to ignore this world where Gautam advocates a
detached view. For him the real man of wisdom is “he who is free from all
attachment neither rejoices in receiving the good nor is vexed on receiving
evil, his wisdom is well established.” Gautam defends his indifference to feeling and to
attachment on the line of the Gita. On the other hand, Maya belongs to this world and she
wants to live her full life. Desperately therefore, she needs either the
father, the brother or the husband for support. Her desperate call is not
listened by anyone of them: “Father! Brother! Husband! Who is my saviour? I am
in need of one. I am dying. God, let me sleep, forget rest. But no, I will not
rest again. There is no rest any more – only death and waiting.” (p. 98)
Because the frustration of her married life is so disturbing that she feels to
have been imprisoned in a veritable hell: “It was mine that was hell. Torture,
guilt, dread, imprisonment – these were the four walls of my private hell, one
that no one could survive in long. Death was certain.”
For Maya, death would
possibly provide the freedom from her desiring that is associated with Gautam.
She longs the life that would permit her to “touch him, feel his flesh and
hair, hold and tighten her hold on him” (p. 102) This desiring of Maya is
hindered and she is left to an existence where she is thoroughly tired in the
shuttle back and forth of events, thoughts, incidents. Past, future and present
lose their significance for her. The only intention of continuing her life is
to wait for the climax–death. Time for her, like murder, is an arrow-head
embedded in her flesh, rusted, corroding, searing.
The reference to death
wish gradually has changed from a pathological expression to a sublimated
desire. Maya wants to sleep permanently not to be disturbed or to be waken up
again. Whether there is after life or not, has not enthused her at all because
for her this life has been intensely unbearable. After Gautam’s death when she
is removed to her parental house she ultimately returns to her childhood world.
Perhaps there is restoration of the happy world to Maya at a time when all
meaning has gone out of her life. Still there is the patter of the child’s
“laughter cascading up and down the scales of some new delight – brilliant
peacock’s feather perhaps.” (pp. 217-18) She is totally unconcerned about the
world around her. Now, perhaps she does not want to call upon God, as she did
once, to give her another heart to bear all her sorrow. She waits only for
grace:
I might, after all, have
achieved the way to grace,
Had you but granted me a
few years more, 0 Lord.
(p. 177)
The two worlds – one of
grace and the other of madness–closed in finally. Desire got sublimated and
Maya entered into the realm of freedom. And the rest is silence.
NOTES
1 Quoted from Contemporary Literary Critics by
Elmer Berkland. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. p. 247.
2 Anita Desai, “A Secret Connivance” in TLS, p. 976
3 R. S. Pathak “The Alienated Self in the Novels of
Anita Dasai” p. 18
4 Malcolm Bowie, Freud. Boust and Lacan: Theory
as Fiction, London: Cambridge University Press. 1987. p. 323
5 Richard Wollheim. Freud. Glasgow: Fonfana,
1975. p. 135
* All quotations are taken from Anita Desai’s Cry,
The
Peacock, Delhi: Orient Paperback. 1980.