The complex interactions of desire and deceit

by Prof. Wimal Dissanayake

Ranga Chandrathne is a well-known journalist who has made a reputation for himself as a perspicacious commentator on matters relating to culture. In particular, he has displayed a deep interest in, and a preference for, music both Western and classical Indian. With Dream he comes before us as a novelist. This is his first novel. In this introduction, instead of summarising the story and assessing it, that is the standard practice, I wish to highlight some concepts that might enable us to enter more fully into the experience presented by Ranga Chandrarathne and make greater sense of it.

I wish to focus on these concepts in the context of the multi-faceted intersections of desire and deceit that is at the nerve-centre of the narrative. This is an interaction that compellingly solicited my attention; I feel that critical moments of discovery in the narrative are related, in one way or another, to this theme. Different readers, I dare say, will interpret Chandrarathne's novel in different ways.

My preference would be to read it with the conjunction of desire and deceit as its thematic focus. What he wishes to underline is the fact that human desire is exceedingly complex and that it is invariably implicated with deceit. The actions and reactions of a group of middle-class characters he creates for us embody this significant fact. I want to gloss this conjunction by alluding to two well-known psychologists, Freud and Lacan, and to a literary scholar, Rene Girard.

Their approaches to this topic differ from one another's in significant ways. The way the characters in this novel displace their unfulfilled desires on to a dreamscape is evidence of the deception and self-deception that animate them and taint them.

Id

Freud believed that desire is largely housed in the id; it is unconscious. If it were to be housed in the ego it would almost certainly generate counter-productive conflicts and tensions. Consciousness indexes that region of the mind that we have access to; according to Freud, what the ego does is to conceal the troublesome desires and the battles they generate. It does so by establishing ersatz links between things and phenomena and making us aware of them. So how novelists address the complex issues related to the id of their characters is central to their chosen craft. Ranga Chandrarathne is fully aware of this fact.

Jacque Lacan, too, pursuing this line of thought opened up by Freud, argued that one of the central tasks of the ego, that is consciousness, is deception. What this means, according to Lacan, is that when it comes to questions of judgment, logic, rationality, the creations of the ego have to be regarded with doubt and skepticism. The term that Lacan used to denote the ersatz assessments advanced by the ego is 'meconnaisance' or 'misknowing.' Consequently, the function of deception performed by the ego is something we have to contend with. A deceptive ego that is prone to propagate lies is an inescapable facet of our mental make-up. Deception and self-deception are, then, inseparably linked with desire. As Ranga Chandrarathne develops his characters, he has, I am persuaded, kept in mind this important fact. It is not only the character of Salinda, but also others in the novel, in varying degrees, betray their failure to rise above deception.

Contention

It was the contention of both Freud and Lacan that human beings possess an inordinate ability to deceive others and themselves. This fact becomes particularly evident when people choose to reflect on or discuss their own desires. In the Dream, the characters that Ranga Chandrarathne has presented to us exemplify this significant truth. It seems to me that it is this truth that powers the narrative.

As we read this novel, it is important to keep before us the fact that desires are largely unconscious and their true nature is concealed by the false connections made and the misleading rationalisations advanced, by the ego. It is no exaggeration to state that one of the basic functions of the ego is to deceive us, and it is the obligation of a novelist to uncover this state of affairs.

It is interesting to note the Chndrarathne, in the opening paragraph of his novel makes the observation that narrator is firmly convinced that some of the events taking place in the world cannot be understood through ordinary intelligence. He notes that although philosophers and scientists have commented on concepts of space and time, it is only an artist who is capable of clarifying how they impact on day to day life of people.

So far, I have discussed very briefly Freud's and Lacan's understanding of human desire. Now let me sketch the approach preferred by the French-born literary scholar Rene Girard who was a professor at Stanford for many years and gained international acclaim for his concepts of mimetic desire, sacrifice and scapegoats. Rene Girard's concept of mimetic desire, which has generated a great deal of interest among literary scholars, is pertinent to the understanding of this novel.

It is a complicated concept that draws on literary studies, psychology, theology and anthropology. It can be explained somewhat simplistically as follows. We almost always borrow our desires from others. Desire should not be understood as a product of an autonomous and sovereign sensibility; instead, it is always brought into being by a desire of another for the same object. What this means is that the relationship between the subject (lover) and his or her object of desire is never direct or linear; it is always mediated by a third person.

There is always a triangular relationship, according to Girard, when it comes to desire: it is between the subject, model and the object. By model he refers to the mediator .As a matter of fact, Girard believes that it is the model that is primarily responsible for the production of desire. In very simple terms, according to the paradigm proposed by Rene Girard, A loves B because C is already in love with him or her.

The intervention of the model or mediator, according to Girard, elevates desire to a metaphysical plane. His famous aphorism is 'all desire is desire to be.' This line of thinking opens up interesting pathways to understanding the motivations and behavior patterns inscribed in Chandrarathne's novel.

Interplay

This interplay between desire and deception paves the way for the narrative topography of Ranga Chndrarathne's novel. It inhabits a space that is shared by realism and fantasy. The title of the novel 'Dream' is doubly significant; it is both a metonymic and allegorical. It is a metonym because it is a part of the larger fictional narrative and it is allegorical because it points to the framework within which the narrative has to be understood. The narrative moves in and out of fantasy. Tzvetan Todorov, who in my judgment, has done some of the most important work related to the clarification of fantasy makes the point that fantasy occupies a space in between what he calls the uncanny and marvellous. As he says, the person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions; either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, or the product of imagination- and laws of the world remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality - but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.'

Todorov's point is that the fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we select one answer or the other, we give up the fantastic for an adjacent space, the uncanny or the marvelous. Using this framework to understand Chandrarathne's novel, we can say that the fantasy in it has been resolved in terms of the uncanny; in other words, it can be understood in terms of the realistic norms, if we are prepared to extend them. This is helped by the fact that the novelist has constantly sought to locate his characters in vividly realised social contexts.

Chandrarathne's narrative, as I stated earlier, moves in and out of fantasy. This is closely related to his thematic focus - the display of the intersection of desire and deceit. The inability to establish a clear line of demarcation between reality and fantasy is both a reflection of, and a commentary on, the way deception functions in our consciousness. In other words, this interplay between reality and fantasy in the novel has an organic connection with the theme of the 'Dream'. This feature, to be sure, is evident in the works of such celebrated writers as Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, and Italo Calvino that Ranga Chandrarathne obviously admires.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation and the deployment of multiple points of view mark the narrative of this novel. ( The biography of the word fragmentation is mot interesting; it was once a term of disparagement; now under the auspices of postmodernism it is a badge of recognition).This propensity towards fragmentation, too, is linked to ideas of deception and self-deception.

The inability to come up with a coherent, unified and linear narrative is partly reflective of the powerful stranglehold of deceit on desire. Let us examine this notion of fragmentation in more detail. The narrative is full of fissures, fault lines, dislocations leading to fragmentation.

This is connected to the understanding of the world displayed by the characters as well as the novelist's vision of society. What the author seems to be saying is that there is no fixed centre available to us and we have to make sense of fragments to make sense of the world. It is important to recall that Martin Heidegger once said that in existence there is a permanent incompleteness.

Ranga Chandrarathne believes that we have to recognise the world as a fissured text just as much as literary texts are. One is compelled to read signs imaginatively; signs in the text that are very often unhinged from each other and manifest no commonly accepted point of reference. Another reason why the narrative discourse in Dream is marked by fragmentation is that it raises the important issue of identity. It can be said that many of the player's in Chandrarathne's narrative are incomplete and possess unfocussed identities.

This phenomenon results in what Baudelaire once termed 'fluid existence.' One result of fragmentation is that it directs attention towards the fluidity and incompleteness of identities. In Chandrarathne's mind this is linked to deceit and self-deceit that is engendered by desire.

Impulse

The way I read Chandrarathne, he is motivated not by a mimetic impulse but a representational desire. Instead of objectively reflecting the world, which is a near impossibility, he is keen to explore strategies of representation which would help him to re-construct it. This attempt, he realizes, has to be partial in both sense of the terms - subjective and incomplete. Fragmentation is the natural outcome of this mind-set. Throughout the narrative, the author seeks to privilege fragmentation over unity. In addition, the characters in Dream are all, in one way or another, victims of memory. They are struggling with memory not only to overcome anxiety but also to make sense of their identities which are connected to memory. What the author seeks to emphasise is that memory is not continuous and smooth-flowing, and that it makes its appearance in bits and pieces. Fragmentation is an outcome of discontinuous memory. As the eminent German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once remarked, 'memory is not an instrument for the reconnaissance of what is past but rather its medium.' This has great implications for fiction-writing.

These are some preliminaries remarks that might help us to make greater sense of Ranga Chandrarathne's novel. Clearly, mine is just one reader's response to this novel, and naturally, others will approach it differently. There is almost certain to be a plurality of reactions to this narrative. For example, some would find the graphic descriptions of sexual desire and sexual relations too gratuitous or excessive or controversial, while others might argue that they are fully justified. It is important to bear in mind the fact that in the final analysis the meaning and significance attributed to a work of fiction rest largely in the hands of independent-minded and discerning readers. And that is how it should be.