Towards a humanistic socialism

The ninth and latest in Gunadasa Amarasekera’s chain of novels has just been published. Although the suggestion has been made that this is the final work in the chain, it is hard to imagine that he is ready to lay down his authorial pen as yet. This work continues the interests, preoccupations, investments that characterize the earlier eight works. In discussing the first seven novels, I made the following observation in my book ‘Sinhala Novel and the Public Sphere’.

In these novels, which center round the iconic character of Piyadasa, issues pertaining to contemporary social history, are vividly portrayed through sensitively charted interpersonal relations. The progress and decline of the indigenous middle class, which constitutes a dominant theme of the chain of novels, is charted with deep sensitivity to the flow of history and density of social formations. The historical consciousness that informs the narratives of these novels compels us to re-think the dynamics of the public sphere with a greater sense of purpose and complexity and how they are connected to literary representation.

‘Gamana Aga’ displays these traits to good effect, extending the trajectory of the earlier novels. This work deals with the sense of melancholia that Piyadasda, the protagonist, experiences at the end of his eight decade old journey. He leaves Sri Lanka, after 1977 with an overwhelming sense of despair and devotes his time to exploring the true meaning of Buddhism and its social relevance and the question of humanistic values.

He travels in the United States and United Kingdom, ending up in Thailand.

Meanwhile, diverse social and political changes take place in Sri Lanka. As the narrative unfolds, we begin to see how Piyadasa has to contend with disappointment generated by social events as well as those created within the matrix of his family. His wife is diagnosed with cancer and eventually she succumbs to the malignancy.

The LTTE is defeated, and Piyadasa returns to Sri Lanka; he experiences a certain relief and freedom. However, as he looks back on his life, a sense of melancholia begins to envelope him. He wonders whether all his ambitions have come to nothing. He seems to, however, derive a sense of solace from the fact that the nation has survived for thousands of years, facing numerous challenges, and that an eighty year span is hardly adequate to base a judgment.

His belief in the indestructible continuity of the cultural life of the nation sustains him throughout his life.

The sense of melancholia that pervades the end of the novel deserves closer analysis. When discussing the concept of melancholia, the path-breaking paper of Freud titled, ‘Mourning and Melancholia invites close study.

According to Freud, there is a perceptible difference between mourning and melancholia; mourning can be regarded as the response to the loss of a loved object or idea; in the case of mourning, this sense of loss and the concomitant grief is overcome after a period of time.

In the case of melancholia it is different; the loss of interest in the external world and the constant self-reproachment and self-rebuke marks the melancholia. This diminishment of self-regard is absent in mourning.

Why is Piyadasa subject to melancholia. The sense of desolation felt by the death of his wife is one causal factor. In addition, despite the relief he experiences as a consequence of the ethnic war, he has misgivings about the creation of a humanistic-socialistic society he longed for.

In drawing a distinction between mourning and melancholia, Freud made an important statement.

He said that, ‘in mourning the world becomes poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego itself.’ The fact that Piyadasa begins to question the value of the effort he has made to create that ideal society reinforces this mark of melancholia highlighted by Freud. I wish to link this sense of melancholia experienced by the protagonist of the nine novels to a felt limitation of his own understanding.

At one point in the novel, Piyadasa says that Erich Fromm is his favorite philosopher and that the West has not understood truly his message.

This is only a detail, and not many readers would pay too much attention to it. However as readers motivated by deconstruction are wont to do, details, seemingly trivial incidents and locutions can prove to be extremely valuable heuristic devices.

The reference to Fromm signifies the nature of Piyadasa’s own quest and his own felt sense of priorities. It enables us to enframe and give focus to Piyadasa’s attitude to individual and society.

Erich Seligmann Fromm (1900-1980), was an important social psychologist and psychoanalyst; he pursued vigorously a form of humanistic socialism.

He tried to combine certain important traits in the thinking of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud while studiously avoiding the extremities of thinking associated with both. He rejected capitalist consumerism and soviet dogmatism. When one reads his books such as ‘The Sane Society’ and ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’, one begins to realize the importance and vibrancy of the message he sought to disseminate.

Fromm is the author of a large number of books – some of them enjoyed the status of best-sellers – that deal with humanistic socialism, Marx’s concept of man, the concepts of freedom, of love, of alienation. Among his books are Escape from Freedom – The Art of Loving – Beyond the Chains of Illusion – The Sane Society – The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness .However, despite his work, and the contributions he made to social and psychological thinking, he is today a virtually an unknown figure.

In an age in which Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva enjoy wide popularity among academics, Erich Fromm, unfortunately, is seen as a relic fro a distant past.

To my mind, one of the central achievements of Fromm was to bring about a productive union between psychological analysis and socio-economic explorations within the horizon of a humanistic vision. For example, he opened an interesting pathway into human consciousness when he asserted that, ‘the content of the unconscious, then, is neither good nor evil, the rational nor the irrational; it is both; it is all that is human.

The unconscious is the whole man – minus that part of him which corresponds to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown.’

Erich Fromm’s approach to psychology carried his distinct stamp of socially-motivated inquiry. As he remarked, ‘we find that the phenomena of social psychology are to be understood as processes involving the active and passive adaptation of the instinctual apparatus to the socio-economic situation.

In certain fundamental respects, the instinctual apparatus is itself a biological given; but it is highly modifiable. The role of primary formative factors goes to the economic conditions ’from m’s approach to conscious is different from that of Jung. Fromm paid great attention to the social and cultural factors that inflect human consciousness.

Another area that Fromm pursued vigorously was the cultural logics that characterize different societies. This is indeed a line of inquiry that has a compelling relevance to the aims of novelists.

He paid close attention to hw grammars, syntax of a language shape the awareness of the users and how for example, he said, ‘there are languages in which the verb form ‘it rains’. For instance, is conjugated differently depending in whether I say that it rains because I have been out in rain and have got wet, or because I have seen it raining from the inside of a hut, or because somebody has told me that it rains. ‘ Fromm goes on to assert that ‘different languages differ not only by the fact that they vary in the diversity of words they use to denote certain affective experiences, but also by their syntax, their grammar, and the root-meaning of words.

The whole language contains an attitude of life, is a frozen expression of experiencing life in a certain way.’ Similarly, cultural logics guide the behaviors of people. This is indeed a thought-track that will find a ready response in the author of ‘Gamanka Aga’ .

Erich Fromm was concerned about the insidious ways in which people were manipulated by the consumer society. He observed, ‘stimulated by the ever increasing technical capacity, man has concentrated all his energies on the production and consumption of things.

In the process he experiences himself as a thing, manipulating machines and being manipulated by them.’ This line of thinking is central to the kind of humanistic and socialistic society that he yearns for.

It is clear, then, that the mode of thinking privileged by Erich Fromm is one that Piyadasa, the protagonist of Amarasekera’s chain of novels, will endorse enthusiastically. That is why, earlier I said that the reference to Fromm has more than a passing interest; it enables us to enter into the deeper structures of Piyadasa’s thinking and constellation of values. Fromm is an actual social thinker while Piyadasa is a textual creation of Gunadasa Amarasekera; he is Amarasekera’s alter-ego. Fromm emerges from the central European cultural tradition, while Piyadasa is a product of the Sinhala-Buddhist culture. In this regard, I wish to briefly highlight ten traits that Fromm and Piyadasa share.

First, both of them are sincerely and passionately interested in fashioning humanistic socialist vision and the creation of a humane society. That is their ultimate goal, and they ponder various strategies that will enable them to achieve that objective.

They sought to break through the calcified structures of thought in order to discover a fulfilling personal and social experience. Second, both Fromm and Piyadasa are interested in effecting a fruitful union between Marxism and Freudianism while jettisoning the excesses of both. They both believed that the complexity of the individual human being has to be understood in terms of his or her unique mental features as well as the social and economic forces that shape them It was the considered judgment of Fromm and Piyadasa that the linguistic uniqueness that mark a language, the cultural logics that animate a social collectivity have to be accorded due respect in social analysis and fictional recreation.

Fourth, Erich Fromm was persuaded that human beings possess diverse limitations and it is only by recognizing them and making use of their potentialities to the full that they would be able to contribute to the progress of society.

When one examines the steam of thinking of Piyadasa throughout the novels, one realizes how close this is to his own mode of thinking and re-imagining. Fifth, Fromm, like Piyadasa, felt in his bones that to become homeless home less in one’s own culture is a tragedy that can befall any human being.

Hence, they sought to explain to others, and to themselves, the importance of cultural rootedness, although in the case of Fromm it proved to be a more formidable challenge than he anticipated.

Sixth, throughout his life, Piyadasa addressed himself to the need for eliminating shackles and barriers erected by human beings in their blind pursuit of power. Fromm, too, followed a similar pathway of thinking. He repeatedly pointed out that the chains that bind human beings are social, and that it is difficult to conceive of a much-needed personal transformation without a larger social transformation.

A deep ethic of social responsibility guides their thinking. Seventh, Piyadasa realized the importance of raising the consciousness of the people, making them more self-aware, alerting them to the true conditions of their lives as a prerequisite for social change. For this to take place, active, informed, committed participation of the citizenry is essential.

Erich Fromm, too, expounded a similar line of thinking. He remarked that, ‘The conclusion seems unavoidable that the ideas of activation, responsibility, participation – that is, of the humanization of the technological society- can find full expression only in a movement which is not bureaucratic, not connected with the political machines, and which is the result of active and imaginative efforts by those who share the same aims.’ Eight, Fromm placed the utmost importance on reason in understanding, and ordering society. However, reason by itself was inadequate to comprehend the complexities of human life. Hence, one has t summon the powers of imagination as a way of supplementing the efforts of reason. A similar way of approaching the world through a judicious conjunction of reason and imagination is advocated through suggestion by Piyadasa.

Nine, Fromm was a secular thinker as is Piyadasa. However, they both saw the significance of religion as a meaning system that serves to expand the empathic capacities of human beings. It is interesting t note that Fromm was deeply interested in Buddhism, both Theravada and Mahayana forms.

He was deeply familiar with, and often quoted, statements from D.T. Suzuki and Nyanaponika Mahathera. Similarly, the religious imagination and its importance as a constructive force were readily recognized by Piyadasa.

Tenth, the ability to recognize the role of uncertainty in human affairs, root oneself in uncertainty is desideratum highlighted by Fromm as well as the protagonist of Amarasekera’s novels.

This is, of course, an admission of the fact that mot everything can be explained neatly through rationality. Chance, accident, unanticipated occurrences play a crucial role in human life, and that is why Tolstoy’s in his enunciations of history (I discussed this in last week’s column) placed so much emphasis on this aspect. Similarly, Nietzsche, too, recognized the salience of this phenomenon.

I have briefly called attention to ten areas of commonality between Fomm and Piyadasa.. Admittedly, it is a risky venture to compare an actual philosopher with a literary creation; however, for analytical purposes, one can justify such an endeavor, and this is not uncommon in literary analysis. As I stated earlier, at the end of the narrative Piyadasa is overwhelmed by a sense of melancholy by the personal loss of his wife as well as the inability to fashion the kind of humane society he was longing for.

There are two reasons why the kind of society that Piyadasa wished to see emerging in Sri Lanka did not take place. First, although his thinking was constructive, he was not able to disseminate it in a way that would mobilize widespread support. Second, we see how social analysis is forced to encounter its own limits. Fromm realized the veracity of this as indeed did Piyadasa.

Second, constructive thinking that has as its goal a general transformation of society, if it is to be successful, has to be allied with a kind of activism and social organizing capacities. This is indeed the valuable lesson contained in Antonio Gramsci’s writings. His blueprint for social change contained an architecture of social activism.

As we take a retrospective look at the nine novels that began with ‘Gamanaka Mula’ (1984) and has ended with ‘Gamanaka Aga’ (2010), we realize that Amarasekera has produced through his texts a system of exchange between the novelist and his times, between word and incident, and between history and its future.

The argument he makes through his nine novels is cumulative, and the guiding master trope of the journey (gamana) gives it depth and definition. This alliance between history and its future is important in terms of the intent of the novels. Gunadasa Amarasekera, like Nietzsche, will be valorized as a posthumous writer as well – a writer who comes to life in the future through the cogency of his narrative energy and the power of predictive social analysis.

Nietzsche once remarked, ‘how strange that the greatest literary glories of our time should be born of entirely posthumous works.’