22 December

He left me today

Long long ago

I did not know him

Back then

Then on

As if I know him

Now

Now on

He left me

To be

Me

Today

His parting lips lisped

Lisping on my name

He returned to me today

Long way back

Back in the on

Alternation

Never to understand

The chants of that old beggar

As if reciting from some older epic, long lost

My classes take me away from him

Away, far away from this unclean station

There I go, to my lecture platform

I Wait for the day when I can sound like him

Upright from my lecture-platform of

Enchantment.

I wait for that radical day of leakage

When the blank haunt will no more

Give the shivers.

That will be my best lecture

The rest handpicked by the worst

In the melting crust inside his nose...

BIrthday

Poor old birthday

You rugged tramp

Embrace me with

Your raining hands

I will fold my pain in half

And insert it into your navel

I will hold your pain

Like my yellow binocular

It's already dusk, sweetheart

The hours of late lonely light

Do you still blame me?

Roll

Three cows on one matador

Head straightened on

Three tails

Two inside

In the sheath

The middle one

Lolling out

Anxiety's tongue

And wandering eyes

Middling bad

One matador with three cows

Bloodstains in the milk

Two inside

And

The third

Lolling out

Blue Birth

I told them

To leave

Those who had not returned...

I told them

To come

Those who had not departed...

Alone with the candles

On my birthday

Alone once again

Back alone

As once

Back again after five years

The colours poised on the windscreen

'Sex and philosophy'

That tune still haunts me

I ask you to depart

Again and again

Long after your re-departure...

I saw one candle less

Did you take it away?

Anti-Gone

Light...Late...Bad

Too little...too late

Be...late

Nibble...Never...Nape

For ever and ever

Glow...Glass...Gleam

Gone...alone...gone

Too late light too little

To nibble never any nape

Belated

Ever and ever only gone

Glassy glow gleaming alone

A...gone

White-Noise

Fingers in dust

Dust-turn

Fingers in milk

Nails scribble

In milk

Noisy dips

Dusty milk

Milky noise

Invisible scribble

Holy magic in potholes.

Rapid-Fire

When all go away

All

Life begins

When all come back

All

Life re-begins

When some go away

Some

Life begins

When some come back

Some

Life re-begins

When no one goes away

None

Life ends

When no one comes back

None

Life ends

When I go away

I

When you come back

You

The place re-begins

When some go away

And others come back

The place re-ends

Re-winds...

Telos

Going away

A way

A way

Going away

I lag behind

One cannot

Even murmur

In this dark

The ear

Getting bigger

On birthday

The ear

Rapt on

The unplumbed

Hole

Away

A way

A birthmark on time.

In-Ter-Course

Terminals

Mature in the dark

Sex is anatomy

Locating the cracks on the surface

Limiting

Demarcating

Inscribing

The gyrations in the dark

The cracks widen...

Keep widening

Allowing time to enter

Heaving nipples and navels

Blurring the image

Sex, a way of helping the butcher...

Schizzz

I will tell you one day

One day to tell

There will be

I will be

One day

There

To tell

I will be

Will

To tell

There

One day

One I will tell you

Me

One day...

To day

Pour

Bodies joining

In the dark

For mere multiplication

The old man stares

An image

Hard to the core

Softening afterwards

Softening still

Unless the old man

Jumps to his feet

His gaze frozen into a grip

Masterminding

Their departure

Thus the bodies un-joined

Each suck throwing up a corpse

Nipples connote genocide

And the poor old thing

Hardening on...still

Positions

Were a kiss to pierce the dark?

Mine

Dark

Kiss

Yours

Or

Vice

Versa

A promise better still.

Is it too different

In the dark?

Can it be love in the dark?

Ours

Or

Vice

Only

Mine.

Yet

There it comes

On sloppy feet.

I pat on her head

As she goes away.

The white tunnel

Grumbles.

All love

A heap of slangs.

All life

Two half-sayings.

Saying to each other

What if they met?

scribble

The house of love

Burns

Proves

The house of love

Pours

I

There is a raw sincerity when I wish death...death only...but a plop like never before and it departs...the inability to die and the impossibility to live...do they have to be so much in love around me in the dark? I am the bench where they meet, kiss, fondle and make love...I look on...sometimes with tears...at other times, untorn...almost lidlessly...

Win-Dow

The pain of dots

Accuse on

The pain in dots

Self-accuse

All that rots

Time to go

For Good

There is

No time kept...

Pierce

If I were to tell you

Of the failed moisture

And the love impossible

On top of your greatcoat

Of the day he counted the stairs

While climbing towards the rooftop

To jump

I would stop doing all that

If I were to tell you all that

The not-all that cloven in your eyelid

And sand in his buttonholes...

Roped

Hunger
Under
Belly.
Pindrop
Street.
Midway
Nonsense.
Refuge
Goodwill.
Buyer
Helpless.
The midnight-blood
Oozes out unfed.

That Dark Back-Road

That dark back-road
The two of us
Impossible to go
Hand in hand
You gave me the room
And stood aside
I could not
See your face
The dearest face back
In the dark
Darkest
I passed by
Who knows?
Otherwise
We could have been there
Together
To gather
All the carrions left.

CFP: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

NEMLA 42nd Annual Convention: New Brunswick, New Jersey April 7-10, 2011

Call for Papers
Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

Contact email: arkaless@gmail.com

Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011

Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New
Brunswick, New Jersey

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words (The full papers are to be mutually exchanged and read well before the seminar and shortened 10 minute presentations, consisting of four double-spaced pages, are to be made in the session)


Seminar Description
The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to the philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his
work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

Therefore, the thrust-areas are (the abstracts may include these perspectives but need not be limited to these at all):

v Philosophy as influence on Beckett.
v Philosophy as intertextual cultural memory or a textual principle in Beckett.
v Beckett as an influence on 20th century Philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as an anti-philosophical discourse.
v Beckett and the cognitive philosophical tradition.
v The politics of philosophical appropriation in and of Beckett texts.
v The philosophical categorization of Beckett as a Modernist polemic of canonization.
v The philosophical status of Beckett and its contribution in a supposed undermining of the pragmatics of his theatrical practice as a playwright and stage-artist.



All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815
Mail: arkaless@gmail.com

For Suman...

We were wondering if it was the right place to have a seat. Things looked a touch too far, a touch too high. And then the famous old strings...the curtain went up...and there he was...bang in the centre of the stage...bowing down and yet not really bowed. The guitars were to the left of him, the synthesizer to the right. He had just completed his sixty years. What about them? How old were they? To time...to space...yet another gift. He sat. The light and shade started their play around that posture. He was like a mark...a little speck of light in the dark...he had become a pure image. It took sixty long years for him and eighteen for me...there he was...still that half-lit face with a stubble looking at me from the cassette-cover of his first album--"Tomake Chai". I was seven then. It was 1992. My father had brought it home. The eighteen years of adulthood had already marked the encounter, his sixty marking senior citizenship for him. That much of distance was always there...always needed...for company...for fable...for the sound of silence. He was an old man now, baldness all around him. Gone were the cassette-days... stirrings still in the head.

He had kept his promise to me, making me think, dragging me to the road, albeit a road not taken, to haunt me forever. The spectre of the political, as intrinsic as the vestiges of thought that could never go from the dim mind--all sought in vain and yet never unsought...there he was--as always clasping and unclasping the fingers...trying to hold on to something, as if never there. What could the songs do? Could they change the world? Could they feed the have-nots? The questions were all simple...much like their answers...holding on to the wind a touch more before blowing away. The old grit in the bone was still to induce the time, as if ever been...for the "ever"...for the "been"...to erupt... to explode...songs with the ringing core of truth--our very own "ganola", caretaking the voices as well as the silences in truth in what he would call a guardianless and intolerable time. There was a heap of words inside the heart and thus the courage to climb the word-mountains from the beloved time. The pins were fixed.

He named them...the loved ones...of music...of life...so many names...so many, a little too many, lost in the clockwork. He insisted the lights to be on. He wanted to see...to look..."to see to look"..."to hear to listen"... to feel the bond...preserve it.

"Bhange jeno janlar garad shobar"

----my way of loving what would be termed the 'political'...

"Tomar chokhe alokborsho korbe jokhon gan rachana

Tokhon tomar ratri chhunte amar emon kangalpona"

----my way of loving what I now derivatively call the 'two of love'...of rupture...of company...

He always made me understand their affinities. Love was more political than ever in the barricade of kisses...weaving on.

Rotation

It takes a turn.

Stop.

Still takes a turn.

Stoop.

There is no other turn.

Droop.

The flesh is pale.

Drop.

Postmodernism: “It was as if no one had heard”

“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself…”—Lyotard [The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)]

What this epigraph does, apart from setting the tone for what Lyotard will go on to call the ‘paradox of the future anterior’ in the postmodern, is to posit the post-modern as an offshoot of the modern; what was marginal in the modern becomes central in the post-modern as liminality becomes its prevalent register. Is the post-modern then a carnivalised form of the modern where the hierarchies have simply been upturned? As many thinkers, as many post-moderns; as many literary authors, as many post-moderns: that is how it is. Whether it is the removal of the hyphen that separates ‘post’ and ‘modern’ (what has been called the castration of the postmodern) or the perilous addition of the theoretical suffix ‘ism’ to make it ‘postmodernism’, everything associated with the term has been shrouded in profound vagueness and uncertainty. Philosophers like Baudrillard and Habermas have strongly reacted to them, being straightjacketed by postmodernism. Authors like John Barth have expressed their wonder, if not disgruntlement at the label. Postmodernism’s obsessive insistence on all forms of closures on the one hand (end of history, end of philosophy, end of the author, end of criticism, end of performance etc), and a post-structuralist notion of endless proliferation of meaning through the perpetually differing and deferring signifier-gang on the other, has placed it in a no-man’s land. But the fascinating thing about postmodernism is its ability to turn all its critiques into its properties. You call it a no-man’s land and it will say that that is the precise point. As Frederic Jameson says, the postmodern is marked by a schizophrenic displacement of the spatio-temporal; add to it the Lyotardian ‘future anterior’ and you have the timeless, spaceless and, of course, authorless no-man’s land! You call it confusion, it will call itself a ‘simulacrum’; you call it contradictory and Derrida will say “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”; you call it ideologically non-committal and it will retort by saying that parodies have become blank pastiches now; you call it all messed up and it will then resort to ‘micro-narratives’; you say it is playing into the hands of globalization and it will respond that it is a historical inevitable—some ‘cultural logic’ of some late capitalism; you use the word ‘Enlightenment’, it will be angrily silent and if you ask why this silence, it will say that it has been able to invert the hierarchy of speech and silence! Postmodernism has indeed mastered the art of theorizing its other, if not anything else!

It was Jean-François Lyotard who used the word ‘postmodern’ for the first time in his commissioned work The Postmodern Condition in late1970s. His insight into the comodification of knowledge where it ‘ceases to be an end’ in itself and becomes part of an acquisitional process which radically exteriorizes the knowledge from the knower, brings out the changing matrix of knowledge in the post-industrial society. Lyotard presents the new face of knowledge in terms of specific ‘language games’ which are effected by ruptures within what he calls ‘metanarratives’ or grand narratives. In a strongly anti-essentialist manner, he explores the historical destabilization of these narratives e.g. the Enlightenment project of socio-political progress and the Hegelian rationalism in terms of the revelation of scientific knowledge and comes to identify this ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ as the definitive postmodern stance. Gianni Vattimo in his book, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1988), critiques the Lyotardian argument for being located into a historical discourse, which it so desperately tries to decimate.

Jean Baudrillard is another philosopher whose work has been seen as a shaping influence on postmodernist thought. His famous paradigmatic shift from the subject to the ‘object-system’ is a post-Derridean deconstruction of subjectivity. Derrida in his trend-setting essay, “Structure, Sign And Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), exploded the structurality of structure by denouncing the immobility of the centre, characterizing it as an ‘interdicted’ zone, located both inside and outside the structure and thus operative through a continual metonymic surge. Baudrillard, in his radical foregrounding of what he terms ‘the silence of pure objectality’ in Cool Memories, extends the post-structuralist break, constituted by Derrida, to an extreme—“the main interest has always been on the conditions in which the subject discovers the object, but those in which the object discovers the subject have not been explored at all…what if it were the object which discovered us in all this?” (Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime) The Baudrillian theory of ‘simulation’ sets forth one of the fundamental modes in which postmodern literature has been characterized and that is an anti-realist approach. Postmodernism has questioned representation of reality on the grounds of the always already represented character of the real as well as the insufficiency of language as a semiotic register in reflecting the real. One of the basic methods of countering representation in postmodernism has been a tendency to refer back to language. The Lacanian Symbolic is constitutive of reality only through an exclusion of the Real, which remains somewhat resistant to complete symbolification. As William Burroughs says, ‘language is a virus from outer space’ and the only way to deal with it is to tell stories which would not move outward and depend upon the external reality but circulate back to itself and be self-contained. Linguistic meaning apropos of Derrida is only a ‘differance’ and what texts like Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch (1959) and Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983) do is to backtrack into language ad infinitum, becoming immune to reality in an absolutely auto-referential way. This self-reflexivity of narratives builds up what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographical metafiction’ in postmodern literature. Much like Umberto Eco who sees the ‘hyper-real’ in the entertainment parks of America, Baudrillard too, presents to us a complete destruction of the real through its optimization beyond the limit. He theorizes four ‘successive phases of the image’; first in which ‘it is the reflection of a basic reality’; second where ‘it masks and perverts a basic reality’; the third is the order where ‘it masks the absence of a basic reality’ and the fourth and the most chaotic order of the simulacra is where ‘it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, Simulations). The world of the simulacra is, therefore, a world of pure appearances where language, in a Derridean contestation of metaphysics, proclaims instead of hiding the void underneath. A perfect example of this will be the closing lines of Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951)—“Then I went back into the house & wrote, it is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” It is only language that moves one level higher than that of the narrative to deconstruct its realistic referentiality, here.

Another significant break between modernism and postmodernism lies in the different ways in which they see the high-culture-low-culture split in the society. While modernists like Joyce, Kafka, Proust in different ways endorse the charlatanism, embedded in this split, postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and especially someone like Haruki Murakami celebrate what they consider to be a democratic, non-elitist and equalitarian conglomeration of high art forms with ‘kitsch’ or popular low-art genres. Murakami’s works [e.g. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (1997)] make a largely subversive use of the thriller format. Other important post-war fiction- writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Alain Robbe Grillet also delve into what Michael Holquist calls in his essay, “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” (1971), ‘the metaphysical whodunit’ where these authors, in their own different ways, subvert the retrospective logic of the detective story with all sorts of bizarre figurations. They choose the genre for its insistent dependence on logic and then slaughter the logic through reversal of set patterns. In Grillet’s Novel, The Voyeur (1955), it is the very event of the crime, which gradually evaporates rather than a disclosure of the mysterious agency behind it. Grillet’s novels show yet another postmodern symptom by focusing more on the objectness of the objects than whatever they might signify. Not only Robbe Grillet, the entire ‘New Novel’ movement in France provides us with a critique of the psychological realism of the Modernist novel as the spotlight shifts from depth to surface in their works. This rejection of depth psychology and a fascination with surfaces relate to the deconstructive and self-reflexive tendencies within postmodernism. Postmodernism moves away from the kind of high cultural shock, a novel like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) creates in the common reader, and tries to concentrate on a concreteness that is real and yet a little too real for realism. Someone like Beckett might look equipped with all the venom of postmodernism in terms of its post-structuralist and post-realist orientations, but the extreme formal experimentalism, a tendency towards pervasive abstraction and a sweeping metaphysics of the ontological (all speaking of high art) alienate him from the mainstream of postmodernism, relocating him into a predominantly modernist framework. The case of Beckett is not just an instance but a valid indicator of the mutually enmeshed character of modernism and postmodernism. John Barth rightly points out in his essay, “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980), that the ideal postmodern author will ‘somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism’ by combining the ‘pre-modern’ with the ‘modern’. His instances of the postmodern novel include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973).

Now, I would like to examine one of Borges’s stories, Circular Ruins [from The Garden of Forking Paths (1944)], somewhat closely to draw some conclusions (if there are any) about the subject. This particular story of Borges, in many different ways, deals with and responds to the dialectics and paradoxes of postmodernism, I have been discussing. The story is about a mysterious sorcerer who is all set to construct a human being through his dreams in the circular ruins of a mystical temple. It is about the tribulations of this dream-creation and its imposition upon reality and, once the sorcerer’s project is completed, the produced son is sent to another circular ruin according to a divine dream-instruction to get his making perfected. Towards the end of the story, a man comes to the sorcerer and tells him the story of a magical man unaffected by fire in the other ruin downstream. In the final moment, there is a fire in the forest, which destroys the circular ruins in a historical u-turn much like the earlier holocaust, which had turned the temple into a ruin. In the blaze of that devastating fire, the sorcerer finds himself unaffected. The fire soothingly embraces him and he is made to realize ironically that for all this time, when he had been dreaming and creating a human being, he himself was being dreamt and created by another dreaming and creating human being.
I think this Borges-story, written at a time when much of postmodernist theory was still to appear, anticipates some of its directions. To begin with, the story uses the fairy-tale (a popular art form) model to delve deep into a world of simulations, identity politics, lacking closure. The Borgesian ‘magic real’ is a technique of undoing the real through the hyper-real. Unlike Beckett, Borges does not abandon the realistic frame and tries to unmake it from within. The line with which the tale opens is almost a peerless representational fabric (“no one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud…”) and it is only the adjective ‘unanimous’ placed before ‘night’ that makes an abstraction of the night, de-spatializing and de-realizing the image in the process. The entire story poses a challenge to realistic representation as the world of dreams is given an autonomous parallel existence, from which figures can smoothly enter reality, depending upon an intent of transference.

The last chapter of Baudrillard’s book, The Perfect Crime, is called ‘The Revenge of the Mirror People’ where he imagines a future revolt of the mirror images demanding a real existence alongside human beings. In the ‘future anterior’, representation is seen to fail fully in producing the ‘other’ and there shall have been two equally sovereign peoples. Baudrillard theorizes this phenomenon by using another Borges-story, The Book of Imaginary Beings (1974), where the mirror world comes alive and moves out of the mirror to challenge the human authority. In Circular Ruins too, it is the dream world that seems to have completely eaten up the real, by the time we reach the end of the story. And once again it is a radical break from the discourse of humanism that seems to ground the ‘circular ruins’ of representation. In the first phase, the sorcerer uses the pedagogic field of the classroom in his dreams and seeks to find from his ageless students someone who can be imposed upon reality. He does find one after some frustration but shortly thereafter there is a rupture in his project in the form of insomnia and dreamlessness. This rupture can be seen in terms of a postmodern conception of the epistemic and pedagogic lack in all human discourses. The technique that he then uses is a fragmentary technique of imagining parts of the body bit by bit and this blasts the illusion of the unity of the body, something that the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is yet to impress on him. The process also underpins cloning, another technological facet of the postmodern. But initially the imagined youth remains asleep (dreaming?) like his dreaming creator. This sleep within sleep initiates the topography of the Borgesian labyrinth where once one reaches the centre, the centre reveals itself as yet another labyrinth. The constructedness and unreality of the constructor opens up the post-structuralist domain where telos suffers from a fallacy of infinite regress. It is this realization of the sorcerer that he is implicated by an-other dream of an-other dreamer, which destabilizes his existential power centre, and the perpetually shifty nature of power is disclosed. It is this subversiveness that deconstructs the genre as the centre of the mythical content is dislodged. The whole story pastiches the Frankensteinian motif and a host of other literary motifs alike. Towards the end, Borges provides us with a parenthesis where he comments upon the passage of time—“which some tellers of the story choose to compute in ten years, others in decades”. Not only is this a postmodern metafictional bent but a critique of linear and objective time as well. But the parenthesis also adds to the mythical ambience.

Whether it is the dream dimension, which is in line with surrealism or Borges’s intensely allusive texture (an epigraph from ‘Through the Looking-Glass, VI’, references to the cosmogonies of the Gnostics etc) or even the ways in which he simultaneously operates in a mythifying and de-mythifying register, I think Circular Ruins presents to us an accurate spectacle of the mutuality of contraction and expansion in between modernism and postmodernism. While Borges keeps stressing the infinite deferral of ‘metanarrative’ and gives some form of independence to all the micro-narratives, which are initiated by the story, this disconnective nuance is located completely within the Joycean structure of epiphany, which renders it paradoxical. The revelation of the sorcerer’s identity at the end of the story is not projected as a postmodernist fetish- meaning with surfaces only, but rather as a deep structure in terms of linguistic and epistemological imports. It is the text, which is trapped in this eternal tug of war as it tries to hold on to ‘the still point of the turning world’ but ‘things fall apart’ and ‘the centre cannot hold’. And it is only then that literature dreams a dream of evading both circularity and ruins. The contestational labels of modernism and postmodernism may wait for an eternity.


Works Consulted: -

a) Barth John, The Literature of Exhaustion and The Literature of Replenishment, Lord John Press, 1982.

b) Baudrillard Jean, The Perfect Crime, Verso Publishers, 1996.

c) Baudrillard Jean, Simulations and Simulacra From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Poster Mark (ed). Stanford University Press. 1998.

d) Baudrillard Jean, Cool Memories, Verso Publishers, 1990.


e) Beckett Samuel, The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II: Novels, Grove press. 2006.

f) Borges Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, Penguin Books, 1998.


g) Connor Steven (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Cambridge University press, 2004.

h) Derrida Jaques, Writing and Difference, Routledge. 2001.


i) Lucy Niall, Postmodern Literary Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1997.

j) Lyotard Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984.

Somewhere This

Here I stand
When all
All
Alone.

Only here I stand
For all
All
All
Alone.

There they go
Alone
Alone
All.

Allone comes

I lean on his lips.

Need

Do you need me in my silence?
Do I need you in the words?
Words seek love in this shelter
When all the lips are found...