Monday, May 25, 2015

Benjamin Black/John Banville's The Silver Swan

"She held up her wrist and examined, the white furrows his fingers had left there to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself."
Yes, it takes a John Banville to write this as Benjamin Black. The phenomenological aesthetics of the body, the veins and the blood, the gushing wound in absentia in this case epitomizes the crime narrative. Isn't the movement of a crime narrative one where "everything rushes back" to recreate a past? But how does everything replace itself? Can anything ever replace itself? Perhaps only life can replace itself but then there's the wall of death to be considered. The thing which can always replace itself is a Banvillian ghost; a ghost of a crime and a crime of a ghost.
One more:
"May be if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball."
This is a lilting logic of foreboding in a whodunit where the temporal structure is predominantly retroactive. Everything rushes back not only to form a past but replaces itself in and by the future.
'The Silver Swan' is one of Banville/Black's most accomplished crime novels. Not only is it psychic, atmospheric and existential, as one would expect from a literary if not wholly aesthetic writer, taking to the popular genre of the whodunit, the novel is beautifully layered in terms of its narrative.
The detective is replaced by Quirke, the pathologist who is such a psychic character that you can't trust the pseudo-detective figure. Inspector Hackett. instead of slipping into the classic detective couple. creates more nuisance than anything else for Quirke who always carries the poignant smell of a corpse by virtue of his profession. The mid 20th century Ireland with its social moralism and religious industry forms an intriguing historical backdrop. But what's special about this novel is the movement of its narrative.
The detective doesn't find anything. There's no detective as such and the police are pretty clueless as well. The mystery solves itself as the third person omniscient narrator takes to the myriad characters and goes inside out to narrate the crime retroactively from within the past as each chapter takes up a particular individual's perspective. What's most interesting is that in this flashback, the dead victim gets to tell her own version of the past through the omniscient narrator and by the end of the novel, it's the killer's turn to tell his own tale through the narrator's voice. Even at the end, though the police are in the know of things, law doesn't take its course.
The novel leaves the reader in an intensely humanizing and yet ethically unsettling place where the scene of crime lures us with human empathy as well as a profound sense of aesthetic delectation.


Sunday, May 17, 2015

Watching Srijit Mukherjee's film Nirbaak

Finally I saw Srijit Mukherjee's surrealist masterpiece NIRBAAK...
What the fuck, ami toh nirbaak!!!
Since I have wasted the last hour and a half on this film, let me waste another fifteen minutes in venting out my anger as a viewer.
And the rant begins...
Nirbaak is a horrendous film; even Srijit's worst film as far as I am concerned. The story ideas are neither great nor utter crap; but every single story has been treated with crude overdetermination, typically Srijitesque modishness, pseudo-intellectualism and oneupmanship on the audience. All the stories are 'bold' on the face in their superficial impressionism and predictably contrived. A proper treatment would've made for a watchable film at least; this is simply intolerable.
In the name of post-humanism, the narrative threads with the tree and the 'bitch' are disgustingly inane and at the peak of gibberish. The tree is more perverse than cute and the four-legged beauty, reduced to simplified villainy. Post-humanism falls flat on its face as everything in the film gets an anthropo-centric treatment.
As if Anjan Dutta masturbating wasn't enough torture to watch, even the tree had to chip in! And good god, just listen to the masterful G for GUSH-GUSH background score to corroborate the visual of the tree's ejection. Trust Srijit to do that!
 
unsure emoticon
Anjan Dutta isn't bad in terms of acting but again it's a diluted and banal take on narcissism. I guess what happens to his character could be described as a nemesis for the visual pollution caused by his semi-nude shower and bedroom acrobatics. Sushmita doesn't have anything to do. 
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 Casting her is nothing but a pan-Indian gimmick from our posturing movie maverick. Jishu is passable with little to do. And what is that black-and white regime for the 'bitch-camera'? Was Srijit trying to do a Godard there as in Adieu au langage? One would have to say that, much like men, some dogs are more equal than others 
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The only faint reason to watch the film is Ritwick Chakraborty who gets into the skin of his character and controls the baroque excesses of the clown beautifully. In the 'corpse' narrative with its oh so bold necrophillic theme, the exhibitionistic and oh so clever mockery of Bollywood songs becomes irritating!
Nirbaak is an insolently clever film from a self-assuming filmmaker who takes his audience for the greatest personification of stupidity.

The Second Sex

Today I am doing parts of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in my Intro to Philosophy classes.
If Sartre comes (I did Sartre last class) can Simone be far behind? tongue emoticon
As I read from her book, I was struck by the exhilarating literary style of writing she has. An example:
"Wherever life is in the making--germination, fermentation--it arouses disgust because it is made only in being destroyed; the slimy embryo begins the cycle that is completed in the putrefaction of death."
Now both Freud and Kafka would've been happy with this formulation smile emoticon It's interesting to see, apart from the feminist core of her argument, how much of existentialist ontology and psychoanalytic mythology are built into it.

Re-watching Satyajit Ray

Watched Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen, Hirok Rajar Deshe and Agantuk after ages.
The films brought back fond memories of watching them long ago as a boy. The first two films were thoroughly enjoyable as well as politically inspiring. The innocence of fairy tale meeting political allegory in a fulfilling cinematic experience. The films haven't aged whatsoever and still remain so entertaining and relevant. What music and what acting! Comic timing at its best. Rabi Ghosh and Utpal Dutt offer master-classes in acting.
This time I liked Agantuk more than I had as a kid. The somewhat controversial ending esp. the outward movement into the open with the Santali dance sequence didn't seem forced at all. In fact, the narrative logic had started making room for that opening from the beginning I felt.
I was intrigued to think about the testamental quality of Ray's last film. To what extent did he consciously choose to clarify and qualify his position on civilization and urbanity, secularism and scientific and technological modernity in his last film? It seems to be the moot question the film unrelentingly asks and attempts to re-(de)-fine: who is civilized and who's barbaric? And the answer is anything but dichotomous, of course. Everyone in Agantuk is excellent but Utpal Dutt simply towers!

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Reading Leviathan by Paul Auster



Paul Auster manipulates the realistic narrative of contrivances in a clever way by underlining its constructedness. He remains self-reflexive about the contrivances in his plot by having his narrator reflect about the incredulous random patterning of events in life which expose the fact that contingency is anything but illogical. The philosophically interesting question for me in this 'postmodern' narrative technique is whether chance can always be unraveled, retrospectively speaking, as a perfectly (almost too perfect!) logical series of events. To put it with brevity and precision: how logical and readable is chance? If it's logical and readable in a logical way, can we equate this logically readable view of chance with determinism?

The other thing this novel made me think is the possibility of a dialectical tension between the two selves of the artist as a creator of a subversive work of art and a subversive socio-political activist. Is there a tension between these two roles? Does a committed artist feel the impotence of his art as a subversive practice? The two novelists in this novel form the alter-ego of one another and ask this old and yet important question. We have seen cases where subversive activism can become problematic for literary creation e.g. Arundhati Roy or where the writer almost entirely textualises his subversive politics in authorial practice e.g. Amitav Ghosh.

Leviathan with its complex narrative is a political novel with an intensely private emotion--a balance Auster as a novelist has mastered quite beautifully over the years.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Watching Piku

An uncomplicated, unpretentious and sweetly sad film on caring for parents, obsession with excretion, attachment for roots and above all on a love of life that can see fulfillment and not incompleteness in death. Everyone was great in terms of performances and Amitabh Bachchan after quite a long time completely transformed himself for this role which was fantastic to see. Gone were the baritone and the overwhelming body language and the loudness this time emerged from within the character and not his performance. His poker-faced silence with its child-like vulnerability when rebuked by others, Irrfan or Deepika or anyone else just goes to show his calibre and reach as an actor. With his real life personality and screen memory as a larger-than life persona, it's not easy to portray that kind of down-to-earth sloppiness on screen but he did it effortlessly. He was irritating, adorable and heartwarming. Irrfan and Deepika were excellent too, not overdoing things at all. Deepika has come a long way as an actor and it's great to see her growth. Everyone else from Maushumi to Jishu were true to their parts. Yes, the end was predictable and formulaic but not overdone. In fact the director was very careful about not making it melodramatic. The film was visually soothing and Anupam Roy's music touched many strings...

On the metaphorical valence of 'motion' etc, it's interesting that Maushumi at one point makes a joke that it's all about Amitabh's 'menopause'...He's a widower and at the fag end of his sexual life and hence an alternative obsession could have replaced the interest in the life of the body in a sexual sense...his 'medical' interest in the interior of the body in the conversation with Irrfan towards the end in Kolkata is revealing I think...the scatological obsession comes from his fixation with the inner life of the body...all the inner space we don't see as Beckett would've said. And this could also be connected with his outspokenness about his daughter's lack of virginity, 'sexual independence' n so on.

On a personal note, it was lovely to see Kolkata from here in Australia...hearing the old tunes and encountering the old haunts...the old haunts never fail to haunt ...the nostalgia element was full on from Tagore to Jibone ki Pabo na and from Ei poth jodi na to Pagla khabi kI.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Somatic


Blood running through flesh,
Flesh growing around blood,
Cutting into the stream…
Obstructing it…
Silencing it…
Until it stops,
Until the silence rings true…
Blood in flesh and flesh on blood
And then no blood,
And then no flesh,
And then nothing
Only silence for company.

That’s where I see you mother
Where I cannot see you
My gaze falls short of your non-gaze
There’s no visor to hide your gaze
There are no eyes to hide
Not even unseeing eyes
There’s no vision to hide
As I hide mine beneath deep dark glasses
Hoping to attain your non-gaze one day,
Your non-eyes, your non-vision.

Each day your non-gaze sinks further
Into my blood, bites into my flesh
Until they start dreaming about you
And dream you into visibility…

In the imploding shadows where blood writes through flesh
And the flesh listens to that writing in speech
In that dialogue I see you mother,
In me, what I cannot see
Until the silence rings true…
Until there’s no blood
Until there’s no flesh
Only your non-gaze for company in silence.



[In memory of my mother Soma Chattopadhyay who had both the word ‘soma’ (something to do with the body) and ‘ma (mother) written into her name. Her body had to undergo a lot of suffering over the years till the very end. And being maternal was in her name. ]