Heterogeneity in Reading as A Methodological Device in Culture Studies

Women and Literary Fiction in English: Tropes of Gender, History, Autobiography and Religion Dr Susan Visvanathan (Formerly Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, New Delhi) Introduction There are two aspects of writing that feminist authors have always used: one is documentation in existential terms, the other is critique. Sometimes description is sufficient to elaborate the veracity of both, as Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald showed us. Both pitted themselves against their indulgent but provocative, and in some ways, treacherous husbands. They had to prove themselves larger than their husbands’ opinion of them, which as a subtext outran their support and kindness. In Virginia Woolf’s case, the diagnoses of madness was an experiential space on which rested the fictional case history of Septimius Smith enclosed in the novel Mrs Dalloway. Who else could it be, but the fatal footsteps of Dr Savage, visiting the patient, that stalks the novelist’s memory? Anyone who has read Scott Fitzgerald’s novels knows of Zelda’s appearance in them in a mimetic form. Let us look at Slayer Slain or Stharikavadam (1864) as a form of the novel which still echoes the treatment of women and slaves almost a century and a half after it was written. Mrs Frances Collins in her act of novelistically presenting what she called “Syrianisms”, (acts of cruelty of St Thomas Christian farmers /landlords against their lower caste attendant communities, had as husband, Reverend Richard Collins, who as Principal of CMS College lauded her writing, saw to its serialized publication, and completed it after her death. All three cases of women’s writing mentioned above, then, presumes that women writers became visible because of the support of their husbands. Even plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. The support of men to women’s causes is a stance that the Oral History Workshop took in the 1970s where women argued that feminism needed the support of men. However, in this paper, I I am interested in how questions of contradiction arise in the treatment of women as a unit of analyses in certain frequently read literary texts. The Spiritual Search and the Exclusion of Women Let us take the case of Nikos Kazantzakis. His autobiography “Report to Greco” takes a novelistic form. He has an autocratic father, who while very typically Greek in terms of his close patrimonial authority and coerciveness, yet gives his son freedom, and also educates him, though he is ashamed of his lack of warriorhood, and his inability to take on that other available known familial role, that of the pastoral robber baron. Nikos will then be a school teacher, his father prophecies. Kazantzakis however has a strong streak of mysticism which leads him to search for God. The autobiography very vehemently represents pilgrimage, travel and vicissitudes of following the trail of known adventurers, saints and monks. What a powerful imagination it is, then, which compellingly sees women as the problem. They might be amanuensis, lovers and possibly conjugal partners, but in the end their degradation abounds, just as in Homer’s Odyssey, where the sailors constantly face sirens, seductresses and princesses who spell their doom. In Homer’s Odyssey, there is one young girl, who rescues the robber baron from the sea, wraps him in a towel, and takes him to her royal parents. Not surprisingly Kazantzakis Odyssey too, is a tale of horror, revenge, laceration both physical and mental. The place of women is to either be cannibalistic, swallowing up male achievements or to be deluded and defeated. However, Penelope is the dormant impulse of women to wait patiently, carry out household duties, and wait for the roving seaman husband to kill the suitors who eye his property and his wife. Kazantzakis is so afraid of women, as a mystically inclined scholar, who works hard to struggle with texts to read and analyze, that he abhors women, and so do the Orthodox monks whom he meets in distant monasteries. They all view women as eminently dangerous, bound to bring about their downfall. The nursing mother, who exposes her breast while feeding the child is as suspect as the painted ladies (whores) and lovely women who adorn their path, hoping for an alliance with men seeking God. In one case Kazantzakis, at the end of life’s journey, in a text (protected by his wife, who writes the preface) speaks of his meeting a young woman called Frieda, in Vienna. While there is mutual attraction and a promise to meet, the young student finds his face swelling, turning yellow, exuding pus. When he goes to meet his psychotherapist, the doctor laughs and tells him, it is the ascetic’s disease, and as soon as he leaves Vienna, and forgets Frieda, the disease will disappear. And indeed it does. Meanwhile, Kazantzakis who had explored theologically Greek, Buddhist and Christian religions, (while embedded in sufismm, dervishes and the trauma of Turkish colonization) conducted interviews, and writes novelistic versions of St Francis, Jesus, and Odysseus. He writes his last work, an autobiography, Report To Greco, delineating the horror and fear he feels for women, just as he does for Turks and lepers. It is this mass of materials, presented novelistically that allow us, as readers, to understand how hard it must have been for women to overcome this instinctive fear and dread that men had for women. Jung’s Concepts of Anima and Animus In this sense, Jung offers us two concepts, anima and animus to allow us to withdraw from this anxiety. These concepts permit us to dwell in that space of ambiguity, which third gender identity has used to fulfill itself. Anima is the female principle, animus the male. There can be no stereotyping of either as conciliatory and aggressive respectively. Society does stereotype men as aggressive, and women as passive, but Jung’s concepts allow for the notion of co-existence of each in every human. Thus, we find that the concept of androgyny becomes very meaningful, with respect to freedom, and rights to life and work, and if one wishes, procreation. Umberto Eco and the autobiographical connotations of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a very well known account of the fortunes of a library in the hands of 14th century medieval monks who propel secrecy as the only way to promote knowledge. Eco uses the banishment of laughter as the means by which one can understand the terror and spite that induces the monks in their search for knowledge, to coexist with a seeming venality (jealousy and rivalry) which is indeed manifested as outright evil, because murders abound in the monastery. In the later novel, published in 2004, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco uses an interesting and very febrile space to rework time and memory. His protagonist, in a compelling recovery of memory, uses parallel narratives (his friend’s recall of a shared childhood) to reconstruct a juvenile past. That 1950s’ experience of adolescence haunts him in his amnesia, as he recovers from a cerebral stroke. In the novel, his father during the Second World War is away in the city at work, appearing only on holidays. The city of Milan remains the book end of this work, always hanging in the fictional reconstruction with the names of friends, pedagogic institutional appearances and fragmented chronologies. At the age of 60, the successful old trader of antique books returns to the childhood home in a village. His grandfather’s housekeeper, now quite ancient herself, welcomes him with an abandonment of joy and recognition. Her familiarity with the house and its secret, locked portals, propels him to visit the attic. As the grandson who visits the family home, he is able to claim the school notebooks and comics of the 1940s. Consequently, he is drawn to a suppressed and haunting memory of his first love. This love had ended in an unexplained absence. However, another relic friend from that period of adolescence, who is currently his guide into a forgotten past, tells him that his first love called to memory by associational clues, had died in Brazil at the age of 18, after leaving their school in Italy, where adolescent passions and rejections had ruled incessantly. Had he known of her premature death, he would not have carried the memory of her beauty and her irrevocability, as ‘forgotten’ romance; as a thing of the past continuing into the existential present. The intensity of his suppressed feelings for that lost love had a current mnemonic, a young woman called Sybilla, who works as his assistant in his successful Rare Books shop in Milan. The gaps in memory are coincidenatally placed, so that the assistant’s name and how she looks, becomes juxtaposed with his returning memory of that long lost first love. He also remembers that he went to his first love’s apartment, hoping to see her, heard her sing a juvenile love song, and promptly “fell out of love” for her! Connections are not important in proving coincidences. The old erudite merchant, whose existing memory is for words (he can recite by heart texts and verses) cannot now return to his home and family in Milan. He remains in the village, and the density of these emotions, and the repealing of vivid memory causes him to enter once again, the limbo of the coma victim. As a vivid act of novelistic re-creation, Eco draws us into that world, where the person cannot wake, but is aware that he is dreaming. Rather than being frightened by the descent into the black sun, Eco uses the trope of eternal dreaming, not as death, but as an experience of hell. Here, too, women are represented in the passive domain, as ever present in their roles as wife, mother of their children, and in this case the protagonist’s wife is a professional Jungian psychoanalyst and their daughters are supportive of their father’s obsessions. Conversely, women are neutralized, as bystanders or unattainable. How then do novelists deal with the ambiguity that underlines the nuances of different kinds of love? In cosmopolitan Milan, polyamorousness is not veiled, it is hinted at, and rather than secrecy, it is that which is whispered about. Like fascism and dictatorship, these emerge as suppressions and abstractions. What Eco is centrally dealing with is the impact of the platitudes that made Mussolini acceptable to families which wanted their sons to assimilate into the legal bullying by black shirts, for pedagogical purposes. It answers the questions we ask today of our own cultures and civilisations of how bullying and threats of rape and death are tolerated. War is the vocabulary that is projected for this very rhapsody of banalization. Good grades are sought from children , Eco writes, who are then accepting of ideologies, which common sense makes them instinctively reject. To assimilate, however, they have to speak as others do. In this sullen moment of acceptance of family and educational coercion, the young boy , in Eco’s novel reacts by joining a party of those who seek a secret path to climb a rock face, (the gorge) unknown to their parents. Out of this skill, the protagonist then leads a convoy of Cossacks seeking to escape from the Black shirts of Mussolini’s army to join the Resistance fighters. This mesh of events then leads Eco to promote not just his knowledge of Fascist literature which was overpowering, but also means of translation as a symbol of the multi-currents in global literature. European and American comics translated into Italian provide a plethora of images of the masculine and feminine bodies, where warriors appear to dethrone the evil Lord. The illustrated novel, is thus the answer to the hybridization of the text, where family histories, war narratives, the routinization of eccentricity and the pale palimpsest of the ‘normal family’ appears in juxtaposition. In the next section, I shall look at dream and fiction together as the transposition of the truth and falsity principle. What is real, and how can we come to terms with the transferred probability of actual events. The dream shows us the limitless ways in which the imagination vents itself through the subconscious. We understand what we are capable of, whether good or malefic, and we forget the dream in all its intensity when we wake, unless we record it as soon as our eyes open, which is hard unless we follow Jung’s notion of ‘directed thought’. This enigma of the continuously active brain, which alerts us to all the impossibilities of action, is the ferment that also entrances. We know that works of the imagination are real, but not necessarily true, unless proved as prophecy. There are dreams we cannot wake up from, and those threaten life itself, as we may struggle evading death, but are not successful. When it concludes in the struggle which cannot be described on awakening, we can presume that we are dead. Who can we tell, then? The Subversive Realities of Fiction Fiction is the dream time when the subconscious is excavated. It does not happen by will, or wish. The story alights on one’s shoulder and becomes a captive friend. It is constantly using its terrestrial power (things we have seen, heard or done) replicating themselves through memory. Its not a fog of half remembered elements dazzling us by their luminescence in a forgotten past. On the contrary, it is a jumble of odors and sounds and images, each of which then capsizes into frequently unimaginable situations though, being at the same time, immensely persuasive. That is the paradox, for the fiction writer uses facts to dissemble. Every author has to agree to a contract that submits to the reader, on the first page, that all resemblances are coincidental. Yet, the blurring of life, reality and projection are all buttressed by the experiential sense that the writing produced through an act of voluntary discipline, (including seclusion) and is finally performed/expressed/ articulated through inscription. Austin and Ricoeur both saw inscription as the final way by which word becomes flesh. Whether it is the dream time of legend, or the production of narratives, the transmission of images is from the mind of the author to another/others’ minds, sharing a common assemblage of words, symbols and meanings capable of being further translated. This catapulting is what allows the texts of history and event enter the narrative record. Think of Heloise and Abelard, written in the fictionalized form. We know that they became lovers through contiguity (he was her tutor, her uncle his ecclesiastical patron). When they were secretly married, (or naturally cohabited ) they had to escape to the forests, where Abelard’s students followed him, to the Left Bank of the Seine, which was the birth of the University as we know it now. Abelard’s essay on transubstantiation and the Eucharist is still accessible through the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Hastings. So one understands that carnal love is dangerous, and that there is a price to be paid for it. Following this, according to the fictionalized account, the uncle sends assailants to castrate Abelard, Consequently, Abelard and Heloise are now separated for fear of death. Heloise joins a convent, and they continue to write letters to each other. If this is the legendary account, who is to prove its worth, factuality or value? Thus, there is only the commitment to interest, entertain and educate that the novelist has. Does venom entertain? We know from the current ‘Vampire – stories’ loving generation that these versions of fantasy have empowered an age set to accept the co existence of evil as an everpresent existential category. How do they deal with it? They recognize evil and they respond to it. It might be as Kangana Ranaut the actress does, in cyber space, or it might be as young men and women from the Cockroach party respond to the hegemonic and mythic forms in which religion seeks to exhort towards virtue, but the cost is denigration of women, and excluding them from many worlds,, specifically education. Literature therefore has cross currents, and the feminist force which Frances Collins uses in The Slayer Slain is to typify the autocratic landlord who coerces his workers, and behaves in the cruelest way possible. Is that a fictionalized account? Dalits have, time and time again, said the cruelty they received at the hands of the landlord was not imaginary, it was real. The Dream Time of Fiction The Collins couple, a missionary wife, and her powerful husband, together created a tapestry of events that survived 175 years. By publishing an English novella, and translating it into Malayalam, it became a powerful tool for the anti caste sentiments that the CMS (Church Missionary Society, Kottayam, Kerala) wished to promote. However, it served that cause only partially, since caste remained entrenched in marriage and commensality; and as with the allied Mar Thoma, there were separate churches known as Nazrani churches (for upper caste Christians) and Pulaya churches, for the Dalits. This segregation was not just prevalent, it continued till contemporary times, when the opening up of all churches for interdenominational sharing of eucharist has become a possibility by the Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical of May 2026, asking for a unified church which emulates the re-building of broken walls in the manner of distinct traditions of Nehemiah’s walls, as opposed to the creation of the megalomaniac Tower of Babel. Out of the standardized ritual of ‘facing the people’ imposed on Kerala Syro Malankara Christians who followed Orthodox patterns, as they traditionally faced the altar, during the Eucharist, came negotiations with the Pope, and revoking the order for standardization. The entire pursuit of standardization and the manifestation as Christ’s body through bread and wine has reached a point where rather than conflict; dialogue and permission entered a new phase in inter church ecumenical interactions. It is indeed a new ladder in theology and symbiosis between different cultures. Are theological dictums to be read interpretatively? Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical of May 2026, which has been widely read, presents with great clarity and bibliographical finesse, the reading of previous texts and tenets, in the new light of possible human extinction that we face globally. Clearly, there is a notion that the lay and ecclesiastical readers must be aware that the monolithic structure of the church is at variance with the federal nature of human life and belief. The terms of dignity and human rights ate drawn by Pope Leo XIV to mean that grace is understood in terms of the love that God gives each human, regardless of ethnicity, race, class or gender. In this understanding of transcendent love, which rises above sin and error, all are bequeathed this great and universal love. The abstractions of theology overcome political transgressions, but offer the idea of mercy and virtue as constant reminders to move towards justice and truth. Within this, the idea of human rights, the concentration on the worker not merely as an exploited unit in capitalism, but a living human being who must be understood (not merely in terms of the ‘minimum wage’ convenient for capitalism), but within the larger motif of the needs of the family. While the Catholic Church tries to mediate between capitalism and war, where pushbutton technologies don’t count either the costs of labour or of death, the narrative of the Encyclical proceeds in an extremely fascinating way. Who will bell the cat? Pope Leo X1V follows the principles of Social Doctrines laid down by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. This was an abiding commitment to the issues that afflicted human beings, where they were treated as less than human. By returning to the principles of human rights and ethics and morality as a measuring rule for a good society; where human life was not devalued, but in fact, celebrated, the current Pope returns us to a sense of responsibility, or what he calls the ‘evangelicalism of the poor’. We must understand that the strategies of survival and co -operation are what are most combined in this new theology of unanimity, which weaves people together regardless of their ideologies, religious beliefs or status. In this concern to bring people together in the current contexts of misery and dread during climate change and expanding zones of war, the Pope demands that we understand the significance of “subsidiarity” as the corner stone of a developing theology. This means that rather than thinking of monolithic structures, we must remain loyal to the needs of those who are at the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Only when we understand their needs, can we have a constructive theology that helps people live out the myriad social crises. Subsidiarity is the understanding of community needs, voices, networks and organizational facets of actions. It means that it is not Utopia to want better living conditions, it is the responsibility of the agents of change to re-vitalise the way in which human endeavor for justice and -good governance are rightfully projected. Utopia is a distant dream, but grass roots activism and support of the poor allows them to a chance to life. In this context, the Pope cautions us that dependence on AI as a necessary tool has its dangers. Efficiency by itself cannot provide the essential elements of empathy, care and catalysts for human interaction and exchange. In fact, according to Pope Leo XIV, it raises the problem of detachment from the craft of work, to leave it to the machine. Here, in abdicating responsibility to efficiency rather than creativity, much is lost. How can humans make sure that their own knowledge systems are not impeded by a parallel structure of consciousness? Much of this problematic of thinking about war, equality, and questions of gender interrogate concepts in a direction which demand tranquility and meditation. None of its good intentions can be disputed. And yet, we know that the category of women and third gender is side lined in the Encyclical by demanding that murder, abortion and contraception be treated at the same (equal) level. Further, within patrimonial structures, the Church while apologizing for slavery and antisemitism in previous centuries has not been able to change the connotations of everyday extremism and traditional consensus either in the case of war in its demonic and commercial aspect, or rights to freedom and life. Sufficient that the infallibility of the Pope had been undermined decades ago, and we can only accept the valour with which Pope Leo XIV offers us lucid possibility of a universal society based on love. If we return to The Slayer Slain, where the missionary husband and wife sequentially discuss dowry, caste hierarchies, violence and death, we see that nothing much has changed. Women still agree to marry within the definite boundaries of their community, with all the inbuilt hierarchies and transactions. To question these, would mean loss of membership in the church and community. Paulose the slave, loses his grandson to murder, (an act by the cruel landlord who in a fit of anger dashes the child to the ground) but Paulose saves the murderer’s daughter from a death by drowning, saying to the cruel Nazrani Landlord, words to the effect, “ You killed my child/I saved yours”. Then he disappears but the penitent land lord hunts for him to say he deeply regrets his crime. When at the end of the novel, in the section reconstructed by Reverend Collins, (after his wife Frances’s death) Paulose, being the truly loyal slave that he is, accepts the heartfelt apology of his master, and they are united in the Protestant Church of the CMS. The native Catechist who had caused the accident , which almost drowned the Landlord’s daughter, Mariam, in the first place, admits to the strong river current which took his boat out of its propelled route. He is a friend of the Landlord, and plays an important part in the narrative, probably a Nazrani too. His apprentice marries the Landlord’s daughter, and a complex story emerges. The hitherto cruel landlord sife is a Brahmin woman, who had been lost in Benaras and been adopted by Missionaries who had returned her to a school in Kerala. The Landlord’s marriage to this lost and found child, (whom he truly loves and never scolds!) and then her conversion to Christianity, had been arranged for her, by the CMS missionaries and so their children are able to discern the similarity between their mother and their Namboodri neighbour who had till now hidden his blood relation to them. Much of this fictionalized documentary evidence shows us the flexibility of the CMS in the mid 19th century. There were marriages made across borders, nothing was as was fixed in time and custom, or as was expected. All that was required of women was obedience, and devotion to the husband, and an acceptance of his will, and the loving patrimonial governance of women in the family. Where the novel shines is when the Landlord’s daughter objects to the proposed marriage between a rich neighbour’s son and herself. She fights for her rights to refuse the arranged match, as she has become literate, and can read the Bible. It is for this right that she contests her cruel father whose vulnerability, fortunately, is that he adores his eldest child. The fact that she wins that battle for autonomy and self worth is what the novelist couple attribute to the new domain of their influence. From this time on, the fluidity of the boundaries between lower caste and upper caste Christians dissolve, as the holding of hands between the Brahmin uncle of Mariam and the Dalit labourer Paulochen is made possible only because of the acceptance that in this life too, as new Christians they can be equals. The description of slavery and death, of possibilities of change in world view were thus proposed by the missionary couple in their novel. Conclusion The Pope’s 2nd Encyclical of May 2026 is a very dramatic and well argued statement against current day existence of slavery. It takes into account corporate overlordship as responsible for the lack of freedoms and rights to life, world over, among the working class. It highlights the way in which people are deprived of everything when they are forced to leave their homes due to geological and climate crises, or due to war or occupational force of circumstance. We have to emphasize that this concern is central to the Encyclical and offered as a continuing Social Doctrine of the Church representing 19th century Pope Leo X111 call to freedom, onwards to the confirmation of these ideas by Saint Pope Paul, and to Pope Frances, all of whom are extensively referred to. Just as a novel (Slayer Slain) highlighted the familiar practices whereby neglect and cruelty are everyday practices, so also the wisdom of elders may be transmitted through texts which assure us that peace and love can prevail. The fear that AI can take over the thought processes and abilities of individuals to the extent that ‘it‘ thinks entirely on our behalf and is promoted for its efficiency and its applicability strikes a chord of fear. Pope Leo XIV demands an enquiry into the provenance of workers and operators in the deep web, and the manner of their occupational conditions as they follow orders. Logic by the machine, automatism as a cannibalistic force is seen to be a totalizing force. It lacks empathy, though it can simulate it. Pope Leo XIV , who writes in detail about these fears, asks us can we evangelise to AI? This is in essence the problem. If we take the Kautskian Christ, whose followers were the poor, then how can we understand the wedge the Catholic Church places into the system which world over places priorities on weapons, war and trade? Here the Pope uses an advaitic route to suggest that each one represents the Christ, who before his death offered bread and wine as representation, transubstantiated, of himself. If this is the case, the discernment of a shift in theology has taken place, which allows for intereucharist relations to be established, and for those outside the church to be integrated, without danger to either. Hope is a fiction, and we must absorb what we can, and leave the rest to fate, which is non partial.