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Abstract
This essay explores the connection between spectrality and historicality in Rabindranath Tagore's short story ‘The Hungry Stones’. I bring this ghostly story in a dialogue with Tagore's prose essay ‘Historicality in Literature’ to argue that the function of the ‘spectrality effect’ deployed by Tagore is to exteriorize the discourse of realist historiography. My argument here is twofold: first, I argue that Tagore, through this ghostly story, questions realism's attempt at turning literature into a totalizing narrative. Aesthetically predicating his narrative on the limitations of recorded history, Tagore tries to reach at an understanding of ‘human history’ by invoking the spirit of a nameless woman who never found her place in ‘national history’. Second, I claim that the spectrality of this narrative is not limited to the content only. The casual beginning and the abrupt ending of the story not only reaffirm the ghostliness of the narrative, they also spectralize the literary form itself. By questioning the finitude of literature in its realist, representative role, this story also enables an understanding of the limitations of the assumed and linear relationship between postcolonial literature and history.
Notes
1 Tagore was always obsessed with ghosts and afterlife. Kadambini, the protagonist of ‘Living or Dead?’, comes back to life, as her dead body is about to be cremated. Failing to convince anyone of her life, she says, ‘I have left the kingdom of living. I am my own ghost.’ When Kadambini commits suicide, the story ends thus: ‘By dying, Kadambini proved that she was not dead’. ‘[By] organizing his tight narrative around the concept of liminality’, Lalita Pandit Hogan argues, ‘Tagore de-familiarizes a familiar reality to cut through the deadening of sensibility by means of habituation’ (2012: 76).
2 Cheah draws on Derrida's work on spectrality to argue that the haunted state of the postcolonial nation finds its perfect metaphor in the figure of the spectre, not in the life-force eschewed by ‘organismic vitalism’.
3 All excerpts from ‘The Hungry Stones’ are taken from C. F. Andrews’ translation in the collection of short stories by Tagore, The Hungry Stones and Other Stories, available online at http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rt/hungry.htm.
4 An excerpt from Derrida's characterization of ‘hauntology’ is not entirely out of place here: ‘Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time … Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being … It would harbour within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly’ (Citation2006: 10).
5 Jameson sums up this aspect of Derrida's characterization of spectrality succinctly: ‘Hauntology … serves to underscore the very uncertainties of the spectral itself, which promises nothing tangible in return … Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past … is still very much alive and at work, within the living present; all it says … is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us’ (Citation2008: 39).
6 ‘Haunting is unsettling to the very degree that a past remark or event or figure hovers over the present, thereby undoing the line between past and present.’ The haunted protagonist, ‘touched or suffused by something that one cannot quite recall’, is caught ‘between history and memory’ (Brown Citation2001: 153).
7 Rosinka Chaudhuri, however, indicates that the title of the original essay has a more complex history. The essay was first published by Buddhadev Basu with the title ‘Sahitye Aitihasikata O Sahityer Utsa’ (‘Historicality in Literature and the Source of Literature’). As Chaudhuri rightly argues, the second part of the title, which does not appear in the edition Guha uses, undercuts the ambiguity of the first half. Looking at a letter Tagore wrote to Basu after this, Chaudhuri further points out that the poet acknowledged the extreme nature (barabari) of his ideas expressed in the essay (Chaudhuri Citation2004: 106–8).
8 In the short essay ‘Truth and Real’ (‘Satya O Baastab’) Tagore argues that literature enables the human being to capture her ‘true nature’ (satya prakriti), which is different from and larger than the mere real (baastab). The real, for Tagore, almost invariably fails to capture the totality of human existence; whereas the corpus of literature and art often directs humanity towards its true destination (Citation1974c).
9 Echoes of a similar suspicion about recorded public history can be heard in Tagore's response to renowned historian Akshaykumar Maitra's article ‘Aitihaasik Jatkinchit’ (‘Historical Tidbit’), published in the Bengali journal Bharati in 1912, where Tagore (Citation1942: 510) considers historical truth to be an amalgamation of historical events and human mind.
10 Famous nationalist leader Bipin Chandra Pal had this to say about Tagore's writings: ‘Much of Rabindranath's creation is illusory. His poetry has seldom been materialistic; one can also observe this want of materialism in the characters he has created. Rabindranath has written many short stories and a few large novels, yet very rarely does one come across in reality resemblances to any of the characters he has drawn’ (quoted in Chakrabarty Citation2002: 156). Pal goes on to blame Tagore's aristocratic lineage for his disengagement from the reality of common people, specifically the economic lower class.
11 See, for instance, Ray (Citation2004); see also Chakrabarty (Citation2002: 149–79).
12 Ghosh has expressed his fascination with this story on more than one occasion. He translated it for the literary magazine Civil Lines. Ghosh also uses the ‘tropology of the spectre’ (Bishnupriya Ghosh Citation2004: 198) in his writings in order to challenge the epistemic dominance of Enlightenment rationality in a postcolonial context. Bishnupriya Ghosh (Citation2004) and Nayar (Citation2010) argue he uses the trope of the spectre and the uncanny to invoke the spirit of the historically and geographically dispossessed – somewhat similar to Tagore in ‘Hungry Stones’.
13 Although Chakrabarty does not look at ‘Hungry Stones’, he identifies a ‘division of labour’ between Tagore's prose and poetry (Citation2002: 151). While his prose pieces dealt with the social maladies of rural Bengal, Chakrabarty rightly points out, Tagore's poetry celebrated the ‘arcadian and pastoral beauty’ (Citation2002: 153) of the same places and communities.
14 In another essay Ghosh takes a similar position regarding history and literature: ‘I think the difference between the history historians write and the history fiction writers write is that fiction writers write about the human history. It's about finding the human predicament; it's about finding what happens to individuals, characters. I mean that's what fiction is … exploring both dimensions, whereas history, the kind of history exploring causes, causality, is of no interest to me’ (Citation2002: 18).
15 Cheah (Citation2003) extrapolates Derrida's idea of the ‘living dead’ to argue that western historiography, specifically as espoused by Hegel, reduces the people of the colonized periphery to the level of zombie-like beings residing in the in-between zone between life and death.
16 Delivered on his birthday in 1941, this was Tagore's last public speech.
17 A short story – ‘a fragmented and restless form’, Nadine Gordimer points out – ‘is like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness’ and ‘doesn't deal in cumulative’ (Citation1994: 264, 265).
18 The translation is mine.
19 Tagore's desire for the literary eternal is different from and connected with his belief in internationalism. While the latter was more of a political belief in a spatial continuity across human groups, the temporal eternal he refers to is an aesthetic and spiritual gesture. These concepts, however, can be conceptually connected, as they both attempt to deny the boundaries of the discursive responsibility of nationalism ( as he elaborates in his essay ‘Nationalism’) by imagining an essential futurity (Viswanathan Citation2004). Like his literary ideas, Tagore's belief in political internationalism also came under severe criticism from anticolonial groups in India.
20 I borrow this idea from the connection Radhakrishnan (Citation2008: 219) makes between Guha's use of ‘limit’ as a category and the concept of the ‘unthought’ in Foucault.