Time, History and Cultural Spaces

211 Pages·2022·1.601 MB·English

by  Jayita Sengupta (editor)

TIME, HISTORY AND
CULTURAL SPACES
This volume brings together critical essays on time, history and narrativity
and the explorations of these concepts in philosophy, music, art and
literature.
The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to narrative theories
as well as philosophical discourses on time, memory and the self. D rawing
insights from western and eastern philosophy, it discusses themes such as
subjectivity and identity in historical narratives, theorization of time in
cinema and other arts and the relationship between the understandings
of existence, consciousness and concepts such as Kala, Aion and yugas.
The v olume also looks at the narrativization of history across cultures
by exploring modern fiction from China and India, murals of martyrs in
Northern Ireland, music and films set against the canvas of the Second
World War and the Holocaust, as well as diasporic cultural histories.
This volume will be an interesting read for scholars and researchers of
comparative literature, history, philosophy of history, cultural studies and
post-colonial studies.
Jayita Sengupta is Professor of English at Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma
University, India. She was a British Council Fellow, United Kingdom in
2000, a Fulbright-Nehru Teaching Fellow at Stanford University, United
States, and a teaching fellow to National Kaosiung Normal University
and Soochow University in Taiwan in 2013. As a member of the Society
for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI), France, she has
received travel grants for presentations at their Annual Colloquium s everal
times. Her research interests include gender, cultures of memory, n arrative
and translation studies. Besides academic essays and books, she has also
published her visual storybook, comprising four short stories with her
paintings, titled Shivelight and Other Stories, 2020. Her English t ranslation
of Bani Basu’s novel, titled Gandharvi: Life of a Musician, 2017, was
nominated for the Muse India Translation Award in 2018. Jayita is also
a mentor of the Indian Knowledge Systems, a division of the Ministry of
Education and is actively engaged in guiding the short research projects
of the scholars selected for IKS Internships Programme.

TIME, HISTORY AND
CULTURAL SPACES
Narrative Explorations
Edited by Jayita Sengupta
First published 2023
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-28748-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-31827-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31153-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003311539
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgements x
List of Contributors xi
Introduction: Narrative, Narrativity and Narrativization
of Time, History and Culturescapes 1
PART ONE
Narratives of Life, Time and History: Some Reflections
on Theory and Cultural Traditions 23
1 Life: A Critique of Historical Reason 25
SAITYA BRATA DAS
2 On Time and History: A Philosophico-Literary Hermeneutic 34
MOUSUMI GUHA BANERJEE
3 Deleuzean ‘Difference’: The ‘Sense’ of Flows in Cinema 44
DEB KAMAL GANGULY
4 Vaastu Shaastra: Continuum of Time Space and Existence 62
DIVYA JOSHI
5 Undying Death: A World View of Shamanic vis-à-vis
Indigenous Philosophic Traditions 71
SANCHITA CHOUDHURY
v
CONTENTS
PART TWO
Narrativizing History and Memory in Literature 81
6 Painting – Whitewashing: Liminal and Ephemera (l)
Memories of the Martyr in the Mural Literature of Ireland 83
KUSUMITA DATTA
7 “Beaten, Humiliated, and Cannibalized”: Representations
of China in Chinese Fiction, 1917–1966 97
HARISH C. MEHTA
8 Narrative and History in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet 109
CORINNE ALEXANDRE-GARNER
9 Trailing Through Trauma: Musical Narratives of the Holocaust 122
SAGNIK CHAKRABORTY
10 History, Memory and Time: A Study of Qurratulain
Hyder’s River of Fire 129
NISHAT HAIDER
PART THREE
Narrativizing Diasporic Cultural History 145
11 Journeys of the Travelling Tongue to Imaginary
Homelands: Rectifying Asian Food History in the National
Narrative in Canada 147
JULIE BANERJEE MEHTA
12 The Zebra Finch (Short Story) 163
CÉCILE OUMHANI
13 In Conversation 168
GEETHA GANAPATHY DORE AND CÉCILE OUMHANI
Bibliography 177
Index 190
vi
PREFACE
It is commonly believed that when Vyas Dev dictated The Mahabharata and
Shri Ganesh penned it down, there has been a semiotic transference of the
former’s desire for words, images and texts to the latter. This is not history
surely as we understand it or Itihaasa but pertains to mithas, which is a
collective memory of culture creating stories, myths and images. This myth
acts as a metaphor for a narrative that is first created in the mind before
it finds symbolic representation. Somehow this myth has always brought
to my mind images and clips from films from a very different cultural per-
spective. Say, for example, I could find connections between this myth and
the last scene of Amadeus (1984 drama film by Milos Forman, adapted by
Peter Shaffer from his stage play in 1979). This is the scene where Amadeus
Mozart is composing The Last Requiem, and Salieri is making notations of
the same. Much of the music is semiotically transferred, and it is important
for the two musicians to connect mentally before the notes are on the sheets.
This is one instance of a semiotic rendition of a narrative, which when
viewed by the spectators are meant to create resonances or echoes of a story,
where music and images together construct a “text” or a fictionalized ver-
sion of history. The second clip is from the 2004 Spanish film Mar Adentro
(The Sea Inside, by Alejandro Amenabar), where Ramón Sampedro, the
protagonist of the story, fights a campaign for euthanasia. Sampedro was a
swimmer, but on a diving venture, he meets with an accident which maims
him for life. There is a scene, – “And I came flying”, where Sampedro men-
tally flies out of his window to meet his beloved on the sea beach. The music
that accompanies the scene is “Nessun Dorma”, from Glacomo Puccini’s
opera, Turandot. The text Turandot has a history of its own through a long
chain of connections, for narrative connects with narrative across time and
cultural spaces, and all of this finds association and condensation in the
scene in the film, or rather in Sampedro’s desire for a kiss. To dredge up the
referential index, Puccini’s reading of Schiller’s 1801 adaptation led him
on to the earlier version of the play by Count Carlo Gozzi, who had prob-
ably adapted his version from the original story among the seven stories in
a twelfth-century Persian epic poem, Haft Peyker by Nizami. Sampedro’s
vii
PREFACE
desire becomes a metaphor across time, space and history to a point of
intensity where all time collapses. Such could be the power of a narrative,
which moves from the semiotic to symbolic representation. And in all the
three instances cited earlier, across cultures, the keywords are “to connect
and connect”. Narrativity then is an art of articulation through associations
of memory and history across time to understand the riddle of our existence.
The thrust of this volume is on narrative theories in western philosophy
chiefly, though there are contributions from other cultures for opening up
avenues for a comparative study. There would be a second volume to fol-
low, which would concentrate on South Asian narratives chiefly. This one
includes contributions which write about narratives of history and memory
in different cultures like Chinese, Canadian, Irish, French, German, etc. The
chief objective of this anthology and the second one to follow soon after has
been to explore how narratives of history, memory and time are constructed
in different cultures. It has also been my idea to explore narrative possibili-
ties in literature, art, murals and music from a historical perspective.
There has been an extensive theorization of Narrative in western philoso-
phy from the time of Aristotle to the present day. The Introduction to this
anthology is meant to create a framework for studies in Narratology to offer
a comprehensive idea to the reader about various points of view and various
approaches in this field of study. It has been my attempt to include a brief
overview of the theories of the narrative in the twentieth century and touch
on some contemporary ideas on narrative and history as a flow of thought
in western theory. Writings on the philosophy of Time in western thought
and in Indian and Shamanistic thought in this volume have been a kind of
a challenge to note the points of resonance rather than just the points of
departure. Ultimately all theories, all kinds of narratives, which construct
stories of identity, self and the meaning of existence, are attempts to under-
stand different shades of reality. In other words, a narrative connects to
“storytelling”; it is also a careful construction of words and ideas, colours
and musical shades to depict what one in Indian thought would refer to
as “Shabda Brahman” and “rupantar”. The method of articulation creates
patterns in the mind of one who tells the story and the listener, who is on
the receiving end. Perceptions flowing from the speaker may have different
connotations in the mind of the listener.
While I would be discussing orality and memory in the second volume,
here in this anthology, it has been my endeavour to include essays which
would discuss narratives of history and memory in literature, art and cul-
ture. If narrativization of history in art and music has semiotic connotations
of culture and nuances of the historical context(s) in which they are deliv-
ered, narrativity becomes a complex terrain of ideas moving beyond history
to the realms of psychology and power structures that operate in societies.
So, the gendering of a narrative is bound to happen, say for example, the
associations that follow with Wagner’s music, as a kind of an unforgettable
viii
PREFACE
painful memory of the Holocaust. Music and art become, in such cases,
semiotic metaphors of a memory, historicizing the context. If in literature,
there is a fictionalization of history at a given point in time, in the case of
murals and music, narrativity has its own techniques and purposes of its
“storytelling”.
With such ideas on narrativity and narrativization, this anthology I hope
will provoke the readers to a comparative and analytical understanding of
life and reality and storytelling about the same.
ix