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The Anxiety of Acceptance in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Namesake"
The traveling protagonist encountering myriad cultural
cornerstones always carries that embryo from which fascinating literature emanates. The enigmatically unpredictable locus of observation of a sensitive mind in exile or in the cross-roads of various cultures has always been a storehouse of absorbing tales, from The Ramayana to Gulliver’s Travels where fantasy carries the seeds of powerful allegory. Modern man lives a variety of exiles within himself, as the world increasingly decreases in the mind.There is that exile which emancipates,along with that which traumatises. There is that which does both, for the journey within can reach the Conradian “horror” as well as the “god-touch” Sri Aurobindo speaks of in the opening lines of Savitri.
In "The Namesake",the encounters,both serendipituous and chronological,often transpose their effects,as the mind prepares to receive them,in a way akin to the donning and doffing of cultural overcoats that fit in only on certain brief moments. The Namesake is a story of cultural oscillations, like flamboyant yet uncontrolled movements of chess-pieces that often lead one to a no-escape zone and yet the phoenix quality in the novel always carries the fragrance of a rebirth. To make a scientific analogy,it is a cultural version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle seen through the eyes of a many-named character,who,aptly enough,is called “goggles” by his sister.
Throughout the novel,there are images of donning and doffing of various entites to suggest the stepping into and the stepping out of sometimes fascinating sometimes scary foreignness.The first such image in the novel is the unmarried twenty-year-old Ashima’s stealthy stepping into an unknown man’s(who would be her husband) shoes,feeling “the lingering sweat from the owner’s feet” mingling with hers- “the closest thing she had ever experienced to the touch of a man”- a prelude to the much vaster foreignness she would encounter in and as America.
Ashoke’s life follows a parabolic pattern premised on seredipituous encounters, tryst with death and rebirth. Fascinated b Gogol’s short story The Overcoat he develops a strange yet overwhelming attachment to the protagonist of the story; “he was captivated by the absurd,tragic,yet oddly inspiring story of Akaky Akakyevich”. Since The Namesake bridges cultural realms,it would not be absurd to create any cross-cultural cross-linguistic link. The word “ akaki” , in Bengali,connotes a strong solitariness and it is the story’s study of the solitariness of the self amidst an alien world that appeals to Ashoke in a powerful way. Akaky,the bengali adjective for solitariness,is in perfect harmony with the protagonist of Gogol’s story as also with the major incidents in Ashoke’s life- his solitariness of survival in the devastating train accident due to the fact that he was awake and reading The Overcoat ,his solitariness in his life in America despite his family and lastly,the almost comical(Ashima on hearing about it for the first time,shook her head, “a small laugh escaping from her throat”, as she tried to explain that her husband had admitted himself due to a stomachache)suddenness of his death following his solitary or “akaky” drive to the hospital. In his attraction towards Akaky, Ashoke is “akaky” in his miraculous survival as well as in his death.
With this cross-lingiuistic reading, a seemingly unimportant episode in the novel gains an almost mystic significance- the walk of the father-son duo,across the backwater,to the very tip,in cape cod.though all of them had gone to the place together,it was only the father and the son who walked to the point- the “ akaky” Ashoke followed by Gogol- the father-son paradigm in a continual state of fascinating flux. The chapter ends with Ashoke’s words to gogol: “remember that you and I made this journey,that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go”.
The protagonist of the novel,however,is Gogol Ganguly,who is told that he can be classified as an abcd(American born confused deshi) though he “never thinks of india as desh”, but “as americans do,as India”. Like Shukumar, in Lahiri’s short story A Temporary Matter in The Interpreter of Maladies, Gogol too does not possess “his own childhood story of India”(A temporay matter). As a child,he and his sister are “dragged off to a high school or a knights of columbus hall overtaken by Bengalis,where they are required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food”- an experience as distastefully foreign to him as the American accent is,to his parents. The first real epiphanic moment in his life occurs in a school trip to a graveyard where “the peculiarity of his name becomes apparent”, as he “goes from grave to grave with paper and crayon in hand,bringing to life one name after another”. He shudders at the thought that names,like people,can die too. What he does not know as yet is how his namesake had brought a new life,wrought a rebirth to the person who in turn,gifted Gogol Ganguly his life- creating a full circle of life giving,with the two Gogols at either poles of it. From here on,till the end,the journey is from one Gogol to the other,along the circumference of the circle of life.
Published: October 22, 2007