In my introduction, I have covered Marx’s elaboration of capitalism, in which capitalism starts from circulation to achieve accumulation of capital. Through
commodity circulation, the capital owner obtains an influential position in the system
114
of capitalism. The accumulation of profit becomes the original goal of capitalism.
Pran’s mimicking ability to take one identity after another can be regarded as an exchange process of commodity that circulates from one border to another for higher profits. Throughout Pran’s life, he follows the big Other as well as the superego that designates different identities for him. Every time he assumes a new identity attractive to others, he accumulates more profit and obtains a more influential and valuable position in the capitalist system. Eventually, he takes up the most valuable identity, Johnathan Bridgeman, and inherits his property. But throughout the mimicry, he also comes to sense that he has become an empty outcast, who can only estrange himself into a commodity-like identity. During the mimicry, he also discovers the explicit oppression of the big Other and the implicit allure of the superego. Eventually, Pran makes up his mind to unplug himself from the capitalist system of the British Empire and take a further step to reject the call of capitalistic society.
In his interview about The Impressionist, Kunzru admits that the character, Pran, represents his own alienating experience as an Indian boy in Britain. Like Pran, who has an English father and Indian mother, Kunzru has the experience in reverse, with an Indian father and English mother. Kunzru states that he, like Pran, finds difficulties and has had a terrible experience in being multicultural (Interview with Kunzru, 2003). With a conflicting recognition in his identity, Pran manages to assume different identities, but finds it impossible to fit into any one in the end. Though the novel deals with race and identity problems brought about by colonialism, I posit that it represents one of the early symptoms of global capitalism, which is imperial capitalism. In fact, the novel illustrates the oppression of the big Other in imperial capitalism and unfolds its exclusive effect. Through Pran, Kunzru designates the oppression of the big Other and the catastrophic result of over-dependence on it. For Lacan, the big Other appears
115
as the law, religion, knowledge, and language that produce and regulate order, rule, and meaning. Yet, the superego rises “where the Law . . . fails” and masks the void of the symbolic order (Žižek, Metastases 54). Throughout Pran’s life, he follows the big Other to take up one identity after another. In my introduction, I have covered Marx’s elaboration of capitalism, in which capitalism starts from circulation to achieve accumulation of capital. Through Pran’s mimicking process, he represents himself as a commodity that circulates from one border to another for higher profits. Every time he assumes a new identity attractive to consumers, he accumulates more profits and obtains more influential positions in the capitalist system. Eventually, he takes up Johnathan Bridgeman’s identity and inherits his money.
In the novel, Pran was fathered by an Englishman, who was suddenly taken away by a flood. His pregnant Indian mother was then married to a wealthy Indian man of a high caste, Amar Nath Razdan. Pran’s mother passed away after giving birth to Pran.
Unaware of Pran’s true father, Razdan raised Pran as his own son in a luxurious family. At fifteen, when Pran’s true parentage was revealed to his stepfather, Pran was thrown out into the street to become an outcast and pariah. To survive, Pran had to follow different father-like mentors in different stages and assume different identities.
On the one hand, these father-like mentors represent the big Other that dictates law, religion, and knowledge. On the other, they also stand as the superegoic figures that lure Pran into looking for and assuming new identities. When Pran loses the support of the big Other, he loses his identity and is plunged into fear and anxiety.
When he stops following the allure of the superego, he feels neither interest nor fantasy in his assumed identity. Throughout his mimicry, Pran discovers that he estranges himself into a lifeless shell of commodity. He also discovers the implicit oppression of the big Other and superego that transformed people in the British
116
empire into commodities. Eventually he extracts himself from the capitalist system of the British Empire.
In The Impressionist, the first father character that stood for the big Other is Pran’s Indian adoptive father, Amar Nath Razdan. As a distinguished attorney of high caste, he worked to defend the law in court. Back with his family, he was the master of the house who set up all rules and regulations. He published 276 articles in the national newspaper (Kunzru, Impressionist 30), which means that Razdan was the writer and producer of law and knowledge. Meanwhile, Razdan was an obsessive-compulsive who manically devoted himself to “the maintenance of impermeable boundaries” in law and regulations in everyday life (30-31). As a member of a high caste, Razdan favored clear demarcation and was afraid of the “collapse of
categories,” since the dissolution of demarcation referred to pollution, disorder, and disgrace. Therefore, he had to live his life following a strict law of hierarchy and sanitation like fighting a battle:
Pandit Razdan avoids shaking hands with the English Circuit Judge, . . . the real reason has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with his horror of touching a casteless beefeater with suspect personal habits.
Once an eager young English lawyer . . . clasped Razdans hand in his, before he could do anything to prevent it. . . . the shocked pandit, who had locked himself in the men’s cloakroom, obsessively washed his hands to get rid of the taints . . . . The collapse of categories appalls him almost as the fact of death itself. (33)
In the battle to fight for the law of the caste system and hygiene, Razdan exhibited his habitual effort of keeping the possible contamination away from his body and mind.
For Pran, his Indian father, Razdan, stuck to the deep-rooted belief that all
117
demarcation should be maintained at all costs. As a lawyer, he saw the world collapsing into a mess without the clear separation between boundaries and categories. So Razdan avoided shaking hands with the casteless English judge because the casteless beefeater did not follow strict laws of his high caste as Razdan did. When the polluted casteless Englishman shook his hand, it meant spreading the casteless pollutant to Razdan’s noble caste. The touch of the casteless Englishman jeopardized the strict law and order in the Indian caste system, destroying Razdan’s nobility and life. The obsessive gesture of washing his hands was a method of
purification to further ensure his position in the spiritual welfare. Throughout his life, Razdan worked hard to guarantee the distinctions in all fields from blurring into each other. As the big Other that regulates law and order, Razdan stood as the best Indian example of the big Other, who insisted on the clear demarcation and refuted mixture of law, caste, and blood. It became the main reason for Pran’s exclusion, because Pran was later unveiled to Razdan as a casteless illegitimate—the son of an Indian mother and a British father. To protect his world from mixture and destruction, Razdan had to throw his half English and half Indian son away from the purity and integrity of his high family caste.
After Pran lost his recognizable identity that came from the support of his father, he lost his own high caste identity in the Indian society. In Agra city near the Taj Mahal, Pran was first treated as the son of the wealthy and influential Razdan family.
He was the much-spoiled son of Razdan. But when the servant of Pran’s mother, Anjali, revealed the impure birth of Pran, the family saw him as a curse and disease that brought about the death of Razdan. Pran’s impure origin not only took up no position in the Indian caste system, but also threatened to corrupt the system.
Therefore, Pran was thrown not just out of the family, but out of the Indian caste.
118
When this happened, Pran lost the most important support of his Indian father qua the big Other. When thrown out, Pran’s status was worse than the casteless English or even the beggar, who had the lowest place in the castes. In the novel, even the beggar despised and derided Pran. In that moment, Pran experienced for the first time the horror of becoming the excluded undead. Being the undead is worse than having the most feared identity. Compared to the undead, the beggar with the lowest caste status still had an impoverished identity. People were willing to recognize the beggar and give their leftovers to him. People did not condemn or throw excrement on him. He was allowed to sleep on the road shoulder. Yet, for Pran as the undead, Indian people persecuted him for polluting their world. His existence contaminated the purity and integrity of the caste system. He brought disease and bad luck, and thus must be driven away. His ambiguous identity blurred the clear boundary between clean and unclean. In the end, Pran must beg the poor beggar to give him food and shelter. He became a boy, who was symbolically condemned and excluded not only by his own family, but also by the one who was ignored by the society, the beggar. To Pran, the beggar said: “Frankly, you should be grateful I’m talking to you at all” (51). For the beggar, Pran’s polluting existence was threatening his beggar position. When talking to Pran, the beggar risked being contaminated by the undead and could be excluded altogether from the Indian society. If this were to happen, the beggar would become the outcast of the society. He would not be able to beg for food, money, and shelter.
He would be left alone to die. This was what happened to the undead. As an undead outcast, Pran’s situation was worse than the dead. The paragraph depicting a funeral underscored Pran’s situation of the undead. When the magnificent funeral party passed by him, the picture formed a strong contrast between the corpse, whose symbolic identity was disappearing, and Pran, whose symbolic identity was dead.
119
Despite being physically dead, the corpse still had an identity that people cared about and adored, and thus was “wrapped tightly in cotton strips . . . strewn with marigold petals” and “accompanied by a couple of priests” (42-3). The identity of the dead was symbolically respected, while Pran was symbolically excluded and invisible in the eyes of the public. When the funeral party passed, Pran became invisible, inferior, and insignificant compared to the dead corpse. Compared to Pran, the corpse was treated with the symbolic ritual of love, dignity, and respect. To survive, Pran managed to take on another identity. He needed to find another recognized identity that was supported by another big Other. Pran’s life was living evidence that the big Other brought about the undead. Pran became the undead due to the oppressive exclusion of his father qua the big Other.
In order to avoid falling back into the position of the excluded outcast, Pran managed to find identities acceptable and valuable in the colonial society. He changed his intonation and gestures to take up one identity after another in different places as if wearing different clothes. Slowly he turned himself into a desirable object like a commodity that could be swiftly exchanged in the market. When he was adopted by the Reverend Andrew MacFarlane, he tried to change himself from an impure
mongrel to a pure English boy. For Pran, the Reverend Andrew MacFarlane served as a big Other who maintained religious law and order. But clandestinely, he had the other face, which was the representation of the superegoic obscene father. On the surface, MacFarlane served as the big Other for Pran since he taught Pran knowledge and religion, in which the whites dominated the world. As the symbolic figure of the big Other, MacFarlane practiced a strict religious order of control and categorization and created the idea that the European race rules the world with bigger and smarter brains than other races. Like Pran’s Indian Father, the Reverend regulated and
120
controlled everything from his house to his own body in a strict religious order. He preached the strict religion of self-control. In his religious practice, he believed that the power of strict self-discipline and regulation covering personal matters was the best way to control one’s chaotic life:
MacFarlane . . . lives in a space whose contents are arranged with a kind of right-angled vigor, . . . books placed in exact alphabetical order, . . . bed made up with soldierly precision . . . . Religious prophylaxis . . . dictates the condition of the Reverend’s wild patriarchal growth. Like the room, nothing about the man is the product of chance or carelessness.
(194)
MacFarlane employed religion to control his life and then eventually his mind. He saw the strict control on trivialities in life as a way to discipline the uncontrollable part in his patriarchal mind. He endowed the detailed control of his life with religious meaning, and thus followed the self-disciplinary rules like a pious Christian. To be faithful, he had to arrange things, such as study tools, books, and papers with a kind of right-angled vigor. By placing external things in order, he controlled and suppressed the internal abyss of his mind. In effect, religion gave MacFarlane the meaning and purpose to regulate and discipline his life. As a priest, he worked hard to preach the kind of religion that regulated the condition of wild growth. If he did not follow the external discipline and regulation thoroughly, he would feel the outbreak of wildness in his mind and lose the meaning of his life.
Reverend MacFarlane showed up as the big Other when he tried to teach Pran the knowledge of white superiority. After he adopted Pran, he renamed Pran as Chandra Robert and treated Pran like a son. He taught him “Latin and history and English grammar” (235). But the most important part he taught Pran was his theory of
121
craniometry. Through the methodology of science, MacFarlane studied the sizes of different skulls to prove the European white superiority and British imperial domination of the world. He wanted to create scientific evidence to support his hypothesis that the brain size of the European, especially the British, had exceeded all sizes of others, and thus explained why British civilization prevailed over others (196-97). MacFarlane developed his own theory that human beings of the world could be categorized into three different hierarchical levels. At the bottom, the primitive people had the cranial capacity only a little bigger than the apes (196). The Indian group fell in the middle (196). At the top, European elites had the largest space in the human skull sufficient for brain development exceeding all other less intelligent races (197).
In his theory, the white English had the superior biological and better religious advantage, which resulted in the whites dominating the world. He created a clear boundary and became the authoritative religious big Other since he taught Pran knowledge of white superiority. He also unconsciously influenced Pran to assume the white identity and discard his Indian self.
Despite his influential knowledge and religion, the Reverend MacFarlane was isolated from his wife and the Indian society, in which he became a declining big Other. Almost nobody in India, except Pran, cared about the Reverend. MacFarlane insisted on living a life separated from the lower races while his wife, Elspeth Ross, enjoyed making Indian friends and eating with her hands on the floor. Ross embodied everything MacFarlane was against. When MacFarlane’s knowledge and belief were threatened by his wife’s demonic world, he built “a wall” to protect himself from the filthy influence of the inferior race (225). The Reverend was shocked and frustrated to learn that his wife made friends with the black Indians and believed in spirits and reincarnation (226). When he failed to stop her, he accused her of being seduced by
122
Satan. He built the wall that represented a limit keeping his demonic wife and Indian pollutants from seeping into his world. By demarcating a clear limit up to eye-level, he could safely guard and maintain the integrity of his church and scientific
knowledge at all times. On the other side of the wall, she had debased the precious white blood and merged herself into those whose religion and knowledge were close to the primitive and unscientific monkeys (226). Although the Reverend protected his territory, he locked himself in the top of his fortress-like church, away from his wife and the Indian people to whom he should preach. He stopped being a powerful big Other.
As the Reverend ceased to be an influential big Other, he became the obscene Father of enjoyment or “primordial father,”21 (Žižek, Metastases 206) who found comfort and an outlet for the dissatisfaction and frustration in his life. By isolating himself from his wife and the Indians, the Reverend had neither family nor social life.
When he was rejected by the Indian public, he could treat them as a barbaric and uncivilized mass. But when he was denied by his wife, he was tortured by the denial.
Finally he went to Falkland Road where brothels were situated:
The missionary walking among the harlots. The valley of mouths . . . . Fears no evil. . . . The missionary toils over a splayed girl. Nails dig hard into brown skin. English words. . . . Screaming. He makes a fist. All the years. Hit hard. Harder. Somewhere else his forbidden white wife. Oh Lord God. (232)
When he lost his influence, the Reverend unfolded the opposite side of the big Other,
21 The “primordial father” is also called the “obscene father-enjoyment,” “the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment’” (Žižek, Metastases 206). The primordial father is . . . the “result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (206). As the primordial father,
“sexual commerce with women is his exclusive prerogative” (206). Žižek uses the primordial father to explain “how power generate its own excess, which it has to annihilate in an operation which has to imitate what it fights” (Parallax, 370).
123
the obscene Father of jouissance. He no longer cared about the law and order of God.
He walked among the prostitutes in Falkland Road that symbolized the vagina of a woman’s body, “the valley of mouth” (232). He feared no evil as no one cares about his law and order. When few care about the religious law and order, the Reverend felt
He walked among the prostitutes in Falkland Road that symbolized the vagina of a woman’s body, “the valley of mouth” (232). He feared no evil as no one cares about his law and order. When few care about the religious law and order, the Reverend felt