Debaditya Chakraborty1 & Rajarshi Bagchi2
1Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Bankura University
2Assistant Professor, North Bengal St. Xavier’s College
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
Man is the product of his environment, the latter connoting both his natural and cultural environs. The cultural environment, in turn, is determined by his socio-political and economic matrix. Behavioural sciences contend that a man’s environment may produce, shape, or alter his psychosomatic attributes. Genetic science, however, might argue that human attributes are inborn or cultural history shows how works of human genius are often the products and proofs of man’s relentless struggle against his environs. Indeed, the man/nature divide has been the most universal and enduring binary in any culture, where a polyvalent opposition is set between the human and the non-human. Briefly, man is both a creature and the creator of his environment. Any holistic discussion of the environment and its impact must include man’s psychosomatic health – a keep-well of which should be the citizen’s right as assured by the State. By engaging with certain canonical English literary texts, this paper will study the repercussions generated in an individual by his environment, and their collective impact on and import for any society, including the body politic.
Keywords: disease, environment, Welfare State
It is a commonplace of the human sciences that man is both a creature and a creator of his environment. Acted and acting upon, he is the go-between in the nature-nurture dialectic. A careful look around us attests to this man-nature dynamic. If a man has considerably controlled and shaped his environment, his over-exploitation of it has also brought dire consequences in its wake. The growing concern for Global Warming and its ominous effects, environmental pollution, population-explosion and threat of food-and water-shortage, the global disappointment over the failure of the Copenhagen Summit, the socio-political focus on ‘Green Peace’ and other environmental activities, the rising importance of Environmental Studies in the academic curricula—all these bear testimonies to that spirit of dualism beautifully captured on a cosmic canvas by the eighteenth-century English poet-mystic William Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.[i]
By any means, Law, Literature, and Environment is an unlikely collocation but perhaps not an unrewarding one since, if literature has its laws, there is also a literary dimension to law, and both have a bearing upon the ‘human condition’ in the long run. In this light, the term ‘environment’ begins to take up the semantics of an individual’s natural as well as cultural environs, the latter standing broadly for his socio-political and economic matrix. Concomitantly, any holistic discussion of the environment’s impact on health must be inclusive of an individual’s physical and mental health—a keep-well of which is his natural right, and whose assurance is the duty of a Welfare State. Our discursive field thus marked out, our paper proposes to analyze—by way of critically engaging with certain canonical texts of the English literary tradition—the psycho-somatic repercussions generated in an individual by his milieu, and their collective impact on and import for a given society, including the State.
In our search for the triadic interface between environment, literature, and law, we cannot but begin with the most canonical oeuvre in English literature: Shakespeare. And of all his immortal works perhaps none is so contextually rewarding as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark—a play in which disease, madness, and crime comprise an important thematic motif in the delineation of a world ‘out of joint’. Indeed, in Hamlet disease is indicated multiple times in various ways. Sickness and corruption take place at two related levels: within individuals and in the body politic. In their assorted forms, disease and rottenness create ‘iterative imagery’ which helps to individualize the major characters of the drama, announce and elaborate major themes, and reinforce the distinctive atmosphere of the tragic world.
The plot of Hamlet, as we know, hinges upon two crimes committed before the dramatic action unfolds: the usurper Claudius’s murder of his own brother Hamlet, King of Denmark, and his incestuous marriage with his sister-in-law, the deceased king’s wife, Queen Gertrude. In one of the most suggestive of dramatic openings, the lengthening shadow of disease and decay in Denmark is deftly delineated when, keeping watch for the intruding enemy, the sentinel Francisco notes that “tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart” (1.2.8). Horatio, while contemplating the reasons for the ghost’s appearance, observes how “… [the moon] was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (1.1.132) in Rome just before the murder of Julius Caesar. He believes that the appearance of the Ghost is a portent to Denmark, as the sick moon was a portent to Rome. Sickness is an important motif here because the murder of Julius Caesar parallel’s the murder of King Hamlet.
Shakespeare recognizes sickness as more of inner depravity. For many characters in Hamlet, sickness is a result of foul action which in turn leads to sickness in the outer world as well. With the murder of the beloved and powerful king by his own brother and the latter’s incestuous marriage with his sister-in-law, the Great Law of Being has been disrupted. The inevitable aftermath is a moral and ethical sickness that has overwhelmed the body politic, making true Marcellus’s apprehension that ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.90). In this sickly environment only ‘Things rank and gross in nature’ thrive. Prince Hamlet, once ‘The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,/ The expectation and rose of the fair state’ (3.1.151-152), is now reduced to an emotional-wreck whom we hear in his very first soliloquy agonizingly wishing for death: ‘O that this too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.130). To him, his widowed mother’s hasty marriage with his uncle Claudius is foul and unnatural: it is a result of her senses having been ‘apoplexed’ (3.4.73); it is a sin which has made her soul an ‘ulcerous place’ (3.4.145, 147). Even the utterly villainous Claudius feels rotten about his foul deeds:
“O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;” (3.3.36).
The topicality of this Elizabethan play is not far to seek: the factionist politics of violence and opportunism in a hegemonical power-structure; adultery, incest and their implications for the body politic; the violation of human rights—all these are very contemporary issues for us. Speaking on the evolutionary rationale behind revenge plays, Catherine Belsey observes, ‘Revenge is not justice (…). And yet the act of vengeance, in excess of justice, a repudiation of conscience, hellish in its mode of operation, seems to the revenger (and to the audience?) an overriding imperative. Not to act is to leave crime unpunished, murder triumphant or tyranny in unfettered control.’[ii] The problem of judicial overload, lack of speedy trials, the burgeoning volume of pending cases, the vast number of under-trials rotting in custody—all these instances of ‘justice delayed, justice denied’ often lead to horrifying riots, acts of arson and mob-killings: these are the revenge plays of our everyday reality. They are indeed a serious blotch on the efficacy of our welfare government to ensure the citizen’s constitutional right to equal justice. Belsey hits the nail on the head when she avers that ‘(…) it is the sovereign’s failure to administer justice which inaugurates the subject’s quest for vengeance.’[iii]
To move to the personal, and always ‘political’ issue of Hamlet’s madness, the play again puts before us the questions of right, responsibility, and legitimacy. In the play, Hamlet is depressed to the point of mania. The second act includes two soliloquies in which the depth of his depression is revealed. The soliloquy, opening ‘Oh that this sullied flesh would melt / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.129-130), marks Hamlet’s first reference to suicide. This depression in combination with mania makes him, in clinical parlance, a ‘Bipolar Disorder Sufferer’. Since Hamlet displays many manic depressive characteristics, the play’s emotional register seems to be composed of hills and valleys. Oscar James Campbell[iv] describes Hamlet as a series of meditative pauses followed by bursts of action—this is consistent with manic depressive behavior. Hamlet’s depressed phase is marked by brooding inaction and his manic phase is characterized by abrupt lunges toward action. During the entire play, he is in a state of paralyzing perplexity.
When it seems that stress begins to overtake him, Hamlet begins to lash out at the other characters. Sometimes he throws his tantrums in the solitude of a room and at other times he lashes out at people, especially to the ones he loved dearly, like Gertrude and Ophelia. Suffering from paranoia, he gets into a shell: Hamlet remains too sullen and reserved or becomes too ingenious in his words and actions in the presence of potentially harmful characters like Claudius or Polonius. It is Hamlet’s tragic irony that he is declared unfit to rule and thereby denied of his legitimate rights to the throne by those very people whose violent malpractices have thrown his world ‘out of joint’. Given Hamlet’s genuine mental sufferings, the suspicion voiced by Polonius that his madness seemed to have ‘a method’ to it might be appropriated as a critique of and a reproach to our traditional reluctance in acknowledging depression as a full-fledged disease, not an indulgence or a deliberate stance. It also reminds us that such diseases require a culturally as well as physically healthy environment alongside sophisticated medical care. From a legal standpoint, the State’s failure to extend these basic needs to all is a denial of the citizen’s natural rights to a healthy life.
Coursing ahead a couple of centuries, we find Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights turning upon the same thematic of abuse, violation, and madness. Denied of Catherine, of the rights to education and a decent living by his abusive step-brother Hindley, Heathcliff returns the same ordeal upon Hindley’s son Hareton, en route becoming a vengeful maniac himself. It should be fascinating to probe deeper into the ‘legal’ questions involved in this ‘amoral’ thematic of passion: questions like the violation of the laws of inheritance, especially when it involves the complication of adopted survivor(s); the law of primogeniture and the explicit or subtle exclusion of female survivor(s); marriage as a legalized imprisonment and reification of woman; the thin line of demarcation between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’, and so on. On a broader existential axis, the easy binary of ‘culture/nature’ is rendered problematic when the mists of genteel apathy and domestic confinement in the Lintons’ abode, Thrushcross Grange, is counter-pointed with the spiritual freedom and vitality of the ‘stormy’ den of the Earnshaws’, Wuthering Heights. Brought up in the wild Yorkshire moors and the equally wild environs in the Earnshaw house, both Catherine and Heathcliff are abnormally passionate and impulsive, and both finally end their tempestuous lives through a sadomasochistic course to illness, insanity and death.
We conclude our discussion with Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things. This hauntingly beautiful story teems with ‘small’ losses which add up and become too big for life to compensate. Here too, a ‘material perspective’ reveals a wealth of thematic patterns, involving questions of rights and duties, their abuses, and the role of society and the State in creating the right environment. Set in Ayemenem, a small village in Kerala, the novel tells the story of five generations of an upper-caste Syrian Christian family and their negotiations with their inner and outer worlds. The dynamics between physical and mental milieus is masterfully delineated in the book’s opening line: “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month” (1) (italics ours). Commenting on Roy’s Hardyesque art of using locale as a character, K.V.Surendran points out, ‘There was a time when Ayemenem was known for its freshness, an unpolluted river and matchless greenery which made life pleasant for the people there. But when the characters in the novel started losing their dreams Ayemenem did not stand a mute witness. It also started changing, changing for the worse (…).’[v]
A well-known face in the ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’, in her debut novel Arundhati criticizes the powers that be for their lack of concern for environmental pollution and above all for the absence of a comprehensive policy on Ecology and Environment. The river along the banks of which Estha walked ‘smelled of shit’ and was no more than a swollen drain, even in June—the beginning of monsoon in Kerala. The vested interest of the political parties and the government is exposed when a salt-water barrage is built down the river in exchange for votes from the influential farmer lobby. Depletion of fish-resources through fin-rot is caused by excessive use of ‘pesticides brought with World Bank loans’— a devastating aftermath of the much-eulogized Green Revolution. Choked to death with weeds and plastic-bags, the river is reduced to a ‘sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea’ (124). The results are disastrous for human settlement too: ‘Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents (125).
Another significant glimpse into this unholy nexus between capital and corruption is lent through the reference to the five-star hotel chain and tourism industry which are eating into the very heart of Ayemenem’s greenery and cultural purity. Like rainwater filling in the ‘PWD potholes’ on the roads, ‘Six hour classics (…) slashed to twenty-minute cameos” of Kathakali are performed in front of foreign tourists lolling in artificial swimming pools— all to fill the coffers of the hotel-owners. Globalization and the market economy have forced the artist to sell his art, his culture, his very being. As Arundhati puts it, ‘in despair he turns to tourism” and “hawks the only thing he owns; the stories that his body can tell’ (230). No wonder that in such a dismal scenario land-sharks and moneyed entrepreneurs are protected by the Establishment while they indulge in profit-motivated illegal activities, throwing all civic obligations to the winds.
In fact, exploitation and degradation had crept everywhere. The honest ration- buyers are tempted by ‘cheap soft-porn magazines about fictitious South Indian sex friends’ with ‘glimpses of ripe, naked women lying in pools of fake blood’ (13). Thanks to this miasma, the demographic character had been polluted: the mass could gather at a moment’s notice and beat to death a careless bus driver. Without any hesitation, they could smash the windscreen of a car that had dared to venture out on the day of an opposition bandh. The police officer, who insulted Ammu by openly calling her a ‘veshya’ (prostitute) in front of her children, stares in a ‘sly’ and ‘greedy’ way at her breasts as he speaks. Intending to intimidate her further, he follows up the verbal abuse through an indecency that would threaten her with further outrage of her modesty: approaching ominously, he forcefully taps her breasts with his baton.
The Ayemenem House itself had a story of decadence to tell. Once a dreamy house full of life, it was already on death bed when we see it, finally dying with the death of most of its inmates after decades of eventful existence. In the words of Pramod K. Nayar, “Ayemenem House has its own secrets – of illicit love affairs, repressed sexuality, sex scandals, alcoholism, brutality, wife-beating, cruelty, and others. Years later, after Rahel returns, she discovers that her mother’s room ‘had kept its secrets. It gave nothing away’. (91) The loss is of innocence, childhood, love, and their mother. All buried now.” The decadence becomes conspicuous in and through the sufferings of the marginalized sections in the hierarchy of the upper-caste Ayemenem family, namely the women and children.
The denial of rights to Ammu, both as a human and a woman, and her tragic struggle to attain them is the locus of Arundhati Roy’s sepia-tinted chronicle. Ammu is the ‘traditional’ Indian woman living under the debilitating ‘male gaze’—be it that of her domineering, abusive father Pappachi who beats her and her mother in his bouts of irritation, and whose insistence that ‘a college education was unnecessary expense for a girl’ (38) stalls her higher education forever. Or be it her husband, a drunkard, and nincompoop, who does not hesitate to pawn his wife for material gains. Even her brother Chacko, a self-proclaimed Marxist and Nehruvian idealist imbibes the feudal morality and male chauvinism prevailing in the Ayemenem house. An ‘Oxford Avatar of the old zamindar mentality’ (65) forces his attention on the women employees in the factory and exploits them: he had a separate entrance built for his room, so that “the objects of his ‘Needs’ wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the house” (169). Despite liberal progressive ideas, Chacko clings to the Christian law of succession and denies Ammu, Rahel and Estha their share in the family property. He keeps ringing into Ammu’s ears with a sadistic relish, ‘What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is also mine’ (57).
Ammu becomes an eye-sore of ‘our wonderful male chauvinist society’ (57) when she leaves her abusive husband and returns home. She is ostracized and tortured for daring to fall in love, that too with an ‘untouchable’. Disgraced and turned out of doors, Ammu is forced to earn a living by doing odd jobs. She is written off as a ‘fallen’ woman and is even denied the custody of her twins. Her lover, the Christian paravan (untouchable) Velutha, fares worse. Velutha is exploited and oppressed by the ‘God’ of ‘Big Things’ in His many Avatars: be it the ‘touchable’, elite social class of patriarchs like Pappachi; be it the Christian community of a devoutly religious, traditional Ayemenem; or be it the power-hungry, avaricious political bigwigs like Comrade Pillai who is a secular communist and self-styled ‘messiah of the Dalits’. A dutiful member of a political group and a responsible citizen of a Welfare State, Veluthais exploited by both the institutions, leave alone being protected by them. This cruel irony is brought to a climax in his brutal custodial death at the hands of a corrupt State Police, the officious keepers of the law.
This hydra-headed violence gets hold of the twins as well. Estha and Rahel’s mixed parentage rules out possibilities of their being either complete Hindus or complete Christians, an agonizing uncertainty that is underlined in their lack of a surname. NandiniNayar’s observation is illuminating: ‘The stigma of this mixed parentage, the disgrace of a divorcee mother all undermine their position in Ayemenem House (45). As the children of a disgraced daughter of the home, they can demand no right over/in the house (57). Although Chacko is similarly disgraced he lives on in the house.’[vi] Chacko not only ‘lives on in the house’ but as its sole owner breaks down the door to Ammu’s room in a fit of rage and throws her out. Floating weed-like in this sea of uncertainties, Estha is sucked into a vortex of silence and paranoia as a result of the sexual abuse he suffers as a child at the hands of the OrangeDrink-LemonDrink Man. His withdrawal symptoms reach extreme after his false testimony, extracted under duress, eventually kills Velutha. Rahel too carries her share of unpleasant memories: a fractured childhood, an alienated growing-up, a failed marriage.
The incest between Estha and Rahel thus becomes a bond of ‘hideous grief’, a pre civilised act which mocks and mourns the ‘God of Big Things’. As Pramod K. Nayar sums it up, the symbolic incest ‘marks a certain death, albeit in silent secrecy (…). It is a continuation, a homeostatic movement that extends the terror they have lived in for twenty-three years. The crypt closes upon the twins, one empty, the other quiet, as incompatible halves of the secret, an anasemic tragedy’.[vii]
This brief exploration of the literary heterocosm is apt to reveal that the worlds within and without are not so different after all. From pre-civilization dawn to our post-industrial twilight, ontology has always been inseparably intertwined with epistemological efforts of uniting the inside with the outside, the knowable with the unknowable, the Self with the Other. A proper environment is that synthetic matrix. It is the elixir that brings us to our fullest potential, to our brightest blossom. In the end, ours is the cultural ecologist’s dream of letting ‘each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.’[viii] (Thomas Carlyle). That is all we know on earth, and all that we need to know.
End Notes
[i] Blake, William. (1982). ‘Auguries of Innocence’, The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake, Ed. David V. Erdman, London: University of California Press, 493.
[ii] Belsey, Catherine. (1985). The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Dream,London: Methuen, 93.
[iii] Belsey, Ibid. 95.
[iv] From ‘Manic Hamlet’, <http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=4532>, Accessed on 14th January 2020.
[v] Surendran, K.V. (2001). ‘The God of Small Things – A Saga of Lost Dreams’, The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’, Ed. JoydipsinhDodiya and JoyaChakravarty, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
[vi] Nayar, Nandini. (2001). ‘Twin (Un) Certainties – Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Ed. JoydipsinhDodiya and JoyaChakravarty, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 81-86.
[vii] Nayar, Pramod K.(2001). ‘Cryptosecrets – Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’, Ed. JoydipsinhDodiya and JoyaChakravarty, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 80.
[viii] Carlyle, Thomas. (2010). The Works of Thomas Carlyle (Volume 26: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays I), Ed. Henry Duff Traill, New York: Cambridge University Press,
Works Cited
Bronte, Emily. (2003). Wuthering Heights, Delhi: Rohan Book Company.
Craig, W.J.( ed.). (1983). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,London: Henry Pordes.
Nayar, Pramod K. (2001). ‘Cryptosecrets – Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’, Ed. JoydipsinhDodiya and JoyaChakravarty, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 73-80.
Roy, Arundhati. (1997) The God of Small Things, New Delhi: India Ink.
DEBADITYA CHAKRABORTY: Debaditya Chakraborty is a PhD Research Scholar at the Department of English, Bankura University, P.O.: Purandarpur, Dist.: Bankura (W.B.)His areas of interest include Gerontology, Australian Literature, Trauma Studies and Himalayan Studies.
RAJARSHI BAGCHI:RajarshiBagchi is an Assistant Professor in English at North BengalSt. Xavier’s College, P.O: Rajganj, Dist.: Jalpaiguri (W.B.). His areas of interest include Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies.