Anitha Antony
H S A English
Govt. Higher Secondary School Muthalamada, Palakkad
Kerala
‘When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. … Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all.’(246)
Quite distinct from the notion of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus view existentialism as a philosophical and cultural movement which accentuates the individual and the experiences of the person and castoffs the tags, tasks, typecasts, definitions or other preconceived categories the individual fits into. In his categorization of ‘being’, Jean Paul Sartre expose two types , being –in –itself and being –for-itself. ‘Being-In-Itself is full of itself’. (74). It is engaged in the world, too busy for self-reflection. It refers to a non conscious being- the sort of phenomenon that is greater than the knowledge we have of it. It is just being what it is. The latter is defined “as being what it is not and not being what it is” (65). It is our potentiality to be more than we are being. The ‘for-Itself is perpetually designing itself not to be the In-Itself’. i.e. the nihilation of ‘being-in-itself’. This brings nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from being to form attitudes toward other beings by seeing what it is not.
A K Ramanujam’s poem A River negates the denominations attributed to it (the river) as life, fluidity, origin, creation and the epitomic symbol for metamorphosis and philosophical recycling. The river, pregnant with water, stirs up anxiety in human beings living by its banks. Sartre identifies this as an existentialist ‘angst’ which enable one to either act or to remain still. People witnesses the water levels ascend inch by inch and ‘of the precise number of cobbled steps/ run over by the water…’. But their anguish is not dealt responsibly. Their liberty to act is being curtailed.
People merely stay as onlookers incompetent to react or respond. They merely ‘look’
at
the way it carried off three village houses one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda …
as one view the other. This experience of the Other, according to Sartre, is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic
form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from “over there”, the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is “there” as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as he or she does. This experience of the Other’s look is what is termed the Look. The spectators witness the havoc caused by the river and those affected get a personal experience of the same. Similarly, the poets who sang of cities and temples fail to make out the mayhem created by the river during floods although the twins in the pregnant woman had a personal experience of what exactly it is ‘there’. ‘While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity, in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of one’s freedom’.( )The poet’s liberty to see or not to see, to write or not to write, about temples
,cities, summer or floods, is curtailed.
When one experiences oneself in the Look, one does not experience oneself as nothing but as something. The river is elevated to ‘something’ keeping apart its inundation and the catastrophic dilemma it posits. ‘It has water enough/ to be poetic’.
The look thus becomes a part of facticity which on the other hand is the ‘for-itself’s’ necessary connection with the ‘in-itself’.i.e. with the world and its own past. This is marked by the description of the river during the season of summer. It dries up leaving itself like a bare breasted boy whose ribs are being exhibited .The remnants of the past glory that of the period when there was water brimming can also be seen. Straws and women’s hair, which coagulate ‘the water gates’, act as a hindrance to the free flow of water in the river. This stands in contrast to the river during the floods. Here the past and its present are set in distinction with each other. The pity expressed by the poet is that even ‘the new poets still quoted the old’ ones- a Look into the past .Here the past can be taken as what one is, in the sense that it co-constitutes oneself . However, to say that one is only one’s past would be to ignore a large part of reality. A denial of one’s own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle. An individual does not have the liberty to choose his place of birth, his body, his value system and the like. But his values are very much ascribed on where he was born and a person is free to choose it – a liberty provided by facticity. This liberty is enjoyed by the poet too who can either act or react to such a drastic situation.
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as meaning that anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exist no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no values: We are usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they will be “our” values (103).
Sartre asserts that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (no thing-ness)—that ultimately
allows for free consciousness. But simultaneously, within our being (in the physical world), we are constrained to make continuous, conscious choices.
This dichotomy could be found in the poem too. The new poets and the old poets ,the city of temples and poets , the flood in the poem as people saw it, identical twins etc. This dichotomy causes anguish because subjectivity represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thought. Sartre opines that humans try to get rid of our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations or dreams designed to lead us toward some meaningful end.
The free surge of water is the ‘for-itself’-the being of consciousness which is reliant upon the beings around- the facticity of existence. Just as the mind conceives and perceives a stream of ideas and experiences paving way for plurality of thought, so does the river. From the genesis of civilization, there has been a river which might have served as a productive soil for the early settlers to seek their luck. Hence the bank of the rivers can be projected as the one where assorted notions and avenues for augmentation subsist. If we traverse back in history, we stumble on river banks as the instigator of a cult, cultivation and a culture. Within the cult arouse the need for observances and festivities. Thus rose the harvest festivals celebrating plenitude and wealth. It has also lead to the formation of a distinct dialect and a lifestyle. It has served to nourish the literature of the times too. No doubt a river can never flow on its own. It has direct or indirect relation to the people (the beings) around and affects their life and necessitates alterations. The evidence of which could be found during the summer season, when the debris of active living participation is brought forth by A K Ramanujam, by the presence of women’s hair- a cue of women who must have visited the bank for her daily ablutions and the animals who must have had a splendid time playing with the waters. So is the case with the pregnant woman, the cows- Gopi and Brinda, who preserve close affinity with the water body. The bard who carves with words the deluge must have witnessed the summer too, as an onlooker. This passivity is a part of the people leading a coastal life, concerned only about their daily bread which they could gain with least effort in comparison to those living in hilly terrains.
Nonetheless, Sartre asserts our conscious selections (guiding to often unconscious actions) run counter to our intellectual sovereignty. Yet we are bound to the conditioned and physical world—in which some form of action is always obligatory. This leads to futile dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constricting action; between the being and the nothingness that essentially coincide in our self.
Indeed A K Ramanujam’s ‘river’, too, brings forth nothingness as it devours three village houses,
a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies, with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
The river takes with it all the qualities ascribed to a being and consumes everything within its reach. As Sartre himself puts it ‘no being can escape nothingness’ (235).Here the river in A River is the case in point. The river’s indispensable correlation sandwiched between itself and its past and the world holds firm to facticity of its existence.
Works cited:
Hong, Edna and Howard (Trans.), Soren Kierkegaard. Works of Love. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1964.
Melhotra, A.K. (ed), The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern English Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.Sartre, Jean Paul. Hazel E. Barnes (Trans).Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Washington Square Press, 1993