Abstract
Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat is explicitly a complex novel which allegorically shows how human beings are controlled and trapped by an inconspicuous but unavoidable force. The story of the novel usually invites many interpretations but the narrator who is a prisoner in a nameless detention camp resembles the trapped life of human beings. A beast eats, grows, collects foods, does sex and thus, survives in the world. In a materialistic world, human beings are also entrapped with their own businesses like earning money, collecting foods, doing sex, taking bulky entertainments and leading their lives like beasts. They remain busy with the series of insignificant events of life and repeat the same activities every day. But a human being has intellectual faculties. He/ She can think and can create the opportunity of contributing to the civilization. Unfortunately, what happens in the world is that human beings become a part of the system of dehumanizing themselves consciously or subconsciously with the influence of a ‘force’. This ‘force’ may be social mechanism or anything but at one stage of life, everyone feels the urge of emancipation whether he/ she can attain it or not. The Virgin Fish of Babughat connects the absurd literature like Waiting for Godot which also deals with the ‘trap’ of human beings. Estragon, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and Aparesh, Chandrima in The Virgin Fish of Babughat meet the similar fate and it is ‘waiting’ for the uncertainty. But what is more in The Virgin Fish of Babughat is an urge of emancipation reflected by Aparesh and Chandrima. This paper aims at showing how the narrator becomes the representative of entrapped human beings on the earth including different discourses of freedom. Rediscovering the concept of body and soul, human relationship, uncertainty, hatred, animalism, waiting, time, pessimism, optimism etc in the novel accelerates the thoughts of the readers who also encounter many an unanswered question at every moment.
Any study of human existence naturally invites the idea of ‘trap’ and ‘the urge of human beings to achieve freedom’. Human-reality resembles the fate of Tantalus, the son of Zeus with the nymph Pluto in Greek Mythology. For stealing ambrosia and nectar and for his intension to reveal divine secrets, he was punished for eternity.
Over the pool fruit trees hung heavy laden with pears, pomegranates, rosy apples, sweet figs. Each time he stretched out his hand to grasp them the wind tossed them high away out of reach. Thus he stood forever, his undying throat always athirst, his hunger in the midst of plenty never satisfied. (Hamilton 293)
The tragedy of human beings is that for some visible or invisible reasons, they consciously or subconsciously dehumanize themselves.
The novel The Virgin Fish of Babughat starts very abruptly with a confusion of the narrator about his name. “My name is Aparesh Nandy. But how can I be sure it is Aparesh, not Animesh? Or perhaps Akhilesh?”(3). The narrator names himself at the very first line of the text and he confuses the readers in the second line! Actually, it implies a thought that nothing is certain in our life and therefore, there is no significance of ‘name’. Human beings get names as defaults and on this ground, it cannot be identical in any sense. In fact, the ‘trap’ begins with the ‘naming’. With the ‘naming’, a person gets separated categorically from others. After naming, he does not remain only as a human being anymore; rather he is identified as Muslim or Hindu or Christian now. Even before understanding anything, he is set in a particular community/ group/ religion/culture. This is how, he starts getting entrapped by the social or religious force(s) even before his level of understanding starts.
The text upholds Aparesh, the narrator as a prisoner who hopes of getting freedom after the completion of writing a huge stock of papers. He is completely in dark about the reason of his imprisonment as well as his captors. Counting Aparesh’s incidents symbolically, this imprisonment is very much true for any human being who steps every single mark with uncertainty. Hamlet says: The world is a prison (Hamlet 2.2.250). Considering the people around the world and their activities, Hamlet’s statement doesn’t seem to be ‘a metaphor’ at all. William Shakespeare, in his As You Like It, laments for the futility of human relationship on the earth. “Most friendship is feigning, most loving more folly” (2.7.195).
Nevertheless, human beings continue their lives with ‘hope’ and ‘waiting’. Tragically, everyone is like Estragon or Vladimir in Waiting for Godot in regards of ‘waiting’ which is, in fact, a never-ending route. People keep waiting throughout their lives; the issues appear one after another but their ‘waiting’ never comes to an end. In The Myth of Sysiphus, Albert Camus insightfully explains: “Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world, the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility” (51). In this trap of sterility, human beings often get confused in the ‘absurd’ world but continue working the same repeatedly without being conscious about the significance of their works. Actually, human beings live on ‘such repetitions’.
While narrating, Aparesh becomes confused again and again. Sometimes he uses some words but he himself becomes confused about the meaning of the words: “You will find that in the first seven or eight lines the word ‘but’ has been used perhaps five or six times. Anyone who knows how to handle language will not do such a thing” (5).
At the very beginning of the novel, Lokenath addresses a force as ‘they’ and throughout the novel, this ‘they’ is a mystery. But this ‘they’ is portrayed as the most significant and active force in the text which has a definite purpose though it is not easily explainable. ‘They’ are strong but unknown, unrecognized and masked. In a personal letter to Saroj Bandopadhay, a major critic in Bangla and one of the earliest reviewers of this novel, Lokenath Bhattacharya wrote in 1973:
For a long time my imagination has been haunted by the spectre of a social system which attempts desperately to turn human beings into comfort-loving carnal creatures. Its aim is to stifle all introspection and resistance, to divest the individuals of their name, their identity and their language, to bring them down to the lowest level of existence through physical as well as spiritual nakedness, to make them forget the larger anguish of life by creating and satisfying their sensual needs. In other words, to imprison them, to banish even the longing for freedom from their space of confinement and through careful and stringent surveillance to reduce their lives to a bestial pattern of behaviour and habit. (Mukherjee xii)
Lokenath’s idea of such a social system invites a lot of issues that question contemporary life and its various manifestations. As the civilization progresses, human beings have been gradually getting entrapped with repetition. Considering a very few exceptions, the lives of human beings are almost struck with repetition of the same activities.
In line with the repetition of activities, Beckett’s use of language in Waiting for Godot probes the limitations of language both as a means of communication and as a vehicle for the expression of valid statements, an instrument of thought. Different modes of breakdown of language have been noted in Waiting for Godot. Misunderstandings, clichés, repetitions, inability to find the right words, dropping of punctuation marks remind the audience about a language which has lost its function as a means of communication.
Vladimir: Pull on your trousers.
Estragon: What?
Vladimir: Pull on your trousers.
Estragon: You want me to pull off my trousers?
Vladimir: Pull ON your trousers. (Beckett 2.124)
Trap of repetition results from human tendency of getting comforts. As a comfort-loving creature, he cannot go beyond name, cloth and body and this lacking gradually leads him to an intellectual vacuum. Aparesh says: “Except this unclothed body and the lingering life that still beats within, there is nothing I can call my own today” (3).
This ‘naked body’ is highly symbolical. The narrator says: “But if you ask me what is the purpose of putting the mirror in my room, I’ll be in trouble because what can I see in it except this naked body of mine?” (4). In fact, human condition with all its manifestations centres round the ‘body’. Whatever people usually do, they do to ensure the physical comforts. Human beings mirror themselves in terms of name, body and cloth. In The Virgin Fish of Babughat, a mirror is kept in narrator’s room so that he can be felt his nudity. This mirror reminds him repeatedly that he is nude like animal. The captors want that Aparesh must lead a ‘body oriented life’ and he gradually loses his humanistic characteristics and attains animalistic attributes. Mirror is a device through which one detects oneself. On this ground, one may come up with questions like: Do we really see ourselves? Do we confront ourselves before the mirror? How do we justify our activities? Aparesh says: “Before I came here I never had the opportunity of looking at my body at such close quarters” (4).
Apart from ‘unclothed body’ and ‘lingering life’, scholars may ponder over soul, concept of God etc. Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at Call Center appears with the idea that to hear the voice of God or to be instructed by inner-self, one has to exclude all the links of material obsessions so that the sound can become clear and unrestricted. Materialism, lack of commitment etc are the conspicuous obstacles of this journey. To pick out the guidance of God, we have to make our ‘own’ clear and transparent. God in One Night at the Call Center tells:
Yes, the little voice inside that wants to talk to you. But you can only hear it when you are at peace—and then too it is hard to hear it. Because in modern life, the networks are too busy. The voice tells you what you really want. Do you know what I am talking about? (203)
God continues:
And the voice is easy to ignore –because you are distracted or busy or just too comfortable in life. Go on, ignore it—until you get tangled in your own web of comfort. And then you reach a point like today, where life brings you to a dead end, and there is nothing ahead but a dark hole. (203)
In line with God’s statement in One Night at Call Center, the narrator’s view on his imprisoned life in The Virgin Fish of Babughat or Hamlet’s popular dialogue “the world itself is a prison” (Hamlet 2.2.250), human stories get struck with name, body and cloth in terms of power and sex.
The web of traps includes loneliness, another ever-lasting companion of human beings, which makes every single individual suffer with its different exposures. In The Music of Dolphins, we come across a same kind of feeling: “I don’t know what I am thinking. But I am alone. I am trapped in the net of the room. In the net of humans. I think may be I am drowning in the net of humans” (Hesse,110). Characters like Aparesh, Chandrima, Estragon, Vladimir experience loneliness in individual ways.
Human beings are also entrapped with the ‘concept of truth’. Truth is such a relative and almost unattainable notion which itself doesn’t have any colour. “The problem with truths about the world is that the real world is not directly known to us. We know the world through perception and conception. And concepts belong to our subjective mental world, while objects belong to an objective physical world.” (Philosophy of Nature). No one claims anything to be true regarding the captors in The Virgin Fish of Babughat or Godot in Waiting for Godot. Whatever the readers or the audience comes to know, they know in the light of Aparesh or the boy.
Aparesh clearly states that he does not write anything intentionally. Rather, he is enforced to carry on writing. He doesn’t want to tell anything or write anything—but he becomes compelled to tell or write. The conversation between Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot also seems to be ‘a forced conversation’ where language fails to establish a meaning.
Within this trap of invisible enforcement, human beings chiefly stick to ‘waiting’. Throughout their lives, they always get entrapped with ‘waiting for something’. It is in the act of waiting that people experience the flow of time in its purest, most evident form. When people are active, they tend to forget the passage of time; but if they are merely passively waiting, they are confronted with the action of time itself. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot starts with a country road, by a tree, where Estrgon and Vladimir keep themselves waiting for someone. At the end of this act, they are informed that Godot, with whom they believe they have an appointment, cannot come but he will surely come the very next day. Act II precisely repeats the same pattern. The same boy arrives and delivers the same message. Act I ends: “Estragon: Well, shall we go? /Vladimir: Yes, let’s go” (1.84). Similarly, The Virgin Fish of Babughat starts and ends with the same situation. Like Estragon and Vladimir, Aparesh waits for his freedom but it does not literally come. But the difference between these two is that ‘an urge for emancipation’ of human being is exposed in The Virgin Fish of Babughat.
The idea of ‘freedom’ always includes a popular proverb: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau 5). At the very beginning of the novel, Aparesh laments:
You can, because you are not like me. You have books, not one or two, but five hundred or a thousand—you have a roomful of books –or if you don’t have books at home there is always a library nearby. You can go there. Why don’t you? You are a free man, you can walk. (7)
But can ‘a free man’ move freely? Amidst uncertainty, he is actually entrapped with habits. With the gradual advancement of technology, people are getting deceived with new forms of social mechanisms including social media. With the fast paced growth of life, people learn to be faster and subconsciously get tangled with earning money and ensuring physical comforts. This common trend of this material world actually doesn’t even allow human beings to go for ‘rethinking’ about themselves and their ‘happiness’ in the true sense of the term. But everyone feels an ‘urge’ of gaining freedom at least at one stage of life. In The Virgin Fish of Babughat, the urge of emancipation starts with ‘a murder’ which is actually ‘a protest’ against this mechanism of dehumanization:“Yes, Chandrima has murdered the child—her own new born son” (138).
Chandrima murders her new born child not to assist the plan of the captors of multiplying the beast-like human beings. This murder actually pauses the possibility of their freedom but it provides the readers with a message: “True, there is no question of our release. Our enemies know we have understood their trick and are preparing our strategy for a counter move. And at least one of us has provided the leadership –our Chandrima”(138).
The concept of ‘freedom’ always invites a paradoxical notion. Satre in Being and Nothingness points:
Thus we begin to catch a glimpse of the paradox of freedom: There is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human-reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is. (629)
People consider certain facts to feel themselves ‘free’. Freedom of acceptance or rejection is one of those facts. But the problem is that it relies on one’s knowledge about what is certain. Nothing is ‘fact’ in this world; every truth is in the light of another ‘fact’. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sysiphus mentions a term ‘absurd freedom’:
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties –my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack, which means nothing within the limits of my condition?” (Camus 38-39)
Searching the meaning of life and giving efforts to achieve ‘freedom’ in an absurd world are almost fruitless for human beings. But they cannot ignore the urge of ‘getting freedom’ at a particular stage of life:
But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining. (Camus 45)
The Virgin Fish of Babughat is different from other absurd texts on the ground of upholding the idea of the protest against those mechanisms which limit the humanity or dehumanize the people. It symbolizes the subconscious urge of every human being around the world. “What happens at the end of the novel—however feeble, is a protest worthy of human beings. It does not achieve freedom—in any case freedom might forever be an elusive goal—but the aspiration for freedom gets articulated” (78).
The conspicuous and inconspicuous traps are the ultimate companions of a human being for the survival on the earth. He has to encounter a lot of unanswered questions which sometimes make him psychologically traumatic but in the true sense of the term, every maze of the world remains unsolved. The imprisonment of Aparesh in The Virgin Fish of Babughat becomes the representation of every single human being on the earth where he knows that he is captivated but does not know anything about his captor(s). The sense of confinement, therefore, gives birth to an urge of emancipation in him but it remains as an ‘urge’ forever which hardly comes true.
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