Sahityasetu

“So far as history is concerned, its telling has become impossible because that telling (re-citatum) is, by definition, the possible recurrence of a sequence of meaning. Now, through the impulse of total dissemination and circulation, every event is granted its own liberation; every fact becomes atomic, nuclear and pursues its trajectory into the void. In order to be disseminated to infinity, it has to be fragmented like particle. This is how it able to achieve a velocity of no-return which carries it out of history once and for all. Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented, disjointed.” (Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of End, 02)

“Lyotard didn’t mean that all people have ceased to believe in all stories, but rather that the stories aren’t working so well anymore – in part because there are too many, and we all know it…there are lot of centers and none of them holds.” (Walter Trutt Anderson, The Fontana Postmoderism Reader, 04)

“I have had an idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. but it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning.” (Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 125)

Introduction :

The point of departure of 20th century intellectualism is based on three fundamental movements, each discipline linking itself with the remaining ones : structuralism, Existentialism and psychoanalysis. The evaluation and revaluation of language that plays an instrumental role in ‘attaining’ meaning was itself a site of problematic in the postmodernism (Thomas Docherty), primarily because of its inadequacy to capture ‘reality’ (Roland Barthes). Language itself became a ‘baffling polysemy’ that doesn’t ‘freeze the play of meaning’ (Jacques Derrida); rather, it would produce an eternal deference of the play – just or unjust (Jean-Francois Lyotard). The meaning, it was believed among the existential thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, has to be ‘created’ through ‘choices’ and by the representation of the narrative experiences that an individual self-encounters (Jean Paul Sartre). However, the narratives, too, are not absolute; their experiences are bound with the spatio-temporal coordinates that shape their momentary, ephemeral existence (Heidegger). How the later part of the century has looked at the concept of subjectivity in the light of its predecessor movements is what the present study intends to examine. The study would attempt to analyze the postmodern conception of a decentred, disseminated, fractured, fragmented ‘individual self’ in the light of some of the postmodern theories, advocated by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.

The present study would endeavour to examine the theoretical implications of Post-Existential philosophy with special reference to postmodern Spanish novel written by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The present paper intends to apply the theoretical conceptions of the Post-Existentialism onto the selected text and would attempt to (de)locate the interrelationships among the ideology of culture, the subjective consciousness and literature.

Defining Post-Existentialism :

Existentialism as a connotative label to indicate a certain philosophy that deals with the quintessence of ‘being’, the conceptual category that governed the notion of existence and its formulaic representation took centuries to excogitate. Precisely, the real consciously attributable polemic was a search for the rational principle, which could postulate ‘oneness’ that would not only explain the linguistic diversity but also the extra-linguistic world of cognition. Probably, this search for single principle was itself a philosophical necessity, a sine qua non that could in one sweep unite the entire multiplicity of appearances into an inseparable unity; the proliferation of endless significations could be transmuted into the suprareal categories of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ by transcending the sequentiality and discreteness of temporal realities into the atemporality of comprehension by processing them through ‘reason’, man’s highest faculty and the only possible channel that could provide with a complete and panoptic knowledge. Modernity replaced the conjunction of ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ with subjectivity, an individual spirit of examination, where the extra-linguistic world becomes a mere conscious, willing projection of the microcosm through the apparatus of will. Everything was seen to be derived from, and exist in, the substrata of human consciousness. Moreover, the cogito is not a simple license to unbridled subjectivism, but more of prescriptive (or proscriptive) ideology that denies the veracity of existence to those objects that were beyond the boundary set by reason. Conversely, reason justified and validated existence and not vice versa.

Existentialism in the Age of Reason has been a pure product of reason and rationalism. While it was possible for Enlightenment philosophers like Kant to predicate the world into two binary structures of ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’, the noumenon in Kantian system always remains untranslatable and beyond the modes of human understanding. But simultaneously, it can be inferred without questioning the underlying truth that Kant establishes : Pure Existence exists, to be more precise, though unknowable, Pure Reason inheres. Nietzsche, Under the influence of Darwinian establishment of the world as a phenomenal development – that man is a biological product that happens to survive – considers the ‘true world’ as a ‘lie’ and offers the survivalistic attitude as the only possible and fittest way in the ‘world of appearances’ (Fredrick Nietzsche). He privileges the will-to-power and concludes man as a powerful passion. It seems, for him, the world is a lie and the only virtue is to fight it. Here Sartre differs, who accepts the dismissal of any Higher Reality, but simultaneously feels even the power as absurd and meaningless phenomenon and thus announces man as a ‘useless passion’. If there is nothing epistemologically established, the very validity of existence itself is futile and useless. But since there is no exit from this nausea, man has to embrace the world of meaninglessness, has to ‘create’ his own value by ‘living’ and ‘affirming’ it. This leads him to conclude existence as an ‘encounter’ through ‘action’ so that man can ‘tell stories’ (Jean Paul Sartre).

Post-Existentialism consists in the denial of validity of all action. As the entire corpus of ‘actions’ – the willing and conscious projection to ‘create’ and ‘affirm’ existence – is finally governed by the forces that one fails to ‘capture’ and ‘control’ and so the futility of such a projection does not replicate the futility of an objective world, a ‘stable’ and ‘consistent’ narrative (as Sartre agrees) or that of a transcendental world (as Nietzsche or Kierkegaard agrees) but the futile presumption that superimposes such foundational discourses. The category of thought that presumes a ‘cogent’ activity is itself in jeopardy because of its own history of repressions and ‘marginalization’. The Enlightenment basis of such rational thought performing an action is itself questioned in the domain of Post-Existentialism. If thoughts themselves are ‘constructed phenomena’, what the post-existential philosopher seeks to determine is the ‘zone of rupture’ within this apparently seamless category of thought. It is within these ‘absent’ spaces the Post-Existentialism probes its existence.

Since no ‘boundary’ between ‘text and interpretation’ or ‘knowledge and world’ exists, meaning has lost the very element of stability that further causes multi-interpretationalism, ‘polyglossia’, which, rather than cognizing, decognizes the objective category of judgments that stand on ‘ever-shifting ground’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). Instead of ‘freezing the play’ (the grand existential project), this ‘decentred’ ‘jeu’ of ‘optic’ and its temporality signify the ‘free play of language’ that detotalitarianize and deuniversalize and thus insinuates an invariable absence of ‘the metaaltern state of existence’. It further posits reterritorialization of experience through invention of language (codes, concepts and categories) that differs and defers in an endless play of language. Moreover, this ‘decentralization’ or ‘collapse of metanarratives’ (Lyotard) causes the ‘anagram’ - ‘indeterminable multiplicity’ and a ‘radical undecidability’ where stable and consistent objectification gets evaporated. This conceptualisation of existential significance and signifiability – epistemological as well as ontological – transmutes the very paradigms of Existentialism. Existence in this regard is seen as a ‘jeu’, ‘language game’ and ‘simulacra’ where “various scenarios (game rules and codifications) are projected only to be cancelled and replaced by other scenarios” (Brian McHale). Any ‘exchange’ with reality is ‘impossible’ since existence is understood and conceived as an endless circulation of signs and information that suffers from a ‘fallen away’ state of reality (Jean Baudrillard); existence turns into a level of simulacra that has no ‘connection to the real’, a language production or ‘a congeries of letters’, which in itself is a baffling polysemy that remains real within the structural confines of the simulation (play) but disappears in other discursive formations; existence, now, is understood as ‘a flexible network of language games’ (Lyotard) that are played and simulated on local spaces, without having any connectivity with any Grand Narratives (or Ascetic Ideals or Transcendental Principles) and this concept of disjunctional and so simulative narrative encourages the ‘free play of language’ where ‘it is the reality that disappears utterly in the game of reality’ (Jean Baudrillard). Further, these disjunctional narratives postulate existence as a floating locus in the universe having no accessibility to any ‘overarching narrative’, which has been seen as a replacement of ‘mimesis’ with ‘diegesis’, where representation of fragmented reality turns into a mere act of narration. This inaccessibility of overarching narrative further causes the ‘politics of the self’ to rigorously question its own existence, hence create the individual identity with repressions. These (irrational) unconscious structures of human thoughts, the silent and so unexplainable desires, represent the existential identity along with the consciously projected ones and equally remain unsignifiable at the end. How these absences and silences at existential level are reflected and represented in postmodern literature is what the paper attempts to undertake. Moreover, the present study attempts to focalise upon these post-existential thematics in regard to contemporaneous human situatedness in the postmodern locus, not only to its characteristic processes – discontinuity, destabilization, de-universalization, indeterminacy, de-centring, dispersal, displacement – but also of the product – that is, simulation, jeu, language games; however, Post-Existentialism will be conceptually theorized neither as a provisional rubric of Existentialism, nor as an aftermath of it; rather, the present study would try to locate it as a subversion of Existentialism within the philosophical framework of postmodernism. Further, the paper tries to locate Post-Existentialism within a historical paradigm and tries to investigate the continuities and discontinuities that such a progression involves.

The Grammar of ‘Reason’ and Transcendental Consciousness : Foucault and the History of Enlightenment

If we all agree that the ontological undermining constitutes the predominant feature of Existentialism, then the entirely undermined perspective to represent the notion of seemingly reproducible objective ontology constitutes the quintessential structure of the Western Enlightenment. One would clearly survey it on the basis of following subtle evidences : there was a coherent quest of continual studies observable to the analysis of its functions, its structural relationship to narration, and its representation in modernist and late-modernist literary constructions. Intellectuals who have been engaged into the discourse of ‘existence’ – either inferentially (like Erasmus, Kant, Hegal), or referentially (like Descartes, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) – cannot help but notice the impenetrability in bridging the insurmountable disruption between the indeterminateness of any metaphysical presence on the one hand and the meagreness of its rhetoric absence (in terms of loss, nothingness, silence, unrepresentability or to be more specific “the other”. ‘Absence’ here marks the other territorial dominion beyond the closure of any thought system) on the other. Hence, the discourse of existence seems to encounter irresolvable questions : How to configure existence and its essentiality when the transcendence finally remains untranslatable (Kant), how to cognize the extra-linguistic world, where there exists nothing beyond the human subjectivity (Nietzsche), and how to resolve those ‘thou shalts’ when the ‘beyond’ is itself disappeared (Kierkegaard)? In this section of the paper, I would like to engage the role of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ during the Western Enlightenment, which further undermines totalitarian approach through the judgement of any revelation by ‘reason’ and considers a subjective existence as ‘stable’, ‘coherent’ and ‘knowable’ and hence conscious, rational, autonomous and ‘universal’.

Adorno and Horkheimer propose in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Enlightenment is totalitarian”. Gay sums up Enlightenment in two words : ‘criticism and power’; the critical approach that empowers individual freedom, from Enlightenment perspective, should not only be rationally representable in a logico-coherent form, but also the nuance of reason should be the valid and legitimate apparatus of rational thinking. Modernity, not only literary but also historical, philosophical, political, economic as well as cultural, generates its principles founded on ‘universal unity’. This ‘objective unity’ has to be channelized through rationality, where reason functions as a fundamental apparatus for attaining objective consciousness, ‘an absolute meta-subject’. According to Peter Childs, modernity “is characterized by the attempt to place humanity and in particular human reason at the centre of everything, from religion and nature, to finance and science.” Its propositional base was in assigning a dominant episteme to every signification in order to apprehend their representational attributes. As Michel Foucault talks about the representational structure, the narrative discourse, of Western Rationality in The Order of Things, the very raison d’etre of ‘Reason’ to become the dominant benchmark was a shift in the paradigms of representational structures – the “order” of things in the sense of arrangement in logico-coherent fashion. Citing an exemplary fictional Chinese encyclopaedia in the preface of his study, he observes that within the space of representation assigned to objects in western modes of thought, an element of subversion is always already present. It simply means that what rationality achieved within the paradigm of western thought is an ‘assignment’ of things to pre-ordered modes of reality-modes that were primarily determined and calculated through a logico-mathematical framework. Exemplary is the evidence that throughout the Enlightenment mathesis or logical calculus was the dominant way of explaining things since it was considered to be ‘universal’; it was believed that the facts attained through logico-mathesis are unchangeable and hence ‘universal’; not only was the applicability of this mode restricted to concrete phenomena, the observable matter, but also to the abstract construction of human thought. Foucault terms it the epistemic mode of thinking, where a dominant episteme determines the very cognitive structure of the subjective consciousness, which simply means that the subject cannot even think beyond what has been allowed to it to think. However, this system was coercive and therefore need exclusivity rules that allowed subjects who do not fit into the system to be circumscribed and therefore the rise of lunatic asylums and prisons for the people who ‘erred’ came into existence. ‘Cogito’ was seen to be not a simple license to the unbridled subjectivism, but more of prescriptive (or proscriptive) ideology that denies the veracity of existence to those objects that were beyond the boundary set by reason. Existence itself turned into a construction that followed the logic and inflexibility of reason. Conversely, reason justified and validated existence and not vice versa. And therefore a definition of ‘madness’ and ‘civilization’, ‘discipline’ and ‘punishment’ and ‘society’ and ‘family’ were formulated, which always had a dialectical relationship, what Adorno calls the “dialectic of integration and the subjective point”, with the negated aspect of such definitions. In other words, the ‘presence’ of entities always already had elements of ‘absence’ within them. The elements of civilization exclude the elements of madness. And it is this absence that had the possibilities of subversion within the dominant framework of the episteme. It is this subversion that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is dealing with in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The very nature of reality that was seen to be a unified, hierarchically composed, linear, rational, correlational existence (‘chronicle’) that follows the dominant epistemes of the western rational thought are being subverted within the framework of the novel. Further, the novel rejects the quattrocento tradition of western representationalism and favours the non-linear structure as a governing channel that focalizes on the perspective of cancelling every fragment by inserting another possibility. This pluralism poses a problem of legitimation and validity of any ‘truth’ that can possibly be channelized as a foundational proposition. The novel ultimately rejects any basis of/for reality.

Reading ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ :

It was probably the 1960s that marks the recognition of the Post-cognitive questions - “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (Dick Higgins) - which are distinctly subversive to the cognitive questions previously encountered, specifically in modern and late modern era. In an interview with Marlise Simons, Gabriel Garcia Márquez stated, “The era of Sartre and Camus has definitely passed.” That is truer when one reads Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the light of these Post-cognitive questions that shapes the foundational post-existential thematics; they do not only signify the denial of validity of all actions, but also simultaneously constitute the fragmentations of an individual self, the self, as Thomas Docherty notes, that itself has turned into a problematic in postmodern world :
“It has become difficult to make proposition ‘I know the meaning of postmodernism - not only because the postmodern is a fraught topic, but also because the ‘I’ who supposedly knows is itself the site of postmodern problematic.”

‘Absence’ of any overarching truth that further causes ‘indeterminacy’ of any possible transcendence, any solution to the ‘futility’ of any foundational discourse, cannot but signify the signifier (as the participants in the novel), whose very signification in itself is unsignifiable because of the inescapability from existence’s being a series of ‘simulacra’ – language games - and thus the signifier unable to signify the transcendental signified, the ground for such a possibility being ‘absent’, becomes local. As Baudrillard proposes in The Illusion of End, ‘actions’ and their ‘telling’ have become impossible because that telling signifies by its ‘definition the promising recurrence of a sequence of meaning’, and the sequence cannot be constituted in the post-cognitive world of ‘Indetermanence’, which suffers from a huge ‘semantic instability’. The total dissemination and transmission has stimulated every event having been granted its own emancipation. And being disseminated, it has fragmented like molecule. Moreover, this further achieves a velocity of ‘no-return’ to ‘reality’, to any Finished Word that carries it out of history conclusively; this state of ‘no-return’ transmits in its definition the impossibility of the escape from history into memory either. In this regard, Post-Existentialism exists in ‘passing beyond a point of no-return’; it probes its existence on these ‘absent’ and ‘silence’ spaces, where existence remains a mere simulative passion.

If one examines from the generic perspective, Chronicle of a Death Foretold seems to be an exercise in futility. One would also identify that, rather than logical or teleological drive, the novel is guided aboriginally by a performative drive; assembled from instances of repeated information, it constitutes an orchestrated collage that ‘consists of nine citations from the written record and a total of 102 quotations from the thirty-seven characters’ (Raymond Williams). From the narrative point of view, the text can be divided into three layers – first, the narrative of the narrator within whose narrative voice the story is circumscribed; second, the narrative of the protagonist, Santiago Nasar, whose murder constitutes the central action and around which all the sub-narratives revolve; and third layer consists of the micro narratives – tales that are ‘revealed’ to guide the narrator to investigate the crime committed almost before three decades. Raymond Williams rightly points out, “Contrary to what has been announced in the title, this novel is not a chronicle.” It’s true, firstly, as the narrator ‘pieces together’ the event; he intertwines the weft of the gathered tales and builds his own interpretative enterprise. However, this interpretative enterprise of the narrator within the framework of the novel ultimately remains an ‘open reading’ to the reader rather than any ‘interpretative closure’, as there is no final revelation that can even be ‘inferred’ at the end regarding why the murder was perpetrated. Secondly, the apocalyptic nature of the narrative as the word ‘chronicle’ signifies – a promise of ‘unveiling’, the final ‘illumination’, the moment of anagnorasis – is framed within the spatio-temporal coordinates of the present, but this present, however, is itself removed in ‘time’ as well as ‘space’ : firstly, it is recovered from the journalistic piece, which ‘inspired’ its telling; secondly, it is distanced in its moment of telling – the narrator has come back to the scene of violence after almost three decades that makes the ‘telling’ a “speech after a long silence”; and finally, and most interestingly, the characters themselves are unlocated, living almost in a historical vacuum : Santiago Nasar’s genealogy is unknown as though he belongs to a mythical Arabic domain; Bayardo San Roman is an outsider without history; the bishop does not halt at their small town thus not even granting a theological space to the town, his role is restricted – just making “the sign of the cross because he has to”; the mother is an ancient woman; Angela Vicario has a timeless and spaceless lover; the twins are almost mythical in their dimensions. It is on this event of spaceless and timeless existence that the journalist narrator intends to impose a sequential temporality; he wants to forge a ‘chronicle’. Márquez fractures the time sequence, the story moves freely in the past and in the present, which creates a ‘mix-up’ of the death. Moreover, if it is a ‘chronicle’, it cannot be ‘foretold’ and once it is ‘foretold’, it doesn’t remain ‘chronicle’ any more. In this sense, Chronicle seems not as much about Santiago Nasar’s death, as his death is established in the very first sentence - “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on” (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) – as about the story’s coming into being through numerous pieces. Márquez seems to lead the reader into this maze of conflicting realities and leaves him suspended in a temporal aporia. The reader cannot make sense without the chronicalization; but the ‘chronicle’ itself does not exist beyond its temporally created framework. All the micro-narratives, which supply and share the information regarding how the murder was perpetrated, speak their own versions of the committed crime, each creating an entirely different story. There are no facts, as Nietzsche says, and what exists is interpretation constituted by the individual’s perspective and so it is ‘optic’, a way of seeing. And that can clearly be seen in Chronicle that the fuzzing of time and space create a multiplicity of interpretations of what actually had happened. Moreover, perhaps, Márquez discloses the ‘important revelations’ and leaves the reader to his susceptibility to interpret the unexplained elements of the Chronicle and reach any value judgment; the text presents the impossibility of mimesis in favour of diagesis – the judgmental reflection cannot exist beyond the ‘subjective’, ‘original’ interpretation, which the constantly deferred voice of the narratorial interpretation prevents. The reader is confronted with various versions among these micro narratives, where characters mostly contradict one another rather than providing any profound information that can lead to the Fixed Reality. This contradiction among micro narratives further denotes ‘locality’ that ultimately signifies nothing since the coherent whole that the narrative of the journalist seeks to encase is proscribed any determinism by these little and disjunctional tales. Instead of ‘freezing the play’ for attaining the moment of anagnorasis, the objective signification, what the collected micro narratives produce is ‘the free play of the words’ containing contradictions and differences that further shapes collage leading to instability, ambiguity and confusions. The question of their legitimation remains unresolved, since all the ‘obtained’ ‘pieces’ of information may have evidence and proof to be real, but what, in Lyotard’s phrase, proof is there that their proof is true. However, Márquez seems to say, these disjunctive tales are real – however momentary, temporal and inconsistent – the reality to themselves is unquestionable, though their subjective reality may not lead to any objectification at the end. These micro-narratives, disjunctional tales go ‘beyond the criterion of truth’ and they do not require any further legitimation because they legitimate themselves. They are the ‘chronicle’ – unsynchronised narratives that come into existence at the moments of their ‘telling’ and disappear leaving ‘traces’ of meaning, a profound sense of investigative aporia that the narrator tries to fathom. They create the post-existential simulacra through their explosion, not creating but negating all existences. The utter contradiction of the same chronicles regarding the same ontological object – the Kantian Phenomena – have equal validity according to their own perceptions because what their way of seeing endow with them is an interpretation, which is true in itself. And thus all these micro narratives, these little and disjunctive tales, leading to no Final Reality, signify an endless play of language games, with the subjective categories of interpretation its only referent. Thus, the reality – the how and why of the murder – can only be analysed in terms of what Lyotard calls, “discontinuity, plurality and paralogy” : discontinuity in the form of non-sequential chronicalization that leads to incoherence and destabilization; plurality in the form of these micro narratives, disseminated tales, that ultimately ‘tell’ nothing (‘no explanation explains anything’, as Brian McHale observes), the ‘anagram’ that indicates ‘indeterminable multiplicity’ and a ‘radical undecidability’; and paralogy in the form of logically unjustifiable conclusion. Micro narratives, being temporal and self-oriented, thus become separate pieces that cannot be organized into any coherent whole and so, at the end, remain undecidable and constantly ‘self-effacing’. In this sense, the novella seems to be a simulacra, where all the participants perform their roles in a simulated situation of reality created through words with the mask of a spatio-temporal ‘truth-value’, performing their roles and ultimately remaining unsignifiable because the reality itself gets lost in the act of simulation and what is left is a ‘constructed reality’ of the narrative situation. It signifies the simulation (that man is a simulative passion) since nothing enables transcendence and prohibits even the continuity and thus turns the search of singularity of the ‘presence’, transcendental signified, into dispersal, signifiable only to where they belong without having any connectivity with any Bigger Story. Simulation becomes the channel of representing absence: representation of absence becomes nothing else than absence of representation.

Conclusion :

The Nietzschean ‘gaze’ is projected towards a historical reconstruction – the narrator looks at every piece and tries to arrange them in a logical whole. He searches for the objective facts of the crime, attempts to achieve the truth and that is why it is ‘chronicle’ that can lead to attain an ordered view of reality. Instead, what the story does is that the subjective self of the narrator is divided into various micro narratives, which provide only fragmentations and these disjunctions lead to an ever-shifting reality. Thus, what this progressive deconstruction provides is an intersubjective agreement (or disagreement), consensus (or discensus), and perhaps that is why it is a ‘foretold’ story in which only partial reality in a momentary vision is achievable, atemporal and inconsistent. This intersubjective is what I call the ‘absence’ because there is nothing ‘beyond’ to agree upon.

The promise of the final revelation is transformed into an irrelevant question. The implicit act of ‘telling’ constitutes the event, and not what the ‘telling’ leads to. The phenomenal world of Kant can no more be aesthetically recovered through either ‘judgement’ or ‘practical reason’. The framework of the story discussed earlier, in its centered and concentric structure, finally becomes a conflict of voices (polyglossia) where every ‘same’ is in an antagonistic (and therefore, collusive) relationship with the ‘other’. What the journalist seeks to redeem is a philosophy of the ‘same’ – a world of certainties, a world where temporalization indicates an apocalyptic moment – which the narrative constantly defers by inserting an ‘other’. After all, the ‘same’ comes into existence through the ‘other’, though that ‘other’ may be fundamentally subversive. The narrator thus, can only ‘begin’ with the ‘end’ – the murder of Santiago Nasar – and all his attempts to retrieve the ‘beginning’, the original moment, the essence, are thwarted. All ‘chronicles’ in a post-existential world are ‘always already’ ‘foretold’.

Mitul Trivedi, Head, Department of English Language and Literature, Institute of Language Studies and applied Social Sciences, Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar – 388 120. Contact Cell : 0091 – 9824975768 Email Id : mitul.t@hotmail.com