Memory as a Narrative Strategy in Bharti Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine
Abstract:
The use of memory as a narrative strategy has been found very effective for revealing consciousness as a pervasive, timeless and subjective reality. Memory has come in handy for the woman writer in her attempt to focus the mind of the protagonist in the novel. It has also imparted a psychological viability to the characters and their actions, and has changed the novel into a world of subjectivity and private sensibility. Through memory the protagonist is motivated by the desire to redefine the self after placing it against a subjectively perceived personal past. Retrospection in these novels keeps the present in constant tension with the past. There is an extensive past locked within each single moment in the present and the novel's metaphysical and aesthetic target is the fusion of the working present and the remembered past into the central character's image of herself.
Keywords: Memory, Past, Narrative Strategy, Neurosis, Psychology, Mind
Concepts of memory have undergone several modifications up to the present times. The pre-Socratic philosophers surmised that memories were stored as a mixture of natural elements like heat, cold, light and air in the body. St. Augustine's discussion of memory in Confessions contains the basic tenets of the modem interpretation of memory according to which recollection and expectation can recreate new combinations out of past experience. The predominant discipline of each period in history has approached the subject of memory from its own angle of vision. Today psychological analysis of memory has subdued all other perspectives. William James believed that the intellectual value of any state of mind depends on "our after-memory of it" and that "the effective consciousness that we have of our states is the after-consciousness". (The Principles of Psychology 644) He classified memory into primary memory and secondary memory.
An individual representation of past life with regard to present practices has become an important feature in present-day literature. Henri Bergson's theories of memory helps us to understand use of memory in contemporary literature. In Matter and Memory, he states that "it is memory above all that lends to perception its subjective character" (Bergson 80; Bergson), bringing in the past into the present and depicting several moments of time into a single sensitivity. He classifies memory into two forms: memoire voluntaire which can be acquired by learning and retained by habit, and memoire involuntaire which is comprising of spontaneous recalls based on unintentionally grouped images and facts. While the previous is the aftereffect of reason and will and is made out of specific images from the past useful to practical living, involuntary memory "stores up the past by the mere necessity of its own nature" (Bergson 14). Involuntary memory alone has any aesthetic use for the creative artist because it forms the raw material of art. Bergson calls it "memory par excellence" and establishes its sovereignty over simple "learnt recollection." Its ways are "capricious" and frequently it interferes with our rational thinking for breaking into our consciousness and reveal some concealed truths from the ambiguous depths of our soul. These truths are significant to the creative artist and are never arrived at by voluntary memory which as time goes by "becomes more and more impersonal, more and more foreign to our past life" (Bergson 95). Bergson's theory of the potential of the involuntary memory to disclose the internal truths has been applied by the new novelists in their psychological fiction. They charged the experiences and circumstances with a subjective point of view that blended the present with the past. With a conscious awareness of the Bergsonian theories, Marcel Proust for the first time, presented involuntary memory into fiction. He stated his dissatisfaction of voluntary memory as a resource to transfer the spirit of an experience:
It gives us only the surface of the past without the truth; but when an odour, a taste, rediscovered under entirely different circumstances evoke for us, in spite of ourselves, the past, we sense how different is this past from the one we thought we remembered and which our voluntary memory was painting like a bad painter using false colours. (Matter and Memory 187)
Memory as utilized as a part of modern literary expression is no more a fixed record of past events, however an active source equipped for renewing the past events in the light of the living ones. Additionally, when memories of different events from the distinctive periods of a character's past went into specific fusions, some key truths about the behaviour arisen. These fusions repeatedly broke the sequential order and followed the order of the character's subjective reflexions. Some present experiences are like stimulants to emerge unexpected memories from various corners of the past life. Eleanor Robson Belmont has summed up the nature of memory as used in contemporary literature in the following words:
Often in memory's house, there are many mansions. Usually the doors are closed. Some may even appear to be hermetically sealed by the passage of time, when suddenly an event, a sound, a glance, performs some abracadabra, doors mysteriously fly open and treasures of memory emerge, making wistful rainbows of light which illuminate the recesses of the past and draw them into the present. Once again past and present become a connected whole. (The Fabric of Memory 30)
A remarkable concern of Indian women novelists in English seems to be the digging into the complicated depths of the Indian women's consciousness and presenting its relation to society. The characters are presented as struggling with the altered realities of Indian life and the suffering they entail and on the other hand with the cognitive struggles of personal origin. These struggles and sufferings become too prominent at a specific point of time in their life and their ability to hold their feelings under control gives way. Bharati Mukherjee's Wife, Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence, Suniti Namjoshi's Conversations of Cow are some of the novels which depict sensitive individuals in their moments of penetrating struggle and in their efforts to search for solutions to their problems in their own ways.
The women novelists in English have preserved the psychic phenomenon in the Indian perspective by creating exceptionally interesting women characters, through whom they have possessed the capacity to uncover the oppressive and anti-human value system of the society. The novelists portray the psychic conflicts and the psychological curves of helpless people and thus underline the importance of disrupting the established values and replacing them with those values which are more agreeable to human nature and which may help to promote more happiness. For this reason, the sturdy frame of the social machine, which forges and fosters these values, needs an overhaul. The women novelists make clear this point by delicately indicating that society is often uninterested and bitter towards sensitive and suffering people, particularly women, while actually it should be rushing to their help. Indian women have shown for ages a distinct tendency towards becoming introspective, which is a preamble to neurotic response. This kind of feminine awareness has a close relation to neurosis at least in the Indian perspective. Neurosis almost always results from a pressure to suppress one's feelings and desires because they are not in consonance with the acknowledged standards of society. Women are mercilessly deprived of opportunities for open expression of their true feelings in the tradition-bound Indian society. In this and in many other respects they are at great disadvantage when contrasted with men.
Bharati Mukherjee's Wife and Jasmine attempt to maintain disorder and succession of the memories of their protagonists. From the strict viewpoint of criticism, these are novels of inaction. The central characters in these novels are in a state of dilemma and confusion. They cannot look ahead until they discover themselves. They are driven into an unconscious psychic journey to find certain crucial points in their past life. Their actions and interaction with characters in the present are suspended until they complete this journey. To use a self-explanatory phrase from Richard Gilman, these novels are thus, a "testament at the impasse" (Common and Uncommon Masks 159). However, something occurs in these novels and the thoughts and actions of the characters construct an effect of apparent flexibility.
Bharati Mukherjee is preoccupied by the experience of immigration and extradition. The Tiger's Daughter is the story of an emigrant returning to her home country. Wife is an insider novel- a novel about immigration and the psychological disaster it could create. Days and Nights in Calcutta postures peculiar questions of identity- Who was I? Where did I want to live? South Asian immigrants who run through new identities in Canada and the US has been depicted in the short stories of Darkness. The Middlemen and Other Stories has a tone of affirmation of belonging. Jasmine is about an immigrant girl. All these works depict the psychological reality of the characters.
The passages curtail from Dimple's frantic responses and her thoughts upon her helpless marital dilemma are using the technique of memory in Wife. She hates her pregnancy. Along with her husband, his whole family is hated by her. She cannot give aperture to her hatred in reality. This she gratifies in her imagination. Her imagined games are suggestive of her neurotic behaviour:
There were games she played with these strangers; she threw bits of newspapers, hair balls, nail clippings down on the heads below to make them jerk upward in anger. From these trapped, angry faces she borrowed noses, warts, eyebrows, to be assembled in fantasy in endless combinations of dread. Sleeping was worse than anything awakes, for then she was sucked into the centre of cone-shaped emotions that made her sweat, cry loudly, sit up in bed. (Wife 34)
This fantasy suggests neurosis. The characteristics of a neurotic person has been discussed by Erich Fromm as:
A neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for himself. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life. (Psychoanalysis and Religion 27)
Dimple discovers expression for her anger in a freezing attempt at self-assertion in New York, restricted by her culture and despair of the immigrant community, the act becoming her husband's intentional murder. Whole event might seem to occur in a surreal imagination that is neurotically demented. Apparently, Dimple is a psychologically troubled individual whose psychological disorders centre around depression syndrome. Previously, Dimple "had set her heart" (Wife 12) on numerous neuro-surgeons, although she ultimately marries an engineer. Dimple's choice for neuro-surgeons and other associated motives leads us into black areas of her inner consciousness. The behaviour perceptible in Dimple's conscience is attributed very skilfully from her husband's silent anger through increasing frustration and contempt that ultimately culminates in catastrophe. Whereas Amit notices her periodic tits of depression as the unavoidable consequence of upper middle class's peculiar disease—"boredom— Dimple considers the indirect reason in Amit himself: he mostly doesn't even fit her dreams:
"she wanted to dream of Amit but she knew she would not. Amit did not feed her fantasy life; he was merely the provider of small material comforts. In bitter moments she ranked husband, blender, colour TV, cassette tape recorder, stereo, in their order of convenience" (Wife 113).
The novel Wife depicts the continuous breaking of a fundamentally neurotic sensitivity fed on common fantasies of advertising and yet fighting to voice an anguish that it hardly knows. This absence of consciousness, be it fiction or fact— if it is implemented or imagined— is proposed in the very uneasy depiction of Dimple's "chilling act of self-assertion: but of course," we are told, "it was her imagination because she was not sure what she had seen on TV and what she had seen on the private screen of three A.M." (Wife 212-213) A crushing feeling of frustration and destruction captures the awareness of Dimple. She has no command over her mind and her internal activities or actions are not controlled or ordered by the novelist. The novel observes her mental sampling order. The other characters like Ina, Leni, and Milt Glasser are restricted to positions for both herself and the readers to exhibit their plight. Throughout this novel, neurotic patterns of behaviour and self-communication have been transformed into efficient mnemonic symbols that unfold the broken internal truth of a disturbed consciousness in a concurrence of time. Outcasts and perverts caught in an isolating world subconsciously map the geography of the psyche of the protagonist while attempting to confront the current crises.
The opening scene that belongs to the present is the life of the protagonist at Baden, Elsa County, Iowa in the novel Jasmine. However, the depiction of her personality is completed by her past brought up to the surface of her consciousness through her memories. Put against American cultural backdrop, Jasmine narrates her life's voyage through several phases— Jyoti, Jasmine, Jase, and Jane through vast geographic locations such as Punjab, Florida, New York, Iowa, and lastly to California. However, the narration moves from past to present, from India's previous lives to America's present. Hence each section in the book is a mini memory plot, excluding the first and last chapters. Unlike the expressionist novels, which decrease characters to kinds, concepts or stereotypes, the novel's protagonist is vividly depicted. The memory approach shown here is a key source of information for identifying the protagonist's character and plight. The past is the childhood of Jyoti in Hasanpur village, Punjab, her marriage to Prakash, the young enthusiastic city person who has always thrashed customs. He gave her a new identity and a new name, Jasmine, because she was young, cute and pungent, and with her fragrance would accelerate the entire universe. The present is her existence as Jane in Iowa, where she is Bud Ripplemeyer's live-in partner. Bud is mesmerized by her alienate. She is darkness, strangeness, and unsearchable. "The past plugs me into instant vitality and wisdom. I rejuvenate him simply by being who I am" (Jasmine 200). Jane is captured by a desire to belong in the process of her transformation. She recognises strongly with Bud's adopted son Du, a Vietnamese, because just like herself he is an immigrant. "They had both hurtled through time tunnels, seen the worst and survived. Like creatures in fairy tales we've shrunk, we've swollen and we've swallowed the cosmos whole" (Jasmine 240). Both Du and Jasmine are trying to forget their early life's memories, but America, the land of dreams, has so many disappointments in store for her. 'The world's misery was a challenge to her ingenuity" (Jasmine 156). Jasmine considers more greed on the streets of New York and more individuals like herself, ''New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens" (Jasmine 140). Jasmine's greatest jolt is the truth about the Professorji's livelihood means. He's not a professor, but a human hair importer and sorter. "He needed to work here, but he didn't have to like it. He had sealed his heart when he'd left home... He was a ghost hanging on" (Jasmine 153). Jase's next identity is driven on by the Hayse family, where she operates as a "caregiver." The twist provided to the story where Jase falls in love with Taylor appears to be a fragile connection in the series of events. Jyoti's conversion has come in half-circle: "Jyoti was now a sati-goddess. Jasmine lived for the future, for Vijh and wife and Jase lived for today. For every Jasmine the reliable caregiver there is a Jase, the prowling adventurer" (Jasmine 176). The novel's final conflict emerges as Jane is captured between her obligation toward the devastate Bud and Taylor's love. She makes the ultimate selection. Not feeling ashamed, but being reassured. She stopped to think like Jane of herself. Again, she feels powerful enough to reorient her stars. Time would derive its own findings on its real identity. "Adventure, risk, transformation--the frontier is pushing indoors. She cries through all the lives she has lived and for all her dead…. I am out of the door…. greedy with wants and reckless with hope" (Jasmine 241).
It can be said that the novel Jasmine has a complex psychoanalytic arrangement. All the significant characters from the past and present of Jasmine are introduced and referenced in the novel just as all the people with whom we come to be associated are always in our minds at some level of consciousness. Across their corresponding positions, they react easily to their insights. Eventually, Jasmine brings out the different experiences of her past to link all of them in a subjectively significant way to her present in which she has to create some choice. Jasmine's psychosis has been created by Bharati Mukherjee as a metaphor for the phenomenon of past subconscious interrogation that presses her mind in a state of current crisis. The response to them rests not in a reasonable but an epiphanic way in a psychic connection of past experiences. Psychoanalytic in understanding is the structural linking of fictional counterparts representing past circumstances. With its ramshackle amalgam of characters and plots, the rambling structure addresses the protagonist's confessional needs. Rather than allowing an emotional fiction to arise from a neatly linked sequence of sequences, Bharati Mukherjee produced the characters stand up from the various fields of the chapters as and when the memory of Jasmine requires a picturesque projection of previous experiences. Their attitude and behaviour are shaped by Jasmine's need for a thorough response to her tormenting issues. The purpose of this response is to accept her accountability not only for her sufferings, but also for the sufferings of all those connected with her existence. As the neurotic victim is healed at the end of a therapy, Jasmine stands at the end of the novel with her neurotic self-doubts clear and willing to acknowledge Taylor's new life.
Therapy has entered the notion of characterization as an important idea in the novels mentioned above. They give a psychic way out of the complex of distinctions that address the characters through works of fiction dedicated to spontaneity in time and space strategy. During the course of events, most characters in the novels maintain themselves psychically, removed of all ego defences, moving freely in and out of an inching present and an overwhelming past or thoughts. This mental deep-sea travel has given them a tragic self-illumination. They were allowed in a completely uninhibited way to relive their own internal sufferings. This fresh trial of ancient agonies is a reward of its own.
Furthermore, the characterization of the main figures in these novels shows an informative display of the transmutation into a job of art of neurosis, psychoanalysis and therapy. It also centralized the novel's dominant motif on the protagonist's psyche. The variables mentioned above show that memory is one of the characteristics that has given direction and concentrate to the goalless, indecipherable abundance of psychological doctrines in novels. It has helped preserve the characterization authority and theme concentration in novels. Psychoanalytical novels with a strong concern for the memory of the main character of thematic disclosure remain clear of the ambiguity of wish fulfilment novels and dreams and achieve significant discovery of unconscious emotions and a feasible understanding of life.
Works Cited:::
- Belmont, Eleanor Robson. The Fabric of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957. Print.
- Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and Scott Palmer. Reprint. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919. Print.
- Fromm, Eric. Psychoanalysis and Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Print.
- Gilman, Richard. Common and Uncommon Masks. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.
- James, Williams. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Print.
- Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New Delhi: Viking, 1990. Print.
- —. Wife. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1976. Print.