Scribbler Maverick

1. We deny ladders and places to some writers on account of their unnatural inclinations towards romantic sentiments and sensibilities. P. Padmarajan is one among them; but perhaps he may be the one and only writer, as per my little knowledge, who considers Man as an unfathomable riddle (to put in one of his favourite terms, “Prahelika”) consisting of labyrinthine knots and NOTs. Really a death blow to the Freudian advocates of female Histeria. 2. Another romantic who drives my attention is, of course, K. Surendran who in Maranam Dhurbalam makes an astounding remark that a posted letter does never belong to the post-box. Here, the poet-protagonist is describing his first child. Though she was conceived in and delivered by his wife, it actually belongs to his lover Mayamma. 3. Even the most subversive and bohemian forms of artistic expression could not disown the Oedipalised strategies of familialism. When Salvador Dali became unfavourable to the dons of Surrealistic Syndicate, they be...

It is easy to reform and revolutionise the society-contesting its conventions, defying its norms and sabotaging its values-but applying or more tersely, repeating (of course, with differences!) the same logics and practices to and in the generic field of an art-form is not that much easy-going. This is the initial and ultimate impression Blessey’s Pranayam has left in my mind. The movie tells and to some extent, celebrates the reunion between a woman and her ex-lover-husband with the consent of her present husband. The film attempts to explore the avenues of conducting multiple relationships; husband, wife and her ex-lover-husband. Setting aside the needs and desires of the flesh and body, this democratisation of human relationships moves along the axis of amity, friendship and camaraderie. This thread of the movie can be considered as an instance of radical break in the backdrop of Kerala society where age old notions of purity, loyalty and chastity still exercise determining roles in...

What is the legacy of M.N. Vijayan? Many would say that he attempted and offered compromising terms of synthesis and merger between two incompatible domains of thought; Marxism and psychoanalysis. He was able to illustrate and explicate the social terrain of the literary texts. These are the usual accolades given to him by the existing academia in Kerala which is conveniently unconscious of its own unconscious. They will cite, for instance, some celebrated passages from his works like Seershasanam and explain to us the way he marvelously oscillates between the dangerous terrain of psychoanalysis and the ‘safer’ loops of Marxism. They take it for granted that his work is an autonomous text. But a reader who has no ‘fear of the outside’ can easily realise that these patriarchs of the academia under the pretext of close reading is practicing a kind of closed reading of Vijayan’s texts. They are attributing someone else’s legacies to him. A merger of Marxism and psychoanalysis is indeed a ...

The brutal fact of being repeated with/in the representational matrix of truth and reality has been a perennial and constant source of fear and anxiety to most of the philosophers belonging to the lineage of western thought since Plato. However the repetition which has caused difficulties to this tradition of western philosophy has not been either clearly perceived or candidly explicated. Most of the secondary critics working in the area of repetition take it for granted that the concept of repetition that appears in the writings of Plato as a homogeneous and unified notion harbouring only the elements of integrity, singularity and linearity. With the publications of The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze, the forerunner in the second wave of post-structuralism, the monolithic image of repetition has been redrawn in favour of heterodox, heterogeneous and pluralistic factors that went deep into the making of representation as a conceptual modality. In t...

                         1 Epitaph scratched on the surface of the Water is no less significant to the Earthly tombstone. If you live in times and Homes enclosed even casual coupling of the Shadows may tend to gesture toward casualties: Lores of Rumours would be Generated; Outcastings, exiles, expulsions Deaths. Orchards would bear fruits Bearing the complexion of aborted foetus. Even Romantics tread a midway betwixt Reform and Progress and hence they Do offer ephemeral melanges rather than Carved out rubies of the immemorial. Measure out The delicacies.   If night elopes with light Who took the lead Is an unnecessary question Since all proceedings on the Pavement of the process Nullify all beginnings. The Self-redemptive postures… Being within and among names and homes Does simply mean a by-stander Among the inquisitors. So We may stop here the journey and the Pr...

It is a widely currencied observation that those males who are Macho in their Masculine spirits and looks can never trap a girl but can only bewail the plight of women in particular or general. This is highly significant to Metallica since their heavy metal numbers remind me of something hyper-masculine tinged with the traits of a complete if not perfect Macho. One of their most popularly watched No. “Turn the Page” strengthens the foundational validity of the earlier notion. Here they present the pathetic conditions of a woman as revealed in her lives as a mother, strip dancer and sex worker. The Macho face of Lars Ulrich and the masculine tone of    James Hetfield turn out to be elegiac vignettes looking onto a canvas where the chiaroscuro of cruelty, violence, pathos, affection and helplessness are light/ly unfurled through a series of shades sliced off from the peripheral territories of the so-called “life”. Sometimes she affectionately embraces and smothers her daughter ...