Scribbler Maverick

Most often, the Romantic Era is perceived by its critics and readers as a transition phase. The lines of this transition are usually emplotted somewhat around the in-between realms of feudalism and modernity politically, while in the domain of literary criticism its locale is firmly and fixedly rooted betwixt realism and modernism. Alas! With romanticism we are relieved of the realistic tyrannies of feudalism and feudal tyrannies of realism!!! There is a little bit of truth here. But at the same time this harbours innumerable loaves of ironies too. As far as I am concerned, romanticism is a transformational narrative rather than a transitional mode. That is why a romantic poet like Changampuzha Krishna Pillai harbours heterogeneous forms and contents of non-entity in his romantic vessel. On anchorage it sees and appreciates the beauty and terror of stasis and when it is put to motion in the sea we can never predict its wayward journeys.

Here I am planning to launch a series of notes and drafts towards an understanding of the meanings and processes of desire. By understanding, I simply mean avoiding definitions; definition  by nature is itself antithetical to the nature and function of desire; otherwise borrowing a much quoted phrase from Mayakovsky :"it is the quite antipode of" desire . The format of Malayalee thought-process being mediated via Pukasa   paradigm, it can never outdwell the castles and citadels of progress and reform. For a comprehension of desire one has to move beyond these territories and push oneself into the peripheries of huts and burrows of anti-developmental theories.   Initially I   propose to understand this miraculous zind   -phenomenon called desire through poetry: poems of Ilanko Adikal, Propetius,Catullus, Jalaludeen Rumi,   john clare, ginsberg, eliot, shelley,Ezra Pound...

Slavoj Zizek, the Yugoslav based psycho-analytic thinker is slowly becoming accepted as a sensitive-sensible defender-observer of Third World colonised territories. As a thinker and more as a writer I do have apt and due respect for him. But the common thread of his writing appears to me rather funny and to some extent evokes laughter. This thinker will start with describing the Real Politik forms and contents of the French Revolution with the aid of tools adopted from Kant, Fischte, Hegel and Schelling and in the very next passage he will jump onto the problematics of perspectives embodied in the vision of Strether in Henry James’ The Ambassadors and then he will present an anecdote gleaned from the off-screen peripheries of the battlefield of either First World War or the Second World War which will mostly be the story of sexual jealousy between hubby and his wife and most likely the protagonist will be a Jew!!! The fourth passage will talk about the dynamics of vision involved i...

Despite the Barthesian pronouncement of the ‘death of the author’ and the Foucaultian incision into the whatness of the author and the final dissolution of it into a multitudinous rubric of contingently indeterminate/determined historical elements, the ‘whoness’ or the author as being authorised, personalised and individuated continues to haunt or at least tends to make its re-incarnation through new garbs in the discussions on the nature and function of literature in Kerala. This I, provisionally, attribute to the clubbing of postist psychoanalysis with the moribund dialecticism of Kerala Marxism. However to start with it is to be highlighted that the practice, genre and institution of conceiving, imagining and “writing” literary words and worlds through the medium of aesthetic contemplation and mediation is yet to be acknowledged as a category of both technology and labour and at the same time, the accessibility to these two interrelated but autonomous domains also needs special...