The Legacy of M.N. Vijayan
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 ...