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 reality; a dream-like-reality that achieved its fulfillment in the open alleys of Frankfurt school; the writings of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse do bear testimonies to this event.
The Legacy of M.N. Vijayan lies elsewhere; surely and totally removed from the dreams and realities of the Frankfurt school. It is a fact that he has made adept use of the vocabularies and concepts of Psychoanalysis, but for the realisation of another dream. His authentic and genuine contribution was to render cultural and political legitimacy to the colonising and dominating projects of social fascism in Kerala. This process was much more complex and intricate than one could imagine. Because he had to draw imaginary lines of distinction and differentiation between social and communal variants of fascism. On the one hand he had to reject communal fascism, but on the other hand he had to extract heavily from the repertory of communal fascism; its techniques, concepts, imageries, mythologies and rhetoric. This was his real victory; stealing Hindu repertory of mass mobilisation from the hands of communal fascists and passing on it to the much cleverer hands of social fascists with a secular face and appearance!

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