I wanted to touch on an exchange between Anand, Samriddhi and me in conversation with your reading of Vijay Dan Detha’s The Dilemma. Anand had criticized the story for not portraying the wife’s subjectivity with much nuance, which made the story take on a more masculine perspective. Samriddhi countered this by pointing out that the story does not understand itself in terms of subjectivities, but rather in terms of archetypes. It is a contemporary re-imagination of a folkloric form. It is a form that predates prose, where there is a need for interiority and subjective psychological structures that are individuated from the social context. Vijay Dan Detha is more concerned with archetypes and the morals they can be used to impart rather than subjectivities. In class, I backed up Anand on his point: the story may draw from folk imaginaries, but it still seeks to portray (some of) its characters’ subjectivities. The characters don’t just narrate their values, but the stories’ narrator imposes those values on its portrayal of the world at large. The reader is presented with their subjective interpretation of the world. I’ll complicate this in a moment, but the characters feel less like devices a storyteller can move to their ends and more like an artistic rendering of a life. In my reading of their respective readings of nature that I offered last week, I definitely treat them as such.
But your perspective on the ghost existing as an incarnation of the bride’s dream of love, care, and intimacy (both physically and emotionally) complicates this. In that reading, the ghost is more of an archetype. In that case, the ghost’s subjectivity is not a subjectivity per se. It is a fantasy of a subjectivity as produced by an unsatisfied and unappreciated woman. The ghost seeing her beauty everywhere in nature is not a portrayal of the subjective experience of infatuation, it is a portrayal of what Vijay Dan Datha takes to be a woman’s fantasy for a man’s love. At the same time, her actual subjectivity is never really portrayed — in this reading, only a supernatural manifestation of it is.
I have trouble with whether or not that reading is damning of the story. What should we make of the fact that the ghost's love is so groundlessly based on a glimpse of a first impression rather than any actual care for who the bride is as a human being? Does Vijay Dan Detha mean to show how the best that a woman in her context can imagine is unwavering amorous infatuation? Or does the story just have a narrow conception of love?
Still, I think the whole discussion of the folk archetype versus contemporary subject mixture in this story brings out what’s so interesting about his work here. The fact that one could read the story in terms of either one is interesting in that it puts our relationship with both into question. What does it mean that a contemporary folk-like story rests so heavily on portrayal of subjectivities? Can we understand these ‘subjectivities’ as something other than individuated ends in themselves? Is their subject-like quality just Vijay Dan Detha integrating a contemporary device into the structure of a folktale? In other words, is this a reclamation of the folk mode with contemporary tools? Or does it represent the centrality of the subject in contemporary human creativity, and our inability to work outside of it?