WEEK 12. 04/13. Wed. Rabindranath Tagore. Read all selections (Vol. F, 1671-99). Naguib Mahfouz. "Zaabalawi" (Vol. F, 2527-38). Read also Volume intro "The Modern World: Self and Other in Global Context" (Vol. F, 1579-1606).
Notes on Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali
“Deliverance” (1674) and “At midnight the would-be ascetic announced” (1676)
“I will never shut the doors of my senses.” Tagore rejects traditional paths of renunciation, which is a strong emphasis in Hindu tradition. He casts a man who seems to be Prince Siddhartha (Buddha) as misguided, seeking after what is already available to him.
“On the Seashore” (1675)
Tagore’s poem reminds me a little of Wordsworth’s treatment of childhood in “Intimations of Immortality,” where the poet writes,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
“I Won’t Let You Go” (1677)
This moving poem posits a persistent faith in the life-principle even in the face of death. What makes children perfect in their way is what they don’t understand – death. But the poet here makes even mother earth similarly naïve.
“The Golden Boat” (1681)
I find it best to read this poem as drawn from the lesson taught by Krishna that we must not cling to or try to own the results of our actions. The boat will gather the harvest and go where it will, but we will not be aboard. Maybe that’s a melancholy thought, but Krishna doesn’t describe it that way – rather, it’s supposed to be a liberating, ego-reducing thought.
“A Stressful Time” (1681-82)
If I understand the poem rightly, the speaker tells the bird that it must take flight, in spite of its blindness and the many dangers all around. I came across a statement on the Net that resonates here: “He moves with effortless ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part to the whole, from a tiny detail to the vast cosmos.” http://nirmalyachakraborty.tripod.com/rabi.htm. The bird has only its little wings, but they will do, and have done so before, many times. Then, too, there’s something of the imperative of action in this poem: Krishna says, “If I did not act, all would come to a halt.” Each thing must do what it does, its “duty.”
“Hide-and-Seek” (1684)
Like William Blake and the English Romantics generally, Tagore privileges childhood. Here, I think, he reminds us that our way of comprehending children, reducing them to something we understand and control, is a delusion. There’s something to them that escapes our control, even our notice.
“No. 27” (1685)
Well, John Lennon said something like, “Time is well spent if you’ve enjoyed wasting it.” That’s worthy of Oscar Wilde. Here, Tagore seems to be on the same line.
“Flute Music” (1686)
What we see around us is illusion, and the differences amongst people are more apparent than real. The speaker is to some extent constrained, though, by his impoverished circumstances. He still gets his moment of transcendence, and preserves the woman from whom he fled, as a sensuous ideal.
“In Praise of Trees” (1689-90)
Ah, the arboreal metaphor: when you think of trees, you think “rootedness,” something that grows slowly and lives much longer than a human being; it has something of the seasons’ cyclical perpetuity. It provides shelter and comfort and serenity to us, and is a thing of great beauty that needs no help from us, drawing its sustenance from deeper sources than some bucket or garden hose. And of course where trees and plants go, so follow other forms of life: namely, us. Here Tagore describes this spreading of life as a kind of language, a linguistic “code” sowing meaning and intelligibility everywhere.
A few examples of trees characterized in the same way – the great tree in Odysseus’ bedroom, a symbol of his strong union with “self-possessed Penelope.” Yeats in “Among School Children”: VIII
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. 2.
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones....
“On My Birthday” (1691)
This late poem offers a notable construction of language as something that came at first from nature and suffused us with vitality. That’s refreshing in that it corresponds neither to the common instrumental view – we invented language and mostly use it as a tool to get things done and communicate our wishes – nor to the idea that language is a set of arbitrary “signifiers,” as in European structuralism like that of Ferdinand de Saussure.
“Punishment” (1693)
This story begins as a male-dominated one, with brothers Dukhiram and Chidam Rui in charge of what happens. Dukhiram commits a sudden crime against his wife, while Chidam’s lie pins the blame on his own young wife, Chandara. But at 1697, just at the end of Part II, Chandara’s silence turns the tables on them: she won’t play by their rules. Trouble is, as we see in Part III, there’s no escape from the patriarchal tyranny Tagore is describing: her fidelity to her story convicts her. Still, there’s nobility in her final act of rejection: she says of her husband, “To hell with him” (1699).
Naguib Mahfouz. "Zaabalawi" (Vol. F, 2527-38).
“Mahfouz's aim is, I think, to embody ideas so completely in his characters and their actions that nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has always fascinated him is in fact the way the Absolute--which for a Muslim is of course God as the ultimate power--necessarily becomes material and irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawi's decree of banishment against his children throws them into exile even as he retreats, out of reach forever, to his fortress--his house, which they can always see from their territory.” “Naguib Mahfouz and the Cruelty of Memory,” by Edward Said. http://www.counterpunch.org/mahfouz.html.
