Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito

When you see the second of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Aparajito  (The Unvanquished, 1957), currently being revived in repetoire at Film Forum, you think first of Bergman. Ray was really the Bergman of India; we could also say that Bergman was the Ray of Sweden. Both had no qualms about letting the camera linger in the kind of stasis that is foreign to Hollywood in order to explore the complexity of emotion. Like the first in the trilogy Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito is really about the development of consciousness and it unfolds as as a series of awakenings. The camera lingers on the face of the mother Sarbojaya Roy (Karuna Bannerjee) as she sees her son through a gate and then you hear the sound of the train which will eventually take them from Benares to their new home. The sound is superimposed in a no man’s land between the present and the future. There are other wonderfully touching scenes such as the coins anomalously filling a plate following a spiritual séance conducted by the husband, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), an aryurvedic healer and the black birds flying upwards as Sarbojaya gives Harihar his last drink of water. But what distinguishes Ray from Bergman is really the satiric cast of characters who are so reminiscent of Dickens. There’s the school teacher (Subodh Ganguli) with his wire-rimmed glasses and books on exotic locales like Africa and the North Pole and Nandu Babu (Charuprakash Ghosh), the owner of the Royal Press where Apu (played now by Smaran Ghosal) both works and lodges when he goes off to Calcutta for school. Apu falls asleep and is expelled during an English class in which his professor (Nemata Chatterjee) says “synechoche is a figure of speech based on association.” Later he is comforted by a more worldly classmate who tries to get him to try his first cigarette. But a filmic form of synecdoche, a series of symbolic omens that one might find in a bildungsroman like David Copperfield is really what Ray is up to in this coming of age in Bengal. “Benares is a nice place except for the monkeys,” Harihar intones before he succumbs to the illness that will kill him.

Sewage Lagoon

Martha Nussbaum begins her recent review/essay on Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (“Sewage Lagoon," TLS, 10/12/12 by enlisting Dickens to speculate on the difference between data and narrative in describing human suffering. “It is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants and beetles, ‘passing to and from their nests.’” Nussbaum, who teaches philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, then goes on to brilliantly link Dickens to groundbreaking work in social psychology. “What Dickens knew intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.” In his essay “Human Rights, Storytelling and Narrative,” (The Journal of Human Rights, Vol l0, No. 1), Titus Levy delineates literary techniques of both empathy and alienation in the context of a more modern British novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Human suffering is so ubiquitous. The connoisseur has so many choices and vantage points from which to view it (genocide, apartheid, famines and earthquakes) that there is literally a Darwinian struggle in which the varying catastrophes with which mankind is afflicted or which he afflicts upon himself compete for our attention. Just opening the mailings of human rights organizations like Medicins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International can be mind numbing. Kony 2012, about the exploitation of children by the Lord’s Resistance Army, received over 93 million hits. But there were all kinds of problems with subsequent calls to action, not the least of which was that the creator of the film, Jason Russell, had a mental breakdown in which he was found wandering naked and incoherent in the streets. Kony 2012 was sui generis and unless you are a Bono, the odds are not high that your story will be heard. This is where literature and genius come in handy. “The English novel was a social protest movement from the start,” Nussbaum remarks, “and its aim (like that of many of its American descendants) was frequently to acquaint middle-class people with the reality of various social ills, in a way that would involve real vision and feeling.” Another aspect of empathy that Nussbaum doesn’t discuss in her essay is the fact of its curative effect on those who might otherwise have perished from self-absorption.

 

Goosing

A goose is an animal, but it also refers to uninvited fondling of the genital area. Scrooge bought the Cratchits a turkey after his bad dream, in which he comes up against The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. But one wonders if Dickens wasn’t unconsciously putting Scrooge up to his old antics, to the extent that he wasn’t just being generous, but perverse. Let’s analyze the situation for a moment. Scrooge is the eponymous pinchpenny whose lack of eleemosynary feelings for his fellow man has turned him into a lonely old geezer (which is a form of goose). His visionary dream is actually quite typical of misers, since the only antidote to miserliness is the realization of mortality. But, once a pickle, never a cucumber again. Scrooge is coerced by his unconscious, and his sudden contrition is a Mephistophelian bargain in which, like the Iran-Contra arms deal, he is trying to trade figurative constipation for the eternal irrigation that many ascribe to paradise. Still, anyone who makes a bargain ends up being resentful. “Why couldn’t they like me for who I was?” the bargainer may complain. Thus, the turkey is basically a goose in turkey’s clothing (OK, turkey to goose is a stretch, but let’s willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of the point). Yes, Scrooge does offer a gift, but it's essentially a payback for the ostracism he has experienced for not being a “good” person. Hence, when he furnishes the holiday fowl, he is really telling the Cratchits that he wants to goose them. What better foreplay than a good goose?