Roilings: The Riverine Lingo of Sage-General Arundhati Roy
Part I: Insinuating Myself Into the Mind
In Big Lingo, the adult language of dictionaries, a riverling is a small thing: a rivulet, a flowing of waters, a small river.
In the superfluid, private, drive-ridden, rhythm-impelled babblings of childhood, a riverling might be just about anything: a pleasurable flow of syllables over the tongue, a cry for mother's breast, a small river fish, a fingerling, a type of lingo, the playfully lapping and dancing tongue of the waters.
As a small child, Roy's mind found itself aswim for hours upon dreamy hours in sonorous riverine silences as she contemplated how to insinuate herself into the minds of unsuspecting fingerlings and larger fish, themselves plotting how to nibble away unsuspecting clouds.
She attributes the deep influences of these fishing hours with fashioning her into the writer she is constantly becoming. Fashioning, however, is my wrong expression. For the tongue of the river--riverine linguistics--is not a building up, like the erection of a grammatical system, but a licking away, a lingo of erosion.
Languidly, softly insistent in the dry season, when its micro-eddies curl silken around the slopes of the sandbars, caressing and carrying away the smallest of silt grains--with the coming of the monsoons, the tongue of the waters swells to demonic dimensions, lashing and licking away the soaked, surrendering banks, which plunge their trembling offerings of sod into the whorling, roiling depths of the mounting onrush.
This erosive mother tongue of the river, the fount to which Roy ascribes the flow of her own outpourings, is mirrored in the childhood speech of The God of Small Things' two young protagonists, Estha and Rahel: a code shared in part with their mother, Ammu, and always with an awareness of the nearness or absence of her maternal form. This language, with its own innocuous rhythmic microcurrents and whorls and eddies, resists and eats away at the Big Categories, the Official Categories defining how adults "should" live their lives.
In the latter part of the last century, while American feminists were attempting to nail down equal pay and maternity leave, French feminists were advancing theory into the realms of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the politics of language. Continental feminists became fascinated with mother-child relationships, with the babbling stage, and with the infant's nostalgia for union with the maternal form: with the kissy cosmos of mother-child communications and communions as a counter-language challenging and transcending the brutalizing absolutism of Big Categories, Official Categories, Gnomic Grammars.
For Julia Kristeva all of signification can be located on a continuum, with the semiotic occupying one pole and the symbolic the other.
The semiotic is closely associated with the infant's babbling state, with our pre-Oedipal union with the maternal body, with our bodily drives, urges, rhythms, tones, and movements as these interact or merge with those of the maternal form and her movements, rhythms, tones, urges, and drives.
At the other end of the spectrum of signification looms the symbolic: associated with grammar and, more fundamentally, with denotation. The symbolic makes all reference, signification, possible. It thus facilitates fixed meanings, reification, even totalitarianism.
If we are opposed to totalitarianism, we may find ourselves on the far semiotic pole of the spectrum, thrusting our hips while chanting "O baby, O baby." At the opposite pole resides the symbolic: for instance, non-emotive, rational legislation for "the greater common good" allowing the building of, say, dams that displace whole sustainable communities or caste laws stipulating how untouchables are to transport Brahmin manure.
All signification involves some degree of both the semiotic and the symbolic. Without the symbolic, all signification would never proceed beyond the babblings of an infant or a psychotic. Without the semiotic, all signification would read like computer code or Panini's grammar: mathematically exact but humanly empty.
Children, poets, painters, sculptors, magicians, and musicians find themselves at play in an embrace that breaks down the fixed significations of culture and of artistic cliché, an embrace where formlessness and form eternally find themselves melting into one another, a reversion back to our absolute union with the voluptuous, nude, nurturing, fecund and warm mass of the maternal form, babbling our hours-long jazz songs of ourselves, babbling in the sense that long, bop apocalyptic sax flights and starving, hysterical, naked feral howls and heavenly connections of mantras dissolving into light-body forms of the Goddess are babbling, white-hot moments of oneness.
Because of her linguistic and "feminine" orientation, Julia Kristeva is generally regarded as the most influential representative of the linguistic-oriented schools of French feminism.
In 1974, with the publication of La revolution du language poetique, Kristeva became increasingly concerned with the signifying process in general and with the theory of the subject in relation to language, especially poetic language. In her assessment of the psychological development of infant subjects, she posited the existence of a semiotic chora, a receptacle or space across which physical and psychic impulses or drives flow rhythmically.
The subject, as chora, is in a state of fusion with the maternal body: a state prior to temporality, signification, and representation.
This oceanic state of fusion with the maternal form is crisscrossed with rhythmic pulsations and drives. Though prior to language, it builds up the foundations for language acquisition. It does so gradually, at first through a process of regulation dictated by natural or sociohistorical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure or, in the case of India, caste.
Social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraints in a mediated form, which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but through an ordering.
It is the mother's body (Ammu's body) that orders and mediates between the ambiguous (simultaneously assimilative and destructive) drives that dominate the chora and the symbolic laws organizing social relations.
As these drives become gradually "marked" by constraints mediated by the mother (potty training, gender identification, separation of public and private, dirty and clean, touchable and untouchable), the body of the infant, especially its orality and anality, become demarcated, becoming the "semiotic," a disorganized, pre-linguistic signifying system.
Thus, along with orality and the regulation of the flow of milk from the mother's breasts, the regulation of the flow of excrement through the anal drive plays a role in this "marking out" of the body under the pre-linguistic authority of the mother (Revolution 27). In this way the semiotic, according to Kristeva, "is articulated by flow and marks" (Revolution 40). This semiotic level, this prelinguistic flux of maternally demarcated movements, gestures, sounds, and rhythms is a substratum of material that remains active beneath mature linguistic performance.
As the child matures and separates out from maternal unity, he or she also begins to acquire language. The child begins to gain linguistic competence, competence in the realm of symbols, in what Lacan would call the Law-of-the-Father. But in order to engage in language, the child must learn syntax, logic, and fixed signification.
In other words, the rhythmic, meaningless flow of the semiotic must be chopped up, articulated into stable terms and categories that have meanings. Like Professor Higgins tutoring Eliza Doolittle, the symbolic molds the relatively unorganized material of the semiotic into "mature" language. In entering the symbolic, the drive-ridden semiotic thus becomes repressed. However, the symbolic is never present without the semiotic, the semiotic surviving in mature linguistic performance as pulsional pressure--as tone, rhythm, bodily and material qualities--and also as contradiction, meaninglessness, disruption, silence, and absence.
In order for societies to exist, they must maintain terms with stable meanings. They must have categories, for instance, Touchables and Untouchables. But the semiotic is fluid and plural, a pleasurable and creative surplus or excess over precise denotation, taking delight in subverting the seeming stability of fixed significations. In Kristeva's view, the semiotic undermines the symbolic order most evidently in French Symbolist and other avant garde literature, wherein secure meanings and received social meanings are pluralized (Revolution 211-33). A confessional jazz solo also erodes away at the fixed symbolic order, which is why jazz became such a liberating force in post-WW II Europe.
In Lacanian lingo, Poets who tap into the semiotic enter the Body-of-the-Mother and resist the Law-of-the-Father. The result is a return to the linguistic play that is always already at work within the semiotic substratum of the symbolic, a return to language's full playful, truly poetic possibilities, as poesis. In this manner, the semiotic undermines the ingrained speech habits, freeing the subject not only from linguistic, but also psychic and social networks of clichés.
Poetic revolution then, the disruption of authoritarian discourse, is closely linked to radical social change, to political and spiritual revolution (Lechte 149). Thus Kristeva advises that she cannot be called a feminist, if that means the creation of a new feminist order of society, for all societal order is founded on the Law-of-the-Father.
Kristeva analyzes texts in terms of the interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic, for both always exist in texts:
Because the subject is always both semiotic and
symbolic, no signifying system s/he produces can be
either "exclusively" semiotic or "exclusively" symbolic,
and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to
both. (Revolution 24)
Every text, then, is made up of two types of threads. As Leon S. Roudiez remarks in his introduction to Revolution in Poetic Language:
Those that are spun by drives and are woven within the
semiotic disposition make up what Kristeva has defined
as a genotext, they are actualized in poetic language.
Those that issue from societal, cultural, syntactical,
and other grammatical constraints constitute the
phenotext, they insure communication. Seldom,
however, does one encounter the one without the other.
All language thus contains within it a residue of
the semiotic, which can be detected in poetic language,
in the genotext, recognized by those same elements that
characterize the subconscious: repetition (rhythm)
condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy)
(Lechte 142).
I would add that these elements often are conjoined with imagery of union with the maternal form.
Part II: Two Marks
The tongue of the waters erodes away the symbolic order of the Law of the Father not only in Small Things, but in two grand river narratives of another great river-inspired writer, Mark Twain.
"Mart twain!" is what a pilot calls out--pushing a long pole into the muddy river--when he is fishing for a depth ample enough to accommodate the hull of his vessel. It means two fathoms and provides one way of demarcating the river.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain's account of how he became a river pilot, he writes of an eternal contest between the repressive activities of the symbolic and the irrepressible force of the semiotic.
The shape-shifting, fluid mass of the Mississippi presents a force that the Pilot's Association, acting as a collective father figure for Twain, seeks to demarcate fastidiously.
In this battle, the symbolic intrudes onto the river by naming, quantification, demarcation (for instance, the phrase "mark twain"), hydraulic control, monopoly, the patriarchal, the legal, the governmental, the linearity of architecture and of the city -- and the static.
To wit: an example from the technology of hydraulic control:
Just as society attempts to demarcate and control the semiotic, "external" economic activities can influence the "internal" flow of the river. This is the subject of chapter 17, "Cut-Offs and Stephen." Twain notes that the upper Mississippi, from Cairo to St. Louis, flows through rocky country and is thus relatively straight. The lower river is another matter:
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the "lower" river
into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in
some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity
of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or
three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest
a couple of hours while your steamer was coming
around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an
hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is
rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back
in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has
only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across
the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the
water into it and in a wonderfully short time a
miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi
has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed
a countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable
plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big
island; the the old water course around it will soon
shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of
it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former
worth. (145)
Once the width of such a ditch has reached 15 feet, Twain declares that there is no power on earth that can stop it. Thus the untamable drive of the current has been molded by "external," "social" and economic forces. It is by virtue of such economics that backwoods plantations grow into landings, landings into villages, villages into towns, and towns into cities.
The semiotic is signified by the shifting, the unnamable, the poetic, the untamable flow of the river, the eddy, quicksand, the outlaw, profanity, the mobile, the maternal, the diverse, the unquantifiable.
Twain's narrative proceeds between these two poles, and every time the river washes away an ossified symbolic form, the reader, and we suspect the author, experience delight.
Twain again and again returns to the motif of flooding, and to efforts to control it. In the following passage, the repressive force of the Law-of-the-Father has assumed almost cosmically cartoonish proportions--it becomes the United States River Commission:
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night,
with the exception that now there were beacons to mark
the crossings, also a lot of other lights on the Point
and along its shore; these latter glinting from the
fleet of the United States River Commission,
and from a village which the officials have built on
the land for offices and for the employees of the
service. The military engineers of the Commission
have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the
Mississippi over again--a job transcended in size
only by the original job of creating it. They are
building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the
current; and dikes to confine it to narrower bounds;
and other dikes to make it stay there; and for
unnumbered miles along the Mississippi they are felling
the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the
purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark
with the slant of a house-roof, and balloting it with
stones; and in many places they have protected the
wasting shores with rows of piles. One
who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver--not
aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their
back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb or
confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there,
and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction
which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh
at. But a discreet man will not put these things into
spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be
known of their abstruse science; and so, since they
conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river
and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.
Captain Ads, with his jetties, has done a work at the
mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly
impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one
would pipe out and say the Commission might as well
bully the comets in their courses and undertake to
make them behave, as to try to bully the Mississippi
into right and reasonable conduct (205).
Just as the river in God of Small Things is a place of refuge from symbolic order, in Life on the Mississippi's sister narrative, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for Huck and Jim, the vast, maternal body of the Mississippi provides a refuge from the Law of the Father, especially from the Laws of Slavery. As in Small Things, the river provides a place where an illegal communion, between freeman and outcaste, can flourish.
Part III: One Mark
Linga means penis, or mark. That mark would be the dam on the Narmada.
How dare one even think of opposing it?
After all, this Grand Mark is theologically sanctioned, because no less then Shiva Himself in all His Dreadlocked-ness has always already planted so many of his marks, his pert little phalli, in the Narmada. The result of a meteor falling into the canyon in the geological past.
And as if that were not enough, Shiva in the Pine Forest, has shown us what must happen if we should somehow dare to politic against phallocentrism: to sever signifier and signified, severing his Mark.
All Hell would break loose.
We would need to mend signifier and signified back together with eternal offerings of ghee and . . . .
Part IV: No Marks
Water leaves no marks.
Rivers have no shape. Riverlings follow the contours of the terrain.
An army should have no form but flow away from the form of the enemy.
Strategies of the sage are spirit-like, entering the enemy's heart on invisible wings.
In 149 BC, the famous strategist Kong Ming of Shu and a few bodyguards fled to the city of Yangping, with the full might of the Wei army in hot pursuit.
When Suma-I, with his army, approached the city, he espied a few old men nonchalantly sweeping the grounds within the gates.
He spotted Kong-Ming lounging atop one of the towers, smiling and playing his lute. He was being fanned by the type of peachy-cheeked beauties one would find centuries later on Mao's Socialist Realist posters. (And Mao took to heart such strategies, which he had learned from Three Kingdoms.)
Suma-I remarked to his advisors: "That man seems to be too happy for my comfort. Doubtless he has some deep-laid scheme in mind to bring us all to disaster."
As the enemy army stood spellbound, the strains of Kong Ming's lute reached their ears, and this only heightened their sense of foreboding.
*
May Roy's mantra "A Thousand-Star Hotel" enter the hearts of millions, proving more powerful than any weapon.
*
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiGzcCf76TUAhVD0GMKHRk2AksQFghLMAY&url=http%3A%2F%2Fshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in%2Fbitstream%2F10603%2F13027%2F8%2F08_chapter%25202.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGX5oo72SojL1avvjegheE5kEaJRg&sig2=SGPWsULcIJI8sn9ZzRSC5g
Part II: Two Marks
"The semiotic articulates itself through marks and flows." ~ Julia Kristeva
The tongue of the waters erodes away the symbolic order of the Law of the Father not only in Small Things, but in two grand river narratives of another great river-inspired writer, Mark Twain.
"Mart twain!" is what a pilot calls out--pushing a long pole into the muddy river--when he is fishing for a depth ample enough to accommodate the hull of his vessel. It means two fathoms and provides one way of demarcating the river.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain's account of how he became a river pilot, he writes of an eternal contest between the repressive activities of the symbolic and the irrepressible force of the semiotic.
The shape-shifting, fluid mass of the Mississippi presents a force that the Pilot's Association, acting as a collective father figure for Twain, seeks to demarcate fastidiously.
In this battle, the symbolic intrudes onto the river by naming, quantification, demarcation (for instance, the phrase "mark twain"), hydraulic control, monopoly, the patriarchal, the legal, the governmental, the linearity of architecture and of the city -- and the static.
To wit: an example from the technology of hydraulic control:
Just as society attempts to demarcate and control the semiotic, "external" economic activities can influence the "internal" flow of the river. This is the subject of chapter 17, "Cut-Offs and Stephen." Twain notes that the upper Mississippi, from Cairo to St. Louis, flows through rocky country and is thus relatively straight. The lower river is another matter:
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the "lower" river
into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in
some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity
of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or
three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest
a couple of hours while your steamer was coming
around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an
hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is
rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back
in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has
only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across
the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the
water into it and in a wonderfully short time a
miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi
has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed
a countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable
plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big
island; the the old water course around it will soon
shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of
it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former
worth. (145)
Once the width of such a ditch has reached 15 feet, Twain declares that there is no power on earth that can stop it. Thus the untamable drive of the current has been molded by "external," "social" and economic forces. It is by virtue of such economics that backwoods plantations grow into landings, landings into villages, villages into towns, and towns into cities.
The semiotic is signified by the shifting, the unnamable, the poetic, the untamable flow of the river, the eddy, quicksand, the outlaw, profanity, the mobile, the maternal, the diverse, the unquantifiable.
Twain's narrative proceeds between these two poles, and every time the river washes away an ossified symbolic form, the reader, and we suspect the author, experience delight.
Twain again and again returns to the motif of flooding, and to efforts to control it. In the following passage, the repressive force of the Law-of-the-Father has assumed almost cosmically cartoonish proportions--it becomes the United States River Commission:
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night,
with the exception that now there were beacons to mark
the crossings, also a lot of other lights on the Point
and along its shore; these latter glinting from the
fleet of the United States River Commission,
and from a village which the officials have built on
the land for offices and for the employees of the
service. The military engineers of the Commission
have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the
Mississippi over again--a job transcended in size
only by the original job of creating it. They are
building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the
current; and dikes to confine it to narrower bounds;
and other dikes to make it stay there; and for
unnumbered miles along the Mississippi they are felling
the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the
purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark
with the slant of a house-roof, and balloting it with
stones; and in many places they have protected the
wasting shores with rows of piles. One
who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver--not
aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their
back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb or
confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there,
and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction
which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh
at. But a discreet man will not put these things into
spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be
known of their abstruse science; and so, since they
conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river
and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.
Captain Ads, with his jetties, has done a work at the
mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly
impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one
would pipe out and say the Commission might as well
bully the comets in their courses and undertake to
make them behave, as to try to bully the Mississippi
into right and reasonable conduct (205).
Just as the river in God of Small Things is a place of refuge from symbolic order, in Life on the Mississippi's sister narrative, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for Huck and Jim, the vast, maternal body of the Mississippi provides a refuge from the Law of the Father, especially from the Laws of Slavery. As in Small Things, the river provides a place where an illegal communion, between freeman and outcaste, can flourish.
Part III: One Mark
Linga means penis, or mark. That mark would be the dam on the Narmada.
How dare one even think of opposing it?
After all, this Grand Mark is theologically sanctioned, because no less then Shiva Himself in all His Dreadlocked-ness has always already planted so many of his marks, his pert little phalli, in the Narmada. The result of a meteor falling into the canyon in the geological past.
And as if that were not enough, Shiva in the Pine Forest, has shown us what must happen if we should somehow dare to politic against phallocentrism: to sever signifier and signified, severing his Mark.
All Hell would break loose.
We would need to mend signifier and signified back together with eternal offerings of ghee and . . . .
Part IV: No Marks
Rivers have no shape. Riverlings follow the contours of the terrain.
An army should have no form but flow away from the form of the enemy.
Strategies of the sage are spirit-like, entering the enemy's heart on invisible wings.
In 149 BC, the famous strategist Kong Ming of Shu and a few bodyguards fled to the city of Yangping, with the full might of the Wei army in hot pursuit.
Vastly outnumbered and unable either to retreat or sustain a siege, Kong Ming played a last-resort strategy that made him famous throughout China. He removed all the guards and battle flags from the walls and had all four of the city gates flung wide open.
When Suma-I, with his army, approached the city, he espied a few old men nonchalantly sweeping the grounds within the gates.
He spotted Kong-Ming lounging atop one of the towers, smiling and playing his lute. He was being fanned by the type of peachy-cheeked beauties one would find centuries later on Mao's Socialist Realist posters. (And Mao took to heart such strategies, which he had learned from Three Kingdoms.)
Suma-I remarked to his advisors: "That man seems to be too happy for my comfort. Doubtless he has some deep-laid scheme in mind to bring us all to disaster."
As the enemy army stood spellbound, the strains of Kong Ming's lute reached their ears, and this only heightened their sense of foreboding.
Such peculiar behavior was too suspicious. Fearing a clever trap, Suma-I turned his army back and retreated.
After the threatening army disappeared, Kong Ming and his remaining troops departed in the opposite direction, making their way safely back to their capital.
After the threatening army disappeared, Kong Ming and his remaining troops departed in the opposite direction, making their way safely back to their capital.
*
May Roy's mantra "A Thousand-Star Hotel" enter the hearts of millions, proving more powerful than any weapon.
*
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiGzcCf76TUAhVD0GMKHRk2AksQFghLMAY&url=http%3A%2F%2Fshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in%2Fbitstream%2F10603%2F13027%2F8%2F08_chapter%25202.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGX5oo72SojL1avvjegheE5kEaJRg&sig2=SGPWsULcIJI8sn9ZzRSC5g
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