The Maya Tree Liberal Arts Review Vol. 3, 2012
BNU
Beaconhouse National University 3-C Zafar Ali Road, Gulberg V Lahore, Pakistan themayatree@gmail.com
Copyright © 2012 Beaconhouse National University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission of Beaconhouse National University. Publication Layout design by Tasmia Khan. Cover art, watercolor titled “Ice and Crimson Leaves,” by Amina Rizwan. Cover layout design by Fizza Hayat. Printed by Le Topical Printers, Lahore.
Contents Foreword iii Acknowledgements v POETRY
1. Qasr-e-Sikandar Ali Faateh Khwaja 3 2. Of Every Fire Maham Khan 4 3. Someone Ahmed Talat 5 4. Dux Farhana Chaudhry 6 5. Each Maham Khan 8 6. Naseeb Sumaya Makhdoom 10 7. Infirmity Ali Faateh Khwaja 11 8. Painted Talk Maham Khan 13 Guest Features
9. Poets/Surgeons Asmara Malik 14 10. Wanderlust Asnia Asim 15 11. Men of Mardan Asmara Malik 17
PROSE 12. Nobody’s Home Mahey Noor 21 13. Charcoal Letters Taha Sheikh 22 14. And Then There’s You Sumaya Makhdoom 27 Guest Feature
15.
An Open Letter to My City
CRITICAL DISCOURSE
Sarah Elahi
28
16. Sound and Silence: Manto’s Radio Drama and the Critical Deficit Mavra Tanveer 33 17. Sylvia Plath: Vision and Technique Hera Naguib 86 Guest Feature
18.
Metaphysics Precedes Ontology: Criticism before Truth
M M Nauman Faizi
121
Foreword The Maya Tree Liberal Arts Review is the first peer reviewed creative and academic journal published by the only exclusively dedicated liberal arts institution in our country, Beaconhouse National University. The journal is the heart of an extended initiative growing steadily, organically attempting in some measure to arrest or retard alarming creative and critical deficits in Pakistan’s academy. The environment continues to prove inhospitable for, and often downright hostile towards, the liberal arts—literature particularly, for expressly shortsighted and ill-conceived reasons. So, it may just be worth(less) reiterating: trees evolve and come to fruition over and for generations, yet take only a few senseless minutes (and men) to fell. As much as it is an academic exercise aimed at epistemic reclamation or restoration, The Maya Tree is an experiment in self-governance. The initiative is envisioned, managed and executed by a multi-disciplinary student Council, which is supported by a demanding hands-on course module offered by the university’s Liberal Arts Department to ensure extensive faculty guidance, oversight and reinforcement. Perhaps entirely ill-advised from the onset, the Council has elevated me to the much too lofty sounding rank of Editor-in-Chief, and has entrusted me with the unenviable task of writing the Foreword. Apropos, I have chosen to pen instead only these two hardly adequate but brief prefatory paragraphs for two reasons. One, ours may be a nascent little Tree, but one that is rapidly acquiring a history, legends, roadmaps, mugs, keys, whatnot; a history that will, God willing, continue to unfold and be re-told in endless poems, stories, plays, papers, essays and more, for posterity. Two, it really would be a pity to keep you much longer with my shabby words from the poetry, prose and critical discourse papers that have made their way into this volume after blind peer reviews, editorial conferences, four rounds of short-listing, and extensive editing and proofreading processes. Jawad Haroon Editor-in-Chief
Lahore 30th December, 2012
* If after all our efforts, mistakes remain herein, the blame is entirely mine. If the volume is somehow meticulous, or even if I have managed to contribute anything worthwhile, with very much love, I would like to dedicate my efforts to all The Maya Tree Council members, former and current, and to Dr. Ira and Zulf.
iii
Acknowledgements After valuable guest contributions by Dr. Ira Hasan, Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Ilona Yusuf graced Volume 2, for guest feature slots in Volume 3 the Council decided to extend the call for submissions to the public. The response was heartening and we are indebted particularly to Asmara Malik and Asnia Asim for their beautiful and powerful poems; Sarah Elahi for her eloquent and deeply moving prose contribution; and, M M Nauman Faizi for his brilliant and articulate critical discourse paper. But, we are just as grateful to all contributors for making the 2012 Liberal Arts Review meaningful and worthwhile. Whereas even BNU faculty are welcome to submit contributions for consideration, vying in external pools for guest feature slots, the bulk of the journal remains reserved for the work of BNU students and alumni. Without their remarkable efforts at multifarious levels, particularly but not only those of the Council members, there would be no Tree: hence, to them we remain in profound, perpetual and existential debt. We have tried to make our processes as robust and rigorous, aesthetically and academically, as possible: without substantial contributions from our alumni, present and former liberal arts faculty, this would not be possible. The return to the Tree’s folds of Nida Maqsud and Zaibun Pasha, who coined the journal’s title back in 2008, has proved utterly invaluable; as have the remarkable unwavering commitment, dedication and efforts of Mavra Tanveer and Hera Naguib. For the beautiful watercolor that adorns the cover of volume 3, we would like to thank Amina Rizwan. Prose Nida Maqsud Mavra Tanveer *
Peer Review Boards Critical Discourse Zaibun Pasha *
Poetry Hera Naguib Sana Tanveer Malik *
Editors Mavra Tanveer Hera Naguib Sana Tanveer Malik Editor-in-Chief Jawad Haroon*
*
The Fourth Maya Tree Student Council Taha Sheikh Sumaya Makhdoom Tasmia Khan Rida Khalid Ailya Waqar Faculty Advisor Mavra Tanveer
v
Qasr-e-Sikandar
Ali Faateh Khwaja
Unbidden, Distant memories barge in: Joss sticks and ittar, Geometric tiles and roshandans, Rooftop panoramas, Their dead grandeur
Rotting leather-bound albums cough dust. Outside, refuse chokes open drains, Twisting, river-like, forever changing course Building children’s immunity To disease and the past Amidst unopened chests, Moth-chewed curtains, Chapped wall paint, They stare down from portraits, Imperious and inscrutable As a junta or a jury
Branches of their tree With such suddenness Sprouted dead ends. Yet some features survive, Surfacing now and again, On successors who cannot speak their tongue
A few miles south, A few feet under, Flanked by tyre shops and middle-aged theatres, In jaundiced marble beds Those lovingly interred relics Are now tended by strangers Poetry
3
Someone
Ahmed Talat
The urge to be someone, To love, to hate someone, To inherit, to breed someone, To be kind, to free someone, Believe you will believe someone. Believe, you will deceive someone That would be you, you will be someone Someone that will be no one.
Poetry
5
Painted Talk
Maham Khan
Either this light is harsh Or the fight has gone out of my skin. His pocket is firmly filled with his hand, His heart jammed fully with blood And all the fight is still in him.
Duly he speaks, he has a drawl that draws me in And time and time, again I am found looking in Past windows and doors, the light just beneath the door
This cosmetic talk, this ice tea saccharine and chilled. Tell me streetlight tales and I will chase them with my will. If I had children, they would all be made of paper And like my mother I fall in love with ashen faces Hide laughter in my hair, firmly pinned
She walks like the night But nights never walk, they stand still And are stubborn: it takes alarm clocks to make them leave While I make love to silence With a civility, drawn in and out like a long breath No footsteps to interrupt us now.
Poetry
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The Men of Mardan
Asmara Malik
Your truck commands me, brother: come to Mardan, scented with perfume. What kind-- you do not say. I would hate to presume it is only I you would summon thus, surely there are others. I am not envious; the men of Mardan do not affect affection. There is only love or
there is none. Candied emotions are left bloodied by your road-side, Mardan. Your men wear their bodies like blades, lean swagger and slow promenades of lank frames-- too knowing smiles framed with untamed hair. The men of Mardan
are Biblical, they are men of a Torah before the Torah, Abrahamic, they are Moosa-sardonic, they speak in tongues
laced with fire, brimstone smashing in every consonant. When the men of Mardan kiss, it is a fist to the mouths of little gods littering the concrete carcass of cities where men are too pretty to remember when the Desert was God and you, Mardan, were His Beloved, His Fingers clawed deep into your dark hair,
His Lips on your eyelids, His voice whispering: Moosa; these forgotten kings of our land without lore. Poetry
17
Nobody’s Home
Mahey Noor
Like the swirling white in the skirts of Sufis, I will survive, maybe another twirl. How alive can I be? Maybe I’ll last till another bolt of lightning hits the sky. Will you kindly just pull your muslin cloth away? It is wrapped too tight across my face. Through the perforated gleam of a life, you suffocate my eyes. Too much, for me to even breathe. I watched you, you know, more than you watched me. I stared at your living and loving, your own, for too long. Your games of hearts and sweaty laughs, those tricks of cards, and magic lies, I remember with the clarity of an ochre morning. Like a stealthy stranger, you reach into the end of me, down to my very toes. You come begging now, with your sweeping words and electric promises, hoping to find me a little rotten, crumpled mess in your pocket. These walls of insanity thrive amidst a sleepless town of putrid bluebells and dead moths that levitate with the light I still find bright in your eyes. Somewhere, deep within your dark window, you did too fall in love. For sixteen seasons, I traipsed along, a monument under a trance, a patient of a constant wait. But still you blame me for wanting out. I chased you to within a foot of the finish line, a fool I was. When does the finish line ever come forward to meet the runner? I flew into the nighttime and did a half patrol around the perimeter of you. What stopped me? What stopped you? So close. So close. So wretched close. Teasing along the edges. Bad Timing. Incoherent thoughts. Breathing steady and then… not at all. I could have kept you in my heart, you hammered ant, but you took a bite and then gulped my heart whole. You hold the reins to a heart you can’t keep. You are a thief, struggling to pick the locks to a million doors within me, which are struck shut through a programmed conclusion. I bind you to me. You bind me to you. Let’s unravel in this wicked mess. Everybody is waiting. It is time. You’re chasing an ideal game, bait long eaten up – gone. It is toward this end that I still wish to applaud you for orchestrating this riddle. You’re flying low, don’t fall, for I can’t catch you, or protect you, even from yourself anymore. The life jacket that I gave you, fabricated from fire, heartbeats, tears and promises, has long been shredded. I’m sorry; it got too hard to keep them all. I fear for the many lands you conquered, because it might take two lifetimes to win those back. You loved this world in me that existed for real in a dream-world. I know the answers you seek don’t exist. The criticism I laced you with, I fear, was a monologue of a sickened hurt heart. I chased you. You’re still chasing me. Why wouldn’t this end? You are going to remain two pages in my journaled memory now. Nothing more. Nothing less. Please. Make do. Tick tock. Tick Tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick Tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Time stands still. I win. We lose. Because now, nobody’s home. Prose
21
Charcoal Letters
Taha Sheikh Empty white room Bleeding voices Aching charcoal wounds Closed eyes Searching for you
Letter One The bruised sky hangs silently. Blue cuts stretch across it, whispering defeat, its fall. The pagan canvas has lost its will to cry or perhaps the rivers of heaven have dried out. The wind dances in and out, swiftly and silently spraying grainy dust upon my skin and into my wideawake soaring eyes. The room mysteriously smells today and looks rather pale. I am sitting next to the window as I write, one eye looking outside and the other observing the room. The two worlds juxtaposed in front of me, for me. It is an interesting vision to look upon; it evokes so many memories and brings rhyme to dead verses. Although the rhyming seems forced now, I guess it is gone from these scripts. Dear brother, it has been a long time since I saw you, spoke to you, wrote for you. I know you are surprised that I am writing to you. Believe me, I am more surprised than you. I do not blame you for not writing to me, words never came easy to you. In any case, nobody would want to live in or be in touch with the madhouse we call home. Living this life always haunted me. It still does but I guess I am beginning to make peace with it or perhaps I am in denial. I think I have started keeping secrets from myself. I seem to have lost my sense of reality since you decided to run away. You were always good at keeping secrets. I have a secret to tell you now. I have started writing stories and poetry again. Nobody knows of this, except you now. I think the fat woman next door has an inkling but I am very careful about not leaving clues lying around. It is exciting to write again and more than that to keep it a secret from so many eyes. They linger outside thinking that I am not aware of them, of their hushed voices flowing in the air. How naive! I am writing a story these days. It is about a man who has fallen in love with a prostitute or perhaps the prostitute has fallen in love with him. I am not sure yet. I’ll send you the first draft soon; right now it is nothing more than random words and fragments of sentences. You are not here anymore to edit and critique my dull paragraphs. You always loved my poems and my sentences about the weather and the landscape around us. I found them tedious but you always said you enjoyed the imagery sunken in them. I thought I was one of the reasons 22
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And Then There’s You
Sumaya Makhdoom
I see you in dreams and in fiction, where no one can see you. You’ll walk past me in such haste that I’ll forget that I’m supposed to follow you. Yes, I do follow you, when you think you’re alone, even when you’re thinking. It’s become a habit; to wake up, brush my teeth, change my clothes and tune in to your channel, seek you out in crowds, walk by your side silently. Never saying a word I support you, even while you’re in the darkest realms of your mind, by pulling you out like a bucket from a fifty-foot deep well. At night, when you have no companion to warm your bed, I lay near you, your back facing me. I don’t mind, I love hearing the blood rushing in your ears, tasting the salt of your sweat and breathing in the odor that is you. Like I said, it’s a habit. But when there is somebody that you’ve replaced me with, my insides are aflame and bubble with toil and trouble. Each caress that I witness slices a piece of my form. Unlike you, I have scales and it’s far more complicated. You’re distracted in lovemaking and so fail to register when the chandelier hanging above your head is alight with virginal blue fire. Pieces of glass fall, dripping and inflamed, blue sparks on your oriental carpet. How is that for support? Instead of burying my replacement under the very bed you share, I’m perfecting my lightshows. Last time it was fuchsia, today its aqua and I plan mustard for the near future. This chandelier is a product of my craft, something that’s been done and undone countless times, just like you. I’m a mere spectre, and you’re my dream.
Prose
27
An Open Letter to My City
Sarah Elahi
Karachi, for a year I wrote you love letters, swearing my undying love with the devotion of a spaniel, determined not to be the lone resident of this city who lacks the instinct to defend you. Love and defensiveness are one and the same here, you have made it so. Sometimes I think all we learn living here is how to seek out beauty in the saddest places, or how to look away. Do you see then, like all fickle lovers, how your own watch life through poetry, camera lenses and lies? How every part of their anatomy is obediently, subserviently, trained to appreciate you in all your cruelty and ugliness? From the eyes that anxiously seek out the sunsets made wild and unique with smog and dust and the sea below, to the noses that anticipate salt and petrol and garbage and dying fish in an attempt to soothe nostalgia, to the feet that hurry up in crowded bazaars and the hips that deftly avoid strangers’ hands in public places. All the time repeating to themselves mantras and tributes and metaphors about melting pots and stepmothers, without daring to leave the parameters of their safe spaces. And daring to leave, the feeling of daring to leave, is what unites your many lovers who see each other feel, but how can we leave everything we know and where would we go? Because to leave would be to let our eyes and mouths seek out more straightforward things and we are used to not understanding so easily. The path to loving this city is never a straight line; it is winding roads and broken homes, fear and comfort, familiarity and strangeness, the joy and panic at the first drop of rain, a love-hate relationship with water. How, then, could we go someplace where beauty is right there, carefully cultivated, cherished and protected, not sought out or understood over years? How would we belong? You have really only enslaved us all, like the most manipulative of lovers and we can never be free because to choose freedom would be to belong nowhere. The children who shrugged off dead siblings in conversations with me last summer; the doe-eyed girl in purdah to whom you gave such big dreams; the seventeen year old teacher who lived by the railway tracks; the chain-smoking social worker who stubbed her cigarette in a dirty chai mug and said it’s best to leave this place but never left herself; the delicate-skinned lady at the museum whose eyes widened at my stories; the free-thinking driver who told me he didn’t believe in God; the flag-waving students who loved Salman Khan and boy scout lessons; the eunuch who was more graceful than all her patrons; the butcher whose skull was bludgeoned for opening his shutters the day of a strike – what do they care for romantic notions of home? In conversations with Lahoris they will all sigh longingly at descriptions of smooth roads and traffic control, scheduled power cuts and homogenous neighborhoods with fewer guns, but they will all say we come from the big city and we have the sea and they will memorize 28
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An Open Letter to My City
the way the gray foam of that sea carries away slippers and long days and its stench will become part of who they are.
Prose
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Sound and Silence: Manto’s Radio Drama and the Critical Deficit
Mavra Tanveer
786
Radio drama earned significant space for itself in the Subcontinent in the 1940s, one it has managed to retain to some extent in the post-partition digital age. It not only fostered a substantial community of writers, voice artists, and musicians but also attracted a large audience. The radically advanced medium allowed the dramatic form to cross over into an unfamiliar creative landscape according it a novel flexibility. Drama written for radio rose up from text, disembodied from the materiality of the stage and, relying heavily on individual imagination, constructed a world purely out of sound and silence. The diffusion and reinvention of dramatic techniques born out of interaction with the acoustic strengths of the radio, the historical and aesthetic presence and significance of the form in Urdu Literature, and Manto’s contribution to its development are the focus of this study. The opening chapter introduces the inquiry, contends that there is a dire need to move beyond prevailing reductive approaches to Manto’s oeuvre, and articulates the particular dimensions this study expands. Chapter two provides a divested biographical context, focused primarily on Manto’s trajectory as a literary artist, particularly as dramatist. The third chapter offers a survey of the limited literature available. It brings into focus and probes the reasons for the immense scholarly vacuum; outlines unexplored aspects of Manto’s work, which can be actualized and pursued through a critical and creative reorientation; and attempts to categorize Manto’s genre-eluding dramatic oeuvre. Chapter four constructs a short history of Urdu drama, and situates the chronological and aesthetic place of radio drama in it. Chapter five develops a framework of techniques and elements of composition unique to the genre of radio drama. In light of which, chapter six offers a study of Manto’s selective radio dramas, followed by the conclusion.
I. Introduction
About a hundred years ago, Saadat Hasan Manto, in the beginning unknowingly then with fierce purpose, set out to become the god of storytelling. In his difficult and abbreviated life, just short of forty-three years, he created and told stories for most of it. His storytelling took many forms: jokes, translations, film journalism, short stories, essays, drama, a novel, screenplays, letters, and personality sketches. However, after his death, Saadat Hasan Manto has been popularly, and in some instances only, known as one of the best short story writers of the Subcontinent. His compositions in other genres, though equally prolific, are often considered to be his “minor writings” (Flemming, Other Reflections 1985)1. Out of the entire range of original writings, Manto’s dramatic works have received the least critical and creative attention over the years. Critical Discourse
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Manto’s Radio Drama and the Critical Deficit
30
پھر چراغ الله سے روشن ہوئے کوہ و دمن مجھ کو پھر نغموں په اکسانے لگا مرغ چمن پھول ہيں صحرا ميں يا پرياں قطار اندر قطار اودے اودے ،نيلے نيلے ،پيلے پيلے پيرہن برگ گل پر رکھ گئی شبنم کا موتی باد صبح اور چمکاتی ہے اس موتی کو سورج کی کرن پھر چراغ الله سے روشن ہوئے کوہ و دمن مجھ کو پھر نغموں په اکسانے لگا مرغ چمن )(Manto Dramey 207
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Critical Discourse
Sylvia Plath: Vision and Technique
Hera Naguib
Ever since Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre gained literary status, it has become the source of an endless whirlpool of interpretation. It continues to remain entangled, disputed, and divided over a web of critical cross-currents and under-currents that stream along a variety of divergent interpretations often discerned as romantic, biographical, mythological, extremist, feminist, and/or political. Across this pool of opinions, one of the earliest and perhaps most significant debates that has preoccupied critical thought is the extent to which Plath’s biography should color our reading of her works. This debate was triggered in the late 1960s and was mainly informed by the critic A. Alvarez’s various commentaries on Plath’s final and posthumously published volume of poetry, Ariel. Mainly engendered in response to the astonishing controversy sparked by her suicide, this debate has been variously marked by critics’ unequivocal need to spurn, reconcile, confront, or simply understand (for the arguments in this vein are many) the “dangerous” and “problematic” relationship between Sylvia Plath’s strife and her art (Brennan 21). In these terms, this debate can be considered the underlying impetus behind research towards much Plath scholarship as its repercussions are evident in the various approaches that have been generated to address this argument. While on one end, critics may have produced germinal insights and approaches in terms of interpreting the oeuvre and rescuing an artistic identity that continues to spill across the controversy of her suicide; on the other more precarious edge, whereabouts arises one of the central concerns of this dissertation, another school of thought continues to proffer an outlook rapt in astonishment and amazement at her suicide. In this light, criticism in the latter vein continually spans a precipice, always given to excessively extreme interpretations of her art. Primarily rooted in the controversy of her suicide and depression, these interpretations frequently inflate her characters to hyperbolic and thereby misrepresentative standards. More unfairly, they conflate the poet with these characters. The relationship is also constituted vice-versa. Either her “curiosity and hunger for experience” has been seen as transforming into a poetry of “annihilation or transcendence” or she has been pathologized as “neurotic,” plumbing the “deep spring of her sickness” in what turns out to be glamorized as her “murderous art” (Oberg 66). And as an effect of the latter, she has been sometimes eulogized to fictional ends as she becomes “hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another ‘poetess,’ but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines” (Alvarez qtd. in Brennan 27). As an almost inevitable extension of this image, she has been further mythologized, and misrepresented as an “infirm prophet, shrill, penetrating visionary” (Lowell vii). 86
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Sylvia Plath: Vision and Technique
By the 1970s, critics had acknowledged the need to develop more complex responses to Plath’s work, evident in the introduction of different thematic, psychoanalytical, and mythic frames of analysis, such as Ingrid Melander’s 1972 full-length study of Plath’s works, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes and David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. However, much of the critique in this decade remains heavily influenced by the early biographical readings. One of the concerns of this dissertation is to explore one of the strands of thought in this school, namely the mythic approach to Plath’s poetry and to assess its ability to adequately represent her works. First informed by Judith Kroll in her full-length study of Plath’s poetry titled Chapters in a Mythology, this vein of criticism seeks to explore or underscore what is configured to be an underlying mythic system or narrative in Plath’s poetry. Kroll and other critics inspired by her maintain that the poems as a totality reflect a personal process of development, a plot wherein the protagonist of the poems increasingly journeys from a state of oppression or symbolic death towards a transformation of the self and rebirth in the form of a mythic figure. If we follow Jacqueline Rose’s evaluation of this approach, then the “worst” has been done to Plath and her works (11). While exploring some of the critical work on this end in greater detail, I mainly seek to set forth several problems with interpreting Plath’s works through the mythic lens. Firstly, akin to the early biographical readings, the mythic readings often tend to aggrandize and embroider the character of Plath’s works to essentially falsified and misrepresentative standards. Secondly, despite their attempt to promote a criticism free from the controversy of the early biographical readings through an approach based on the aesthetic appraisal of Plath’s poetry, several critics offer a reading that is undeniably based on the haunting memory of either the poet’s strife or suicide. As an effect, these readings only misrepresent Plath’s poetic approach and thereby hinder or digress from a clear understanding of the human context of Plath’s late work, particularly Ariel, and thereby Plath’s aesthetic vision. Consequently, such readings necessitate a more representative analysis of the late Ariel poems. One of the more promising approaches is for the critic to turn to Sylvia Plath’s own critical commentary on her work for an understanding of the vision and the technique with which she penned her poetry. Some critics have belabored the futility of this approach, dismissing Plath’s commentary as either limited or confused reflections on her art. While reviewing the essential criticism that has been generated in response to Plath’s oeuvre, Claire Brennan asserts that “there is an unfortunate lack of critical perspective in Plath’s commentary on her own writing” (10). Similarly, for Pamela J. Annas, Plath’s critical work merely evidences the poet’s uncertain or “confused” approach towards her art (11). My main aim throughout this dissertation is to prove that Sylvia Plath’s critical commentary undoubtedly serves as a significant source for identifying the aesthetic approach that she espoused in Ariel. This insight remains pertinent to particularly two of Plath’s essays in which she lucidly articulates the vision and techniques she associates with Critical Discourse
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Hera Naguib
poetry. With brilliant subtlety, engaging imagery, the reflective structure of the essay, and a voice that could not be more self-assured, Plath describes her vision of poetry as compelling and passionate reflections of her soul rather than some extraneous, epic drama towards which she sought to tailor her vision and poems. It is my contention that the aesthetic vision Plath explores in her commentary indicates that at the heart of her poems lie concerns or conflicts that are not mythic, but simply personal. However, when I refer to her poetry as personal, my intention is not to encourage a reading that is influenced by her biography. Rather, I seek to illustrate how Plath identifies with a purely human vision as characterized by the familiar, universal, diverse and conflicting nature of the concerns or conditions with which Plath characterizes human existence. Moreover, Plath’s criticism reveals that she identified poetry as an insistent form as defined by the respective techniques that could best render these experiences in their intensity, namely the poem’s “rapidly shifting setting,” “opposed image sequence,” “compact form,” and “sparse” yet “precise” detail. After establishing Plath’s commentary as a critical aesthetic frame, I finally seek to explore how her poetry upholds this framework. At the heart of Plath’s poetry are concerns or conflicts that are essentially personal in nature. In “Ariel,” the conflict is depicted through the experience of a horse ride and as a rather existential struggle. In “The Couriers,” it unfolds as a general deliberation on the contradictory nature of love. What renders these concerns intense is this characteristic insistent pattern of Plath’s poems as defined by the techniques she outlines in her critical essays. In demonstrating the former aspects, I seek to establish how Plath’s poems remain reflective of, and best elucidated by the vision and the techniques that Plath outlines in these writings and thereby reinstate her criticism as a more representative source for reading her poetry. In this light, this dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is divided into two sections: the first section establishes with reference to Plath’s critical commentary in two of her seminal essays, the main aesthetic frame for reading into the intensely personal nature of Plath’s poetry. The second section of the chapter seeks to test this framework by applying it exegetically to an analysis of some of Plath’s poems from Ariel, thereby substantiating that Plath’s commentary constitutes a most suitable and representative lens for reading her works, particularly Ariel. Following this primary analysis, the second chapter explores the problematic nature of the mythic readings of several critics, and therein evidences how these readings diverge from, misconstrue and misrepresent Plath’s poetic vision. Finally, the third chapter closes the inquiry with a concluding discussion on the appropriateness of employing Sylvia Plath’s definition of her vision and technique for understanding her poems.
I. A Poetic Approach: Sylvia Plath’s Vision and Technique
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I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves
TMT Vol. 3, 2012
Metaphysics Precedes Ontology: Criticism before Truth
M M Nauman Faizi
This essay is an attempt to study the fourth subsection of part A of section One of Totality and Infinity (henceforth, TI). The title of this section is one of Emmanuel Levinas’ programmatic claims in TI: metaphysics precedes ontology. I rely on four basic sources to elucidate the meaning and implications of this claim: the first section of TI, “The Same and the Other,” a short essay by Levinas titled, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” James Mensch’s commentary on TI and Adriaan Peperzak’s To The Other. The purpose of this essay is not to offer a critical or evaluative account of Levinas’ claims about metaphysics, ontology and the history of Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology. Nor do I wish to present a comprehensive account of “the” Levinasian position on these complicated issues. Instead, this paper is a focused exegetical study of the claim “metaphysics precedes ontology” and my basic task is to explicate and elaborate the meaning of this claim in light of the sources I have named1. In my estimation, the best way to characterize this essay is to see it as an introductory, propaedeutic study of Levinas’ views on ontology and metaphysics in TI. There are two parts to this study. The first part is concerned with Levinas’ account of ontology. I describe the essential features of ontological discourse and the way in which they structure the relationship between the ontologist and the beings she investigates. Through illustrative examples, I also take up the reasons for which Levinas believes that almost the entire tradition of western philosophy is ontological in character. The purpose of this section is to map out the sense in which ontology is a totalizing discourse funded by the arbitrary exercise of an investigator’s freedom, and how ontology reduces the alterity of the “other” and jeopardizes the possibility of ethics. In the second section of this study, I engage with Levinas’ description of metaphysics. The section explores the way in which Levinas describes the possibility of philosophy as a metaphysical endeavor that proceeds by way of “calling into question,” and the critique of, the exercise of an investigator’s freedom. I take up the subject of infinity, ethics and the metaphysical relationship between “the same” and “the other” to elaborate how, for Levinas, metaphysics is a non-imperialistic discourse that “respects” the alterity of the other. I conclude the section with a brief sketch of the way in which Levinas builds the relationship between ontology and metaphysics such that the latter “precedes” and “conditions” the former2.
I. Ontology: The reign of the Same
Levinas characterizes ontology as a particular form of theoretical or philosophical discourse, in the section titled “Metaphysics Precedes Ontology.” He notes that “[t]o theory as comprehension of beings the general title ontology is appropriate” (TI 42). Ontology, Critical Discourse
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