ariel: a review of international english literature

ISSN 0004-1327 Vol. 41 No. 1 Pages 45–68 Copyright © 2011

What Cost Abjection for the Sake of the

Nation? Conceptualizing Normativity in the
Works of William Saroyan and Ruskin Bond
Debashis Bandyopadhyay

Having lost his father at the age of three and being pitchforked into an
Oakland orphanage, away from his mother, for the next five years, the
Armenian American author, William Saroyan (1908–81), appears never
to have quite outgrown a trace of psychological abjection that scarred
his mind in childhood. The uniqueness of his authorial vocation lies in
the way he negotiates with this abjection. To the coterie of world writers
influenced by Saroyan, belongs the Anglo-Indian author, Ruskin Bond
(1934–), who, too, has been through a similar bout of trauma—wit-
nessing in early childhood a separation between his parents and at the
age of ten suffering a lonely bereavement, when in a boarding school in
Shimla (India) he received news of his father’s death. This article seeks to
demonstrate how both authors employ abjection to critique the socio-
political cluttering of the notion of normativity. I have selected texts
whose interpretations cast light on the implications of psycho-social ab-
jection in a world roiled by war and terrorism.
In Saroyan’s “Cowards” (Fresno Stories 62–72), a short story based
on the psychological effect of drafting among the able-bodied young
men of Fresno, California, during World War I, the protagonist pre-
fers infantilism to state-controlled coercive fatalism. When the Selective
Service Act reached Fresno in 1917, eligible sons of various families were
supposed to throw down their lots and present themselves to the draft
board. A twenty-four-year-old man, Kristofor Agbadashian, who had
lost his father at three, lived with mother and three unmarried sisters
and worked at the menswear department in Cooper’s, suddenly disap-
peared. His mother, Aylizabet, told her friend, Arshaluce Ganjakian,
that she was upset over her son’s disappearance. From the war officials
and the sheriff who had come in search of Kristofor she had learnt that

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her son was not in the Army. As the war came to an end and fear of con-
scription melted away, Aylizabet confided to Arshaluce that it was she
who made her son evade the draft by stowing him in her place: “He has
been home all this time. It is my fault. I told him I would die if he went
away. His father died when he was still a small boy. I could not bear to
lose the only man remaining in the family” (Fresno Stories 69).
Kristofor emerged from his hideout, went to San Francisco in search
of better prospects, married and had children. When the military in-
quest caught up with him ten years later, he explained, without mincing
words, that he was a coward. However, the sympathetic investigator put
down “Father” as the cause of Kristofor’s failure to present himself for
the draft.
In 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s Independence, the BBC chose
to broadcast a short but significant biographical sketch, “The Playing
Fields of Shimla” (Memoir 51–59), by Ruskin Bond. The author nar-
rates the nostalgic experience of his adolescent friendship with a Muslim
friend, Omar, in Bishop Cotton School at Shimla in India during the
days of the Raj; how they came close to considering each other alter-egos
and in one of their joint intrigues found a tunnel in a defunct drainage
pipe in the school’s third flat to escape into a no-man’s land. These idyl-
lic excitements ceased with the 1947 Partition of the Indian subconti-
nent, forcing Omar to migrate to an unknown land called Pakistan. The
feeling of estrangement comes to a head during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan
War, when Ruskin Bond finds out that one of the pilots of the Pakistan
bomber which is shot down by Indian flak near the playing field of his
Shimla school is Omar.
Bond’s apparently innocuous manner of narrating his childhood
memories hides a deep sense of identity-seeking concerns. Given the
kind of hatred and socio-political rejection that the young author him-
self encountered during the Nationalist movement in India, it was quite
natural for him to feel concerned about fostering, like Omar, a sense of
ambivalence towards the place with which he otherwise identified. It is
important for the reader to know that on the eve of India’s Independence
the identity crisis of the Anglo-Indians turned into a nightmare as they
were jettisoned by the British government as flotsam of the Empire and

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spurned by the Nationalist Indians for their English bearing and al-
leged associations with the colonists. Omar’s fear of territorial belong-
ing is shared by Bond, albeit not due to his religious credo, but for his
physical aspects which are more like that of a white “sahib” than of a
native. Central to both their crises, however, was a fear of displacement.
For both Omar and Bond, the school’s third flat provides the site for a
symbolic escape from institutionalized space, the political implication
of which is to escape territorial boundaries into a no-man’s land for two
persons, a Muslim and an Anglo-Indian, whose identities were under
Nationalist scrutiny.
Omar’s desire for a no-man’s land becomes a prescient foreboding
for the kind of forced disjunction his adult personality will suffer from
childhood impressions. Had Omar been able to make a tunnel to escape
the politically enforced geographical and later ideological dislocations
in the wake of the Partition, he could have been saved from the psychic
schism of his adult life. His is a case of schizoid anti-normativity because
unlike Bond his adult sensibilities underwent recursive disorientation
from the formative influences of childhood experiences. In fact, the re-
versal of the normative in Omar is governed by a perspective that in
itself is rendered highly fickle by the psychopathology of nationalism.
Omar’s alleged neurosis is, in Jacques Lacan’s schema, a position taken
up with respect to the Other.
I will problematize the concept of normativity by exploring how the
socio-political structures of power underwrite the change of content
in Omar’s psychoanalytic component of abjection and validate the au-
thor’s adolescent fear about his own subjectivity. Can Omar’s aggressiv-
ity from an integrationist point of view be treated as having been born
from a culturally complicit enforcement of abjection, that nations force
on each other in order to allay their own fears of abnormality? When
the Saroyanesque Kristofor sought infantilism to save himself from the
fatal consequences of a “death drive,” the authorial narrator in Bond’s
memoir dissociates himself from his abjected “double,” who ends up an
exiled warrior trying to kill his own people.
According to Lacan, a person’s relation to the Other determines his
psychic or clinical structure. This structure develops during childhood

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and adolescence and remains fixed thereafter, regardless of any obvious

symptoms. The child’s mirror image is an anticipation of the Other that
structures his subjectivity. The mirror image in its specular complete-
ness becomes invested with a fantastic idealism that the child wishes to
achieve in order to allay the fear of its fragmented Self. But s/he does
not experience this imaginary ideal in an actual mirror. The mother as
caregiver acts as an ideal image for the child. The child’s desire for the
mother gets repressed in the Oedipal stage under the superegoic prohi-
bition of the father. The incestuous libido resides as a residual potential
in the child to inspire an identification with the father.
The concept of repressive normativity operates under a sacrificial logic
of abjection. “The subject must abject, that is, define and exclude those
things which threaten it” culturally (Coats 8). Adolescence is a time
when the Oedipal work accomplished in early childhood is revisited.
This is a genetic phase when the subject suffers from a double bind
between desire for and fear of the mother’s body. Julia Kristeva calls this
uncomfortable period “abjection”: a state that “does not respect borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4).
This is when the imaginary father intervenes lovingly in rescuing the
child from merging back into non-identity. In the absence of the father
or/and in the presence of a social threat of corporeal fragmentation, the
libidinal desire of the adolescent, revolving around the specular image
of completeness (in strategic relation to the threat of fragmentation),
gets excited. This expresses itself in symptoms of the “death drive” which
needs to be repressed again through symbolic exercises of mastery lest
it becomes a full-blown disease. The appearance of the symbolic father
to the adolescent child in his critical moment takes place in different
sublimational forms. These multiple constituents of identity forma-
tion (in contrast to any reductively singulative norm) are examples of
such forms I deploy in my discussion of Kristofor Agbadashian and the
Anglo-Indian/Muslim friendship further on in this article.
In “Cowards,” Kristofor Agbadashian is a fatherless orphan living
with his mother, a situation inflammatory enough to push him towards
the anti-normative pole of the double bind. His libidinal proclivities
are intensified further by the threat of fragmentation that emerged in

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the form of war conscription in 1917. So, he is subjected to a state

of double abjection—absence of the father and institutional fatalism.
Throughout social history, the exclusions of peoples based on race, sexu-
ality, disabilities and religion have established and bolstered both per-
sonal and national identities. Kristeva’s primary insight is that what we
have expelled as abject does not simply and finally disappear. Identities,
communities and nations are brittle constructs because they are built
on abjection, which haunts their borders. In Bond’s memoir, both the
author and Omar are primarily abjects, like Kristofor and his creator
William Saroyan, in having lost their fathers in childhood. This brought
them together in contradistinction to the other “horde of rowdy, pea-
shooting fourth formers” (Bond 51). The cause of Bond’s abject distinc-
tion lies “in sharing my father’s loneliness after his separation from my
mother” (51–52). That his desire to assume the father’s role stemmed
from a libidinal economy becomes clear in the psychological revival of
the Oedipal feelings that endangered the narrated time of the persona’s
life portrayed in “The Playing Fields”:
It had been a lonely winter for a twelve-year-old boy.
I hadn’t really got over my father’s untimely death two years
previously; nor had I as yet reconciled myself to my mother’s
marriage to the Punjabi gentleman who dealt in second-hand
cars (51).

He was still obsessed with the images overwhelmingly invested with

his father’s presence: his father’s rare visits on brief leaves from RAF
duties, sharing a tent or Air Force hutment with him outside Delhi
or Karachi, visiting Lawrence Royal Military School, his father’s alma
mater, and discovering his name on the school’s honour roll board. In
such a state of loneliness, when he yearned for identification from the
social rim of the fourth form of his school, he discovered his prototype
in a quiet, “taciturn” new boy, Omar, who showed a complete indiffer-
ence to the form’s “prevailing anarchy”(52). Bond’s identification with
Omar is based on the sympathetic principle of abject grouping. “Omar,
too, had lost his father—had I sensed that before?” (52) says the author
in a retrospective reflection on the etiology of a unique camaraderie.

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A shared objective of fighting libidinal urges and abject vulnerability

establishes a communicable reciprocity between them: “Even before we
began talking to each other, Omar and I developed an understanding of
sorts, and we’d nod almost respectfully to each other when we met in the
classroom corridors or the environs of dining hall or dormitory” (52).
At hockey and football, Bond and Omar, as goalkeeper and full-back
respectively, communicated on the same wavelength. When the school
hockey team visited Sanawar to play out their rivals, the Lawrence Royal
Military School, both of them “thrown together a great deal”(52), “ex-
changed life histories and other confidences”(53). On the eve of the
Indian Independence when word spread that the British are going to
divide the country, Omar evinced apprehensive fear of a breach of com-
munication. The fear was realized in the form of abject schism when
Partition forced exile on him. Although Bond tried to assuage Omar’s
anxieties saying, “Oh, it won’t happen … How can [sic] they cut up
such a big country?” (53), he too reeled under the fearful memory of a
nationalist rejection he had suffered earlier. Like Kristofor, Omar suf-
fered a second bout of abjection when his identity was redefined on
the basis of religious Nationalism, snapping the communicative chords
discreetly tautened by multivalent ties and fragmenting his sense of in-
tegrity. Omar’s paranoid aggressivity that subsequently blows him up in
the 1965 War springs from what Lacan calls the “delusion of the misan-
thropic ‘belle ame’” (Ecrits 20), seeing into the world the disorder of his
own fragmentary self. The dissection of the country energizes the infan-
tile trace of his unconscious lack of coordination of motility. His abject
desire for the mother, who is invested with the imago of the fulfilling
supplementer of the lack, inspires him to desire the object of the Other’s
desire in the form of a spatial Gestalt of a place Bond continues to enjoy.
Deprivation of the Indian Other that he identified with becomes the
cause of his resentment.
The connection between libidinal normativity and cultural normativ-
ity appears all the more obscure in analyses of aggressive symptoms.
Kristofor in “Cowards” and Harry Cook and Wesley Jackson in The
Adventures of Wesley Jackson by William Saroyan have something of the
author in them. It is not only metaphoric of Saroyan’s libido-paternal

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angst that he chose to write The Adventures in military conscription in

London in August 1944 in a promised exchange for a furlough to New
York to see his wife and baby son. Although he was denied a furlough
on the grounds that the novel levelled a treasonous tirade against the US
government, the fictive retelling of his Army experience was for Saroyan
a mode of refracting and heaving his psychic pressure through projec-
tion. The Saroyanesque resentment at war and conscription is played
out in intriguing ways in the portrayal of each of these characters.
As“Cowards” and The Adventures are works on identical themes, it is
imperative to read them intertextually for a better understanding of the
paranoid delusions that the characters try to negotiate during war-time
coercive fatalism. Inherent in both the choices of infantilism and fatal-
ism is a psychoanalytic “death drive.” The difference between the two ex-
pressions of the instinct operates in the former being purely fantasmatic
and the latter social symbolic: the former works at the symptomatic level
while the latter teeters on the verge of terminal malignancy. This is why
Slavoj Žižek explains, “the forced actualization in social reality of the
fantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst and most humiliating type
of violence because it undermines the very basis of my identity—my
‘self-image’”(161). In reaction to the egotistic state-craft of legitimizing
fatalism through war and conscription, Saroyan employs fantasmatic
means to simulate libido-cultural economy and resist discernment of
the deviant process of tackling aggravated symptoms.
A clever tongue in cheek enactment of such a veiled retaliation takes
place early in The Adventures. Wesley Jackson and Harry Cook, privates
drafted into the US Army during World War II, are relaxing outdoors
on a pile of reclining timbers in an Army camp when the colonel comes
up with a phalanx of soldiers and a newspaperman. Harry’s resentment
at the entire business of war and drafting is so intense that his sympto-
matic hostility to and infringement of Army codes of conduct smack of
bland distaste. He has already made derogatory comments against the
Army at the risk of being court-martialled. When the colonel and his
team approach him, he evinces discourteous apathy in not acknowl-
edging their presence and singing “If I had my way, dear, you’d never
grow old” (The Adventures 33) sufficiently loudly to register his aggres-

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sive disavowal of militarism and rankle the colonel. When the scribe ac-
costs him for an interview, he dismounts from the pile and walks away,
bearing himself in a manner that might have attracted obvious disrepute
for the Army had not Wesley volunteered to offer plausible explana-
tion for his friend’s behaviour and save the colonel from embarrassment.
Wesley invents an impromptu story about Harry’s mother being fatally
ill and that he is upset crying over it through the afternoon. The ex-
planation appears to relieve the colonel who immediately swings into
damage reparation, demonstrating to the newspaperman how humanely
disposed the Army is towards its soldiers by ordering the Major to make
arrangements for Harry’s speedy transportation to his sick mother. In
fact, Wesley attributes Harry’s intransigence and passive belligerence to
enforced abjection. The stimulation of the “death drive” under condi-
tions of real threat of castration, dismemberment and mutilation in time
of war leads individuals to revive delusional infantile imagoes of narcis-
sistic wholeness of the Other. Concerns of the fragmentary Self seek al-
leviation in the unity of the Other that the infant in its state of physical
disability attributes to the supplementary succour of its mother. Harry
is obsessed with the song whose theme sheds ironical light upon the
threats inherent in growing out of infanthood into an adult being. What
is symptomatic in the mirror stage becomes perceptibly real when a
twenty-four year-old adult is conscripted for war. So for Harry, if he had
his way he would have never grown old; infantile symptoms are prefer-
able to adult eviscerations. In keeping with the motif of Harry’s obses-
sion, Wesley acts like a psychoanalyst to ascribe his abject aggressivity to
neurotic tendencies of infantilism. Harry has been crying for his mother
through the afternoon, says Wesley, because the apprehensions of the
supplementer’s death incite fear of losing the buttress that buoys up
courage during social threats of fragmentation. It occurs to Wesley that
the symptoms of forced abjection can find remedy in the invocation of
subjacent urges of Oedipality. It is Harry’s father, according to Wesley,
who asks Harry to join his ailing mother. If the notion of war seeks to
normalize libidinal instincts by drafting civilians into regimental sys-
tems engendered by real threat of self-annihilation, it needs to camou-
flage its asocial defilement of superegoic strictures by evoking utopian

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images of altruistic submissions. The presence of the newspaperman in-

quiring into the lives of soldiers in an army camp is a sort of metaphoric
implement reflectively introjected into the Army’s psyche probably to
buttress its weak libido-cultural economy. The colonel’s satisfaction at
Wesley’s explanation is ironically self-defeating in that it is a symbolic
approval of the treatment of the symptoms that the Army has chosen to
aggravate. The difference between the deviant and the normal is all the
more fudged. The militarist subterfuge intended to cover up its inherent
contradiction requires a civilian critic in the form of a newspaperman
for its excoriation and dialectic validation. The war program itself being
based on a schizoid pattern of psychic economy, it finds greater efficacy
in conscripting those deviant beings from civil society who are already
suffering from delusional paranoia and are conveniently hewed to the
doctrines of war. A capitalist system would maximize profit through
such deployments; it reduces the cost of attitudinal denormalizing of
patients who are already in the midst of hysterical trigger-happiness.
Psychiatric case files of two female suicide bombers who killed nearly
one-hundred people in Baghdad in February 2008 show that they
suffered from depression and schizophrenia. Al Qaeda insurgents in
Mesopotamia deployed mentally disabled persons as suicide bomb-
ers. Once inducted into the war and deployed in combat zones, civil-
ians formerly of normal mental health develop stress disorders making
them convenient and more effective weapons for repeated deployments,
not to speak of those who are already suffering from paranoia in civil
life; they are always already tailor-made for war. Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth cites the example of an Algerian police officer
whose colonial task of inflicting physical torture on natives had such
a toll on his mental health that he ended up battering his own wife
and children. Examples of such stressful neurosis and its exploitation
as reinvestible capital are numerous in the US Army. A few months
after Sergeant William Edwards returned to a Texas Army base from
a mission in Iraq in 2004, shot his wife Erin Edwards point-blank in
the head before turning the gun on himself. Sergeant Jarred Terrassas,
who was suffering from symptoms of aggressivity and convicted of do-
mestic violence, was knowingly deployed into an Iraqi combat zone

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to exacerbate his frenzy further. He returned from the war to kill his
seven-month-old son by inflicting severe head injury. In one instance,
the US Air Force repeatedly deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan Sergeant
Jon Trevino, a medic with a history of psychological problems including
post-traumatic stress disorder. Multiple deployments eroded Sergeant
Trevino’s marriage and worsened his mental health problems until, in
2006, he killed his wife, Carol, and then himself. In 2003, Jose Aguilar,
24, a sufferer of child-abuse trauma, returned from the Iraq War to his
North Carolina home to kill his infant son, Damien. Christine Hansen,
executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides domestic
violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted
men, said to The New York Times (Alvarez A6) that the organization’s
caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq began. Ironically enough, the
court trials of combat-trauma induced perpetrators of domestic violence
are indicative of the obfuscations of the deviant-normal divide when the
irreducible inertia of pretences and méconnaisance is systematized into
an institutional project.
In each of these cases of traumatic violence, one witnesses aggressiv-
ity as an introjective effect in abnormal condition of “turning round of
the Oedipal conflict upon the subject’s own self ” (Ecrits 25). War is a
psychologically anti-normative function that tends to thwart the typi-
cal development of the human subject in a manner which contributes
to propping up of the narcissistic moment that lies subjacent in all the
genetic phases of the individual, even in a stage where normative sub-
limation of the instinct is to be expected. The sustenance of the motif
of this capitalist form of utilizing human aggressivity despite its suicidal
nature is probably received from a misdirected “quest for ever more neu-
tral subjects in an aggressivity where feeling is undesirable” (Ecrits 28)
or only feeling of detestation is necessary. According to Lacan, war has
advanced its demands for dehumanizing or demonizing subjectivity to
a preposterous extent “after teaching us a great deal about the genesis of
the neurosis” (Ecrits 28).
Wesley’s masked psychoanalysis of Harry’s strange behaviour refers
to symptomatic infantilism that will also act as an apt clarification for
Kristofor’s behaviour in “Cowards.” An example of human resistance

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to the unconscionable demands of war to spur aggressivity by divesting

humanity of feeling, Kristofor’s tactic of hiding himself in his mother’s
boudoir to hoodwink the government and evade the draft is based on the
psycho-social morality of pitting natural Oedipality against the artifice of
organized, state-controlled, coercive abjection. Wesley’s desire to escape
the draft by hiding in the Coast Range Mountains off San Francisco
is like a primordial desire to reverse the genetic course into an embryo
and is collateral with Kristofor’s strategy. When Battaglia, the man from
the government, catches up with Kristofor on an inquest ten years after
the war, Kristofor has lived his life satisfactorily. He has evaded death
by war; Americanized himself by changing his name to Charles Abbot;
prospered in business; moved from Fresno to San Francisco; worked in
a menswear department and finally opened his own store in Post Street.
He has married a Scottish-Irish girl and has four children. To Battaglia’s
suggestion that he should offer amnesia as an escape from the dragnet
of the war inquest, Kristofor does not accede. He wishes Battaglia to
record cowardice as the cause of his failure to present himself for the
draft. Finally, Battaglia resolves the crisis by putting down “Father” as
the reason for Kristofor’s absence from war. It demonstrates his Oedipal
instinct to assume the role of his own father, whom he has lost at the
age of three, and stay with his mother, who claims to have threatened
Kristofor with alternative abjection by choosing to die if her son—the
only male person in the family—goes to war. The author makes a sig-
nificantly open-ended jibe at the mother-son relationship when he says:
“Only Kristofor and his mother knew what they had done and why
they had done it” (Fresno Stories 69). Simultaneously, it is a constative
expression for the man’s human-specific desire to sire his own children.
It is possible to explain Kristofor’s symptoms as an authorial attempt to
come to terms with his own concerns of paternity. When Saroyan could
not avoid conscription into the US Army as a buck private in December
1942, his insidious worries of fatality, which were till then fed by the
unconscious imago of his father’s untimely demise, were aggravated to
such fretful proportions that he wanted to have Carol Matthau bear his
child without delay, even out of wedlock, before he was sent off to war.
The specific desire inherent in human sexuality appeared overwhelming

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to the man threatened by fatalism. Quite significantly, when his son

Aram was born on September 25, 1943, he gained a furlough from the
psychiatric ward of the New York Army Hospital where he was being
examined for insanity. Carol observed that he was becoming a “bitter
and touchy man” (Lee and Gifford, 111) much in the likeness of the
enlisted cases of paranoia in US soldiers referred to before:
Carol Matthau: It was all like a nervous breakdown. It was
all—very, very hard to explain. He lived by his own gut. If he
had the slightest discomfort, he felt like killing someone. (Lee
and Gifford, 111)
The natural comity that lies between the Oedipal and paternal elements
of human sexuality lends energy to deflect death drives towards forces of
alterity. The longest wait for a soldier in the war is either waiting to be
killed or spared. But there are saner things worth waiting for according
to Joe Foxhall, who accompanies Wesley Jackson on Guard Duty one
day. It is better to get killed without going mad, says Joe.
[EH]very man born into the body of a human being is waiting
for that body to wear out and go back to the mud. He’s waiting
to die. But since he knows he’s apt to have the use of the body
for thirty or forty years more, he goes to work and waits for
other things. When he’s a boy, he waits to be a man. Then he
waits for a wife. Then he waits for a son. Then he waits to talk
to his son…. (Saroyan The Adventures 31)
The seemingly stoic rhetoric of Joe’s declamation is invested with a posi-
tive desire for procreative alterity that characterizes the human species.
The effect of destabilizing the Oedipal-paternal entropy by real combat-
zone threats of castration can be realized in the case histories that I have
offered of soldiers who returned from war to kill their wives and chil-
dren. The forces of alterity are so expended in absorbing tactile imagoes
of the fragmented body that the subject is left with no residual energy
for sublimational activity.
In “Cowards,” Aylizabet’s friend Arshaluce refers to The Evening
Herald’s report of the German boy who drowns himself in the Kings

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River to escape conscription, because war to him not only means self-an-
nihilation but also the homicide of his own German ‘brothers.’ The sense
of fraternity stemming from the instinct of alterity leads him to prefer the
Oedipal drive to the more gruesome abjection of the death instinct. In a
state of regressive infantilism he drowns in the water which is like the sea
of the mother’s womb. He retraces his journey into the oceanic oneness
of what Jessica Benjamin calls “the engulfing mother” (50). The economy
of the Imaginary phase that sustains itself in the Self-Other dynamics
acts as a psycho-religious bulwark against committing a Christian sin by
hating the Other. In The Adventures, Joe Foxhall’s conscientious objec-
tion to army duty is based on his disavowal of the principle of hating the
enemy so that “we could kill him when we met him in combat” (32). For
Joe and the Fresno German, hating others means hating one’s own self.
However, the German has acted upon a dogmatic notion of alterity, kill-
ing himself before killing the other. The potential of the procreative other
should have mediated between forced abjection and death: his psycho-
religious concerns are inflected more towards the Oedipal direction than
the paternal. The necessity of striking a centre of gravity in the intersec-
tion of the lines of Oedipal and paternal forces is felt by Kristofor: under
all circumstances self-annihilation needs to be resisted; self preservation
is preferable to even minor breach of religious law.
“Germans,” Arshaluce said. “Enemies. All of a sudden they are
enemies, but after the war will they still be enemies? The boy
will still be drowned. Even a life of sin in a big city is better
than to be drowned, because after the war the sinner will still
be alive, at any rate. There is always such a thing as redemp-
tion. He can start all over again. He can speak to the Holy
Father at the Holy Church and be born again. He can take a
nice Armenian girl for his wife and start a family of his own.”
(Fresno Stories 65)
It is a stable sense of alterity that saved the life of Hovsep Lucinian in
“Cowards” when the Assyrian fellow soldier of his company, whom he
considered an enemy all along, dragged him to safety after he was hit by
shrapnel and left for dead in an area under bombardment. Back home

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from war, they became friends, married American wives and had large
families who spoke neither Armenian nor Assyrian. Kristofor, for that
matter, married a Scottish-Irish girl and had four children whose identity
consisted of not less than four different cultural affiliations: Armenian,
Scottish, Irish, and American. If the Oedipal-paternal dynamics of
Kristofor’s psychological make-up is underwritten by a specific desire,
his notion of the human species is broadly inclusivist insofar as his sense
of alterity is energetic enough not only to enable him to brave the odds
associated with a deviant form of conscientious objection,in the stark
absence of such rights during World War I, but also to help him scotch
memories of communal differences that his Armenian past might have
anthropologically excited. There is an ironically pregnant allusion to the
absurdity of sustaining communal hatred in the face of forced abjection
in a multiethnic army that is metaphorically homogenized by the singu-
lar threat of castration:
Gissag Jamanakian was killed at Verdun, Vaharam Vaharamian
at Chateau-Thierry, and the Kasabian twins, Krikor and
Karekin, at Bellau Wood. All under twenty-five years of age, all
brought to Fresno from Armenia when they were still babies in
arms or small boys. (Fresno Stories 66)
If the existence of the Armenian diaspora in America is the result
of an ethnic-cleansing pogrom perpetrated by their malefactors in the
Caucasus, their quest to escape symbolic castration even in the new land
remains abortive when they are drafted into the army. The sense of alter-
ity in superegoic conditions of normalcy should work independent of
space and time for the human species. But politics of space and preda-
tory concerns that generate abnormal conditions of war and enforce
culturally complicit form of mutual abjection on subjectivity serve to
distend sense of alterity neurotically. Those who have escaped persecu-
tion once are least likely to avoid it again because ethnic-cleansing is
now replaced by a form of terrorist eradication of alterity and difference
in war-time skewed normativity.
Kristofor’s choice of an apparently deviant form of abjection in the
face of a totalitarian norm is more constructive and curative in the

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sense that he chooses to master the symptom of the disease by enact-

ing it in the form of infantilism before the disease grows malignant and
terminal. The energy needed to pursue such a course is greater because
the degree of isolationist abjection in his case far exceeds that of the
draftees who form a compliant group under a delusional heroism. It
is a normative formation classifiable as society as much as the bodies
of the dead by epidemic constitute a community. When Kristofor
bravely describes his conduct as cowardice he is commenting euphe-
mistically on the corrupt variant of normalcy in the same spirit Falstaff
in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays explodes the myth of posthumous
honour, and Wesley Jackson in The Adventures proclaims his pacifist
conviction:
Military men and politicians like to refer to the dead as the
brave dead or the heroic dead or some other kind of dead. I guess
I don’t understand the dead, because the only dead I can imag-
ine are the dead dead, and that’s going too far. I can understand
the brave alive, though. [original italics] (The Adventures 70)

Between the signs composed of signifiers “coward” and its signified

(puns included) and “father” and its signified work the dynamics of
Kristofor’s and, for that matter, Saroyan’s libido-cultural identity as the
ego works in the liminal space between id and superego in psychic econ-
omy. The split of the ego, referred to as “decomposition” (105) by Ernest
Jones in the 1910 version of his famous study of Hamlet, takes place
when “various attributes of a given person are disunited and several in-
dividuals are invented, each endowed with one group of the original
attributes” (105). The fantasmatic act of creating the double, whether
through fission (“decomposition”) of the Self or through autoscopy, is
governed more or less by the same libidinal economy that underlies the
Self-Other framework in the mirror stage. Saroyan’s self undergoes de-
composition in the representative likenesses of Kristofor, Wesley and
Harry Cook. Wesley, in turn, becomes Kristofor’s double like all the
other documented cases of combat-trauma induced neuroses in the US
Army, in whom Kristofor lives his identity crisis of a variant psycho-
literary kind before sloughing him off as a scapegoat. While others, like

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Wesley, are drafted into the war, Kristofor evades military service by a
symbolic mastery of his Oedipal symptoms.
Such a therapeutic performance is resorted to by Bond and Omar in
Bishop Cotton School’s third flat one day when they discover a dark,
defunct drainage pipe and creep through its musty orifice out of the
school’s boundary on to a grass knoll:
After crawling on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found
ourselves in complete darkness. Omar had brought along a
small pencil torch, and with its help he continued writhing
forward (moving backwards would have been quite impossible)
until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty,
musty, very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grass knoll, a
little way outside the school boundary.
It’s always a great thrill to escape beyond the boundaries that
adults have devised. Here we were in unknown territory. To
travel without passports—that would be the ultimate in free-
dom! (Bond 55–56)

The symbolic action and the signifiers demonstrating the action repli-
cate, like Wesley’s yearned-for descent into the Coast Range Mountains
and Kristofor’s war-time amniotic hiding place, a libidinal quest for
incestuous union consistent with Bond’s desire to assume the role of
his absent father. They crawl on bellies like infants (or pre-natal em-
bryos) in darkness of a cavity that evokes the image of a genital passage
during childbirth or copulation. They writhe forward in a musty and
scruffy tunnel where moving backward was impossible. A sado-maso-
chistic orgasm is reached when both emerge in a state of “jouissance”
on to a blissful pine knoll. In an attempt to master the fear of frag-
mentation that loomed large on the eve of Partition, Omar and Ruskin
enact a sexually loaded incursion of the mother’s body. The nature of
the prohibitive act—“to escape beyond the boundaries that adults have
devised”—is ambivalent in terms of the dream-like condensation it at-
tains by combining Oedipal reflexes with spatial imagoes. They travel
without “passports,” as though in disregard of territorial boundaries,
under nationalistic threat of forcible dislocation in a condition al-

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ready hobbled by fatherless abjection. In a symptomatic reversal of the

Imaginary phase of psychic development, Omar projects his autoscopic
self on Bond and Bond lives his decomposed identity in Omar. In a
joint project of achieving their specular completeness through an in-
verted birth, they lose their objective realities into mutually subjective
doubling. In a retrospective musing on his schooldays, Bond makes his
relationship with Omar explicit: “Years later, when I read Conrad’s The
Secret Sharer, I thought of Omar” (53). Like the captain-narrator who
discovers his double in Leggatt, the criminal first mate of the jinxed
ship, the Sephora, in Conrad’s novel, Bond projects in Omar his own
identity crisis. If Conrad’s captain harboured Leggatt to secure confi-
dence in his ability to be “faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own
personality every man sets up for himself secretly” (Conrad 26), Bond
shares with Omar an insecurity of belonging at the face of a territorial
politics of nation formation. As a fair complexioned Anglo-Indian with
blue eyes, he had suffered Nationalist Indian anger in form of scornful
invectives and physical assault. His faith in his identity as an Indian is
threatened as much as Omar’s credentials of being an Indian are chal-
lenged by Partition. An outline of the genesis and development of such
a spatial politics in the Indian subcontinent becomes imperative at this
point to make intelligible the neurotically charged trajectory of the rela-
tionship between the decomposed selves.
Among the factors that contributed to the build-up of the Indian
Partition in 1947, the most malevolent was the historical tradition of
reductionism the European administrators, travellers and scholars em-
braced, most often unwittingly, in their assessment of the country’s so-
cio-cultural scene. In their ignorance as to what value should be placed
on the subtle differences that exist among Indian communities, they
reduced the pluralistic syntagm of Indian diversity to an abysmally sim-
plified matrix based solely on religious ethnicity. Reducing the plural
dimensions of identity to a singular parameter for making differences
among people is an exclusionary practice that instills a sense of abjec-
tion in the masses where there was none before and intensifies feelings
of discrimination into a major conflagration. The genesis of the contem-
porary fear of world terrorism can be connected to such a reductionist

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 Debashis Bandyopadhyay

attitude of governance during the colonial days. Internecine wars in the

Indian subcontinent during the pre-European days were often fought
on religious lines, but the bone of contention was always localized and
did not take as behemoth a shape as to encompass all imagined subscrib-
ers to a faith into anything of the nature of Pakistan. There are examples
of Hindu kings willingly playing into the hands of Mughal conquer-
ors to defeat their Hindu adversaries, but those diplomatic equations
seldom turned out to be egregiously fundamentalist: tactical reason did
not give way to passion.
Ruskin Bond’s nostalgic reflection on his friendship with Omar prior
to their Partition-induced separation is a critical account of imperial
practices. He reverses the notion of identity into an inclusivist project.
If Omar and Bond are Muslim and non-Muslim respectively, they are
also pupils of the same grade and same school, both communicate in
the same language, are players of the school’s hockey team, and if they
belong to different houses according to the rules of the public school
system, they share a bonding in both having lost their respective fathers
and are attracted to each other by virtue of their sense of unbelonging
to the general brood of feverish, Marx Brothers-imitating fourth form-
ers. The sense of psychological abjection suffered by two twelve-year-old
boys is transformed into a sense of fraternity. The difference in their
religious bearings during their public school days is occluded by the
availability of multiple other choices of dispensation.
In the concept of identity inhere the notions of both similarity and
difference: similar to someone or something and different from another
person or thing. Similarity is posited in terms of relational differences
from others where others act as “traces” within the affiliative choice, thus
divesting the point of similarity of any essentialist substance. Similarity
becomes a peculiar absence diffused among the constituents of the trace
which can be categorized in terms of religion, class, profession, caste,
ethnicity, country and so on. The possibility of a singular choice—until
forced into making by historical circumstances like the infant makes of
his delusive “Ideal I” in the mirror stage—becomes always a possibil-
ity of infinitely deferred realizability. Until circumstances culminated
into dissection of the country by a handful of “people who mattered,”

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who presumed having in the Imaginary ideal a better orientation for the
infant nation, identity exclusively in terms of a singular dispensation in-
dependent of its traces was a metonymic absence. The following descrip-
tion by Yasmin Khan of the sociological makeup of the country at the
end of World War II and on the eve of Partition is a well researched ob-
servation testifying to the irreducible nature of the relativity of identity:
On the eve of Partition, even in the places where there was a
heightened sense of difference, there were many countervailing
forces. Mercantile and manufacturing communities from sari
weavers to tea planters depended on pragmatic cooperation for
their livelihoods, while festivals and holidays were flamboyant-
ly celebrated across the board. Class, as ever, acted as a social gel
and rich Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of the same social stand-
ing partied together in gilded hotels, irrespective of religion;
university friends of various backgrounds attended the same
classes; and poor agriculturalists relaxed together on charpois at
the end of a day’s work. Above all, it was a very long jump from
a sense of difference, or lack of social cohesion, to mass slaugh-
ter and rape. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about Partition and
nobody could have predicted, at the end of the Second World
War, that half a million people or more were going to die be-
cause of these differences. (22)

The Indian politicians who tinkered with the issue of Partition in the
run-up for the 1946 election of provincial and interim central govern-
ments found it expedient to ensure quick support for a cause which pre-
ferred emotive investment to rational thought. At the end of World War
II, the imperial interest of the British in India began to flag. Displays of
anti-colonial feelings were so intense that the war-ravaged British gov-
ernment envisaged a process of hasty decolonization. The democratic
means of electing an Indian party to whom power could be transferred
was resorted to with such breakneck speed that neither the Congress nor
the Muslim League—the two major players in the power game—had
time to map out a rational and constructive agenda of self-governance.
Both parties took recourse to playing the religious card that would yield

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instantaneous harvest by exciting sentiments that the colonial rule had

exploited for a considerable time. In other words, the inconvenient pace
in which an uncertain state of modernity with its accompanying ap-
prehensions of material inequality was ushered in made communities
fall back on pre-modern instincts of religiosity for defensive energy. The
Muslim League, under the leadership of Jinnah, staked claim to a sepa-
rate Islamic state for the Muslims, which induced a quick-fire effect on
the imagination of a sizable chunk of the community’s electorate, if not
on its entire adult populace. Although the 1946 election is referred to
as a democratic process, only ten percent of the total adult populace
enjoyed franchise. So, when I mention the Muslim community’s choice
at the hustings, I take care to ascribe the choice to its electorate, of
which many voted for the League, but the electorate itself constituted
only a sliver of the community’s and also the country’s adult populace.
In order to counter the League’s campaigning strategies, the Congress
wielded both Hindu and Muslim communal cards, to attract voters to
the cause of an undivided, sovereign Indian nationhood. The fairness of
the election is questionable not only for its numerically undemocratic
representation but also for the rigged nature of its conduct:
At the polling booths, people long dead were frequently reg-
istered, boxes of ballot papers went missing and women elec-
tors wearing veils impersonated other women in order to vote
multiple times, in at least one case by changing saris on every
occasion. (Khan 37)
The sine qua non of communication is undistorted transparency.
Defined by Jurgen Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action,
this sort of communication is pivotal for benign human relationships.
The entire democratic process that seemingly galvanized fission in the
Indian subcontinent, however, is based on a communicative pathology
that infected the pre-modern defensive mechanism into a septic sore.
Those who voted for a separate Pakistan had hardly any inkling of what
freedom it would secure. Because Pakistan was still then an imaginary
construct with its territorial expanse undecided, the electors were lured
into invoking their own disaster insofar as they did not foresee that the

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creation of a separate state might mean exile and dislocation for large
numbers of people.
When the deliberations of the Cabinet Mission failed to produce
a viable solution to the tangle of power transfer, visceral killings and
rapes were organized between Hindus and Muslims across the coun-
try, even in places like Calcutta, Bihar and Central Provinces which
had no likelihood of being apportioned to a separate Pakistani ter-
ritory. The intention was to demonstrate to the British government,
who were responsible for the crisis to a great extent, that Hindus and
Muslims are inimical to each other and are unable to coexist at the
same time and space. People tried to force abjection on each other
in the absence of any superegoic police or sublimational channels
to defuse death instincts. Identity was reduced to a singular motif:
Hindu (also Sikh in the Punjab) or Muslim. When Pakistan was fi-
nally carved out, most of those who desired it either had to suffer exile
or stay put in the face of bitter sectarian violence. The arbitrary divid-
ing line between India and Pakistan was mapped roughly in terms
of number—numerical strength of communal populations based on a
dated census—irrespective of human relationships, historical and cul-
tural heritages associated with geographical spaces and not the least,
memories of growing up.
The “death drive” in a state of enforced abjection is a revival of the
Oedipal urge that deprives the abject of the normative order of psy-
cho-social independence. The multiple identity-marking factorials offer
a sublimational post-Oedipal dynamic to socio-cultural beings whose
normal development is towards freedom. But when a reductionist ideol-
ogy hopes to achieve freedom by conceptualizing subjectivity in terms
of a unitary dispensation, it suppresses the Self-Other dynamic to a state
of static oppositionality. The fragmented nature of the Self in opposition
to its mirror-image intensifies aggressivity and destructive urges (sexual
content of the drives became perceptible in the gruesome nature of the
riot killings and rapes). Freedom was a metonymic absence: the demo-
cratic means (the 1946 election) adopted to usher in freedom became a
suicidal project. National identities of Indians and Pakistanis tended to
lose their multivalence into a singularly oppositional reality:

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 Debashis Bandyopadhyay

There was no simple blueprint for becoming an Indian or a

Pakistani. One thing people could agree on, though, was that
the ‘other’ state was rapidly looking like an adversary, or even
an enemy. Nationalist politics had collapsed into two national
tragedies. (Khan 166)

A perceived threat of the “other” gave birth to unconscionable defense

spending in the budgetary allocations of both states. Rapid militariza-
tion ensued and the Pakistani government and politicians engaged in
activities that instilled a sense of fear among their countrymen that the
Indian “other,” who were not well disposed to Pakistan’s separation,
might use military power to annex lost territory. When the disputed
princely province of Kashmir acceded to India, the fear intensified and
an immediate armed skirmish in the Kashmir border between the two
states became a reality in 1948–49. The spate of recruitment in the
Pakistani Army reached its nadir when a coup under the Sandhurst-
trained military general, Ayub Khan, based apparently on the motif of
cleansing the Pakistan’s polity of corruption, wrested power from an
elected government. Pakistan became a military state in terms of both
internal administration and foreign affairs. With Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, an
India-bashing foreign minister, most of the state’s energy and time were
directed against India. The relation between the two countries was fur-
ther exacerbated by US arms supply to India in the wake of the latter’s
defeat in the Sino-Indian War of 1962. It was quite likely that Omar
in “The Playing Fields” would be motivated towards a Pakistani Army
career in such a context. Ayub Khan’s clandestine plan to annex Kashmir
through a terrorist attack, code named Operation Gibraltar, culminated
into a full-fledged India-Pakistan War in 1965.
Omar piloted a bomber into Indian territory and was shot down
over Ambala. Unlike the drainage pipe in his school flat, there was no
tunnel in the air where he could practice symptomatic management
of his death instinct. The reductive ideology of identity-formation that
had forced political abjection on the subjectivity of a young boy during
Partition worked at an invidious clip under a nationalistic authoritar-
ian regime. If coercive drafting during war in a cosmopolitan society

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is a totalitarian aberration or, according to Derrida, an expression of

democracy’s “autoimmune” (Rogues 37) tendencies, that inflame aggres-
sivity in otherwise subliminal psyches, aggressivity in an authoritarian
regime stemming from an exclusivist notion of religious identity is a
normative phenomenon. The correspondences between the inhuman
mode of capitalist production of warfare and the reductive principle
of nation formation are so obvious that distortion of communicative
systems and reification of social relations instantiated in Saroyan and
Bond find common ground for analysis. The etiological principle of
the autoscopic self in Omar works in terms of communicative reciproc-
ity. When communication flounders in a pathological sense of betrayal
and mistrust death instincts are first instigated towards annihilating the
autoscopic self because a tremendous amount of energy now scars the
psychic object of narcissistic jealousy.
The Kashmir issue becomes a spatial metonymy for a broader sense
of belonging that had suffered a severe psychological blow at the time
of the territorial dissection. If Omar is Bond’s double, Bond is Omar’s
autoscopic decomposition who also becomes the object of his envy for
being able to persist in the course of the libido-cultural economy when
he is unjustly disbanded from it. From Bond’s point of view, Omar’s
death instinct leads him to unite with the maternal object symbolized
in the space his pre-schizoid normative self affiliated with, the place
where he and Bond once tried to master their Oedipal drives in symp-
tomatic attempts at achieving superegoic independence. Unfortunately,
there is no scope for mastery now; Omar’s double abjection has led him
to self-annihilation in a pursuit of murdering his incestuous double.
Like the paranoid soldiers of the US Army who returned home to kill
themselves and their wives and children, Omar kills himself in the act of
killing his decomposed self/selves (his Indian kin). For Bond, however,
the death of his double appears to be a symbolic release from his own
death instinct that remained repressed in the memories of abjection and
Nationalist rejection. Like Conrad’s captain who sloughs off his double
by letting Leggatt take his punishment at the end of The Secret Sharer and
Kristofor who disclaims any truck with his Wesleyan alter-ego through
an infantile gesture, Bond confirms his emergence from identity crisis

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 Debashis Bandyopadhyay

by recounting the death of Omar. It is absurd for a German/Armenian-

American to fight a German or an Armenian and an Indian-Pakistani to
fight an Indian. Through extrapolation or by dint of the logic of exem-
plarity a bilateral case study becomes a trope for cosmopolitan dystopia.

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