Song no. 151 (Gitabitan, vol. 2)


Still remember me, even if I’m gone far from you.

If the old love is covered by webs of a love new.

If, with my staying on close,

you can’t see if I’m there or not, my presence a shadow’s -

still remember me.

If tears come in the eyelids,

if one day the play stops on a sweet night;

if work is hindered in autumn morning light -

still remember me.

If while remembering,

even the corners of eyes do not glisten,

still remember me.

It is an honor, playing this part in the ceremony of your graduation from this great university. I am moved to remember when, nearly four decades ago, I was like most of you at the crossroads after sixteen years of schooling. My own class grew up in Calcutta, with a sense of the new nation’s still fresh hopes of social and personal self-determination, but also with a sense of the difficulties at each step and of the struggles ahead. Today, your world has a different resonance, you have another set of inter-related hopes and struggles. As you move on to further studies, teaching or other career to engage your education, let me dwell upon an aspect of the vistas and challenges before you.



In this age of job markets and study preferences so focused on the technological branches of knowledge, applied science and business, you’ve shown an aptitude and a certain judgment in opting for a language-and-literature education. And so, you’ll show us not only how to read well and write well, but also how to appreciate the esthetic and ethical conflicts that any great literature records, how to value the literary experience without mystifying either the art or the artist. We need those habits of thought for a self-questioning openness of mind, without which we tend to fall prey to political and religious faiths that shore up righteous self-deception. We need those to get "the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep," as Emerson put it. You know that literature is not only for consumer pleasure, though that is important. It’s also for developing a capacity for inner dialog that can serve as ballast in life’s turbulence and the swirl of received wisdom and passion. Through literature we glimpse linguistic and cultural worlds different from our own and grow aware of the unexamined assumptions.



Aside from this intrinsic value of a literary education, I would also emphasize its functional value for other disciplines that study the social processes. Over the last 13 years, I have tried to mix my social-science training with intensive readings of literature. Although border crossing among the social sciences and between any of those and some of the humanities (like philosophy, psychology, or law) is highly regarded, the mixing of social science and literature is much less approved in the academy. I knew this, but I thought there was scope for imaginative use of literature in social science. So I did some work in the area on my own time and published some, which were liked. Now I can say this area is likely to be more energetically explored in the coming years. I think so for two reasons, which are linked with two contrapositions, two sets of contrary tendencies that are evident at this time.


First, while the specializations within a discipline are getting more and more narrowly focused and technical, the borders between the social sciences and the humanities are gaining breadth and permeability. A disenchantment with ideology and a greater openness to the concerns of the dwellers of margins may have added to this state of flux. Anyhow, the social-science practitioners seem to show more interest in how literature speaks to their concerns with cognitive behavior and social processes. Literature captures the hopes and fears of a society, the angst of a people at a certain juncture. And its distillation feeds back, modifying or reinforcing culture in ways more subtle and enduring than the semiotics of films, pop culture, and pulp fiction. For the behavioral sciences, even for economics, literature holds valuable insights concerning the complex of thoughts, emotions and conflicted motives that underlie personal and social behavior. As the literary world has progressively expanded with authors of post-colonial cultures and peripheral groups, and with translations from the less known or less recognized languages, it seems both desirable and feasible to utilize literary texts as social commentary.



In the sixties and seventies – during my formative years in Calcutta, Cambridge, and Berkeley -- I did not know the opening of borders was around the corner, both physically and intellectually. Having struggled long to move between social science and literature, I now marvel at the eased-up constraints of ideology and inter-disciplinary walls that you can afford early on in your intellectual life. Make use of it; explore the interfaces, the intersections, the overlaps; share your knowledge with receptive minds in the social sciences; apply it to some of the questions of human motivation and behavior in the face of life’s exigencies; do some translation or improve on an existing translation. These tasks will only grow as the Internet becomes more diversified in languages other than English and cultures other than the American.


The second reason why I think language and literature would and should play a much greater role in social study arises from another set of counterbalancing opposites. Even as jet travels, Internet and cable TV keep shrinking physical distances and lifestyle differences, the forces of ethno-linguistic nationalism seem to show no sign at all of subsiding anytime soon. This counterpoise increasingly seems to be not a regrettable inconvenience, but a vital resource for maintaining balance in a world of highly interconnected complexities. It should be managed with sensitivity and care. Sensitivity to the vernacular languages and literatures of substantial bodies of world population, and conserving care for the endangered ones. High-speed information processing helps here by lowering the costs of preserving, circulating, and operating with, the linguistic and literary diversities. The benefits of global interactivity may be reaped without involving sacrifice of valuable specificity. For example, the Chechen-English dictionary being prepared by the Slavic Dept. here will help keep alive the linguistic culture of the approximately one million people threatened with annihilation or assimilation. We can think of a dozen other embattled mountain and forest peoples of similar size whose languages and rights are in need of similar conservation efforts that are now made more feasible and accessible.



While I welcome these developments favoring greater use of literature in social study, I must also stress the traditional role you still have, which is to initiate us, the common readers, into the genuine literary experience we need and seek. Do tell us how to appreciate the great works of fiction, old or new, and do not remain entirely preoccupied with deconstructing them, however revolutionary that might have been in the earlier context of canonization of texts. Tell us about how literature explores the ethics, the esthetics, and the political economics of the social culture it springs from and influences.
I remember a talk Iris Murdoch gave in Spring ’92 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She remarked that the current of deconstructionist criticism spelled doom for the novel. The Age of the Death of the Author, that’s how the new rhetorical criticism was defined, as opposed to the age of esthetic and ethical criticism. Earlier in the century, she said, Marxist literary criticism had spelled similar doom, though proved to be harmless, but this time she wasn’t sure. I still wonder about that remark. Over the 20th century, the Marxist ideas of class interest and class struggle have, shorn of the determinism and the triumphalism, become a layer of our collective awareness, a part of writers’ minds as well as the common readers’. Similarly, decades of being exposed to the view of all discourses as rhetorical practices of slippery meaning, and to the view Paul de Man stated in 1970 that there’s no room for "notions of accuracy and identity in the shifting world of interpretation," have produced a certain sensitivity and astuteness rather than destroyed our interest in literature as art and social commentary. Adding some rigor to literary appreciation is worthy of a critical theory, not killing the inspirations that drive its object and subject.



We need authors to keep bringing us news of the world, the many different worlds, to keep tracing ways through the chaos of life to glimpse the immediacy and heterogeneity of experience, to keep informing us of what Lionel Trilling called "a culture’s hum and buzz of implication", introducing us to the ethno-linguistic conventions as well as to meaningful departures from those conventions. These most of us genuinely need and seek, though there are exceptions. A rationalist friend of mine says he reads no more than two novels in a year because, unlike biography and history, they’re just made-up stuff. He doesn’t see literary fiction as artistic use of biographical and historical materials, nor biography or autobiography and history as part-constructs. At the other end, there are some who are good at processing stories into ideas and presenting ideas as stories but averse to behavioral model and formal logic, resentful especially of stating options and constraints in terms of material resource rather than culture and emotions. They would be glad there is a growing school of behavioral social scientists, including economists, who study apparent irrationalities, and find a lot of economic behavior to be emotional responses. Jon Elster, a social scientist, in a recent book titled Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and Emotions, shows that even when maximizing material gain, we’re conscious of the emotional costs, of the psychic energy involved in rationalizing the choices to ourselves, if not to others.



If being conflicted is the essence of the human condition, if even economic decisions are subject to emotional responses and cultural institutions, then we should have a lot more exchange between the social-science experts and the language-literature experts. I’ve talked about two factors – (a) greater appreciation of literary texts as social commentary and (b) confluence of communications technology and ethno-linguistic nationalism. Both favor literary professionals’ involvement in social studies and social scientists’ use of literary texts. But whether or not you are personally inclined to such crossings over, never take lightly your role to teach us the balancing of esthetic experience and rational analysis in literary appreciation.

Thank you!