From Love to Libido

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From Love to Libido: Irony as a Narrative Mode in Ruskin Bond’s Love is a Sad Song

Pabitra Kumar Rana Assistant Professor

West Bengal Education Service Dantan-II Govt. College,

Paschim Medinipur, W.B.

Abstract:

Ruskin Bond’s Love is a Sad Song is a semi-autobiographical story in which the thirty year old Anglo-Indian narrator wishfully reminisces about his own love – once paternal and subsequently libidinal – for a sixteen year old Punjabi girl and undermines the gravity of his affair by taking recourse to self-reflexive irony. The narrator’s obsessive love for the girl can be deemed as the manifestation of the author’s repressed Oedipal desire as Bond passed his childhood days in the midst of psychological angst due to the separation of his parents. The present article attempts to understand how the narrator was a split subject between the lover and the artist and how his art becomes a defense mechanism to negotiate his Oedipal anxiety.

Keywords: Love, Desire, Irony, Oedipal, Anglo-Indian

Ruskin Bond’s story Love is a Sad Song (first published in 1975) is a wishful reminiscence of an unsuccessful love-affair by a self-critical lover-narrator whose reflection of his affair with a girl almost half of his age opens up interesting avenues of psychoanalytic study. The semi-autobiographical story invites the reader to have a critical look into it not because that it depicts the universal conflict between passionate love and strictures of society, albeit complicated here more for the lover’s being an aged Anglo-Indian and the beloved’s being a school-going young Punjabi girl, but because the lover-narrator’s ironic stance on his own affair. The smooth stream-of–consciousness-like narrative not only details the incidents and mental state of the lover during the active days of his romance, but also undermines the intensity and feasibility of the affair by incorporating the observation of the self-critical narrator who makes gentle fun of his love at the cost of himself. The present article attempts to understand how the narrator of the story turns out to be split subject and how his passionate love is attenuated by the ironic mode of his narration.

I

Nature, children and love are constant concerns in Bond’s fictional world. Bond has an acute sense of perceiving the dynamism of nature and finds the peace of his mind in the midst of hills at Dehra Dun, at the foot of the Himalayas and feels like a fish out of water on the plains. Love, especially between adolescents and young people, is also Bond’s cup of tea. He is not so much interested in marriage or in marital love as he is in romance among unmarried lovers. Amita Aggarwal in her book Fictional World of Ruskin Bond detects the probable reason for this:

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Bond has not created a single couple enjoying happy conjugal life in his short stories. Perhaps, the trauma of his parent’s separation does not allow him to conceive of a pair of lovers living in blissful matrimony.

( Aggarwal 30 )

As any writer’s creation is deeply informed by his/her personal life, so is with Bond whose case was fairly complicated for his being an Anglo-Indian and deciding to stay in India after the Independence. Born to a British father and an Anglo-Indian mother in 1934 in Himachal Pradesh, Bond passed his childhood in unhappiness in the midst of the discord between his father and mother, their separation, the remarriage of his mother when he was four, the demise of his father when he was ten, and his dislike of the very idea of colonialism. Unlike the other sahibs who retreated to clubs and small ghetto like Chandrapore in Foster’s A Passage to India , Bond attempted to ‘de-ghettoize’ himself by living in Missouri and ‘declasses’ himself among his friends in Dehra Dun. Instead of leaving the country like most other members of his community, ge developed a keen interest in Indian landscape and Indian life. Remembering his father’s words that he belongs to England, in his youth Bond went there in 1951 with the aspiration to become a famous writer but soon returned because it was not easy to leave a place that has soul-connection with a person. This was a period of crisis as were the childhood days of insecurity and anxiety. He was divided against himself – between his communal affiliation and his sense of familial attachment with a place he had grown up. Debashis Bandyopadhyay has captured this dilemma in Bond adroitly in his book Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond:

At twenty, the authorial self engages in a debate between his communal commitments and private desires. Whether or not they are mutually exclusive or subsumable ideas like the symbolic and the imaginary constituents of the authorial self is a matter on which he is undecided. The brand of self-reflexive irony that engenders the narration can be called, to borrow Franco Moretti’s words, ‘spell of indecision.’

(Bandyopadhyay 21)

Though the observation is made in relation to another story in the broad context of sense of exile in an Anglo-Indian author, it is very much pertinent to Love is a Sad Song (henceforth Love) as the story not only reveals the narrator’s ‘self-reflexive irony’, but also betrays his defense mechanism to cope with his sense of loss through nature, nostalgia and writing.

Love starts with the thirty year old narrator ruminating, in the midst of nature (against grey rock and beneath the sky of pristine blueness) in a cool November afternoon, his romance in May of previous year with the sixteen year old Sushila, who came to the hills, with her twelve year old brother Sunil and twenty three year old uncle Dinesh who was an acquaintance of the narrator. The narrator charts, in conjunction with his minute sensuous description of nature, how he fell madly in love with child Sushila after conversation on love at night following a picnic in which they came close in the midst of oak, rhododendron, maple and a sylvan stream. The narrator’s calm narration not only dilutes the heat of his passion, but exposes his vulnerability in shifting the nature of his love:



A year ago my feelings about you were almost paternal! Or so I thought… But you are no longer a child and I am a little older too. For when, the night after the picnic, you took my hand and held it against your soft warm cheek, it was the first time that a girl had responded to me so readily, so tenderly. Perhaps it was just innocence but that one action of yours, that acceptance of me, devastated my heart. (Love 24)

This is the feeling of a grown-up child whose psyche is moulded by Oedipal anxiety and lack of women’s company in his adolescence, with the result of what Dinesh rightly diagnoses as ‘delayed adolescence.’ The intensity of the lover’s psychic flow is punctuated by the prosaic reality of the ironic narrator:

Gently, fervently, I kissed your eyes and forehead, your long smooth throat: and I whispered, ‘Sushila, I love you, I love you I love you,’ in the same way that millions and millions of love-smitten young men have whispered since time immemorial…And what else did I say? That I would look after you and work for you and make you happy; and that too had been said before, and I was in no way different from anyone. I was a man and a boy again.

( Love 25 )

The narrator enumerates every little move of his physical intimacy with Sushila and for the purpose of his narration appropriates Sushila’s thoughts which, in reality, remain unfathomable to him for ever. The narrator imagines that she thinks of him in some private moments away in Delhi, but could not understand her mind when she was with him:

You never replied directly to a question. I suppose that was a feminine quality; coyness, perhaps. ‘Do you love me, Sushila?’ No answer. ‘Not now. When you are little older. In a year or two.’ Did you nod in the darkness or did I imagine it?

( Love 26 )

These are the moments of uncertainties and doubts which sufficiently capture the split personality of the lover-narrator. The narrator is bemused at the sincerity of his desire and his consciousness of the drabness of his language. This psychological gap, coupled with his jealously against her imagined lover, generates a self-pity that verges on self-mockery:

I’m very impatient, I know that, but I’ll wait for as long as you make me—two or three or a hundred years. Yes, Sushila, a hundred years!’ Ah, what a pretty speech I made! Romeo could have used some of it; Majnu too. ( Love 27)

The narrator’s ironic attitude intensifies as he continues to narrate his attempts to convince the members of Sushila’s home of his intention to marry her. The narrator ventures into intimating his intention to her mother, and having done that in the midst of a crowded bus in Delhi, reverts into his ironic self-derogation:



‘…You are her mother and so I want you to be the first to know.’ (Liar I was! She about the fifth to know….) … ‘Don’t tell anyone else just now,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she said with a smile. So now the secret—if it could be called that—was shared by at least five people. (Love 41)

It is the narrator’s realization of the improbability of his situation that engenders his narrative self-pity; barring one occasion rarely does he become sentimental. Even when the narrator meets Sushila’s other lover Pramod whom he has visualized as crude, selfish, irresponsible and unattractive college student and finds him to be gentle, diffident and uncertain like himself , he cannot help exposing his own wishful fantasy and uncertainty: ‘I wondered if I should tell him about my own feeling for you.’ The irony operating in the narrative resembles structural irony as ‘Narration is the most common vehicle for structural irony…’ (Bedford 254), but differs from it in that the narrator can hardly be identified as naïve as he himself consciously brings to light the discrepancy between his feelings and his reflection of them.

II

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the incidents narrated in the story and the narrator’s rendering of them in fiction can be deemed as an attempt, on the part of the author, to assuage the psychological anxiety embedded at the core of his being. The pungency of psychic mechanism manifest in Love has its genesis in Bond’s real life. In his introduction to the 2015 anthology of his favorite stories chosen by the author himself, Bond writes:

Readers often ask me if a particular story is true or not, and sometimes the answers surprises them. ‘Love is a Sad Song’ is a true story, and happened very much in the same way I have described. But of course Sushila wasn’t her real name; and the real Sushila is now a grandmother. In Delhi, you grow old. In Deoli you are trapped in a time warp and stay young forever.

(A Gathering of Friends ix)

The narrator’s obsessive desire for Sushila, given the absurdity of their situation, can be seen as the disguised manifestation of the author’s repressed oedipal trauma because of the separation of his parents. According to Freud the repressed desire for mother and its accompanying fear of castration in child are revived during adolescence and during paranormal conditions of adulthood. Going a step farther, the French psychoanalytic theorist and critic Jacque Lacan postulated that the child’s entry from the illusory but idyllic and delightful realm of the Imaginary order to the Symbolic order of law and language results in a split or division at the heart of the subject. In the words of Lois Tyson, ‘Our entrance into the Symbolic Order thus involves the experience of separation from others, and the biggest separation is the separation from the intimate union we experienced with our mother during our immersion in the Imaginary Order. For Lacan, this separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us all our lives. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with our mother. We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing it in the Symbolic Order—maybe I’ll recapture that feeling of union if I find a perfect mate; if I acquire some money; if I convert



to a different religion ; if I become better looking; if I become more popular; of if I buy a flashier car, a bigger house , or whatever the Symbolic Order tells me I should want—but we will never be able to sustain a feeling of complete fulfillment.’(Critical Theory Today 28). Sushila becomes, in the Lacanian paradigm, object petit a, an ‘object-cause’ which comes to mean an object of desire that can never be actually attained. To that extent, it can be viewed as the cause of desire rather than a concrete object that is actually sought by the drives. In Love Sushila remains both palpable and evanescent. Though on one or two occasions, she expressed her love for the narrator, for him she is ultimately an enigma; he is not sure whether he has seduced her or she has seduced him. As for Pramod so for the narrator, Sushila and her love remain a mystery. The narrator’s quizzing of Pramod on the exact nature of the latter’s love is ironic self-investigation:

But do you know if she loves you? Did she say she would like to marry you?’ ‘She did not say—I do not know…’ There was a haunted, hurt look in his eyes and my heart went out to him. ‘But I love her—isn’t that enough?’ ‘It could be enough—provided she doesn’t love someone else.’ ‘Does she, Uncle?’ ‘To be frank, I don’t know.’ He brightened up at that. ‘She likes me,’ he said. ‘I know that much.’ ‘Well, I like you too, but that doesn’t mean I’d marry you.’ He was despondent again. ‘I see what you mean… But what is love, how can I recognize it?’ That is the one question I couldn’t answer. How do we recognize it? (Love 46)

The narrator does not know whether Sushila loves anybody at all despite having intimacy with her. The narrator tells Pramod that in their pursuit of Sushila, ‘It is not time that’s passing by, my friend. It is you and I.’ In his book Jacques Lacan, Sean Homer’s description of Lacanian object petit a in the context of love corresponds the narrator’s inexplicable desire for Sushila:

When you first fall in love you idealize the other person and feel perfect together. This is the imaginary dimension of being in love. There is also symbolic dimension of being ‘a couple’ and of being in a relationship with another subject who is lacking. But there is also something more; your new partner may be beautiful, intelligent, funny, a great dancer but then so is everyone else. So what is it that makes your new partner special? There is something elusive, something intangible, something extra about them and you cannot grasp or articulate it but you know it is there. That is why you love them. This is the object a—object-cause of your desire. (Homer 88)

The object of desire (i.e. other) is under the grasp of the Other from which the self seeks confirmation for its existence. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan declared that ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ and further wrote:

…it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the desire of the Other that the subject’s desire is constituted.



( Lacan 235)

Thus Sushila is constituted first by her household members, especially her grandmother, then by her husband and ultimately by society. She chooses security over love. In “Time Stops at Shamli,” (1989 ) often considered as the sequel to Love, Sushila is married to the elderly Mr. Dayal, the distracted manager of an obscure hotel at Shamli; a perfect arranged mismatch as the man has no idea or ability of how to come up to Sushila’a romantic yearning. Meeting Sushila after the gap of six years and finding her yoked to an unromantic man in a place cut away from the outside world, the narrator’s passion for his lost object is roused again, and he proposes her to flee with him which she flatly refuses. But the object a remains ever evasive being absorbed in the Symbolic:

‘So your marriage is a success?’ ‘Of course it is as a marriage. I am not happy and I do not love him, but neither am I so unhappy that I should hate him…But you take me away and we will only have regrets.’ ‘You don’t love me,’ I said foolishly. ‘That sad word love,’ she said, and became pensive and silent.

(“Time Stops at Shamli” 78)

The love between the narrator and Sushila never consummated. Perhaps, because of this failure, the narrator could not make Sushila’s husband an attractive man. Debashis Bandyopahyay offers insight into the author’s psyche operating in the two stories:

The narrator was thirty when he fell in love with Sushila, sixteen, in ‘Love is a Sad Song’. His parental love for the girl had turned into conjugal desire, revealing the author’s Oedipal angst, as it was unconsciously informed by the traumatic experience of his parent’s separation, due in part to the wide difference in their ages. The author’s libidinal anxieties seek alleviation in attributing his desires to that stage of his psychic development which Sushila’s uncle…refers to as ‘delayed adolescence.’ In Shamli the author willfully obviates the age factor to invest in both the narrator and Sushila the timeless qualities of nature – made jealously absent in Mr. Dayal – that the author knows constituted the object of his father’s desire. That Sushila should marry Mr. Dayal who is almost as old as he narrator, compounds the intricacies of the latter’s Oedipal envy…His repressed instincts do not only find a substitutive object for the mother in Sushila, but also takes care to make egotistical amendment to the nature of the woman by portraying her in broad relief against the lonely decadence of Miss deeds.

(Bandyopahyay 81-2)

The narrator realizes that Sushila is unattainable and displaces his desire into various other activities such as assuming ironic stance, describing nature, fondly recollecting his old days and even narrating his affair by fictionalizing it.

III

The narrative of Love is addressed by the first person narrator, in the Prufrockian manner, to the second person ‘you’(Sushila) is if she will appreciate his feelings. The entire narrative can



be viewed as a defense mechanism to come to terms with profound anxiety in his private life. The story depicts the transference of his feelings for girl from love to libido which is mediated by his self-reflexive irony generated from his sense of the impossibility of regaining the lost object of desire – both in real life(his mother) and in fiction (Sushila). When Sushila returned from the hills, the narrator tried to fill up her absence by shifting his attention to metonymic objects of love – a handkerchief, a bangle or a length of ribbon. His dream in which Sushila almost imperceptibly beheaded a young man he and Sunil murdered a young man resembling Sushila’s lover is, no doubt, informed by his deep sense of anxiety of loosing object of desire. The narrator is also divided in his dependence of nature in the hills and the necessity to stay on the plains for the sake of his love. The narrator’s recurrent return to nature – to its flora and fauna and the landscape – while recounting the tale, itself acts like balm to his overtly ironic but covertly painful narration. The narrator ultimately strikes a reconciliation between his lover self and his artistic self by making light fun of his anxiety and savouring the lost romance by proxy— by deciding never to stop loving the days he loved her.

Works Cited:

Aggarwal, Amita. The Fictional World of Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Sarup and Son. 2005.Google Book Search. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

Bandyopadhyay, Debashis. Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Anthem Press. 2012. Print.

Bond, Ruskin. Love is a Sad Song. A Gathering of Friends. New Delhi: Alpha Book Company. 2015. 21-52. Print.

---. “Time Stops at Shamli”. A Gathering of Friends. New Delhi: Alpha Book Company. 2015. 53-88. Print.

Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton & Company.1981. Print.

Murfin, Ross and Supriya M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. 2009.Print.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York and London: Routledge. 2006.Print.



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From Love to Libido