Victims Of Ironical Abuse


+'With irony such as yours, I do not need a divorce. No, even a prozac bath would be too catachrestic. Instead, I shall willingly accept a life of imprisonment within one of your texts' --- Circumlocution attributed to the non-existent wife of a French writer who cannot be signified for post-feminist subversions.

+'We are all victims of ironical abuse today' --- "---"

Suppose tomorrow you received a text message from me on your cellphone that went as, 'Dear Reader, you do not really exist outside my text message. You are just a transient blob that has emanated from it and you shall soon be sucked back into its anonymous depthless surface', I am pretty sure that I know what you are going to scream at me : 'You male chauvinist! You Stalinist! You Communist!'. And yet, having endured these rebukes too painful for my civilised ear, if I were to give you a book which told you, 'Dear Reader, you do not really exist outside this text. The whole world is a text, and you are so deeply immersed in it that you can never extricate yourself from it', it is highly probable that you shall digest its contents at once.

And this really makes me wonder. It is indeed a truism that we speak, talk, and think through language, but does this warrant the conclusion that our language forms a prison-house or a cage within which we are trapped and from which we can never escape? Nevertheless, there are many in our generation who argue in the following manner. To begin with, they tell you that the attempt to describe what we mean can be made only through more and more streams of language and texts. From this they jump to the conclusion that the world is nothing but a collection of billions and billions of texts. Indeed, 'I' and 'you' are collapsed into these texts and we do not exist 'outside', 'behind' or 'beyond' them. As if this was not enough, there is more trouble to come : these texts have no definite meaning, and since they can be understood or interpreted only through other texts, once again we go multiplying texts ad infinitum. Consequently, there is an infinite number of texts between 'I' and 'you' so that no real communication or understanding is possible between us across this textual gulf. The 'I' itself is but an obtrusive emanation from the text, and no writer is responsible for what he or she has written for words and meanings are arbitrary.

To put all of this into a neat formula : There is nothing outside the text. There is no real 'you' for me to reach out to, no world whose biophysical 'reality' impinges on my existence, and nothing 'external' to me that sets the context within which I plot the story of my life. If I were to go to my uncle's house tomorrow and on finding therein a pink door with the notice on it, 'This room is My prison. Proceed at your own risk', I was told that my teenage cousin inhabits that prison, I would sort of understand, in my usual paternalistic manner, what she was 'going through'. But if I were to be whisked away to Rwanda, Sudan, or Kosovo and was introduced to a journalist from CNN who grinned at me and told me, 'Gee, no sweat! There is no genocide happening here outside my newspaper text', I would probably wish to run back to the prison-house of my cousin. So then the next time you are in one of those cultural capitals, drinking coffee on the pavement, and a woman comes to you asking you for some money, kindly do her a favour. Take out one of your flashing cameras, take a photograph of her emaciated face, and when you come back home mount that photograph on an ebony frame beside the long row of your polished texts. That photo will constantly remind you that there is at least one thing in this world that it outside your texts : the hunger of a starving woman that your texts are powerless to pacify.