Chapter 7

The Metaphor of the Body

The Saga of Dharmapuri is a complex work of art. Perhaps it

is justifiable to look for an element of mystery, an inscrutable layer

of meaning in such a work. It is among the limited number of novels

that speak the language of revelation and build up the tone of the

ultimate prophecy. It contests in a rude and shocking language the

beliefs that prop up our empty lives. The novelist eloquently declares

that our so -called truths are steeped in untruth and deception. He asks

the reader right from the beginning whether he is prepared to

undertake the task of self -purification that is more fundamental and

comprehensive than any political revolution.

O. V. Vijayan is intellectually a democrat, though deep in his

psyche, he harbours a strong skepticism towards democratic

institutions and conventions. His essays on contemporary problems are

the meditations of a democrat. But his art is shaped by the

unconscious belief that politics is absurd and irrational. So he

dislikes the idea of using his art for immediate political ends. This

is the reason why he disputes, in all humility, the notion that The

Saga is the story of India under the state of Emergency.

In his essays, Vijayan explores the possibilities of existential

 147

politics. But the awareness that political leadership is absurd remains

an integral part of his artistic sensibility. This intense awareness

helps him to discover the absurdities of history. He considers his own

mind more important than any other source of knowledge. So he can

recognize history as the condition of man on the basis of the

existential political philosophy that he has tried to shape. His

response to politics is in fact his response to the condition of man.

His short stories like "The Wart, " "The Foetus" and "Oil" are

allegories of power which throw light on the helplessness and tragic

fate of man.

The Saga is not a simple political satire. Like many post-

modern novels it is a confluence of diverse streams of thought. Apart

from political problems the novel depicts several vague, nameless

agonies and despair that might have shaken Vijayan I s subconscious

mind.

Dharmapuri is afflicted by the cancer of meanness,

ruthlessness, exploitation and corruption. The ruling community is

power-hungry and war-crazy. Futile wars have been fought with

alarming regularity from time immemorial. There is the disconcerting

recurrence of the naked dance of cruelty and injustice in this

insensitive world. Vijayan looks upon the degeneration of the

government a~d the primitive political leadership as the tragic fate

that lies upon history. The tragic spectacle of history fills him with

anger, anguish and a taste for bitter humour.

Vijayan employs scatological imagery to reveal the limitless

 148

depravity of the rulers and the ruled in Dharmapuri. David Selbourne

refers to the conspicuous characteristic of the novel: 11 0. V. Vijayan I s

parable of post -colonialism-in India a world of folly, corruption, lies

and ancient languor-is an excremental satire, Swiftian in its savage

1
hatred for the Indian body politic 11 The basic metaphor of the novel

evolves out of the familiar proverb in the vernacular, "To eat

somebody else I s shit. 11 Dharmapuri is presented as the land of shit-

eaters.

The excremental vision which informs the novel is of colossal

proportion. The novel opens with the ritual spectacle of the . President

of Dharmapuri defecating, and the whole population of the country

crowding round to secure a share of the sovereign excrement.

In the second chapter there is an elaborate description of the

President 's defecation:

As the President squirmed on his throne, and signalled

his intent to defecate; a tremendous disquiet passed

over the gathering in the Audience Hall, for it was

not yet sundown, the Hour of the Second Defecation.

Ever since Dharmapuri attained freedom its President

had kept the Hour, defecating at daybreak and

sundown, in the rhythm of Sovereign nationhood; and

these hours were solemnized by the broadcasting

network, which played the national anthem to reassure

2
the people that all was well.

Mothers of children would invoke for their little ones the grace of the
 149

sovereign excrement. Only those who are very close to the President

were privileged enough to obtain the excrement. They share the power

with the President. They mix the smatterings they get with rare and

valuable spices and feast on with garish ceremony. There is a real

scramble for faeces. Newspapers carry pictures of the excrement­

venerators. The President uncovers his behind and ascends the

ornamental receptacle. The defecation begins with music and ends with

a flourish of trumpets. Half -a -dozen bare -breasted young women wash

the President I s posteriors and freshen them with frankincense and

myrrh. The adulators would marvel at the hardness and shape of the

roundish turdlets. The sight of the courtiers and ministers eagerly

competing to have an access to the President I s excrement, which is

the novelist I s metaphor for the debasing and obscene forms of

sycophancy to which people have reverted, informs the whole of the

parody of political authority in the novel.

Excremental images are sprinkled through the entire texture of

the novel. A jewelled turd is carried by Parashara, Dharmapuri I s

General, on ceremonial occasions. Smatterings of the sacrament could be

found in the crevices of Rumannuaan I s teeth. He is the minister of

Sorrowing ( euphemism for war) • Pestilential stench emanates from his

mouth. The ministers are to show their loyalty to the President by

saluting the receptacle that contains the sacred excrement. The

President gives sacrament as gift to spineless subordinates. Rumannuaan

loses the m'inistership of Sorrowing. To compensate, the President

makes him a minister without portfolio. In gratitude, Rumannuaan holds

 150

his hands out and begs for the sacrament.

The sycophants of Dharmapuri find rare pleasure in sharing

the President I s excrement. In fact they find it their sacred duty. The

ordinary people who carry the humiliation of these ignoble acts, are

helpless. Through the endless repetition of the President I s act of

shitting, and the hyperbolic description of the excrement of diverse

shape and taste, Vijayan reveals the physiological and psychological

structure of a populace steeped in the dirt of servility. The President

defecates in the angst of eating the flavoured and sweetened food

brought from the West. The battalion of children who accompany the

President on his foreign trip empty their bowels on the dining table

making cushions of excrement in the presence of their dignified host.

Fear and anxiety invariably make the President and the

ministers defecate. At times they use excrement as a weapon. Vijayan

gives a splendid account of such an occasion: liThe President prostrated

himself before the white man, which threw his behind into relief. The

sight of that behind, with its scab of excrement, terrified the

3
Imperialist, and he beat a hasty retreat. 11

Dharmapuri is the land of social, political and moral

degeneration. The President and his adulators are immune to shame and

humiliation. The President is a political upstart. He does not have a

decent past either. In a memorable passage, Vijayan presents his

reminiscences:

Like molten excrement in the guts, malodorous and

obscene memories, a whole generation of them, roiled

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the President I s insides. He recollected his orphanhood

after his father I s passing, the desolate paths of the

pimp, the painted faces of his sisters, the slights at

the hands of strangers, the sad and· stale suppers, and

then the rabble, the demagogy and the incendiarism,

4
and at last the Palace.

He is imbecile and impotent and has to rely on imported aphrodisiacs

to ensure an erection. He bleats like a goat when he achieves an

elusive orgasm. He is a vulgar hedonist who seeks out his own ways

of pleasure, ignoring the affairs of the state and the people.

Corruption, nepotism, meanness, foolishness, and all other conceivable

sins shape his hideous personality. He represents the ceremonial head

of a nation of ·starving, and servile people. His only concern is about

ensuring a free import of candy and other luxurious items from the

West.

The land ruled by such a ruler can never be prosperous. His

heartless atrocities and callous and criminal indifference to the

problems of the people have made a hell of his land. The misery of

the people multiplies due to war, violence and lawlessness. Medicine

kills those who take it. A woman has to prostitute her way to the

hospital where people are turned into dead bodies to be exported to

the medical colleges in the West. Laavanya is subjected to a variety

of ordeals in her attempt to save her ailing son. Every establishment

in Dharma.puri is manned by corrupt and sinful people. The ministers

who share power with the President have no sense of self-respect •

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They wag their tails like obedient dogs. They stoop to any level to

keep their positions safe. Rumannuaan, the minister of Sorrowing has

no compunction to send his wife to the bed-chamber of the President.

He himself is happy to be with the maidservant. Hayavadana who

replaces him is a male whore. But for his pretty and promiscuous

wife, Priyamvada, he would never have been the minister of

Sorrowing.

The novel is replete with horrible pictures of moral and

political chaos. Vijayan is filled with righteous indignation when he

looks at the fleeting phantasmagoria of shocking realities. He considers

such degenerate community, the slave of excrement.

Vijayan employs the artistic device of synthesizing the sublime

and the grotesque in some of his short stories. In the story 11 Theetam"

(Excrement) he dispels the possible nausea created by the disgusting

and the ugly with the help of humour. The story deals with dirty

things. Normafly they should produce disgust. But through the artistic

equivalent of alchemy Vijayan turns the disgusting into the delightful.

It becomes an interesting parody of The Ramayana. When life is

trapped in restrictive social order, evil administration or distorted

beliefs, Vijayan identifies it with dirt. In the story, Isakumuthu

stands atop the mountain of excrement. He keeps within his bosom the

dirt of society and speaks for morality. Dirt, that is nauseating in the

physical world generates joy in the realm of art.

Jean Genet, the modern French writer, in his Our Lady of the

Flowers ( 1949) depicts a character I s ugly act of holding the air that
 153

passes through his anus in his cupped palms and directing it to the

soul through the nostrils. Sartre, who has written a lengthy foreword

to the novel points out that such acts create a new proximity between

the protagonist and the reader. In The Saga, through the employment

of vulgar language Vijayan represents the downfall of despicable

characters like Hayavadana and Pippalada, from the cosy thrones of

power.

There is controlled and judicious use of scatology in The

Autumn of the Patriarch. Marquez succeeds in giving his novel a

" s hitty grandeur. II Vijayan IS excessive use of excremental images can

be pointed out as an artistic blemish. There is an overstraining of the

metaphor as a result of which the faecal imagery loses part of its

Genet -like effects. Some of his morbid obsessions could be traced back

to his unresolved anal-erotic instincts. He is believed to have passed

through many emotional crises.

Jonathan Swift shook the very foundation of eighteenth -century

morality by highlighting the anal function in some of his works. In

mere quantity of scatological imagery he may be equalled by Rabelais

and Aristophanes; but whereas for Rabelais and Aristophanes the anal

function is a part of the total human being which they make us love

because it is part of life, for Swift it becomes the decisive weapon in

his assault on the pretensions, the pride, even the self -respect of

mankind. The most scandalous pieces of Swiftian scatology are three of

his later poems. But even more disturbing, because more

comprehensively metaphysical, is Swiftls vision of man as Yahoo and

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Yahoo as excremental! y filthy beyond all other animals, in the fourth

part of Gulliver I s Travels (1726). Swift was called a neurotic who

exhibited psychosexual infantilism with a particular showing of

coprophilia, associated with misogyny and misanthropy. In him the

anal fixation was intense. The genital demands were said to be so

impaired or limited at best that there was a total retreat from genital

sexuality in tiis early adult life.

Freud describes the different aspects of infantile neurosis:

"Faeces are the child I s first gift, the first sacrifice of his affection,

a portion of his own body which he is ready to part with, but only
5
for the sake of someone he loves. 11 Faeces are also used as an

expression of defiance. At a later stage of sexual development faeces

take on the meaning of a child. The child may use faeces either to

obtain love " from another, or to assert independence from another, or

to commit aggression against another. Thus faeces become gift, property

or weapon. The sexual instinct is originally divided into a great

number of components. Some of these cannot be taken up into the

instinct in its later form, but have at an earlier stage to be

suppressed or put to other uses. There are above all the coprophilic

instinctual components which have proved incompatible with our

aesthetic standards of culture probably since our adopting an erect

posture. The fundamental processes which produce erotic excitement

remain unaltered. The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably

bound up with the sexual. Erich Fromm thinks that words like

"excrement II and "defecation II and frequent references to foul smell

 155

speak of necrophilia. He observes that Hitler's facial expression was

that of a person who was exposed to foul smell. The genocide that he
was guilty of, was inspired by a sort of necrophilia.
Norman O. Brown comments on the relationship between

excrement and death:

Excrement is the dead life of the body, and as long
as humanity prefers a dead life to living, so long is

humanity committed to treating as excrement not only

its own body but the surrounding world of objects,
6
reducing all to dead matter and inorganic magnitudes.

In Vijayan's hands art becomes something akin to the

unconscious defiance shown by children. Children defecate on the bed

to attract the attention of indifferent parents. The fetishistic scenes in

the novel represent the childlike ways of defiance that arrests the

attention of the custodians of dehumanized and degenerate political

culture. Scatology is somewhat basic to Vijayan's ridiculous version of

the perversion of power which has taken place in a Third World nation

during its post-colonial phase. Vijayan justifies the use of scatological

imagery in the novel:

I was in search of the ultimate verbal obscenity

becatise the objects of my criticism-the state, war,

political and personal domination, the trivial motives

beneath the grand historical postures of Kings and

Presidents-were not merely scatological aberrations,

but obscenity rooted in the spirit itself. 7

 156

Next to scatology, sex becomes a focal point in Vijayan I s

evocation of the public life in Dharmapuri. He weaves into the texture

of the novel, many pictures of defiled eroticism as part of his attempt

to present the degeneration and moral breakdown in Dharmapuri I s

public life. E. V. Ramakrishnan 's observation is pertinent:

The life giving libido degenerates into a desecration

of the body. While the subjects of Dharmapuri are

relentlessly driven to submission and defeat along the

dismal tract between memory and oblivion, they shed

8
all their sense of human identity.

He adopts vulgarity as an artistic device to expose the lacerating

wounds of history. Erotic images become a technique in his hands. It

is not a titillating subject -matter, but a shocking mode of discourse.

When the dirt of politics is transformed into erotic degeneration, the

subject -matter and mode of discourse become one. The message is

dissolved into the mode of discourse. Words do not just represent

something. They remain as they are, in a terr! ble way. They appear

before the mind 's eye as historical degeneration. Language becomes a

mirror that reflects the artist's erotic dream about history. The fusion

of theme and technique evokes the impression that political depravity

and sexual degeneration are one.

Sex is an open means of gaining access to the seats of power,

. and of getting things done in daily life. The sexual impotency of the

senile President is the defunct senses of politics. He and the

unscrupulou!3 mafia around him have transformed Dharmapuri into a land

 157

of pimps and whores. They indulge in wnnton forms of erotic

gratification which remain as the principal basis of their ethics of

power. The cynicism with which the rulers of Dharmapuri treat the

body of the .;,oman parallels their brazen disregard for the decencies

of political conduct, and the total vulgarization of desire which has

taken place in their realm forms an aspect of the general vision of

decay and dissolution,

Prostitution is institutionalized in Dharmapuri. The President

makes several futile attempts to prove his power by copulating with
the kitchen maids and the wives of ministers, on the strength of the

imported aphrodisiacs. Many of the ministers act as his pimps.

Rumannuan I s joy knows no bounds when he sees his wife in the arms

of the President. Hayavadana looks on with a sense of gratification

when his wife Priyamvada entertains the President.

The President is stretched naked on his back, with naked

maids massaging him with precious ointments. The Palace boy brings a

scroll. It is �he petition from the sex-starved women of Dharmapuri.

Vijayan 's description of the scene is full of sarcasm:

The opportune hour was a joint deployment of Tartar

and Confederate aphrodisiacs on the President, for

well over an hour the President's genitals had been

massaged with these, although to the mortification of

the donor ambassadors, watching from the wi.ngs, the

President's organ had not arisen. All affairs of state

had been suspended, and the communards in ritual

alarm, ran berserk on spy -hunts. 9

 158

The erotic expressions in the petition achieve what even the exotic

aphrodisiacs could not. The President produces goat -noises which

precede an erection.

The chapter entitled "The White Overlord II presents the

President I s sexual encounter with one of his concubines. He rests in

the stupor of a discharge, an august occurrence of State, while a

concubine kneels naked, her head buried in his crotch. The Minister

of the Interior stands before them. The President asks: "Woman, in

what fashion would you like to amuse yourself with this august

personage? 1110 She giggles softly and spits on the minister's face.

Interspersed between the President I s question and the woman I s response

to it is Vijayan I s unique observation on the connection between power

and sex:

Neither the President nor the whore quite realized the

enormity of the proposition; it was a call to play

with history. Princes and Presidents played in erotic

ritual for their concubines, they played thus while

they reigned, in the little times they had which they

11
mistook for permanence.

Marquez brings out the connection between sexual perversion

and political degeneration in The Autumn of the Patriarch. The

reminiscences of one of the victims of the Patriarch I s passion throw

light on the nexus between power and sexual perversions:

• I stood alone on the street by the school when

I knew that no one was watching me and I tried to

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reach the candy and he grabbed me by the wrists

with a gentle tiger I s claw and lifted me· painlessly up

into the air, took me through the skylight with such

care that not a pleat in my dress was wrinkled and

he laid me down on the hay that was scented with

rancid urine trying to tell me something that wouldn I t

come out of his arid mouth because he was more

frightened then I, he was trembling, you could see his

heart beating under his jacket, he was pale, his eyes

were full of tears as no other man ever had there in

all my life in exile, he touched me in silence,

breathing unhurriedly, he tempted me with a male

tenderness which I never found again, he made my

little buds stand out on my breasts, he put his

fingers underneath the edge of my panties, he smelled

his fingers, he made me smell them, smell it, he told

me, it 's your smell, I didn 't need Ambassador

Baldrich 's candy any more to climb through the stable

skylight to live the happy hours of my puberty with

that man of a healthy and sad heart who waited for

me sitting in the hay with a bag containing things to

eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them

marinated with the brine of my inner humours,

delicious, he told me, you taste like a port, he

dreamed about eating my kidneys boiled in their own

ammonia stew with the salt of your armpits.

12
 160

Here, perversion reaches its heights.

In The Saga, the ministers are no less lascivious than the

President. Rumannuaan exploits sexually the vulnerability and

susceptibility of the weaker class. He subjects the kitchen maid,

Laavanya to frequent sexual assaults. He had spent his youth in

Feringheeland, snake -charming and selling trinkets and propagating the

·· cause of Dharmapuri I s independence. He is the most prominent among

the sycophants. He is extremely dishonest and has a highly elastic

conscience. Vijayan I s description of his amorous advances is full of

sarcasm: "The old man's slaver fell on her neck and shoulders, his

fingers crawled over knots and buttons like slow-jointed spiders, and
13
·clumsily but surely went on undressing her. 11
He shares the sexual

perversions of the President. Vijayan exposes the degeneration of the

whole system with a stunning depiction of Rumannuaan I s sexual assault

on Laavanya:

Rumannuaan lay on the kitchen floor and stradding him

Laavanya futilely nursed his limpness. Presently

Rumarmuaan stopped crying and grabbed his conch and

blew it, calling forth his officers, who on a sign from

him fetched vials of Tartar and Confederate potions

14
and a native aphrodisiac as well • • • •

La�vanya sees the struggle of the subject peoples and the triumph of

St atesmen shrink into the space of a kitchen and the triviality of an

incompetent act of lust.

Rumannuaan, like other ministers, is helpless. His desperate

 161

utterance is difficult to be ignored: "One wishes one could stop with

the sacrament, Rumannuaan said cheerlessly. But it does not suffice. 0

my kitchen maid! One has to part with one I s women too. Such is the
15
awesome process of history. 11

Laavonya frequently becomes the victim of sexual violence. The

secret policemen arrest Vaatasena, her husband for alleged acts of

indiscipline. In sheer despair she chases the chariot in which he is

taken away. On the way she is captured by a secret policeman. She is

interrogated. The policeman begins to examine her body. He measures

her breasts and buttocks and kisses her a number of times. He starts

disrobing her. Laavanya resists. The policeman ejaculates on the floor.

Laavanya undresses herself and stands naked before him when she is

reminded of her duty as a citizen in the days of historic insecurity.

Priyamvada, practises prostitution to promote her interests.

She is one of the concubines of the President and considers it a

privilege to satisfy his carnal desires. Abundant recompense comes in

the form of an official elevation for her husband. In her nascent

arrogance, th·:: imperious whore brings the secretary to his knees and

makes him prepare the Presidential order. With pride, she refers to

the carpet she received as gift from R umannuaan, her former lover, for

an "afternoon's messing". She goes down memory lane: "The. old man

held me, and not knowing what to do with me spilled over my navel
16
and crotch. 11

A striking characteristic of Vijayan I s reconstruction of the

libidinal life of the people of Dharmapuri is the manner in which he

 162

makes use of nude shapes somewhat reminiscent of the method of the

Hungarian film director, Miklos Jancso. In Jancso I s films nudity always

figures as a metaphor of political oppression, and it has a similar

function in the world of The Saga where male vanity has reached such

tyrannical lengths as to seek pleasure through paroxysms of public

display.

The erotic encodings of the politicnl order deepen in the

second part of the novel where we are made to look at the mechanical

lusts of the various characters in direct relation to the nature of the

modern society which is organized around the principle of consumer

pleasure. At a time when man lived in harmony with nature, sexuality

was spontaneous and 1 yrical, devoid of all traces of anxiety and guilt.

The process of corruption of the carnal desire paralleled the growth

of the male urge for the conquest of the land. As man lost contact

with the organic rhythms of life, his approach to sex came to be

dictated by possessive haste. The mounting suggestion of sexual panic

in the novel touches a new peak in Chapter XXIV which is set in a

Western city. Here, inside the household of a captain of industry, we

watch two hippie children making love to each other in utter

innocence. This is followed by a scene of totem feast to which they

invite their dumbfounded father. The children have violated the taboo

of incest--one of the last taboos of Western civilization-because they

want to reject the conditioning by a civilization which knows no true

love, and is propelled by the dynamics of endless consumption.

Nature, in all her primal fury, is seen to have taken revenge upon the
 163

modern way of life.

Vijayan proceeds to unfold the insanity that shapes the

politics of Dharmapuri by showing the brutal arrogance of dictatorship

that seeks satisfaction through sadism. Erich Fromm comments: 11 A

great deal of psychoanalytic ingenuity has been deployed to prove that

libido is the driving force of cruelty, even when the naked eye could
17
not discover such sexual motivations. 11 Sadism is essentially a sexual

phenomenon. Sexual sadism along with masochism is one of the most

frequent and best-known sexual perversions. It ranges from the wish to

cause physical pain to a woman to humiliating her in chains or forcing

her complete obedience in other ways. Sometimes they just need a

sadistic phantasy to be sexually excited. In sexual masochism the

procedure is reversed. The excitement lies in being beaten, abused or

hurt. Both sadism and masochism as sexual perversions are to be found

frequent! y among men. However, it has become quite fashionable among

some radical thinkers, like Herbert Marcuse to praise sadism as one of

the expressions of human sexual freedom.

The core of sadism is the passion to have absolute and

unrestricted control over a living being. The person who has complete

control over another living being, turns this being into his thing, his

property, while he becomes the other being 's god. Sadism is also

interpreted as a blending of Eros and the death instinct, directed

outside oneself.

Albert Camus's play Caligul� ( 1945) provides an example of an

extreme type of sadistic control which amounts to a desire for

 164

omnipotence. Caligula, brought by circumstances to a position of

unlimited power, gets ever more deeply involved in the craving for
power. He sleeps with the wives of the senators and enjoys their
humiliation when they have to act like admiring and fawning friends.

He kills some of them and those that remain still have to smile and
joke to delight him. But absolute power alone can bring satisfaction to

him. It is through sadism and unlimited power that dictatorship seeks

its mean gratification.

The President of Dharmapuri behaves in the same way as his

counterparts in history. He insults and humiliates the husbands of his

concubines. Rumannuaan and Hayavadana are the victims of malignant

aggressiveness generated by sadism. He does not kill them. The Prime

Minister of Samarkhand acts in identical fashion. He spares the life of

his concubine I s husband. His justification sounds strange only to those

who fail to realize the anatomy of a sadist I s psyche. He explains to

his mistress:

Now coming back to your husband, on second thoughts,

I decided against liquidation because were your

husband to be removed, you would become mine and

mine alone. Where then, 0 delectable whore, would be

the 1
pleasure of prevailing over the adversary?
Divested of such triumph, of what use would be my

power and sovereignty? 18

In his short story "Ettukaali" (The Spider) Vijayan employs

sexual sadism of a different kind. In the course of the sexual activity

 165

the man whispers to the woman some vulgar words. He derives a

strange pleasure by watching the sense of shame and embarrassment of

the woman.

Tyrants like Hitler are believed to have found pleasure in

persecuting those who are inferior to them. But they loved to be

masochists before those they admired and feared. In The Saga,

Hayavadana, the Minister for Sorrowing, experiences the pleasure of

masochism. Priyamvada stands naked before him. He kneels before her,

captivated by her beauty. Tantalizingly and wickedly, she holds out

her big toe to the creature grovelling before her in imbecile lust.

Kneeling, the Commander of Dharmapuri's armies takes the toe into his

mouth and sucks it. Such depictions of slavish submission give insights

into the filth of power. In "Ettukaali 11 (The Spider) the mysterious and

pathetic desires of the aged woman take the readers to the strange

realms of masochism. The woman enjoys watching the demented sexual

activities of her daughter and her lover.

Necrophilia which is based on a passionate affinity for dead

bodies, represents a degenerate dream in vijayan. The delectable

delineation of degenerate dreams is a characteristic feature of

Vijayan's art. In "Chavittuvandi" (The Pedal Machine) there is a

voluptuous description of the nude dead body of Kalyaniyachi. The

passionate affinity of the novelist for deadbodies finds its disturbing

expression in the story. The policemen and the people crowd round the

beautiful body without caring to clothe it. They pine for it. They

watch spell-bound the lovely undulations of her body and are content
 166

to live the remainder of their life with haunting memories of that

sweet nudity •

In the novel, Sidhartha is leading Laavanya and Sunanda

through the doorway of the House of Healing. They find themselves in

a dismal length of tunnel along which, over rails sunk in the ground,

move an interminable succession of trolleys. Colliding against

Sidhartha, one of the trolleys comes off the rails. It comes to a halt.

In it lies the cold deadbody of a woman. Short! y, the attendant peels

away the shroud and takes off his own clothes. He mounts the inert

body. Vijayan captures the horrible situation in a striking passage:

Recovering himself, Sidhartha steered Laavanya and

Sunanda away from the gruesome transgression. As they

walked down the corridor, they came upon another man

copulating with a corpse on a trolley, and another and

yet another. The menacing dusk of the tunnel grew

19
dense with funereal lust.

In "The Wart" that is reminiscent of Kafka I s "The

Metamorphosis." Vijayan I s demented imagination brings out the tragic

nexus between authoritarianism and eroticism. The wart that appears on

the face of the protagonist as a parasytical protuberance is the symbol

of dictatorship. Incredibly, a phallus grows on it. It takes Naani to a

tumultuous and fatal orgasm. Even in his disfigured condition the

narrator is oppressed by lust. Vijayan writes: "Thus does the unfree

man seek freedom, in lust; like the condemned prisoner who spends

his last moments not on God but mating with empresses in his
 167

fantasy • 11 20

In the story, necrophilia reflects the evil of power: The

narrator recounts: "The wart asked me to lie down on Naani I s corpse

once again for a funereal mating. It kissed the black parted lips, then

I heard a noise like the snip-snipping of barber's scissors. 11 21

Sexual perversion underlies the relationship between Mandakini

and Sreelata, wives of the persuaders. In one of the homes of the

Cantonment, Mandakini sat in bed with Sreelata, counselling and

comforting her. Vijayan takes us through the intricacies of their

relationship.

She began to cry, and Mandakini bent over her and

kissed away her tears; then she kissed her on the

lips. Neither women knew how long the kiss

lasted. And in such wise were quenched the

, 22
rest of the ten thousand. persuaders I wives.

The President is crazy about the kitchen boy with fair thighs and lush

lips. The shared fate, sexual privations and physical proximity land

Aryadata and Ghrini in the comfort of a homosexual liaison.

With the help of excremental and erotic images Vijayan

unleashes a systematic assault on the decaying concept of power. The

novel attempts a relentless revolt against the false morality and the

conventional concept of beauty in the language. The scatological and

erotic metaphors highlight the violation of the individual I s solitude

which is the first moral code to be broken when fascist tendencies

take roots in the State. Vijayan I s fears assume Kafkaesque dimensions.

The encounter with the evil becomes an irresistible compulsion in him.

 Notes

1 David Selbourne, 11 At the Sign of the Goat, 11 rev. of The Saga

of Dharmapuri, by O. V. Vijayan, TLS 13 Dec. 1990. 18.

2 O. V. Vijayan, The Saga of Dharmapuri (New Delhi: Penguin,

1988) 11.
3 Vijayan, The Saga 116.
4 Vijayan, The Saga 13 .
6
5 Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, Vol. 3 (1925; London: The

Hogarth P, 1956) 559.

6 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1959) 186.
7 O. V. Vijayan, 11 The Saga of Dharmapuri: Interview with O. V.
Vijayan," Littcrit 18.1-2 (1992): 94.
8 E. V. Ramakrishnan, Politics of Language and the
11 The

Language of Politics, 11 Littcrit 16.1-2 (1990): 68.

9 Vijayan, The Saga 46.

10
Vijayan, The Saga 111.
11 Vijayan, The Saga 111.
12 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tbe Autumn· of the Patriarch, trans.

Gregory Rabassa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976) 187.

13 Vijayan, The Saga 30-31.

14 Vijayan, The Saga 33.

15 Vijayan, The Saga 32.

16 Vijayan, The Saga 122.

 169

17
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1974) 291.
18 Vijayan, The Saga 67.
19
Vijayan, The Saga 62.
20
O. V. Vijayan, "The Wart, 11 After the Hanging and Other Stories
(New Delhi: Penguin, 1989).
21 Vijayan, "The Wart" 27.

22 Vijayan, The Saga 49.