Literatura académica sobre el tema "Arranged marriage – Fiction"

Postcolonial fiction and trauma are almost coalesced into one another as a result of the nature of postcolonial cultural condition. Trauma emerges as one of the most important and inevitable themes in postcolonial novels written, in particular, by the British authors of colonial origin. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali portrays the tragic destiny of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman, forced into an arranged marriage, when she is eighteen, to a Bangladeshi man in his forties living in London. It is a story of trauma, migration and adultery. After her mother’s suicide, Nazneen’s father arranges her marriage to Chanu and sends her away from home to the Imperial centre. As a postcolonial Bangladeshi immigrant, Nazneen not only suffers from the trauma of her deceased mother but also from the trauma of her arranged marriage that results in the birth of a son who dies when he is only a few months old. In addition to her personal breakdown after a series of tragic events, she inevitably undergoes cultural clashes. This study discusses Nazneen’s traumatic background and her postcolonial identity and questions whether or not her tragic situation stems from the postcolonial cultural condition.

AbstractRecent attention to the modern history of emotion in China has traced multiple and shifting discourses. The New Culture Movement that competed with "butterfly fiction" in the first decade of China's new Republic championed an autonomous form of individual personhood that broke with the authoritarian family and arranged marriages, and embraced free love and free choice marriage. In the late 1920s, projects of revolutionary emotional retooling reoriented passion, loyalty, and identity in the direction of the nation. But historians have relatively little source material that illuminates the linkage between changes in elite discourses and the everyday experiences of individual commoners, particularly for the study of emotional expression. The unusual survival of a set of petty-urbanite love letters permits the close textual mapping, in this essay, of the ways in which the broad public circulation in the Republican era of multiple and contradictory discourses of emotion entered into and affected particular commoner lives.

Chetan Bhagat is a popular Indian writer. He exposes the various issues being practiced in society. All his novels present the problems of youths, their hopes, aspirations, dreams and frustrations. The Present novel One Indian Girl is acclaimed for his stance on female issues. This novel is presented from the female perspective. Radhika is the major female character in the fiction. She is victim of the male chauvinism. She undergoes many tribulations but in the end she takes her own decision. She doesn’t accept the male choice. After much emphasis she accepts to do arrange marriage but at the she realizes her own importance and refuses to marry. She determines to live life according to her own terms. The writer presents her expedition in a fantastic way.

The subject of the essay is the staging of Gombrowicz’s Ślub [The Marriage], directed by Eimuntas Nekrošius at the National Theatre in Warsaw, treated as an example of ‘creative betrayal’ of the stage arranger towards the author of the dramatic text. ‘Creative betrayal’ is a perfect metaphor for directorial interpretation, which consists not so much in the stage materialisation of the fictional universe of the drama, as in the translation of the literary work’s meanings into the signs of a theatrical work. Referring to the theory of the spectacle as intersemiotic translation, the author shows how the stage world remains a creative reaction to the dramatic situations and conflicts designed by the playwright, as well as – to put it much more broadly – the image of a man and the shape of reality. According to the author of the essay, such a reaction as a rule contains polemic elements in relation to the playwright’s vision. Nekrošius remains polemical towards Gombrowicz, but his criticism – included in the actions of actors, scenography, costumes, and all directorial solutions – takes on a very deceitful shape. In his interpretation of The Marriage, the Lithuanian director focused on the motif and the problem of betrayal, which seems to be crucial in his worldview, based on psychoanalysis and existentialist philosophy. In this way, the stage arranger’s ‘betrayal’ became only an ironic response to the author’s ‘betrayal’, proving in fact ‘faithfulness’ to the meanings of the The Marriage, which was not noticed by the reviewers of the performance. Recalling the statements of one of them, author makes us aware of the complicated relationship between the author of a dramatic work, its director and the reviewer of the performance. And at the same time – of how typical for the dynamics of cultural life is the conflict between the participants of the artistic and critical dialogue.

In a family, power relations can be seen in a father-child relationship, where the father has the authority to control the life of the child and the child must approve the father's decision. Not only the father, however, the son might also have different objective that he wants to achieve. Here both parties will usually try to keep pursuing their own objectives. In other words, both parties will look for strategies of how to win their objective in the power relation by acting certain ways. Hence, strategy can be used as the means to obtain victory (Foucault, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to analyze power relations that occurred in a family in a fictional work, namely Family Matters novel by Rohinton Mistry, particularly between Nariman Vakeel and his father, Marzi Vakeel. Nariman’s objective is to acquire his father’s approval for his desire to marry his girlfriend, Lucy Braganza, who is a Catholic. This is the opposite of Marzi’s belief, that his family should marry a Parsi. Power relations and strategies used between Nariman and his father were examined using the theory of power relations from Michel Foucault. The findings show that each character implements different strategies in imposing power and confronting each other. As for Nariman, his strategies include persuading his father, and when this does not work, he started to show a clear insubordination every time. On the other hand, Marzi’s strategies include writing a letter to newspaper to let other people know his opposition to interfaith marriage, objecting Lucy’s presents in his house by rejecting Nariman’s suggestion to invite Lucy over for dinner, and being patience in confronting Nariman’s insubordination for eleven years. During these years, Marzi never utilized violence. In the end, Marzi succeeded in achieving his objective to make Nariman marry a Parsi woman when Nariman was finally tired of confronting his father, and let his father choose a Parsi woman. Nariman ended up having an arranged marriage.Keywords: Family, Foucault, power relation, strategies

Carey, Edward. Heap House. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014. Print.Heap House is Edward Carey’s first foray into young adult fiction. The author of two of the most original adult novels in recent years—Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva—Carey brings his quirky and emotionally resonant style to Book One in the Iremonger trilogy.For generations, the Iremonger family has been responsible for “the Heaps,” a tremendous sea of trash outside an alternate-universe London with Dickensian echoes. The story has an Upstairs/Downstairs structure that is masterfully managed by Carey’s use of two protagonists: Clod Iremonger, gifted outcast of the Upstairs Iremongers, and Lucy Pennant, feisty orphan of the Downstairs Iremongers. The chapters alternate between protagonists, and the stories slowly intertwine as Clod and Lucy begin to uncover the dark secrets of the Iremonger family.Each of the protagonists faces significant challenges. Clod has the unusual ability to hear the voices of birth objects (objects assigned to each Iremonger at birth), and each object calls out a different name. This skill leaves him shunned by many family members. Clod is bullied by his wretched cousin Moorcus and has to face a dreaded coming of age ceremony involving an arranged marriage to an unpleasant cousin, Pinnalippy. Lucy is oppressed by the rules imposed on the servants downstairs and struggles to hang on to her identity and her memories in a house where she is stripped of everything but the name “Iremonger”. Accompanying these challenges faced by the two protagonists is the larger problem of the Heaps themselves, which certainly make the reader consider the environmental consequences of our culture of the disposable, as well as the way we accumulate unnecessary stuff in our consumer culture. The Heaps surround the house and provide a menacing backdrop for some intense scenes, while the objects inside the house begin to become threatening in their own, very unexpected, way.The chapters are accompanied by evocative and gloomy portraits of the occupants of Heap House with their birth objects. The illustrations create the effect for the reader of walking through the grand hall in a Victorian manor house lined with family portraits. As with his adult fiction, Carey creates a marvelous architectural space for this story.This is a family saga of such originality that readers will be swept away wondering where the tale will take them, and the story ends on a cliffhanger certain to leave readers anxious for the next installment. Suitable for ages 12 and up.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Natalie HamiltonNatalie Hamilton is a lifelong bibliophile who has worked as an instructor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, MacEwan University, and Medicine Hat College. She recently interned with Dalkey Archive Press in Dublin, Ireland, where she edited a series of 10 Korean novels. She was a longtime employee of the greatly missed independent bookstore Greenwoods’ Bookshoppe in Edmonton.

Laidlaw, S.J. An Infidel in Paradise. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2013. Print.In S.J. (Susan) Laidlaw’s first novel, she takes us to a contemporary Canadian diplomatic compound in Pakistan. Emma, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, has been suddenly uprooted from a comfortable life in the Philippines. Her father has left her family and her mother has moved Emma and her two siblings to Islamabad. Suffering from culture shock, adjusting to a new school, and playing parent to her younger sister, Emma is frustrated and takes her anger out on her family. Emma offends a dreamy young man, Mustapha, whom she meets on her first day at her new school and she is subsequently labeled as rude and racist. However, we know from listening to Emma’s inner dialogue that she is neither, and her interactions reinforce this. In the time-honored literary romance tradition, Emma’s clash with Mustapha does not prevent them from developing feelings for each other. Mustapha, however, is promised in an arranged marriage. Their drama comes to a head when threats against the American embassies shake the international community in Islamabad, leaving Emma in a life threatening situation.This novel is well-written and wonderfully real. Emma’s anger with a sub-text of guilt, her raw frustration with her new situation, and her inability to deal with her feelings all rang true. The little touches, like Emma’s interaction with a slobbery dog, hit home: “He licks my hand, which is gross but also comforting. I wipe it on my jeans when he’s not looking”. Emma cares about the people and creatures around her, although she is terrified of being hurt. She is angry at her parents, but she also understands why they separated. Her feelings of being alone are exasperated by the extreme culture shock and she is having trouble coping. Emma’s flouting of local tradition caught me by surprise; for one so well-traveled with a diplomat parent, she did not give much credence to local customs. Perhaps it is her form of rebellion.Laidlaw addresses socio-cultural issues with honesty and frankness. She does not separate the ‘us’ from the ‘them,’ identifying cultural boundaries but noting the permeability of those boundaries. Laidlaw broaches intercultural conflict openly, acknowledging that her protagonists’ countrymen are not necessarily welcome, but few people mean to cause harm.I would recommend this book for anyone 12 and up. A somewhat graphic scene near the end of the book may be too much for younger readers. I hope Laidlaw continues with additional novels as these themes are critical to explore and she does it so well. Note: my favorite part of the novel is the Urdu glossary at the back; it’s a very nice touch.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Jorden SmithJorden Smith joins the team as a book reviewer. Jorden is a Public Services Librarian in Rutherford Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. She is an avid fiction reader and subscribes to Hemingway’s belief that “there is no friend as loyal as a book.”

Abstract: this article explores how the concepts of ideology, identity, and power contribute to the construction of the voice of the Other in immigration short fiction. For this purpose, a twofold linguistic analysis using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)and stylistics is carried out. The innovative nature of the study can be perceived in its theoretical background as well as in its analytic process given that it combines CDA and stylistics andit proposes a corpus of immigration literature. The two short stories analyzed are “Negocios” by Junot Díaz and “The Arrangers of Marriage” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.The results show that the voice of the Other as immigrant is destructed and through processes of discursive power there is an attempt to shape his/her identity to conform to a new ideology. Resumen: este artículo explora cómo los conceptos de ideología, identidad y poder contribuyen a la construcción de la voz del Otro en historias cortas de temática de inmigración. Para ello, se elabora un doble análisis lingüístico a través del Análisis Crítico del Discurso y de la pragmaestilística. El carácter innovador del trabajo se percibe en materia teórica y metodológica ya que utiliza un marco teórico combinado de ACD y estilística para analizar un corpus literario de relatos de inmigración. Los relatos analizados son “Negocios” (Junot Díaz) y “The Arrangers of Marriage” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Los resultados indican que la voz del Otro como inmigrante es destruida y que a través de procesos de poder discursivo existe un intento de moldear su identidad a fin de acomodarle a una nueva ideología.

The release in 2004 of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice marked yet another contribution to celluloid’s Austen mania that began in the 1990s and is still going strong. Released almost simultaneously on three different continents (in the UK, US, and India), and in two different languages (English and Hindi), Bride and Prejudice, however, is definitely not another Anglo-American period costume drama. Described by one reviewer as “East meets West”, Chadha’s film “marries a characteristically English saga [Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] with classic Bollywood format “transforming corsets to saris, … the Bennetts to the Bakshis and … pianos to bhangra beats” (Adarsh). Bride and Prejudice, thus, clearly belongs to the upcoming genre of South Asian cross-over cinema in its diasporic incarnation. Such cross-over cinema self-consciously acts as a bridge between at least two distinct cinematic traditions—Hollywood and Bollywood (Indian Hindi cinema). By taking Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as her source text, Chadha has added another dimension to the intertextuality of such cross-over cinema, creating a complex hybrid that does not fit neatly into binary hyphenated categories such as “Asian-American cinema” that film critics such as Mandal invoke to characterise diaspora productions. An embodiment of contemporary globalised (post?)coloniality in its narrative scope, embracing not just Amritsar and LA, but also Goa and London, Bride and Prejudice refuses to fit into a neat East versus West cross-cultural model. How, then, are we to classify this film? Is this problem of identity indicative of postmodern indeterminacy of meaning or can the film be seen to occupy a “third” space, to act as a postcolonial hybrid that successfully undermines (neo)colonial hegemony (Sangari, 1-2)? To answer this question, I will examine Bride and Prejudice as a mimic text, focusing specifically on its complex relationship with Bollywood conventions. According to Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice is a “complete Hindi movie” in which she has paid “homage to Hindi cinema” through “deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar” (Jha). This list of film makers is associated with a specific Bollywood sub-genre: the patriotic family romance. Combining aspects of two popular Bollywood genres, the “social” (Prasad, 83) and the “romance” (Virdi, 178), this sub-genre enacts the story of young lovers caught within complex familial politics against the backdrop of a nationalist celebration of Indian identity. Using a cinematic language that is characterised by the spectacular in both its aural and visual aspects, the patriotic family romance follows a typical “masala” narrative pattern that brings together “a little action and some romance with a touch of comedy, drama, tragedy, music, and dance” (Jaikumar). Bride and Prejudice’s successful mimicry of this language and narrative pattern is evident in film reviews consistently pointing to its being very “Bollywoodish”: “the songs and some sequences look straight out of a Hindi film” says one reviewer (Adarsh), while another wonders “why this talented director has reduced Jane Austen’s creation to a Bollywood masala film” (Bhaskaran). Setting aside, for the moment, these reviewers’ condemnation of such Bollywood associations, it is worthwhile to explore the implications of yoking together a canonical British text with Indian popular culture. According to Chadha, this combination is made possible since “the themes of Jane Austen’s novels are a ‘perfect fit’ for a Bollywood style film” (Wray). Ostensibly, such a comment may be seen to reinforce the authority of the colonial canonical text by affirming its transnational/transhistorical relevance. From this perspective, the Bollywood adaptation not only becomes a “native” tribute to the colonial “master” text, but also, implicitly, marks the necessary belatedness of Bollywood as a “native” cultural formation that can only mimic the “English book”. Again, Chadha herself seems to subscribe to this view: “I chose Pride and Prejudice because I feel 200 years ago, England was no different than Amritsar today” (Jha). The ease with which the basic plot premise of Pride and Prejudice—a mother with grown-up daughters obsessed with their marriage—transfers to a contemporary Indian setting does seem to substantiate this idea of belatedness. The spatio-temporal contours of the narrative require changes to accommodate the transference from eighteenth-century English countryside to twenty-first-century India, but in terms of themes, character types, and even plot elements, Bride and Prejudice is able to “mimic” its master text faithfully. While the Bennets, Bingleys and Darcy negotiate the relationship between marriage, money and social status in an England transformed by the rise of industrial capitalism, the Bakshis, Balraj and, yes, Will Darcy, undertake the same tasks in an India transformed by corporate globalisation. Differences in class are here overlaid with those in culture as a middle-class Indian family interacts with wealthy non-resident British Indians and American owners of multinational enterprises, mingling the problems created by pride in social status with prejudices rooted in cultural insularity. However, the underlying conflicts between social and individual identity, between relationships based on material expediency and romantic love, remain the same, clearly indicating India’s belated transition from tradition to modernity. It is not surprising, then, that Chadha can claim that “the transposition [of Austen to India] did not offend the purists in England at all” (Jha). But if the purity of the “master” text is not contaminated by such native mimicry, then how does one explain the Indian anglophile rejection of Bride and Prejudice? The problem, according to the Indian reviewers, lies not in the idea of an Indian adaptation, but in the choice of genre, in the devaluation of the “master” text’s cultural currency by associating it with the populist “masala” formula of Bollywood. The patriotic family romance, characterised by spectacular melodrama with little heed paid to psychological complexity, is certainly a far cry from the restrained Austenian narrative that achieves its dramatic effect exclusively through verbal sparring and epistolary revelations. When Elizabeth and Darcy’s quiet walk through Pemberley becomes Lalita and Darcy singing and dancing through public fountains, and the private economic transaction that rescues Lydia from infamy is translated into fisticuff between Darcy and Wickham in front of an applauding cinema audience, mimicry does smack too much of mockery to be taken as a tribute. It is no wonder then that “the news that [Chadha] was making Bride and Prejudice was welcomed with broad grins by everyone [in Britain] because it’s such a cheeky thing to do” (Jha). This cheekiness is evident throughout the film, which provides a splendid over-the-top cinematic translation of Pride and Prejudice that deliberately undermines the seriousness accorded to the Austen text, not just by the literary establishment, but also by cinematic counterparts that attempt to preserve its cultural value through carefully constructed period pieces. Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, on the other hand, marries British high culture to Indian popular culture, creating a mimic text that is, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” (86), thus undermining the authority, the primacy, of the so-called “master” text. This postcolonial subversion is enacted in Chadha’s film at the level of both style and content. If the adaptation of fiction into film is seen as an activity of translation, of a semiotic shift from one language to another (Boyum, 21), then Bride and Prejudice can be seen to enact this translation at two levels: the obvious translation of the language of novel into the language of film, and the more complex translation of Western high culture idiom into the idiom of Indian popular culture. The very choice of target language in the latter case clearly indicates that “authenticity” is not the intended goal here. Instead of attempting to render the target language transparent, making it a non-intrusive medium that derives all its meaning from the source text, Bride and Prejudice foregrounds the conventions of Bollywood masala films, forcing its audience to grapple with this “new” language on its own terms. The film thus becomes a classic instance of the colony “talking back” to the metropolis, of Caliban speaking to Prospero, not in the language Prospero has taught him, but in his own native tongue. The burden of responsibility is shifted; it is Prospero/audiences in the West that have the responsibility to understand the language of Bollywood without dismissing it as gibberish or attempting to domesticate it, to reduce it to the familiar. The presence in Bride and Prejudice of song and dance sequences, for example, does not make it a Hollywood musical, just as the focus on couples in love does not make it a Hollywood-style romantic comedy. Neither The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) nor You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998) corresponds to the Bollywood patriotic family romance that combines various elements from distinct Hollywood genres into one coherent narrative pattern. Instead, it is Bollywood hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Pardes (Subhash Ghai, 1997) that constitute the cinema tradition to which Bride and Prejudice belongs, and against which backdrop it needs to be seen. This is made clear in the film itself where the climactic fight between Darcy and Wickham is shot against a screening of Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (East and West) (1970), establishing Darcy, unequivocally, as the Bollywood hero, the rescuer of the damsel in distress, who deserves, and gets, the audience’s full support, denoted by enthusiastic applause. Through such intertextuality, Bride and Prejudice enacts a postcolonial reversal whereby the usual hierarchy governing the relationship between the colony and the metropolis is inverted. By privileging through style and explicit reference the Indian Bollywood framework in Bride and Prejudice, Chadha implicitly minimises the importance of Austen’s text, reducing it to just one among several intertextual invocations without any claim to primacy. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to view Bride and Prejudice without any knowledge of Austen; its characters and narrative pattern are fully comprehensible within a well-established Bollywood tradition that is certainly more familiar to a larger number of Indians than is Austen. An Indian audience, thus, enjoys a home court advantage with this film, not the least of which is the presence of Aishwarya Rai, the Bollywood superstar who is undoubtedly the central focus of Chadha’s film. But star power apart, the film consolidates the Indian advantage through careful re-visioning of specific plot elements of Austen’s text in ways that clearly reverse the colonial power dynamics between Britain and India. The re-casting of Bingley as the British Indian Balraj re-presents Britain in terms of its immigrant identity. White British identity, on the other hand, is reduced to a single character—Johnny Wickham—which associates it with a callous duplicity and devious exploitation that provide the only instance in this film of Bollywood-style villainy. This re-visioning of British identity is evident even at the level of the film’s visuals where England is identified first by a panning shot that covers everything from Big Ben to a mosque, and later by a snapshot of Buckingham Palace through a window: a combination of its present multicultural reality juxtaposed against its continued self-representation in terms of an imperial tradition embodied by the monarchy. This reductionist re-visioning of white Britain’s imperial identity is foregrounded in the film by the re-casting of Darcy as an American entrepreneur, which effectively shifts the narratorial focus from Britain to the US. Clearly, with respect to India, it is now the US which is the imperial power, with London being nothing more than a stop-over on the way from Amritsar to LA. This shift, however, does not in itself challenge the more fundamental West-East power hierarchy; it merely indicates a shift of the imperial centre without any perceptible change in the contours of colonial discourse. The continuing operation of the latter is evident in the American Darcy’s stereotypical and dismissive attitude towards Indian culture as he makes snide comments about arranged marriages and describes Bhangra as an “easy dance” that looks like “screwing in a light bulb with one hand and patting a dog with the other.” Within the film, this cultural snobbery of the West is effectively challenged by Lalita, the Indian Elizabeth, whose “liveliness of mind” is exhibited here chiefly through her cutting comebacks to such disparaging remarks, making her the film’s chief spokesperson for India. When Darcy’s mother, for example, dismisses the need to go to India since yoga and Deepak Chopra are now available in the US, Lalita asks her if going to Italy has become redundant because Pizza Hut has opened around the corner? Similarly, she undermines Darcy’s stereotyping of India as the backward Other where arranged marriages are still the norm, by pointing out the eerie similarity between so-called arranged marriages in India and the attempts of Darcy’s own mother to find a wife for him. Lalita’s strategy, thus, is not to invert the hierarchy by proving the superiority of the East over the West; instead, she blurs the distinction between the two, while simultaneously introducing the West (as represented by Darcy and his mother) to the “real India”. The latter is achieved not only through direct conversational confrontations with Darcy, but also indirectly through her own behaviour and deportment. Through her easy camaraderie with local Goan kids, whom she joins in an impromptu game of cricket, and her free-spirited guitar-playing with a group of backpacking tourists, Lalita clearly shows Darcy (and the audience in the West) that so-called “Hicksville, India” is no different from the so-called cosmopolitan sophistication of LA. Lalita is definitely not the stereotypical shy retiring Indian woman; this jean-clad, tractor-riding gal is as comfortable dancing the garbha at an Indian wedding as she is sipping marguerites in an LA restaurant. Interestingly, this East-West union in Aishwarya Rai’s portrayal of Lalita as a modern Indian woman de-stabilises the stereotypes generated not only by colonial discourse but also by Bollywood’s brand of conservative nationalism. As Chadha astutely points out, “Bride and Prejudice is not a Hindi film in the true sense. That rikshawallah in the front row in Patna is going to say, ‘Yeh kya hua? Aishwarya ko kya kiya?’ [What did you do to Aishwarya?]” (Jha). This disgruntlement of the average Indian Hindi-film audience, which resulted in the film being a commercial flop in India, is a result of Chadha’s departures from the conventions of her chosen Bollywood genre at both the cinematic and the thematic levels. The perceived problem with Aishwarya Rai, as articulated by the plaintive question of the imagined Indian viewer, is precisely her presentation as a modern (read Westernised) Indian heroine, which is pretty much an oxymoron within Bollywood conventions. In all her mainstream Hindi films, Aishwarya Rai has conformed to these conventions, playing the demure, sari-clad, conventional Indian heroine who is untouched by any “anti-national” western influence in dress, behaviour or ideas (Gangoli,158). Her transformation in Chadha’s film challenges this conventional notion of a “pure” Indian identity that informs the Bollywood “masala” film. Such re-visioning of Bollywood’s thematic conventions is paralleled, in Bride and Prejudice, with a playfully subversive mimicry of its cinematic conventions. This is most obvious in the song-and-dance sequences in the film. While their inclusion places the film within the Bollywood tradition, their actual picturisation creates an audio-visual pastiche that freely mingles Bollywood conventions with those of Hollywood musicals as well as contemporary music videos from both sides of the globe. A song, for example, that begins conventionally enough (in Bollywood terms) with three friends singing about one of them getting married and moving away, soon transforms into a parody of Hollywood musicals as random individuals from the marketplace join in, not just as chorus, but as developers of the main theme, almost reducing the three friends to a chorus. And while the camera alternates between mid and long shots in conventional Bollywood fashion, the frame violates the conventions of stylised choreography by including a chaotic spill-over that self-consciously creates a postmodern montage very different from the controlled spectacle created by conventional Bollywood song sequences. Bride and Prejudice, thus, has an “almost the same, but not quite” relationship not just with Austen’s text but also with Bollywood. Such dual-edged mimicry, which foregrounds Chadha’s “outsider” status with respect to both traditions, eschews all notions of “authenticity” and thus seems to become a perfect embodiment of postcolonial hybridity. Does this mean that postmodern pastiche can fulfill the political agenda of postcolonial resistance to the forces of globalised (neo)imperialism? As discussed above, Bride and Prejudice does provide a postcolonial critique of (neo)colonial discourse through the character of Lalita, while at the same time escaping the trap of Bollywood’s explicitly articulated brand of nationalism by foregrounding Lalita’s (Westernised) modernity. And yet, ironically, the film unselfconsciously remains faithful to contemporary Bollywood’s implicit ideological framework. As most analyses of Bollywood blockbusters in the post-liberalisation (post-1990) era have pointed out, the contemporary patriotic family romance is distinct from its earlier counterparts in its unquestioning embrace of neo-conservative consumerist ideology (Deshpande, 187; Virdi, 203). This enthusiastic celebration of globalisation in its most recent neo-imperial avatar is, interestingly, not seen to conflict with Bollywood’s explicit nationalist agenda; the two are reconciled through a discourse of cultural nationalism that happily co-exists with a globalisation-sponsored rampant consumerism, while studiously ignoring the latter’s neo-colonial implications. Bride and Prejudice, while self-consciously redefining certain elements of this cultural nationalism and, in the process, providing a token recognition of neo-imperial configurations, does not fundamentally question this implicit neo-conservative consumerism of the Bollywood patriotic family romance. This is most obvious in the film’s gender politics where it blindly mimics Bollywood conventions in embodying the nation as a woman (Lalita) who, however independent she may appear, not only requires male protection (Darcy is needed to physically rescue Lakhi from Wickham) but also remains an object of exchange between competing systems of capitalist patriarchy (Uberoi, 207). At the film’s climax, Lalita walks away from her family towards Darcy. But before Darcy embraces the very willing Lalita, his eyes seek out and receive permission from Mr Bakshi. Patriarchal authority is thus granted due recognition, and Lalita’s seemingly bold “independent” decision remains caught within the politics of patriarchal exchange. This particular configuration of gender politics is very much a part of Bollywood’s neo-conservative consumerist ideology wherein the Indian woman/nation is given enough agency to make choices, to act as a “voluntary” consumer, within a globalised marketplace that is, however, controlled by the interests of capitalist patriarchy. The narrative of Bride and Prejudice perfectly aligns this framework with Lalita’s project of cultural nationalism, which functions purely at the personal/familial level, but which is framed at both ends of the film by a visual conjoining of marriage and the marketplace, both of which are ultimately outside Lalita’s control. Chadha’s attempt to appropriate and transform British “Pride” through subversive postcolonial mimicry, thus, ultimately results only in replacing it with an Indian “Bride,” with a “star” product (Aishwarya Rai / Bride and Prejudice / India as Bollywood) in a splendid package, ready for exchange and consumption within the global marketplace. All glittering surface and little substance, Bride and Prejudice proves, once again, that postmodern pastiche cannot automatically double as politically enabling postcolonial hybridity (Sangari, 23-4). References Adarsh, Taran. “Balle Balle! From Amritsar to L.A.” IndiaFM Movie Review 8 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://indiafm.com/movies/review/7211/index.html>. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 1999. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York, 1994. 85-92. Bhaskaran, Gautam. “Classic Made Trivial.” The Hindu 15 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/fr/2004/10/15/stories/ 2004101502220100.htm>. Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989. Bride and Prejudice. Dir. Gurinder Chadha. Perf. Aishwarya Ray and Martin Henderson. Miramax, 2004. Deshpande, Sudhanva. “The Consumable Hero of Globalized India.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 186-203. Gangoli, Geetanjali. “Sexuality, Sensuality and Belonging: Representations of the ‘Anglo-Indian’ and the ‘Western’ Woman in Hindi Cinema.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 143-162. Jaikumar, Priya. “Bollywood Spectaculars.” World Literature Today 77.3/4 (2003): n. pag. Jha, Subhash K. “Bride and Prejudice is not a K3G.” The Rediff Interview 30 Aug. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://in.rediff.com/movies/2004/aug/30finter.htm>. Mandal, Somdatta. Film and Fiction: Word into Image. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2005. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. Sangari, Kumkum. Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika, 1999. Uberoi, Patricia. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2006. Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Wray, James. “Gurinder Chadha Talks Bride and Prejudice.” Movie News 7 Feb. 2005. 19 Feb. http://movies.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_4163.php/ Gurinder_Chadha_Talks_Bride_and_Prejudice>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mathur, Suchitra. "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>. APA Style Mathur, S. (May 2007) "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>.

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

ZULEIKHA, who was trained as a pianist in her hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, arrives in Irving, Texas after her arranged marriage to ISKANDER, but finds it difficult to get accustomed to the appurtenances, encumbrances, and perquisites of the middle-class housewife lifestyle. Despite giving birth to a son, WASIM, she quickly falls out of love with her dutiful but straight-laced husband. She begins giving private lessons, and commences an affair with PATRICK, a transplanted Canadian who is trapped in his own loveless marriage. When she gets pregnant, Zuleikha is convinced the child belongs to her husband. She ends her affair with Patrick, but Iskander finds out about it anyway. The ensuing confrontation between Zuleikha and Iskander turns into a physical altercation, during which Zuleikha, having fallen to the floor, is unable to see if Iskander stomps on her belly, or falls on her by accident as he will later claim. The trauma results in a miscarriage. The unusual set of circumstances surrounding this violent episode serves as the backdrop for the rest of the story, by catapulting this otherwise nondescript couple into the glare of the public eye. Iskander is arrested and charged with feticide, and he faces a long prison sentence under Texas law. A court order prohibits him from contacting Zuleikha and Wasim, who are taken to a shelter for Muslim women and children. There, the other domestic abuse victims view Zuleikha as someone who "had it coming" because of her infidelity, and are therefore openly hostile to her. The shelter's director, a woman named REZA, is beholden to wealthy Muslim donors, and therefore arranges for Zuleikha to meet with members of a highly controversial Islamic tribunal. Zuleikha is pressured to forgive her husband and testify in his favor, so as not draw further negative attention to the Muslim community. JANE, the District Attorney, on the other hand, initially plays nice with Zuleikha and informs her that she will devote any and all available resources in the prosecution of Iskander. When Zuleikha can't get her story straight and hesitates about testifying against her husband, however, Jane, too, turns against her. Zuleikha discovers that the DA has been caught hiding her own secrets and now faces a public confidence crisis of her own. Zuleikha comes to realize that Jane's reasons for being so gung-ho about winning Iskander's conviction have as much to do with re-endearing herself to her electorate as with justice. Zuleikha thus finds herself at the epicenter of a political firestorm fueled by winds of anti-Muslim hysteria, with different people trying to use her situation to their own advantage. When Wasim gets in a scuffle at the shelter and has to be taken to a clinic, she panics and contacts Iskander against her better judgment. Husband and wife finally confront each other while Wasim is being treated. Iskander claims to still love Zuleikha and begs her to take him back so that they and their son can resume their prior family life. But Zuleikha realizes that even if Iskander is sincere and not merely seeking reconciliation in order to avoid a harsh prison sentence, she will never be able to forgive him, let alone love him and live with him again. She comes to accept the fact that she has no control over Iskander's fate in court, and can only move forward by testifying truthfully and trying to do what is best for her and her son. While waiting for the trial to begin, she gains admission in a summer training program for piano instructors and begins the next phase of her life.

This study explores the influence of the Indian socio-cultural hegemonic discourse on the urban Hindu arranged marriage. For this purpose, four novels in English by Indian women writers have been selected for their location within the specific urban Indian socio-cultural tradition. These novels are the avenues through which the Gramscian theories of hegemony and consensual control are observed. The study focuses on unravelling the damage caused by the hegemonic socio-cultural traditions within the marriages portrayed in the fiction. The interplay between the reader and the texts is vital in further exploring the reach of hegemony into the reading codes of the audience. The need for a model reader is discussed within the study which also addresses the roles of both protagonists and readers as 'cultural insiders/outsiders.' The study focuses on the emotional and socio-cultural dilemmas faced by the protagonists and the audience who occupy the 'in-between-zones' of those who fall into neither category of absolute insiders or outsiders in cultural terms. This thesis is not an attempt aggressively to deconstruct the Indian traditional social structure. The main aim of this thesis is to use the literary discourse as an instrument to explore the subversion of the ancient Hindu discourses whenever it has suited the vested interests shaping the hegemonic socio-cultural discourses. This study also attempts to further an understanding of the exploitative manipulation of married couples by various interest groups. In the process, using fiction as an instrument, there might be a chance to create stronger marriages and more harmonious marital interactions within urban Indian society.

This chapter traces the process of who arranged marriages and how they were planned, with particular attention to the role of parents and kin, kings and lords, and initiatives of the couples themselves. In the period under discussion, marital arrangements were made by parents, kin, and lords with minimal input from the couple. In fact, the legality of marriage was subject to parental consent, not the couple’s. In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries evidence emerged that suggests a development in thinking amongst the laity and clergy about what established a valid union. In narrative sources, such as chronicles, hagiography, and fiction, demands of young men and women for self-determination with respect to marriage were recorded. There seems to have been a gendered aspect to these emerging voices with more women than men, mostly from elite or well-to-do backgrounds, demanding a say in the choice of marriage partner.

This chapter discusses sex and the married couple, beds and bedrooms, and love and affection. The chapter illustrates in a sense the enduring human experience of living in sexually satisfying relationships if couples were fortunate to have found compatible partners. Amongst the elites arranged marriages could result in disastrous unions, though they were probably exceptions rather than the rule. Once the couple were married the clergy became even more invisible than they were during the process of couples getting married. The evidence on sexual pleasure as compatible with happy marriages in fictional narratives seems in line with loving and affectionate married bonds. Admittedly, evidence of love and affection mostly surfaced in moments of crisis characterized by the threat of loss of the beloved husband or wife.

Abstract In Canada in 1996, an Indian man’s massacre of almost all of his ex-wife’s family in the British Columbia town of Kelowna was immediately misrepresented in the media as a fatal consequence of the Indian system of arranged marriages, so that the incident was portrayed as something other than family violence and as indicating an Indian cultural pathology. The Inda-Canadian community stepped in to correct this misrepresentation and argue that the perpetrator of violence was operating from within patriarchal ideologies common to most cultures, including those of the West. However, for the West, even feminist studies departments, Indian dowry culture continues to function as the vehicle for a Western imperialist epistemology of India as its Third World “other.” The Indian nation’s central meanings are deliberately and reductively quilted to the experiences of the Indian woman’s body to produce an India that is culturally retrogressive and, more particularly, to represent its culture in sexual metaphor as a masculinity that is always-already pathologically inadequate in its greed and brutal perversity and as always-already less than masculine. This discourse has entailed the West’s willful refusal to recognize Indian women’s response to the dowry system as intending subjects of resistance and also to misrecognize one aspect of Indian culture as the representative of the whole. This burden-the excessive meaning that the dowry system is made to bear as signifier-is also made possible by the West’s imaginary perception of the dowry system as present everywhere in India and in the self-same form; in actual fact, dowry practices occur in specific pockets of the country and involve different activities, sometimes generating meanings for women that are other than disempowerment. For instance, in some southern parts of India, as well as in the diaspora, women are given control over their dowry money, and it is not unheard of for them to use this money for additional education.