LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:9 September 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Fabulating through the Spiritual:
Gibran’s The Prophet and Anand’s Bliss

Roghayeh Farsi, Ph.D.
Neyshabur University, Iran

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study of Gibran Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) and J. S. Anand’s Bliss: The Ultimate Magic (2007). This cross-cultural comparison traces a line of development from early up to late twentieth century. While Gibran’s text embodies his anxiety about modernity and its aftermaths, Bliss addresses the already lost generation of the postmodern era. Thematically, both works are texts of spirituality. The Prophet is a fictional narrative in prose-poetry, while Anand’s text is a philosophical treatise hybridized with poetry and narrative. Despite this structural discrepancy, both texts emerge out of a dialogical texture. The Prophet develops out of the dialogue between Al-Mustafa and people of the fictional city, Orphalese. Bliss, in contrast, dialogizes directly with the reader. This paper takes the dialogical base as an important shared feature which interlinks the spiritual crisis of the modern age with the urgent hail to the soul in the postmodern era. This comparative study adopts a Deleuzian lens and takes both texts as their writers’ attempts to fabulate through sloganizing spirituality against a backdrop of scientific and materialistic logic. It is argued that both texts legend a better people by training them into world citizens.

Key words: Gibran, Anand, fabulation, slogan, dialogism

Introduction

Modernity and industrialization have brought about a gap between body and soul. Science with its experimental outlook has marked man’s vision with a materialistic and calculative perspective. Modernism, as the cultural movement against this materialism, manifests man’s mental disintegration. Yet this does not imply man’s return to the spiritual. As the nausea of all traditional beliefs, modernism has ignored the spiritual dimension of man’s life. As spirituality is closely linked with religion, lack of the spiritual is related to the modernist suspicion towards religious belief. This spiritual ignorance is reinforced through Freud’s psychological scrutiny and is taken to its heights in the hands of Lacan and Derrida. Therefore, from the late nineteenth century onwards, the world has been witnessing reduction of the soul to the rationalizing faculty of mind especially through its experimental analysis of man’s psyche. Even when Symbolism sprang up as a revolutionary movement, “tending toward the spirituality . . . in response to the dislocations brought upon the modern individual by the industrial revolution,” it did not reject outright rationalism (Sheehi 81).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Roghayeh Farsi, Ph.D.
Neyshabur University
Neyshabur, Khorasan Razavi
Iran
rofarsi@yahoo.com
Farsiroghayeh1956@gmail.com
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