Abstract
Shortlisted for the 1999 Man Booker Prize, Anita Desai’s Fasting Feasting impressed many with its close study of the “sugar-sticky web of family conflict,” spanning two generations and two continents. Though ostensibly about family relationships explored through the cultural symbolism of food and consumption, the novel surprises the reader with a running presence of violence and menace — evident not only as important themes but also in imagery, setting and characterization. This paper examines the pervasive imagery of violence, blood and menace that darkens both halves of the novel, analyzing how the body, the family network, the natural setting and the artifacts of civilization all become sites of threat and harm. Despite this atmosphere, tentative suggestions of redemption emerge through the symbolic power of water and fleeting moments of familial understanding.
Keywords: Anita Desai, Fasting Feasting, violence, family relationships, imagery, Lacanian psychoanalysis, patriarchy
”A Blister with Blood”
There is almost a constant sense of heaviness, claustrophobia and anxiety that weigh down all major characters in the novel. The dull painful throbbing remains largely unrelieved — much “Like a blister with blood” (15) that Uma mentions early on when describing the atmosphere in her home. The imagery of blood recurs throughout, most violently when Uma bites her tongue in the throes of an epileptic fit and blood gushes out from her mouth, “lurid and scarlet.” This scene takes place at an ashram — a religious retreat supposed to be an abode of peace and calm.
The first and last epileptic attacks notably occur when Uma is forced to submit to the Symbolic Order of patriarchy-ordained domestic roles. When her parents decide to pull her out of school, Mother Agnes firmly nudges her back into the clutches of her family, and the extreme stress brings on Uma’s first epileptic fit. The last attack occurs at Aruna’s pre-wedding cocktail party, when Uma simply keels over “as if she had been cut down by an axe.”
Interestingly, blood is also drawn by the child Arun, for whose care Uma is pulled out of school. Uma is commanded by her mother to force-feed the child, which makes him bite Uma’s finger so sharply that it starts bleeding. Instead of being associated with nurturing and sustenance, eating is associated with resistance and force throughout the novel.
”A Bluish Lump”: The Body as Site of Violence
A running trope is the human body as the major site of violence. If the stress created by Uma’s lack of control over her circumstances erupts as epileptic fits, in the case of Melanie, the teenage daughter of the American family, it takes the form of bulimia. Both conditions can be read in Lacanian terms as the consequence of a split subjectivity.
In the novel, both Melanie and Uma are deprived of the love and acceptance in the gaze of the (M)other. Melanie’s bulimia is an indication of a neurosis, caused by her incomplete subjection to the Law of the Father, and her symptoms are an expression of her rejection of the Symbolic Order. Likewise, Uma develops her epileptic fits when forced to submit to the Symbolic Order of patriarchy-ordained domestic roles.
Papa enforces a physically and mentally gruelling schedule on his only son Arun, in hope of making him a successful student. His childhood is one long punishment, at the end of which he is left physically stunted and emotionally desiccated. Even when accepted at MIT, he gives no evidence of relief, joy or hope — “these had all been ground down till they had disappeared” (125).
The “Smothering Wilderness”
While the body and family network figure as the chief sites of violence, the setting of the novel is often infused with images of threat and menace. When Arun leaves the hot and dusty plains for the United States, even the verdant suburbs of Edge Hill appear as a “smothering wilderness.” The greenery of the forests seems to him “a creeping curtain of insidious green” (223). Birds don’t sing or even chirp — they just “shriek.”
Towards the end of the novel, Nature and the human body fuse into one site of menace when Arun comes upon Melanie thrashing in her own vomit — “the reality is daylit, three-dimensional and malodorous” (227).
”The Comfort of Each Other”
Despite the atmosphere of violence, the two main families in the novel can still be counted to pull one away from complete annihilation. Uma’s parents seem to commit every oppression of the patriarchal system, yet when she is caught in a fraudulent marriage, Papa brings her back. Likewise, Mr. Patton takes charge of Melanie’s situation and takes on the rigours of a night job to fund her rehabilitation.
The act of the family pulling the child back from annihilation is symbolically described when Uma is saved from near-drowning — not once, but twice. In Lacanian terms, Uma’s attraction to water could be interpreted as the desire to return to the peace and wholeness of the Real Order. In its waters, Uma hopes to find the comforting embrace she has been denied all her life. The last time readers see Uma is her standing in the river, pouring water onto her head — an act of cleansing and benediction, following a fleeting moment of understanding between mother and daughter. “They have the comfort of each other…it is a bond” (159).
Works Cited
- Barry, Peter. “Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literature and Cultural Theory. Manchester UP, 1995. pp. 96-114.
- Desai, Anita. Fasting Feasting. Random House, 2008.
- Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 76.
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. HarperCollins, 2008.
- Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Routledge, 1977. p. 2.
- Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. G. Stanley Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920.
- Sharp, Matthew. “Jacques Lacan.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.