Friday, October 22, 2021

Lady X

A Review

The Basis

Author: Dawson Preethi

Publisher: Amazon

 

A brief review on The Basis, a novel by Dawson Preethi

Lady X: Is she Kuveni's reincarnation?

by Janake Gunathilake

 


I would like to begin my brief review of Dawson Preethi's debut novel, The Basis, by quoting a conversation between a stranger and the protagonist, Ghananatha. It is merely a re-enactment of the common society in which we currently live: death is unavoidable, the jurisdiction may or may not be available to get precedence, but it has its own authority. Because of this untimely death, society is in a terrifying state of anguish and silence. Life and death are just two sides of the same coin, yet they each have an equal chance of appearing in the next minute. This uncertainty has grown in the context of the pandemic, and the current predicament is mirrored in the scene.


                “Are you Mr. Ghananatha? The author of ‘Hakawati, the dead sea of stories?’”

                “Yes, I am Ghananatha, have we met before?”

                “Mr. Ghananatha, do you know that you are the one responsible to make a life miserable to the death or near death by your actions?”

                "I don’t need any jurisdiction here. I am the law here by now. If you are not going to be calm and patient to hear the reasons why you are sentenced to the death by my law, you will surely die without knowing the reason or the accusation for your death. Do you want to know why you deserve this death sentence or you can die without knowing facts, what is your choice?”

                -The Basis pp 6-8


Imagine a circumstance when a test indicates someone has Covid 19 positive and she has no idea why she influenced such a fate. Assume someone complains to her that this is because to climate change, which has resulted in the release of a slew of dangerous diseases from the Real. What the hell is that Real, anyway? She enquires. If the corona virus could speak, it may say something like this: you created me in a fictional work and expected me to become real. As a result, I become real. Now I'd like to see you dead. What would her response be? She must either understand the reasons for her early death or face death regardless of the revelation. Isn't this an important clarification of our current crisis? Our connection to the corona virus's origin is uncertain. And most likely will remain undiscovered for the rest of time.

The society is reflected in fiction. Fiction includes hypothetical events, characters, character behaviour, locations, and so on; these hypothetical events, characters, behaviour, locations, and so on are the writer's imaginations. In other ways, the imagination is really a misunderstanding of unconscious desire in numerous kinds of fantasies, which is the sole substance of the person in a way, it could be grasped as the fountain of creativity of the writer. This connects fictional events, characters, and character behaviour to real-life events, characters, and human behaviour in a fantasy environment. The reader feels the experience of his own is explained through the fiction. In a masterpiece of literature, most of the characters are personified by the readers as they reflect the hidden desire of them. The Lady X in the novel “The Basis” also claims that her unconscious desires are revealed in one of the fictions of the writer Ghananatha and for the same reason Lady X wanted to kill the writer. It might be either Ghananatha's error in revising the so-called novel structure made by a ghost writer as a program script for the parliament blasting or Lankathilaka's mistake in adding stuff that he had never written but plagiarized from his friendly professor during the writing process. Despite this, Lady X was unable to track down her true killer due of the scripting novel's jumbled authors. This shows that every debate centred on social transformation has a plethora of unsolved mysteries when it comes to becoming a reality, making it difficult to pinpoint the point at which the failure occurred. A failed society has a slew of mishaps that revealed nothing about how it came to be that way. On the other hand, according to Carl Jung, the original idea may be an archetypical similarity, which no one can refute.


                “You wrote about a real character there hiding behind the curtain of fiction status, masking by a creative work, and you exposed my real name attached to this character, at the end of the story. How inhuman you are there made everything bad to me after the publication went out. Why you did that to me?”

                -The Basis pp 9


Ghananatha failed in explaining her appearance in his fictional work. But it generates a lot of light in Jungian context. Kuveni may be a symbol of the collective unconscious, an archetype and the dots could be readily joined in such a background, but The Basis, as a literary work, circumscribes a lot into human nature through its traverses of mind-other realms-quantum reality, becoming characters in the same human drama.

The interesting fact is that how Kuveni re-emerges in the fictional universe of The Basis: it is through another fiction, and fictions of fictions, a nexus of fictions. And at the end, this Lady X become a curse of the ruler of the Tarantinoland, and resembles with historical narrative, is not a mere coincidence. The Kuveni’s avatar or the reincarnation as the Lady X approach to the ruler of the Tarantinoland is a fantastic recreation, realistic. Most of the rulers keeps femme fatales as their religious advisers secretly.

I met several people from Tarantinoland, the Democratic Socialist Republic of Tarantinoland, which is described as “Tarantinoland is a country located in the Planitoria planet. It is a small island where the main cities are scattered in a pentagonal pattern”.  Thoughts, feelings, and the emotions of the people are reflected by the actions of them to a greater extent. The system has adopted in a way that ruling parties are entrenched in the country for several decades. The embedded policies and the practices have not brought any productive outcome to the people of the country. The leftist and Marxist parties of the country (Sakigake etc) are still in deep arguments, but things are still not in favour of the people. People are frustrated about the ruling regime of the country, according to the history of the country, not only the current ruling regime but also the ruling parties of the country in the past have not fulfilled the duties of them in favour of the people of the country.

Rebellions have taken efforts to attack the parliament of Democratic Socialist Republic of Tarantinoland in 1980s in a dystopian manner. Uprising of a country does not occur in the event of success and prosperity; it indicates that the people have been suffering for ages. The feelings of the people who are really worried about the system of governing when it is not in the correct track, is shielded by the fantasies of the majority. The fantasies and desires of the people are created by the Other, mass media. Nevertheless, the majority is worried about the enjoyment but not the impact of the society by the policies and practice of the country. Finally, the few people who are worried about the existing system as well as those who are yearning for a better future for the country, are compelled to satisfy their fantasies of destroying the current system of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Tarantinoland.

“All well, it’s a basic one as a ‘skeleton’. I only want you to make up a tale about a crew that intend to blow up the parliament by a tunnel under it”.

-The Basis pp 16

The rebellions want a fiction of blasting the parliament of the Tarantinoland where policies and governing rules are introduced and implemented to the land. The desires of children are to fight and slay giants, but this is impossible. It is also impossible for a small group of academics to challenge the country's powerful ruling government. Cartoon characters appeal to children, and films in which the hero defeats all foes appeal to teenagers. One of the reasons for their fascination is the realization of a concealed desire on the screen. Writing a story about blowing up the parliament also symbolizes the people of Tarantinoland's aspiration for a brighter future.

Dual nature of human as conscious and unconscious, dual nature of matter which behaves a particle and a wave, dual nature of humans as physical body and astral body are the theories which explain the mysterious behaviour of human beings and their activities. In addition to the well-known dualities, The Basis offers a new duality, Particle-God duality, which is merely a fictional approach to a merger of science and non-science and is unquestionably a lateral method to making a change in scientific understanding. The inculcation of the fictionalized expectations in related to such theories by Lacan about psychoanalysis, states of minds in Buddhism and quantum mechanics by various scientist is a tremendous approach by Dawson in the novel “The Basis”.

Although we know that behaviour of ourselves is a pseudo acting in the society, we consciously and shamelessly behave, as others are unaware of our twofold nature. This is applicable and accurate to the others as well. Henceforth, to remind this cynical act of ourselves, it is necessary to see our reflection through a mirror again and again. Even as writers, people have adopted to the default system based on monitory value. Mr. Lankathilaka Sirimanna, the ghost writer who signed the contract with Konstantin to write the fiction about blowing parliament, was under the agreement that his identity will not be revealed at any circumstance. The novel's central role is played by the underlying story structure, which keeps the rest of the story together. The entire hidden project became obsolete as a result of his sloppy and irresponsible personality, and this criterion of mixing together unfamiliar texts into real work occurs on every level. In this post-modern era, a true work is never produced. It always featured a significant amount of unknown stuff that the author had not examined but rather copied from somewhere else. In Tarantinoland, this exemplifies the nature of the political guru. All the political gurus show up to debates with empty hands and make inane jokes while under the influence of drink. This is the standard timeline and requirements for political and intellectual collaboration. Most political gurus are skilled at reciting book titles, but they haven't read them. Those gurus' writings are thicker and more academically rich than their own knowledge. When it's their turn to talk, they crack jokes. This is a tragedy depicted in the novel.

Characters and events impact meaning full symbiosis when their thoughts, feelings, and motives are of equal or greater interest than the external action of the narrative. As a result, the novel "The Basis" is a genuine work of art. In some ways, it's a story about a lost nation populated by individuals who have lost their identities. In today's society, religious orientation, sexual orientation, cultural orientation, and national orientation have all been questioned at various times. The inability to interpret the movement of society, as well as the incapacity to distinguish between fact and deception, has become the root of many of today's issues. The Basis is the overarching guide to a new way of thinking for the conscious mind generation.

According to The Basis, what exactly is reality? After reading the novel, we must ask ourselves this question. We've been trying to deduce reality by peering into other people's minds via cosmological realms and dreams. The coexistence of material and immaterial worlds: we cannot easily demarcate the boundaries of those worlds, especially in the novel's universe. It's unlikely that dissecting the whole into small pieces will reveal the truth. To conduct research, the physiology of the human body should be divided into systems and organs, with organs being dissected into tissues and cells. When cells are broken down into complex molecules, simple molecules, and atoms, which are then broken down into subatomic particles, life ceases to exist.

The same difficulty arises in the pursuit of the truth as it travels through a cyclical journey of science to non-science and pseudo sciences. In Lacanian terms, this is a hysteric discourse trajectory. In the meantime, human limitations cast doubt on not only the identification of reality, but also its existence. It happens because what is real cannot be explained in words, and what cannot be explained in words exists as Lacanian objects, Real. The Basis is an attempt to recall human reality that has become entangled in such complex notions and limitations of human reality.

 


References:

1.       J Lacan, Ecrits, Translated by Bruce Fink

2.       Carl Gustav Jung, Four Archetypes - Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster

3.       About Kuveni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuveni

 

Janake Gunathilake

21/10/2021



https://www.amazon.com/Basis-Buddhist-Cosmology-revolutionary-mathematics/dp/B09GJGBGDT/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=