The Basis is indeed a masterpiece. Mathematics, quantum physics, Buddhism, fiction, it has got it all. The story takes you through an exciting experience from the very beginning to the very end. That is what I love the most about this book. It never gets boring.
The basis revolves around an amazing story that alternates between fantasy and reality. In Tarantinoland, the city in which the story takes place, is almost like a modern Sri Lanka. A dystopian society in the midst of a war, where the rule of law and social ethics deteriorate and people are unexpectedly murdered.One day, a person comes to meet Mr. Lankathilaka, who lives in this city, asking him to be a ghostwriter. to write a story about a parliament bombing. But he warns him that what he writes will exactly happen in the real world. Lankathilaka is terrified by this proposal but yet isn’t ready to let go of the 4 million dollars he has been offered to complete the book.
And meanwhile, a parallel story goes around another writer, Mr. Ghananatha. A woman comes to his house and threatens him, saying he has written her real-life story in a book without her permission. Which is a lie, according to Ghannatha, who swears he has never seen this lady before. And this lady claims she had to die in the exact way the character in the book dies while she is standing in front of Ghananatha alive! This leads to a theory of parallel universes explained by string theory.
String theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. And Mr. Dawson Preethi cleverly matches the string theory with the Buddhist theory of 31 planes of existence, including Ruupa loka, Sura Asura Loka, Deva Loka, and so on.The full story is divided into three main parts: Kama Loka, Rupa Loka, and Arupa Loka.
This is one of the best sci-fi books I have read, and it is really surprising to know that the writer is a Sri Lankan. The "inception" kind of flow makes it even better and still hasn’t failed to make it comprehensible. And the plot is mind-blowing! I think anyone who is interested in sci-fi stories would love this intellectual masterpiece.
This extro-scifi is mostly recommended for young readers who are enthusiastic about mathematics, string theory, polycephaly, the 31 planes of existence, and Buddhist cosmology.
Price 2150/= Courier charges 300/=
Inbox a message with a delivery address and phone number in Whatsapp, +94779968572. You can obtain the bank payment details to purchase the book.
He
works with human excrement - what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to
mankind - and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth.
-
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
Summary
This
review attempts to investigate the film Al Borada, directed by Asoka Handagama
2022, through the lens of psychoanalytic theories and interpretations of Freud,
Lacan and Deleuze. It demonstrates the symbolic uses of faecal elements in the
filmic text, which depicts a few of the discourses associated with social
bonds. It concludes the challenging and controversial use of faecal symbols in
artistic and political contexts.
Faeces
The
movie is positioned in a universe of faeces. This starts from the first
instance of the protagonist’s arrival at the new accommodation, which is given
by Lional Wendt. The "Bucket Toilet" is
located a little far from the residence outside the beach. This toilet is
inspected by the protagonist, Pablo Neruda, who finds its function is awful and
queries about the drainage system of the area. The answer was that this is the
way of dumping excretions, and the bucket underneath would be replaced by a
Sakkili woman daily. That was the whole sewer management system for the
residence. The caretaker, Rathne Ayya, had got a different toilet for his
use.
Besides
the fact that Pablo intervenes in his affairs, which made him leave Burma and
come to Sri Lanka, his obsession with the toilet cleaner, a young woman from an
untouchable caste, brings him a fantasy. This fantasy has its own obscene
dimension as it ties in with excretion in the Freudian context.
ad
nauseam of toiletry
The
movie develops with the smell signifier from the beginning minutes until the
end. In another perspective, it signals at the beginning that the movie does
not bring you any fantasy other than misery. This bad smell starts to echo in
the mind of the spectator, and it becomes an anti-catalyst to the entire
artistic core of the filmic text. This would be an extension of mechanical art to
the level of perversion in the observer. It should be noted that the background
music also acts as a body of signifiers which revolve around the theme and has
natural tones. At the beginning of the scene of Neruda’s travel from home to a
nearby party location, he experiences strange music, a folklore, but he loses
himself looking for it, and experiences a traumatic pain, a wound of his own
mind with the immediate past memories.
All
the other events are built around this faecal castle. Once, Pablo ordered the
servant, Rathne not to use his toilet as he offered his excretion in the purest
form to the young woman who comes daily to clean the toilet and discharge the
collection bucket.
This
mandate of offering his excretion to the woman is a direct follow-up to Freud’s
equation between faeces and gifts, Lacan states that the formula of
offering-‘everything for the other’—shows that it is a fantasy of the
obsessional neurotic[1].
From
this point forward, he begins his fantasy of being seduced by remotely
observing her working process in the toilet. He possessed himself by watching
the toilet in the early morning in a hidden gaze and became obsessed to the
point of raping this young woman of low caste who had been repulsed by the
caretaker of her same ethnicity but of a higher caste.
The
caretaker leaves the premises by excreting in the banned toilet, which was
assigned only to use by Pablo, showing him the disgust of being associated with
a low-caste woman, untouchable in the background of his Hindu faith. Pablo
watched his act of denying the rule over him and fell into the reality at the
end of his fantasy space. His fantasy was shattered.
The
woman kills herself as a true act in response to the Pablo at the sea by losing
her purity, though no one cared about low-caste females’ dignity at the time of
the events but portraying self-denial of the crime that happened over her.
Finally,
Pablo decides to replace her service by himself and carries the sewer bucket on
his head towards the Sakkili village to discharge, most sarcastically, the
excretion of his caretakers contained in the bucket. In his act, he firstly
dramatized his guilt for the crime of raping the woman, and secondly, he
demonstrates the carrying of his caretaker’s excretion-contained bucket on his
head to escape the reality of betraying his God’s resemblance, which he faked
to the caretaker. This point is merely a transfiguration of the master-slave
relationship inversion just to remake his destiny, which is full of guilt.
During
the progression of the above events, two other major event moments took place
in the main theme. The Burmese Affair and Lionel Wendt. First, Pablo undergoes
a process delivered by his schizophrenic condition to the experience of his
Burma affair, a former girlfriend, depicted as a devil in his fantasy space, in
contrast who portrayed herself as Pablo’s "desire" or object of
desire at the meeting of the second subject, Lionel Wendt, the photographer.
Lionel dramatizes the locus of Pablo’s social order being threatened by the
schizophrenic subject, the femme fatale, whom he encounters.
One
of the best Hollywood movies that could be compared against this symbolic use
of the scatological elements in the movie, i.e., faeces, toilet interior, sewer
collecting buckets, women portrayed to carry sewer buckets, depiction of bad
smell (Hydrogen Sulphide) etc. is the movie called “The Help” 2011. It uses the
symbols of the toilets separately used by the white people and the coloured
people demonstrate the issues of the society in 60s in terms of racism. This
movie suggests the mere mobius of the cinematic text of Al Borada in an
ethnocentrically fixated universe.
Trainspotting
(1996), which depicts the unrest among poor youth in Edenborough and their drug
addiction by symbolically portraying disgusting images of faecal matter,
literally reproducing "the worst toilet in Scotland," is another film
that has used faecal symbols in a more widespread adoption.
Reawakening
the social traumas through faecal elements
From
a panoramic view of the cinematic text, it could be concluded that the
unveiling of the obsessional neurotic and narcissistic nature of Pablo Neruda
is the subject of the movie. In Lacanian context, partial drives, especially
the anal drive which produces the faeces as partial object, and consequently
the olfactory, the sense of smell, unveils a truth about the suppressed memory
of Neruda.
The
fabric of the symbolic universe is the disgust of the excretion of the human
subject, in complete opposition to the Freudian anal discourse: faeces become a
traumatic gift. In the meantime, how do the erotic pulses get their life
through embodying the external objectivity of the same faecal universe? Oversimplified
version, can shit trigger sexual arrogance? A Lacanian perspective,
rather than the idea of Deleuze, of a body without organs, BWOs, a resembling
and analogical solution prevails in the core of the cinematic text. How can a
smell of faeces or scatological elements create a material image of sexual desire
in the psyche? In a sense, that challenge had been answered by Asoka. In this
filmic context, he had become the first director to manipulate such elements
into an artistic form in Sri Lankan cinema: A controversial adoption of a faecal
metaphor of sexual desire. In the smell, as an anti-voyeuristic image on the
screen, the whole potential to become a signifier is embedded, and he uses it
to explore a wide range of human core values (here the subjects of the Al
Borada, especially Neruda), exploding them into a plethora of organs, by
products, and faeces. The egg becomes a creature of its own traces; the
cancerous dimension of BWOs. I suppose that as time passes, the Deleuzian
interpretation will find its own locus.
Perhaps
in the movie, the social order is being deconstructed by two main themes:
first, the Tamil ethnocentrism and social hierarchy through caretakers’ point
of view, and second, the feminist world view about the time of the events in
question through all the characters integrated in the main story, especially
the position of the woman who acts as a sewer carrier.
On
the other hand, Asoka’s attempt to bring the faecal symbols to a form of
cinematic art is a political expression. It could be seen as a symbol of how
people might become aware of an opposing group or hegemony against the political
powers in the future. Already, faecal material as a foreign body to the
existing ideological atmosphere has become a trendy political expression. The
end scene of the movie, the re-emergence of the dead woman from the water,
could be a sign of that moment.
Notes:
I
took the title “Holy and unholy shit” to produce the title of this article from
the book, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art Studies in Scatology:
Holy and Unholy Shit: The Pragmatic Context of Scatological Curses in Early
German Reformation Satire losef Schmidt,
with Mary Simon
Dawson Preethi
dawsonpree@gmail.com
[1] Jacques
Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960–61, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1991.
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
