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=
