The Ambiguity of Authority: Anita Desai’s Linguistic Fabulation in Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975)

Abstract

Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) can be labelled as Anita Desai’s innovative experimentation in blending the human mind with the spoken and the written word. Language and literature, in the mind of a creative writer can productively be coalesced and bonded especially while delineating the intricacies and inaccessible depths of a human being’s mind. The central protagonist of Where Shall We Go This Summer? Sita, is a highly self-conscious woman whose narcissistic tendencies make it impossible for her to understand other humans and communicate with them.  Sita within the fictional world of the novel functions as a highly self-aware individual, a human island inaccessible even to her husband. The heroine’s existential alienation makes her an abnormal woman whose self-reflexivity insulates her from other humans. The authority and the genuineness of Sita’s functional self makes her “a religious symbol without a religion, a mythic image without benefit of a myth....”1 Even as a married woman living with her husband, Raman and her children, Sita remains as an ironically transcendent figure ‘naked’ by virtue of her own sensibility  and the vicissitudes of her inner self. To make matters worse, Sita gets cylindrically as well as emotionally imprisoned in her past when she used to live with her father on the Manori Island. A destabilizing father-fascination bordering on the Electra-Complex complicates matters and the broken pattern of the heroine’s actions “recalls the futile courage of the Sisyphus toiling to unite one pole of experience to the other”.2 Sita’s language in which she communicates with the other personages in the narrative of the novel becomes a language of metaphysical and psychic turbulence, a fabulation of words symbolizing a chaotic, turbulent feminine personality.