Fascination and repulsion from Otherness in Song of Kali and The City of Joy

Tom Shulich ("ColtishHum")

A comparative study on the theme of fascination with and repulsion from Otherness in Song of Kali by Dan Simmons and in the City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre

ABSRACT

In this chapter, I examine similarities and differences between The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre (1985) and Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (1985) with regard to the themes of the Western journalistic observer of the Oriental Other, and the fascination-repulsion that inspires the Occidental spatial imaginary of Calcutta. By comparing and contrasting these two popular novels, both describing white men's journey into the space of the Other, the chapter seeks to achieve a two-fold objective: (a) to provide insight into the authors with respect to alterity (otherness), and (b) to examine the discursive practices of these novels in terms of contrasting spatial metaphors of Calcutta as "The City of Dreadful Night" or "The City of Joy." The chapter further argues that these spatial metaphors are redolent of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) refer to as the "phobic enchantment" (p. 124) of the Occidental social imaginary for the poverty, squalor and the horror of the Third World.

Otherness & Self

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) describe a sociological dynamic by which a sense of subjective superiority of a dominant social class is constructed through a process of abjection. In the aesthetic domain, "high culture" is constituted by identifying what counts as "low culture," then disparaging and rejecting it. In a similar manner, otherness can extend to racial, erotic, legal, health, and economic domains: an (often unmarked) sense of "whiteness" is derivative of identifying non-white, "people of color" against which to form the distinction, sexual "normality" is defined against sexual deviance, the innocent are defined against the criminal, able-bodied in relation to the disabled, the rich against the poor. In the era of French and British colonization of Asia and the Near East, the Western self was defined against the "inferior," "childlike," "impoverished, "depraved" Oriental Other (Said, 1979).

In short, the subjective self can bolster its own social status by identifying a contrasting group as "non-self" and then rejecting them as "other." The self is always implicitly defined against the other, just as a perpetrator is defined in relation to a victim: without a pair of actors to inhabit both irreducible elements of the "penal couple," there can be no crime (Mendelsohn, 1956, p. 26).

Stallybrass and White contend that social and aesthetic categories can be ranked along certain evaluative lines: high and low, self and other, good and evil. These basic divisions apply to concrete symbolic domains such as the human body or geographical space, but also to more abstract domains, such as social relationships and psychology (1986, p. 276). Although these evaluative hierarchies of self and other can admit of gradations, the starkest contrast is between the high and the low, the most exalted and the basest. Stallybrass and White contend that sublime literature, with lofty moral ends, deploys debasement and degradation to provide a point of contrast differentiating heroes from villains (Stallybrass & White, 1986, p. 277).

The producers of high cultural forms position themselves as arbiters of the dominant value system, defining what constitutes the "low" in contrast to their own privileged position. Furthermore, this social interactionist model of hierarchical distinctions does not claim that all social actors are equal in their capacity to fill a central or marginalized role. As David Spurr (1993) commented on Western surveillance of the Oriental Other, "the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation" (p. 13). Through the act of observing and reporting, members of the dominant group tacitly assume the power to define the terms of the relationships in the hierarchy of symbolic social distinctions.

Both the Dan Simmons (1985) in his horror novel Song of Kali and Dominique Lapierre (1985) in his journalistic novel The City of Joy belong to this Orientalist tradition of presenting the Other as spectacle. The authors describe the journeys of white men into the space of the Oriental Other, which is framed as a quest or a challenge within self-imposed constraints. The main storytelling preoccupation for both the novels is alterity and other space. Calcutta becomes a realm of social symbols in which to stage the shifting, transformative dynamics of Western vs. Other. For Simmons, the protagonist Robert Luczak's sense of self is violated by the perfectly evil embodiment the radical Other in the form of the goddess Kali, the main antagonist or villain to Luczak. Lapierre, in contrast, imagines an ideally good and noble Other in the Indian peasant/slum-dweller Hasari Pal, who contrasts with the saintly Polish priest Stephan Kovalski -- two outsiders who venture into the slums of Calcutta from different starting points and for different ends.

Simmons's protagonist, Robert C. Luczak, is depicted as an educated, white male member of the American creative class. Luczak is employed as a journalist by Harper's magazine. He is self-conscious about his privileged position, and is socially aware enough to ironically distance himself from Waspy pretensions. Luczak describes himself as a "Chicago pollack" who is married to an "Indian princess" (p. 4).

The pretext for Luczak's trip to India is to write a piece for Harper's on M. Das, a celebrated Indian poet who is poised to have a new collection of his writings published in the United States. In an introductory scene, Luczak appeals to Indian high culture to defend a stanza from one of Das' poems from charges of vulgarity leveled by his editor, Abe. Commenting on Das' submission for publication, Abe reads to Luczak, "according to the translator's copy [the stanza] means, 'Maddened by lust, Kama and Rati fuck like dogs.' Sweet. It has a distinctive lilt to it, Bobby. Sort of early Robert Frost-ish." Luczak defends the artistic merit of the poem with an affectation of cultural sensitivity to Hindu civilization, admiring how the poet blurs the boundaries between low folk art and the high Vedic literature, "It's part of a traditional Bengali song... Notice how Das has embedded the rhythm of it in the general passage. He shifts from classical Vedic form to folk-Bengali and then back to Vedic" (p. 8). Later in the narrative, Luczak turns less generous in his judgment of Indian culture.

Luczak journeys into Calcutta as a journalist assigned to do an article on a contemporary literary figure for an upper-middle class American audience. He feels entitled to take from Indian society what he finds of value -- a beautiful wife, a lovely daughter, the rights to publish a work of literary value -- but is free to visit the country for a short stay in a high-end hotel, then leave when he has had enough adventure. In contrast, Lapierre's two main protagonists, Hasari Pal and Stephan Kovalski, are drawn to Calcutta precisely because of the harsh economic realities that Simmons' protagonist finds most disturbing: the Indian peasant Hasari out of financial need and the Polish priest Kovalski out of religious idealism.

Lapierre's Indian protagonist, Hasari Pal, confronts his own version of the low-other as he undergoes a transformation from a proud, rural peasant farmer to a lowly rickshaw puller, beholden to mob bosses who exploit his labor. Although the narrative of the novel gives considerable space to following the history of the Pal family from their perspective, the political viewpoint of Lapierre avoids subaltern critique. Hasari and his family endure repeated demotions in their status and sense of self as they establish themselves in the "City of Joy." For example, within a short time after the family's arrival in the city, Hasari finds he lacks the funds even to buy bananas to feed his family. Hasari's wife suggests they send their young daughter to beg in front of the train station. Hasari rejects this as a supreme humiliation, saying, "we are peasants, not beggars" (p. 25).

The Hasaris resist the abhorrent idea of broaching the peasant/beggar distinction for several days, before the threat of hunger forces the parents to send their children to beg from rich travelers as they exit their taxis. In Lapierre's world, this first act of humiliation and the many to follow, these losses of boundaries between self and other, are portrayed as fortifications of the human spirit, a purging away of pride as a means of entry into the joyous mass of suffering humanity. For in Lapierre's world, whatever Hasari becomes, he will be of no less intrinsic value, and he will be cared for by the surrounding community. "In these slums people actually put love and mutual support into practice. They knew how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity toward beggars, cripples, lepers, and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon. Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbors and old people were cared for and revered by their children" (Lapierre, 1985, p. 40).

Thus, from the perspective of the bottom rung of Indian society, it is Lapierre's contention that the self/other dichotomy if not fully eradicated, at least becomes practically irrelevant. Lapierre's slum dwellers refuse to entertain invidious distinctions between self and other. The familiar as well as the stranger, the healthy and the diseased, the old and the young -- all are taken in and cared for in one big, harmonious community of the urban poor. In a society of unfortunates who all must struggle simply to survive against great odds, no one is rejected "marginal." The denizens of Calcutta's slums, Lapierre tells us, "had reconstructed the life of their villages in urban exile" (p. 41).

Stephan Kovalski, an expatriate Polish priest, is the main European protagonist of Lapierre's novel. Originally written in French for publication in France, translated within a year of publication into other European languages for distribution in Spain, Holland, Germany, Italy, and the United States, many readers may have identified more with Kovalski as the central character, though the third person omniscient narrative alternates between Kovalski's and Hasari's stories.

Kovalski's sense of self/other was formed at an early age by an overriding desire to seek social justice. This commitment to help the poor was reinforced by the character's Roman Catholicism, and strengthened in the aftermath of his father's suicide. Kovalski's father had been badly maimed in a violent confrontation with the police during a coal miner rebellion over low pay and poor working conditions. Following this incident and some time in prison, his father became radicalized and plotted acts of terrorism as a member of a militant Marxist League. After a series of struggles with the authorities, Kovalski's father hung himself in a prison cell.

Upon learning of his father's death, young Kovalski shut himself in his room to meditate over a picture of the Shroud of Turin his father had given him at his First Communion. When he resolved to become a missionary, he explained this as born of "a desire to achieve by other means what [his father] had attempted to accomplish by violence" (p. 45).

Kovalski's central drive to fight on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged "other" is thus central to his sense of self. His fascination with the non-European Other is an extension of his life mission. The struggling and vulnerable Other provides Kovalski with an opportunity for act on his saintly ideals. The poorer and more wretched the Other, the greater occasion they present for the priest to perform supreme acts of charity and humility.

Both novels use the domain of physical space as a contrast between Western and Other. The Luczaks reside in a middle class neighborhood in Exeter, New Hampshire. Luczak describes their home as "clean and open as a Scandinavian designer's dreams, all gleaming bare wood, comfortable modular seating, immaculately white walls, and works of art illuminated by recessed lighting," and contrasts this with his Indian wife Amrita's childhood home in Delhi: "bar walls encrusted with grime and ancient handprints, open windows, rough sheets, lizards scrabbling across the walls at night, the cluttered cheapness of everything" (Simmons, 1985, p. 16). Thus, the basic contrast of the novel between clean, white, American self and dirty, dark, Indian Other is first introduced.

Lapierre's Western protagonist Kovalski, in contrast, idealizes the Other, desiring to enter their space and participate in their suffering. While still in Europe, Kovalski identified with other displaced workers. He came to think of the North Africans, Senegalese, Turks, and Yugoslavs who visited his family home as members of his own family. A challenge from a Senegalese immigrant was formative in his desire to leave Europe and embrace the Other: "You're always saying you're close to us but do you really know anything about us? Why don't you go live for a while in a shantytown or in out poor countryside? Then you'd have a better idea of why we were forced to leave and come here to break up stones all day at the bottom of a mine" (p. 46).

Kovalski took this challenge to heart and chose to devote his life to living among the poor as a missionary. In his youthful idealism, he describes the allure of poverty in glowing terms:

India! A subcontinent with exceptional potential wealth - yet where areas and social groups of overwhelming poverty survived. A land of intense spirituality and savage racial, political and religious conflicts. A land of saints like Gandhi, Aurobindo, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda, and of spiritual leaders who were sometimes odiously corrupt. A land that manufactured rockets and satellites but where eight of ten of its inhabitants had never traveled faster than their oxen could pull their carts. A land of slums of Bombay or Calcutta. A land where the sublime often stood side by side with the very worst this world can offer, but where both elements were always more vibrant, more human, and ultimately more attracting than anywhere else. (Lapierre, 1985, p. 47).

In contrast to The City of Joy's full spiritual embrace of the Other, the Song of Kali establishes from the first page its white protagonist's total alienation from and rejection of the South Asian Other, as represented by Calcutta and the city's patron goddess. Luczak contrasts the foul air and filth of life of the chawl[footnoteRef:1] with the environmental hygiene of life in an American city: "Slums of tin roofs, gunnysack walls, and mud-path streets... extended for miles and were terminated only by gray monoliths of factories belching flame and unfiltered soot toward the monsoon clouds... The air in Calcutta, already sweetened by raw sewage, burning cow dung, millions of tons of garbage, and the innumerable open fires eternally burning, was made unbreathable by further effusion of raw auto emission and industrial filth." He concludes, "I found it almost impossible to imagine myself living in one of those floorless hovels, working in one of those grim factories," and "I realized that sweeping philosophical convictions such as ecology and pollution controls were luxuries of our advanced industrial nations" (Simmons, 1985, p. 125). [1: A South Asian slum or shanty town]

When later in the narrative, Luczak is challenged over a glass of premium imported Scotch by an upper-class Indian host, Mr. Chatterjeee -- who lives separated from the pandemonium of the city in a walled off, residential section built by the former British colonial officials -- to give his frank opinion of the city, Luczak politely defers. He tells Chatterjee that he finds Calcutta "fascinating" and wishes he had more time to explore it. Mr. Chatterjee keeps pushing Luczak for his honest assessment: "You are diplomatic, Mr. Luczak. What you mean to say is that you find Calcutta appalling. It has already offended your sensibilities, yes?" (Simmons, 1985, p. 130). Chatterjee then comments to Luczak's Indian wife, Amrita, that that "the American psyche is as predictable as sterile as vulnerable as the American digestive system when it encounters India." He says that when Americans encounter Calcutta, they "react in either one of two ways: they will find Calcutta 'exotic' and concentrate only on the tourist pleasures; or they will be immediately horrified, recoil, and seek to forget what they have seen and not understood" (p. 131).

Lapierre's Father Kovalski subjects his health and digestive system to the challenges of poverty in order to more fully empathize with the hardships of the Other. "How could I share faithfully the living conditions of my brothers in the City of Joy without knowing their most fundamental anguish, the anguish that conditioned every instant of their lives: hunger - Hunger with a capital 'H' - the hunger that for generations had gnawed away at millions of people in this country, to the point where the real gulf between the rich and the poor existed at the level of the stomach" (Lapierre, 1985, p. 117). Kovalski then hires a woman from a neighboring Muslim family to prepare meals for him identical to those the other slum-dwellers regularly consume. After three days on this diet, the priest suffered violent stomach cramps, dizziness, and icy sweats. After a period of adjustment, his body seemed to adapt to the austere local diet and his health returned, only to suffer a relapse after breaking his diet and eating some European delicacies offered to him by a French visitor.

The result was disastrous. It awakened the Pole's appetite in a way that was completely uncontrollable. The nausea, cramps, and attacks of sweating and dizziness reappeared with an increased vigor. Kovalski felt himself becoming weaker daily. His muscles wasted visibly. His arms, thighs, legs, and pectorals were as if emptied of all substance. He lost several pounds more. The slightest task, even going to fill his bucket at the fountain, took immeasurable effort. He had difficulty staying upright for half an hour. He suffered from hallucinations. Nightmares haunted his sleep. He even began to bless the chorus of rats that woke him at the point when, in his dreams, an endless procession of emaciated men was bearing down upon him. He was physically living the curse of hunger in his flesh. Physically and mentally, Stephan Kovalski had joined the ranks of the majority of occupants of Anand Nagar - and thus had achieved his objective (Lapierre, 1985, p. 119).

Simmons uses the character of Amrita, an Indian expatriate who has naturalized as an American citizen, to challenge the idealized Western multiculturalist view of the low-Other as a kind of "noble savage." Amrita inhabits a liminal position between Western and native perspectives. In a defending her husband against challenges from the elite Indian Chatterjee, Amrita contends that the sense of otherness -- manifest as poverty, cruelty, filth, and violence -- that so disturbs her husband is something inherent to Indian culture. She gives examples of two events she had seen earlier that day. First she witnessed an "Untouchable"[footnoteRef:2] woman gardener being nearly electrocuted outside her hotel, while others looked on, no one lifting a finger to help. The woman would have died had Amrita herself not intervened to save the woman's life. Second, she witnessed a young girl on the street bathing herself in cow urine directly sprayed on her by the animal. [2: Amrita acknowledges the "Untouchable" in post-Gandhi India is a politically incorrect term, with "Scheduled Class" or "Harijan" (Beloved of God) as the accepted euphemisms intended to soften or deny the implications of otherness and rejection from the dominant caste society (Simmons, 1985, p. 137). However, she argues, merely applying less offensive labels has not gone far enough in improving the plight of these social outcastes, or reversing long-standing social prejudice regarding their contaminating status.]

Chatterjee responds by accusing Amrita of insensitivity to legitimate cultural differences, possibly a consequence of living away from India too long, becoming Westernized; Indians simply don't share Westerners' "horror at the idea of class differences," and many Indians traditionally believe urine to have "strong spiritual and medicinal properties" (Simmons, 1985, p. 139).

Amrita rejects Chatterjee's conclusion that she is merely experiencing reverse culture shock and Eurocentric revulsion over the cultural traditions of the native culture she has abandoned. Instead, Amrita appeals to "mathematics" as she expresses a detached assessment of claims that certain traditions, beliefs, or practices are beyond challenge by cultural outsiders: "As a mathematician, I tend to view different cultures rather abstractly, as adjoining sets with certain common elements. Or, if you will, as a series of human experiments as to how to live, think, and behave toward one another" (Simmons, 1985, p.139). Amrita voices the anti-relativist view that places little value on "tradition" itself, no matter how widespread or entrenched, as a reason to continue to promote or excuse a practice.

Later, when talking in private to her husband, Amrita gives a more insoluble mathematical theory of radical alterity. She proposes that rather than analogizing different cultures to different sets of traits (with some commonalities/overlapping subsets), some cultures may better be analogized to alternative geometries. "Sets and numbers overlap," she observes, "Geometries don't. Different geometries are based on different theorems, different axioms, and give rise to different realities" (Simmons, 1985, p. 143). The concept of unbridgeable alternate cultural realities implies that the gap between Western and Other is so radical it may never be bridged.

In the following section, I further investigate the phenomena by which that which has been rejected as debased, designated as "low," comes to ignite a fascination. The fascination is ambivalent, a mix of attraction and revulsion.

Fascination -- Repulsion

In the context of Indian society, the Untouchable may serve as the paradigm of "the other" from the dominant cultural perspective of a member of the Hindu caste system, as the leper may embody the paradigm of "unclean" in the domain of Indian hygiene. In both examples, the other is contact-sensitive. It elicits visceral feelings of disgust and fears of contamination at the prospect of physical proximity or contact with the skin. As touch is a form of intimacy, the subject is repelled by that with which the he or she desires no intimate association.

In the Western religious imagination, disgust toward the other can elicit righteous indignation and the impulse to destroy, or beatific empathy and the impulse to protect. The Priestly authors of The Book of Leviticus opted for the former, providing instructions on how to identify and eliminate or kill abominations that threaten to defile the ritually pure.[footnoteRef:3] Saint Catherine of Siena opted for the latter, demonstrating her transcendent humility by drinking a bowl of pus drained from a cancerous breast, then receiving a vision of Christ offering to nourish her on the Holy Communion of his actual blood and flesh. [3: Mary Douglas (1966) analyzed the impulse to destroy that which violates our ideals of ritual purity in her chapter on "The Abominations of Leviticus."]

Simmons' Song of Kali uses images of contamination, pollution, decay and otherness of the slums of Calcutta to evoke terror in the reader. Lapierre's The City of Joy deploys similar tropes and imagery in the same exotic geographic setting for beatific ends.

Both authors deploy the beautiful/hideous image of the monstrous goddess Kali as a central metaphor for the city of Calcutta, following a tradition of Western writers who depict the city as a "metropolitan nightmare," with its urban sprawl, overcrowding, filth, poverty, disease, and crime (Moorehouse, 1971). Association of the frightful deity as a patron goddess of the city has an etiological basis in the native language as well: Kolkata (anglicized as "Calcutta") derives from "Kali-khata" -- the city of Kali ("Kolkata," 2001). The Kalighat, one of Calcutta's oldest neighborhoods, is a site of pilgrimages for worshippers of Kali.

The name Kali, in turn, derives from the Sanskrit "She who is black," or "She who is death" ("Kali," 2011). A consort of Lord Shiva, she is associated with darkness, sexuality, violence, death, and paradoxically motherly love. The Hindu goddess is often depicted nude or semi-nude, with black or blue skin, a lolling tongue protruding through fangs, enraged red eyes, and disheveled hair. She wears a necklace of skulls and frequently wields a saber in one of her multiple arms and a severed head in another.

Although Lapierre intends no irony in calling Calcutta "the City of Joy," he also associates it with the dark goddess. In Lapierre's (1985) words,

In many respects the city resembled the goddess Kali whom many of the inhabitants worship -- Kali the Terrible, the image of fear and death, depicted with a terrifying expression in her eyes and a necklace of snakes and skulls around her neck. Even the slogans on the walls proclaimed the disastrous state of this city. "Here there is not hope," said one of them. "All that is left is anger." (p. 30)

Simmons' protagonist Luczak learns of the association of the city with the goddess from Krishna, his native guide to the city. Krishna explains to Luczak, "Kaliksetra. It means 'the place of Kali.' Certainly you knew that this is where the name of our city originated?" (p. 57). The guide goes on to explain that Kali is a sacred sakti (feminine aspect) of Siva, then elaborates:

She is a goddess; obviously she has four arms! You must see the great idol in Kalighat... very terrible. Beautifully terrible. Very tall. Very gaunt. Her mouth is open. Her tongue is long. she has two ...what is the word... The teeth of a vampire? ... She alone of the gods has conquered time. She devours all things... Her beautiful feet tread on a corpse... In her hand she holds... A sword and a severed head. (Simmons, 1985, pp. 57-58)

Thus, the terrible goddess serves as metaphor for the central object of fascination-repulsion in the two novels: the city of Calcutta itself. The squalor of Calcutta's garbage strew streets and miles of decrepit slums present an obscene spectacle to the Western gaze. The poverty, civic disorder, disgust of urban blight, provide the inspirations that the authors use for different ends. Both narratives follow the journey of "innocent" Western outsiders into a place of danger and despair -- a horror myth that is reminiscent of Dante's descent into the Inferno.

Written from the viewpoint of white Western men who are drawn into the passion and pathos of a sprawling, decaying, complex of overcrowded slums inhabited by a mass of exotic dark skinned peoples, these works manifest the Centre's (First World's) fascination with and attraction to the spectacle of misery of the periphery (Third World). In both books the Inferno-esque spectacle at once enthralls and repels the Western imagination, and the books are themselves representative of the Western phobia and fascination of the city.

The travel trope of a journey into the pit of despair in both Simmons and Lapierre harkens back to an Orientalist theme in Kipling. Both novels reveal a shared allegiance to the Kipling-esque identification with Calcutta as a "City of Dreadful Night." Kipling's (1888) short story "The City of Dreadful Night" is a journey into the underworld, also in the tradition of Dante's Inferno. Kipling's Calcutta is an oppressively hot city, muggy and wet, where the sounds of insects and jackals conspire to disturb sleep, and even the dead are ejected from their graves:

The dense wet heat that hung over the face of land, like a blanket, prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helped the heat; and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sit still in the dark, empty, echoing house and watch the punkah beat the dead air. So, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for coolness' sake. (Kipling, 2009)

Kipling took the title of his story from an 1873 poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson, in which Thomson presents a bleak view of early industrial London through the despairing eyes of an atheist. The ravages the industrial revolution exacted on the urban center of the British Empire is projected outward onto a colonized other. In Simmons' novel, the elite, upper class Indian, Mr. Chatterjee, turns Kipling's Orientalist projection on its head in an attempt to call out Luczak for the assumed racial/nationalistic superiority that Luczak politely refuses to acknowledge. Asking if a passage was a "fair and reasonable description of Calcutta," Chatterjee read:

… a dense mass of houses so old that they only seem to fall, through which tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here and whoever ventures into this region find the streets -- by courtesy so called -- thronged with loiterers and sees, through the half-glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation… the stagnant gutters… the filth choking up dark passages… the walls of bleached soot and doors falling off their hinges… and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please. (Simmons, 1985, p. 132)

Upon finishing the reading, Chatterjee informed Kuczak that it was not an account of Calcutta at all, but a contemporary account of London in the 1850s.[footnoteRef:4] The presumption is that Third World societies must be allowed to pollute the environment and exploit workers in sweat shops as a necessary stage of the birth pangs of industrial development, just as the industrialized nations did at a similar stage in their history. [4: The passage is in fact quoted from Michael Crichton's (2002) The Great Train Robbery.]

Both Simmons and Lapierre follow Kipling in their accounts of hellbound quests, tracing their characters' descent into Calcutta's underworld. There is a foreboding that accompanies the trespass into a place these characters do not belong, in the mode of Kipling's exploration of Calcutta as an off-limits journey to Westerners. Simmons looks up "the most evil place on earth," while Lapierre visits and tries to reach out to "the poorest of the poor."

For Simmons' character, the first glimpse of hell is viewed from above the city as the plane circles around to make its descent. Kuczak looks down upon a literal inferno:

My God," I said again. Calcutta was stretched out below, over 250 square miles of city, a galaxy of lights after the absolute darkness of cloud tops and the bay of Bengal. I had flown into many cities at night, but none like this. Instead of the usual geometries of electric lights, Calcutta at midnight was ablaze with countless lanterns, open fires, and a strange soft glow - an almost fungal phosphorescence - that oozed from a thousand unseen sources. Instead of the predictable urban progression of straight lines - streets, highways, parking lots - Calcutta's myriad of fires seemed scattered and chaotic, a jumbled constellation broken only by the dark curve of the river. I imagined that this was what London or Berlin must have looked like - burning - to awed bomber crews during the war. (Simmons, 1985, p. 21)

Once the plane has landed, Kuczak is greeted by a bedlam of shouting porters, grabbing for his bags, and a strange taxi driver he describes as predatory. He then relates images from his harried taxi ride to the hotel:

The buildings seemed decayed beyond age, decayed remnants of some forgotten millennium - some pre-human age - for the shadows, angles, apertures, and emptiness did not fit the architecture of man. Yet on every second or third floor there were open-windowed glimpses of humanity inhabiting these druidic shambles: bare bulbs swinging, bobbing heads, peeled walls with plaster rotting off the white rib-bones of the building, garish illustrations of multi-armed deities clipped from magazines and taped crookedly to the walls or windowpanes, the cries of children playing, running, fleeing through the knife-blackened alleys, the wail of infants half-heard - and everywhere the random movement caught in the corner of one's vision, the sibilant rush of the bus's tires on wet clay tarmac, and the sight of sheeted figures lying like corpses in the sidewalk shadows. (Simmons, 1985, p.27)

Simmons proclaims, like Kipling, his hostility toward the "City of Dreadful Night." The ideas of radical alterity once celebrated and championed by Kipling is revoiced and revoked in Simmons' novel. Simmons revisits Kipling's racial thesis and clearly situates himself in the same tradition of representing Calcutta as an inferno-esque journey.

As for Lapierre, he takes the cue of slumming narrative from Kipling to propel a new myth of "low life" (as termed by Kipling) that revolves around inferno-purgatorio-paradisio. While Lapierre also presents hellish descriptions of disease, death, and desperation, his characters struggle heroically to improve the lot of the poorest of the poor, claiming to find inspiration and redemption in this setting:

The arrival of ... successive waves of destitute people had transformed Calcutta into an enormous concentration of humanity. In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million of them who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each. Consequently, Calcutta had become one of the biggest urban disasters in the world - a city consumed with decay in which thousands of houses and many new buildings, sometimes ten floors high or even higher, threatened at any moment to crack and collapse. With their crumbling facades, tottering roofs, and walls eaten up with tropical vegetation, some neighborhoods looked as if they had just been bombed. ... In the absence of adequate garbage collection service, eighteen hundred tons of refuse accumulated daily in the streets, attracting a host of flies, mosquitoes, trats, cockroaches, and other creatures.

In summer the proliferation brought with it the risk of epidemics. Not so very long ago it was still a common occurrence for people to die of cholera, hepatitis, encephalitis, typhoid, and rabies. Articles and reports in the local press never ceased denouncing the city as a refuse dump poisoned with fumes, nauseating gases, and discharges - a devastated landscape of broken roads, leaking sewers, burst water pipes, and torn down telephone wires. In short, Calcutta was a "dying city." (Lapierre, 1985, p. 30)

The two authors attempt to promote different responses in the reader to the Third World hell they depict. Lapierre's Calcutta in the final analysis does not threaten eternal damnation, but holds out the promise of redemption through heroic struggle against great odds. At a critical point in Simmons' the narrative, the Western protagonist returns to Calcutta heavily armed with the intention of going on a shooting spree, exacting murderous revenge on the Kapalikas[footnoteRef:5] who had abducted him and murdered his child. At a similar point in Lapierre's novel, the Polish priest risks his own life to save his neighbors who are drowning in a flood that devastates the city. As David Spurr (1993) has commented, "for Lapierre, [the ethical] absolute is not the principle of evil, but rather its opposite: the slum dwellers of Calcutta come to represent a state of beatitude in which the spirit transcends the corruption of the diseased and hungry flesh" (p. 133). [5: Kali worshippers]

Whether we are compelled to annihilate the other out of fear and disgust, or embrace the other in a demonstration of saintly humility, the unease that can grip us in confrontations with that which we have rejected as "non-self" may be accompanied by a paradoxical attraction. That which is most repellant, most other, inhabits a symbolic realm of ambivalence. For both the self-righteously disgusted and the self-sacrificing saint, the other does not simply horrify and repel, but also entices and compels. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (2002) have noted on the tendency of the subject to waiver between these polarities when confronted with that which has been rejected:

Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing 'low' conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for this Other. (p. 270)

Stallybrass and White analyzed "high culture" in terms of a necessary contrast -- a need to identify and distinguish what constitutes (ethical) propriety and (aesthetic) good taste from the "low culture" -- the improper and vulgar which is to be excluded and rejected. Yet once the line between high and low, beautiful and ugly, self and other is drawn, the temptation to violate this division and transgress the boundaries becomes compelling. Thus, "high culture":

continuously defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as low as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating, Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust. But disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as "Other," return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination. The forest, the fair, the theatre, the slum, the circus, the seaside-resort, the "savage": all these, placed at the outer limit of civil life, become symbolic contents of bourgeois desire. (p. 191)

The tension between rejection of and desire for the sad, disturbing, or horrifying aspects of the impoverished South Asian Other is manifested differently in these two novels. For Simmons' protagonist, the American journalist and poet Robert Luczak, the ultimate transgression of the boundary between the innocent, victimized self and menacing, evil Other turns erotic. For Lapierre's hero, the Polish Catholic Priest Stephan Kovalski, the transgression culminates in his dream of "going native," erasing all barriers between self and Other, and personally vowing to experience the poverty and suffering of a Calcutta slum offers as an occasion for spiritual transcendence.

Luczak is drawn into the society of Kapalikas -- an aggressive, underground cult or gang whose worship of the goddess Kali includes human sacrifice. Luczak is entrusted with a book of sacred poetry, "The Song of Kali," by M. Das, a leprous poet who was resurrected to serve as a thrall to the goddess. Das instructs Luczak to deliver the book to an American publisher to spread the cult's message of despair to the broader world. The American spends a restless night in his hotel room, reading the epic poem describing the "Age of Kali." The work is a litany of human atrocities: a woman cannibalizes the lover she has murdered in the name of love, screams are torn from the bellies of slaughtered millions, silhouettes of children etched on a wall as fallout from a bomb blast, a father coldly and deliberately guns down his wife and daughters as they arrive home (Simmons, 1985, p. 178). Kali thus represents to Luczak the primordial other which civilization has evolved to reject -- "the focus and residue of all atavistic urges and actions which ten thousand years of conscious strivings had hoped to put behind" (p. 177-178).

Even though Luczak is scheduled to awaken early the next morning to flee Calcutta and return safely home, he finds himself compelled to stay up all night obsessively reading the obscene stanzas into the early morning hours. When he finally nods off, he has a vivid erotic dream, finding himself lying naked in the temple of Kali. The monstrous dark idol comes to life, approaching the paralyzed Luczak with her multiple arms writhing and her snake-like tongue lolling about, She performs an erotic dance, and proceeds to copulate with the aroused Luczak. The narrator describes the scene in graphic detail, relating how his "penis stirs, hardens, and rises stiffly into the night air. My scrotum pulls tighter as I feel the power flow through me and center there" (p. 180). While Luczak is unable to escape, desiring on some level to resist, he nevertheless find himself drawn ambivalently to the goddess' sensual form: "I want to go to her, but I cannot move. My pounding hear fills my chest with the drumbeat of the chanting. My hips begin to move of their own accord, thrusting involuntarily. All my consciousness is centered at the base of my throbbing penis" (p. 181).

Luczak's seduction scene is set in the dark holy place of the frightening Hindu deity, accompanied by incense and chanting. The chanting is the "Song of Kali," with refrains in Bengali and ancient Sanskrit, evoking the Hindu pantheon of Vishnu, Siva, and the others, who meld with Kali into the ultimate form of Nirguna Brahman -- the supreme reality without attributes, or simply "God." This is the hot, exotic, sensual spirituality of sakti (the primordial feminine cosmic energy) or the Kama Sutra, the sensual, embodied spiritual dynamic that Western religion denies and rejects as carnal or anti-spiritual.

The Western heuristic of splitting of debased lust from any sort of high spiritual aspirations when the fascination-repulsion dynamic arises is also a theme in The City of Joy. Compare Luczak's hallucination of fucking what he later refers to in revulsion as the Hindu "bitch goddess" with Father Kovalski's attraction to, and rejection of, the beautiful, exotic, dark-skin young women he encounters during the course of his mission work. In a passage in which Kovalski reflects on the meaning of his vows of celibacy, he comments on how young female slum dwellers seem to be flirting with him:

How, amid so much misery, could I fail to succumb to desirable women, who were such beacons of grace and seduction in their multicolored saris? In the ugliness of the slum, they were beauty itself... my reputation for being a sort of Santa Claus often brought the women of the slum to me. An innuendo, a hand laid on mine, a flirtatious way of adjusting a sari, or a disturbing look sometimes led me to think their intentions might be suspect. (Lapierre, 1985, p. 108)

For Kovalski, following Augustine, such carnal impulses are temptations to be resisted. He believes that resistance against consummating his fleshly urges with a feminine other is a necessary sacrifice to further strengthen his faith and commitment to love all of suffering humanity. In the priest's faith, sexuality and spirituality are strictly incompatible, whether in Eastern or Western religious traditions. He therefore interprets the sexual imagery of Hindu scripture and iconography through a Christian lens, as representing temptation that a holy man must resist:

I had hoped that my well-known status as a religious man would protect me from such manifestations of feeling, but I was wrong, and it wasn't really all that surprising. Wasn't there always, in every work of Hindu literature, a scene in which the guru was tempted? And what about the erotic sculptures in the temples, where veritable orgies spread right across the bas-reliefs? I noticed that it was always during periods of relaxation that temptation hit me hardest, and not during intervals of intense trial. It was always during a phase when my relationship with God was in some way impoverished that I was at my most vulnerable. If you don't find your joy in God, you seek it elsewhere. (Lapierre, 1985, p. 108)