Between the Village and the Void: Spatiality of (Non)Being in Jibanananda Das’s Tale of City and Village

Abstract

This article examines the topological psychodynamics of spatiality vis-à-vis the myriad and complex configurations of subjectivity underpinned by the unconscious dynamics of psychosexuality operative and observable amongst the protagonists in the great modern Bengali poet and author Jibanananda Das’s short story ‘Tale of City and Village’ who find themselves in an impossibly triangulated situation attendant upon the trope of the a visit(ation) of/from the past. It concisely and closely examines the unconscious dynamics of fantasy, desire and drive mapped onto the daseinal displacement from the country to the city which answer to the existential void or originary lack in being deploying the theoretico-critical framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, narratology, Russian Formalism, Bakhtinian dialogism, and continental philosophy. Keywords: Being, subjectivity, fantasy, desire, drive, jouissance, displacement, anxiety, pastoral, sublime.