The Problematic of Class Relations and Gender in Bhutan: Situating Marxo-Feminist Praxis in Kunzang Choden’s The Circle of Karma

Abstract

Literary theory negotiated (and altered) the literary semantics good deal with its overbearing intellectual discourse in the enlighted contemporary academia. The curious saga of literary inquiry has come a long way from simpleton traits of Liberal humanism which shirked from the explanation of the totalizing realities and the ‘grand narratives’. The congenial discourses forged by the literary theory could be, with an intellectual comfort, characterized as clenching the intellectual universe from its parametric ends and vouch for something which was earlier glossed over and in the process flinched from ethical responsibilities of discursive information and ethical imagination. And the ethical angle of literary performance is conspicuous in Swearingen’s observation where he avers that literature as a “rhetorical” transaction involving “author, text and reader” is essentially an ethical project that presupposes a community of readers (Swearingen 145). The contemporary literary theory, as a resolute adversary to make the unheard thin phenomena more vocal and explanatory, is hence bent upon taking a rational dip into the subterranean networks of words and sieve meanings and, as said earlier, contribute towards the newer productions and, consequently, codifications repotentiating the literature with political energies drying up in the complacent lap of liberal humanism. Already, the omnipresent dictatorial beckonings of the “linguisticrelational abilities of humankind” by the global capitalist regimes bring forth the “common places” of language, the generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse” (Virno 35-36) Literary theories like Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Postcolonialism, Marxism, Psycho-analysis, Feminism, Gender Studies, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Eco-criticism, etc. suffuse the literary with a vigor, able to elevate the language and in the process its biopolitical offspring literature, from Aristotelian ‘common places’ (topoi koinoi) and facilitating a reach out to its ‘special places’ (topoi idioi). Hence, the earlier unassuming literary verdicts of the liberal humanism stand effeminate when the currents of neoliberal, neocolonial global order are redesigning the matrix of the capitalist world order. And literary theories have successfully infused fresh dialectical angles to broaden the academic and philosophical horizons of the proponents of the same as the word literary today, has to include its emerging forms and culture defying easy codification. Hence, the theories bind this ethico-political potential of literature with the cultural, the social and the political of the contemporary discourse. In the current paper, I take up the much politicized feminist semiotic beside the material worldview suffused Marxist thought as the starting point of interrogating the socio-cultural dynamics of a precolonial economy in the times of neocolonial and neoliberal economies and its cultural production like the English novel. Bhutanese society with its irreducible particularity of antiquated socio-economic and cultural determinism and class relations becomes the apparent theoretical problematic of feminism and Marxist validations.