Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents a lecture on Lies in Literature.
The lecture will be given by
Professor Vijay Mishra.
As usual excellent wine (and orange juice) will be available.
When: Wednesday October 28, 2009 4.30 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title: "Lies in Literature "
Abstract
I would not have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, –
— Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Derrida in his essay on the history of the lie (on its radical impossibility in fact) writes about ‘the Judeo-Christiano-Kantian hypothesis of the lie as radical evil and sign of the originary corruption of human existence.’ This is, after Kant, a determinate (or determined) definition of the lie, different from definitions which come to us, again after Kant, upon reflective judgment. A lie indeed lacks the stability of ‘truth.’ What of literature though? The most beautiful of all lies as Claude Debussy said of art? Or is literature a discourse which defies examination in terms of determinate judgment? Are lies crucial to the aesthetic design of fiction? I make my way through this dilemma by looking at the word ‘lie’ itself in several languages and in a number of authors. I also look into the genre of the lecture or keynote address itself as a structure aimed at hypnotic induction (after Jennipher McDonald’s 2007 Honours paper) and use Freud’s essay on the ‘Uncanny’ to make my point. I use literary texts (Freud had nominated only one major text – E T A Hoffmann’s ‘The Sand-Man’ – when thinking through the ‘uncanny’) to make my case and, suggestively, to arrive at a conclusion which comes dangerously close to declaring (or hypnotically inducting the audience into believing) that all literature are footnotes to a great lie.
Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Among his publications are: Dark Side of the Dream; Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (with Bob Hodge) (1991), The Gothic Sublime (1994), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (1998), Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002; rpt six times) and The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007; rpt twice 2008).
