The Secret Name
Photo: Karan Madhok
An essay on art and analysis by Dhani Muniz: “Art was never art in the way that food has always been food; or perhaps, rather, it is a vast restaurant at the end of the universe in which we are all picky eaters.”
I recently had a chance encounter with a couple of newlyweds on holiday from Chennai . They happened to be staying just next door to me and my family. The woman—a Bengali English Lit. major—had just finished her master’s thesis on the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien. While having a meal together, I asked her about her plans for the upcoming months. She was locked and loaded with an answer.
“I am planning my PhD.” As you may imagine, this was not earth-shattering news by any stretch.
“What about?” I asked.
“It’s a new field, you probably haven’t heard much about it,” her husband cut in, an odd note in his voice that perhaps suggested damage control, more than any masculine condescension.
She ploughed right through his last syllable. “Ecocriticism,” she said. Someone coughed from the living room.
“What is that exactly?” I was now genuinely curious.
“Basically, literary criticism, but through the lens of ecology,” she explained. Then, she added “This amla pickle is great,” and pointed to her plate.
Her husband later came up to me and started speaking in a surprisingly confidential manner; I had, after all, just met the man. He had a strange vocal lilt, a mixture of apology and pride (and now, perhaps just a touch of masculine condescension). “It’s an incredible field, you know, what she’s into. Very valuable, I think. It’s really a whole new approach to literary criticism.”
“What is it exactly?”
“Well, think of a classic book,” he started. “Take Moby Dick. Normal criticism looks at it from the points of view of style, syntax, plot. What makes it what it is. Ecocriticism focuses on how the book relates to the environment. The whaling industry, animal cruelty, the treatment and depictions of Native Americans. These are the kind of things we have to take special consideration of in our time.”
Their conception of their own work, its significance within their own lives, dies with them; the ‘secret name’ that they have carried through nameless trials and criticisms, is no longer with their creations, but with their own selves. Once the maker is out of this world, their art must fend for itself.
Now I was even more puzzled than before. “Are all books criticised from the same perspective? I’d think something based in an urban environment would be a bit more challenging.”
“Not necessarily,” the man said. “An urban environment just means the destruction of whatever was there before, the usage and waste of natural resources...”
“But isn’t a city a kind of environment?” I pressed him.
“I suppose,” he admitted grudgingly. “But Moby Dick is the ideal example to explain it, I think, because there’s so much there to unpack that we just haven’t yet. Until now.” Sly smile.
I really didn’t know what to make of this. How did he or anyone else know what readers have been unpacking from Melville for the past 150 years? Like most good novels, it is far more than a book and stands alone as its own genre. It encompasses the absolute without a hint of personal moralizing, the narrator as unreliable as any man and a hero only by virtue of chance survival. It has been a primary influence on writers ranging from Salman Rushdie to Bob Dylan.
When I brought all this up, however, my new friend seemed to find the book extremely straightforward.
“It’s really not that complex a story, when you look back on it,” he insisted. “The captain is just a monomaniac who’s supposed to represent a very classic Christian strongman image, and he’s under the impression that he’s taming the seas on behalf of God... They’re cutting up these beautiful creatures because they feel they have some God-given right to kill. I must say, as a vegan, I found those scenes truly disgusting, to an unnecessary degree... The Native American on board and the narrator have that particular encounter in the bunks, which is so obviously now a projection of Melville’s own probable hatred of homosexuals and natives. And that preacher, Father Mapple, in the beginning, is so obviously the author’s own sense of morality! His and Ahab’s and Melville’s sense of morality is the same: They believe that truth is always clear and must be pursued no matter what.
“It’s just one of those books that takes forever to not say much,” he added.
Now, how was all this so clear to this man but not to me? Was I simply the village idiot for not seeing the apparently obvious homophobia in Queequeg and Ishmael’s encounters? One of my favourite and most ineffable stories was now laid out before me like some rotten picnic lunch on a garish flowered blanket.
As the hours before dinner passed however, the wellspring of my confusion became more and more clear, as the words of this esteemed couple burrowed into my brain. Here, this woman was pursuing the vocation of not only trying to extract psychological secrets from literature—as is so common in much contemporary criticism—but further paring down the critical lens to ecology. An ecologist reviewing creative art. Naturally the need for less anthropocentric ideas in cultural commentaries is understandable, but why do our commentaries require constant recalibration for the changing times? Why would someone who deals in straight, external fact—ones and zeroes—be a decent critic of any art? Do people ask Toni Morrison for her thoughts on molecular physics? And if they did, what scientist would take her seriously? And especially, can we really focus on individual concepts in literature while still retaining a broad view or is it always a reductive process?
Can a piece of art be killed?
Through these thoughts I arrived at a piece of writing that holds a special place for me, the introduction to William Burroughs’ The Western Lands. It is a summation of a concept that the infamous author found out about through Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, that of the ancient Egyptian belief system in regards to the seven parts of the human soul and, by extension, the afterlife.
“Top soul, and first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name.”
An Egyptian was given a secret name at birth, which was known only by parents and, eventually, the child. The individual would be known for the remainder of their lives by a nickname, so as to prevent the hijacking of their Ren, which they believed had the ability to destroy their physical body and soul completely.
“This (Ren) corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. When you die, that’s where Ren comes in.”
Not only a name that can make or break you, but one that can be stolen in order to direct and control you, even after death. Defacing the name of a person on an object or monument was seen as a potential hindrance to that individual’s journey into the afterlife.
And when does a piece of art die? Ostensibly, when its creator does. Their conception of their own work, its significance within their own lives, dies with them; the ‘secret name’ that they have carried through nameless trials and criticisms, is no longer with their creations, but with their own selves. Once the maker is out of this world, their art must fend for itself. The idea that the Ren is, by default, unknowable, is anathema to critics and most laymen alike, so the role of the ‘secret name’ of a piece of writing or music is thus flung out into the public for discussion.
Contrary to what we tend toward believing, this system of criticism has existed for centuries. Analyse it, break it down, name it yourself; you, now, own a part of a piece of art. The Ren has become public domain. Melville, Mark Twain, Knut Hamsun, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Alvin Schwartz, Alex Gino... all flitting around with the vacuum of their seventh soul helplessly commandeered by a nameless crowd.
So, the natural progression ensues; art becomes a punching bag, something to observe in very personal ways, then abuse with these strange senses of universal morality that so often provide the darkest humour and saddest reflections of our culture. The eternal itch to put a finger on something, to define it for the ages, ends up being the death of indescribable art—which, as we all know on some level, is the greatest kind.
There is a reason, I think, that the arts and sciences have retained a somewhat conscious distance through the ages; the fact that practitioners of each discipline implicitly understood that they simply could not accomplish what their counterparts across the aisle could. A painter cannot capture a physical scene as well as a photographer.
So why continue to paint? echo Rembrandt and co. from the metro tunnels of history. Because a photographer cannot show you their personal relationship with that same physical scene, at least not nearly as efficiently or simply as a painter can. An artist of any kind is in constant dialogue with their surroundings. Yet the exponential growth of interdisciplinary fields—while sometimes creating interesting avenues for research—often hinders this responsibility by overloading the artist with concerns that have nothing to do with the piece itself. In addition, it can narrow down the ability of an otherwise highly intelligent human being to understand its subtleties to such an extent that they can no longer feel true empathy.
Anyone who reads Father Mapple’s sermon on their second reading of Moby Dick would be hard-pressed not to stifle a laugh, so prescient yet pathetic is his possessed preaching in the face of what is to come; the same kind of possession that I finally realized is eating up all culture, the obsession with the official title, with the name. And once something is named, it is open season.
A few discerning words from Mr. Rushdie’s essay “Is Nothing Sacred?”: “Ahab, gripped by his possession, perishes; Ishmael, a man without strong feeling or powerful affiliations, survives. The self-interested modern man is the sole survivor; those who worship the whale—for pursuit is a form of worship—perish by the whale.”
The whale is the Ren, the Unknowable Name, pried loose from cold dead fingers.
Medallions on red sand...soft winter light filtering through the papaya leaves.
The eternal itch to put a finger on something, to define it for the ages, ends up being the death of indescribable art—which, as we all know on some level, is the greatest kind.
Back with the newlyweds from Chennai, we find ourselves still in the throes of discussion. “You can analyze anything through the lens of ecology, yaar,” the woman smiled dismissively, over more amla pickle and rotis at dinner. “Even social issues can be the by-product of environmental issues.”
“No argument there,” I ceded, then paused and turned to her husband. “You know Ralph Ellison, right? The Invisible Man?”
“Of course, brilliant book... Read it in my sophomore year. Probably still one of the best indictments of racism of all time.”
I grinned. “You know what his favourite book was?”
My new friend’s face fell.
“This isn’t the point,” his wife insisted quickly. “The point of all these disciplines is to bring about new ideas and critical attitudes. This is showing people new ways to read.”
“You don’t think each person has their own way of reading, no matter what you tell them?”
“Whatever, people still like to read opinions of others, especially about the arts. Like, who wants to read the same old book reviews forever? That’s what this is for.” She made a face of distaste. “This coffee is too strong.”
I handed her some hot water with impatience. “So then you’d admit that at the end of the day, this is all still an exercise? Trying to completely define something that’s impossible to fully define?”
She took a long sip and shrugged. An air of calm settled into the room, tensed shoulders relaxed, whiffs of a contented indifference. To each their own. Our hard-fought battle for the high ground had transformed it into a plateau. Our postures relaxed, now to contend with a happy, mild curiosity, rather than the vitriol of morality upon which we had embarked.
Experiences with art were now separate, for we were, after all, separate beings. Though both are necessarily disconnected from the strict standards of morality, art was never art in the way that food has always been food; or perhaps, rather, it is a vast restaurant at the end of the universe in which we are all picky eaters.
Why waste time arguing about taste, when in those confused and draining moments each could be suspended in that rarefied and wordless world, which accompanies all activity that feeds body and soul? Why not just...dig in?
***
Dhani Muniz is an Indo-Brazilian writer and musician. His writings focus on the subversive elements of human cultures and traditions, as well as the unifying elements of nature. Coming from a broad cultural background, and having lived in New York and Alaska as well as India, he strives to communicate a sense of rootlessness in his work—both in writing and music—as well as to effect a cross-pollination between his chosen disciplines. You can find him on Twitter: @suitetheexpatriate and Instagram: @suitetheexpatriate.
