After Melancholia

Transgenerational transmissions of diasporic lack of home in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.

“…Mishra (2007) asserts that “there is no immediate cure for the condition [of impossible mourning] because the loss remains abstract; it is not compensated for by happiness in the new nation-state and is therefore internalized as the emptiness of the ego itself” (p. 10). In another study, Munos (2013) has explored Jhumpa Lahiri’s works including The Namesake from the perspectives of various psychoanalytic thinkers. Her exploration reveals Lahiri’s use of melancholy to illustrate second-generation diasporic subjectivities caught in the predicament of melancholia—a state of impossible mourning.…”

“…Her exploration reveals Lahiri’s use of melancholy to illustrate second-generation diasporic subjectivities caught in the predicament of melancholia—a state of impossible mourning. The hyphenated children of Lahiri’s first-generation characters, especially Gogol, imbibe their parents’ traumas of dislocation in their psyche which is “emptied of meaning, an unsymbolized absence” (Munos, 2013, p. 18) and thereby thwarts Gogol’s entry into the Symbolic Order , leaving no choice but melancholia.…”

“…Gogol introjects these traumatic memories through the Oedipal encounter of naming, ultimately influencing his own subjectivity, a subjectivity shaped by the inscription of Ashoke’s psychic scars, or his frustration. Munos (2013) testifies:Ashoke’s train accident and his granting a name to his son that promises always to bring him back to such a foundational moment are apt metaphors for the ways in which, for second-generation desis like Gogol, the notion of origin is inscribed not in their own stories, but in that of their parents—more precisely, in their parents’ act of departure. (p. 112)…”

“…Synchronous with the theoretical developments in the field, diasporic fiction most often portrays the descendants of migrants as having fractured identities and contradictory ideas about home and belonging owing to the migratory experiences of their parents (see Abulhawa, 2010; Adichie, 2017; Tan, 2006). The analyses of the literature written by and about diaspora across the globe quite often portrays the descendants of migrants suffering from the parental scars which mold their lives in their new abodes (see Mishra, 2007; Munos, 2013).…”