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

Abstract

This article engages with alternative understandings of psychic transmission of experience from the first to the second generation of diaspora, conventionally seen as a transfer of pathologies and traumas. By drawing on Jacques Lacan’s concept of lack and subjectivation, the article argues that this transfer is a transmission of diaspora’s lack of home—home here is taken as a Lacanian lack which is provisional, multiple and in flux. The article proposes that this transmission is an inevitable structural necessity which takes place during the intergenerational Oedipal encounters between the first and the second generation. The second-generation character Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake has been taken as a case in point whose subjectivation reveals the complex dynamics of interaction between the first and the second-generation diaspora, leading to the formation of a pastiched second-generation subjectivity.