Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Finds Himself to be an Immigrant

The Lowland caught me by surprise.  I found the opening chapters “interesting” – a damning affect if there ever was one – as I have found other novels by Indian writers about India “interesting” – but not interesting enough to blog about them.   Things started to shift when the protagonists had their child and suddenly their experience – or aspects of it – started to illuminate parts of my own life.

This is the story of two Hindi brothers born 15 months apart who grew up together in a suburb of Calcutta near the Country Club that the English built for themselves.  The Lowland of the title is a swampy area that they play and run through as children and that is the place where the younger, more adventurous brother dies.  The brothers are described as being like twins – very much alike in how they speak and look, both very smart, but differentiated by how active they are.  The older, more lethargic brother moves to Rhode Island to pursue graduate studies in Marine Biology just as the younger one starts to get involved in the Maoist based communist movement – one that involves violently revolting against the Indian power structures of the late sixties and early seventies.

This book covers a lot of territory – spatially and temporally.  The Indian Revolution against the British right after the end of World War II forms the first bookend and contemporary – or nearly contemporary Calcutta, Rhode Island, California and places adjacent form the other.  The voice of the author is in the third person, but focuses on the internal experience of different characters in different chapters – reminiscent in some ways of the style of All the Light We Cannot See – but the voice does not, to my ear, reach very deeply inside the characters – it stays near the surface of their observations – sometimes confusingly so – it may be a page or two into a chapter before we know which protagonist is being followed at this moment. 

The younger brother marries – not someone he has been arranged to marry, but someone that he loves.  This upsets both families – her family disowns her – they move into his parent’s house – a house being expanded to support the three expected families – those of the parents and the two sons (the eldest of whom, by protocol, was to have been married first).  But the parents do not warm to this woman.   The older brother hears of this through letters in the US.  The internet and Skype have not been invented – and no phone calls.  He simply follows along – and is also aware of, and worried about, the younger brother’s involvement with the revolutionaries.  During the two years that he lives in the US, the references to the revolution disappear from the letters and the older brother hopes the younger one has gotten out, until he gets a telegram informing him that his younger brother has been killed.

The older brother travels home and discovers not only that the police have murdered his brother within sight of his parents and wife, but that the younger brother’s wife is pregnant, something she was not able to inform the younger brother of before his death.  The older brother decides to marry his brother’s wife and take her back to the States with him – his parents intend to discard her after the birth of the child which they intend to raise, and so the older brother is interceding – but also interested in this woman his brother loved – as she is interested in him.  Their decision to marry, though, is borne of necessity, not passion, and – in a chapter told from the older brother’s perspective – he is prepared to wait for her to come to love him.

And this is the moment that the book comes to life for me.  The description of a man waiting for a woman to come to love him – of becoming close to her – and she to him – but of their failing to bridge the gulf that divides them – and even some of the dynamics that get played out between them – feel – despite the entirely different circumstances – powerfully reminiscent of central relationships in my life.  And I learned about the dynamic of this experience of being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t quite love you yet, and what unfolds as it becomes apparent that they aren’t going to make it to the goal and how you react in ways that drive them away while continuing to desire them and somehow both of you are unaware of the great violence that you are doing to each other and yourselves – and I learn about it from a dispassionate source – one that is observing the experiences – the surface experiences of these two individuals from a respectful remove; not taking one side or the other, but noticing how the process unfolds.  And what I learn is not shocking or revelatory.  In some ways it is achingly familiar while also being novel – a new more organized way of comprehending what has occurred and what I have ruminated on and fumed and despaired about – dreamt about and given up on understanding.  And here it is again – another opportunity to work it through.

What emerges as a parallel is the process of waiting for love - one that "works" for both the now husband and wife for quite some time.  They have a close but not intimate relationship that meets both of their needs - his for closeness with a little remove, perhaps enough for his safety, also with hope - hope for a different level of closeness that, while it may be feared it is also deeply desired.  He has had hints of that kind of closeness in an earlier affair with an Amderican woman.  She feels a sustaining sense of connection, but also safely interpersonally distant - not threatened in the particular ways that she is (in her case I think by guilt - of not feeling deserving of closeness for reasons that are not revealed until the end of the book).  Thiis is a stble system until the husband realizes that the stability of this system is contingent on the limits in it and that they will get no closer.  As he realizes that, he withdraws from her, in some ways cruelly as he is angry that she will not become what he has  hoped for and counted on.  This precipitates a crisis for her as the relationship that has sustained her disintegrates and she withdraws from it to depend on herself because she can no longer rely on the person that she has needed and kept at a distance.

I don’t want to focus on the details of my own experience – in fact the details of my life and the lives of these people are so different that I would leave the book entirely.  What I want to focus on is how this book becomes such a good vehicle for projecting my experience into it – or for informing my parallel – though very different - experience.  I think that the author’s ability to stay very close to the surface of the thoughts of the characters – and to provide the details of their lives so that the context in which those thoughts occur are so clear (this book is better than 400 pages – and the plot could be enumerated in a paragraph), that we begin to make the associative connections – to understand how the thoughts are arising.  And our thoughts (or at least mine), I think, begin to run parallel to the characters, and that, in turn, leads those thoughts to start tapping into our own associative networks.  We begin to have a profoundly empathic experience with the characters – not just appreciating their experience as it is presented, but resonating on a deeper, personal level as we feel the tendrils of their lives reaching into our own.

There was a recent presentation here in town about empathy as understood by a philosopher and an analyst.  The philosopher talked about a variety of empathic stances – and spent much of her presentation describing perspective taking.  I found perspective taking – seeing the world through someone else’s eyes – as a necessary but not sufficient component of empathy.  The analyst described empathy as a much deeper resonance – feeling what the patient is feeling – as a deeper kind of knowing of the patient’s experience (he was talking about psychoanalytic empathy proper).   I like that definition better.  I think perspective taking can inform empathy but true empathy goes well beyond that, but I suspect that it is not as pure as the analyst would have us believe.

I’m not sure that we ever know another’s experience directly.  I don’t know that we can ever feel what another person is feeling.  I think this is part of the dilemma of the empath.  We too quickly say, “Oh, I know what you mean…” when we really don’t.  While my experience of the book paralleling my life enriched my experience – and made the book a much better read – it also distracted me from the book – necessarily.  I experienced the loneliness of the older brother as my loneliness, something that I think parallels his – and perhaps finds fuller expression in the woman who grew up thinking she was his daughter – and being her – though she was biologically his niece - but is not the same as his or his daughter's..

This book is about an important part of the American experience – the experience of being an immigrant – a stranger in a strange land – but I think it is much more essentially American than that – it is about having the freedom to create your own life – to pursue happiness.  That pursuit is an incredibly complicated matter, and we are haunted by the events that occurred before we immigrated – when we are travelling from another continent and when we are making the transition from living within a family whose rules and mores you follow to the continent of seeming autonomy where you can, more or less, chart your own path.  It is not just because the older brother ends up in the States, bringing his wife and daughter/niece with him, that this is a story about the American experience – in fact it is a story about the American experience because it is a story about something deeply and universally human as played out in our society – the ways in which our freedoms allow us to pursue happiness largely blinded to the forces that are actually driving us.  And yet, paradoxically and strangely – and long after the fact – we can get a handle on them, appreciate them, and, if we are lucky, carve a new direction – use our freedom to find a new fate, one that may bring us closer to a destination we would choose.

The reflections on empathy raise another issue, present in the last paragraph.  Can we truly experience the internal world of another or are we always relating their experience to our own.  I think my wish to have this book be an "American" book - not to read about "foreign" experiences, is a wish to find a common link - not to feel tossed into a place where I don't know the language and don't have cultural references that I rely on to orient me.  Psychaoanalysis is an attempt to bridge the huge gap that separates us from each other.  We gain some insight into the working of another mind through closely listening to it, we also find parallels between our own experience and those of others, and, in the analytic situation and in a story well told, we also come to better understand the other's exerience through living through a part of it with him or her.    

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