The Fragmented Self in Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man or Dastan-e-Lapata: Where the Narrator and Protagonist Intersect
Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man focuses in on the trials and tribulations — or perhaps, the lack thereof — of the protagonist, Zamir Ahmed Khan. Readers are presented with layers of the aforementioned protagonist’s being which remain in conflict with one another leaving him always unsettled, disoriented and lost in his own thoughts; so much so that inaction grips him as tight as a tourniquet, paralysing him to such an extent where his outbursts become his only real escape. Both the above-stated are alluded to in the first few pages of the novel in fact, with him “twisting his trunk and limbs into all kinds of contortions” and him not understanding — or answering — when Doctor Crocodile asks for his name (Ehateśāma et al. 11, 9). This paper will attempt to ascertain the nature of the protagonist’s conflicted self, consequently putting forth the claim, that the same has arisen out of the sheer fragmentation between his ego, superego, and id.
The superego as conceived of and explored by Sigmund Freud, consists of — among many other defining facets — “social feelings” being predicated upon “identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal [superego]”; the “injunctions and prohibitions” that a person’s upbringing or society imposes on them remaining “powerful in the ego ideal … in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship”; and the superego “as the representative of the internal world, of the id” (Freud, and Berasaluce 18). Zamir Ahmed Khan’s interactions with Doctor Crocodile illustrate the workings of his superego. The narrator assumes the role of his preconscious superego when the Doctor asks him to “[g]o ahead” and explain what had been ailing him. Just as he is about to begin explaining having uttered the words “’Doctor Sahib’” he stops, and the entirety of the following paragraph descends into him pondering over the problem of how to go about describing “with any clarity what he wanted to say”; that too in the third person in the guise of the narratorial voice, all the while antithetically, expounding in great detail of what ails him. Since it is alluded to, that he stops speaking out loud right after he begins; that the reader is only provided with “what he wanted to say”; not to mention, it never being stated what information the Doctor received upon having “listened very closely to what he had to say” instead proceeding to ask him a completely unrelated question; therefore all this points to the reasonable conclusion that the protagonist doesn’t speak in this exchange of what ails him (Ehateśāma et al. 7). The aforementioned contradiction would also imply that he is unaware even of the ‘little’ he comprehends of his problem.
As Anna Freud writes in her book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, the “contents [of the superego] are for the most part conscious” but only remains as such, that is, of being perceptible to the subject themselves, “in the state which it produces within the ego: for instance, when its criticism evokes a sense of guilt” (18). An exact example of this, rears its head, when the protagonist berates himself, having “only himself to blame for speaking without thinking” when he inadvertently likening the Doctor — out loud — to a crocodile. In this act of cursing himself, what is to be witnessed is the conscious superego in action. Another example comes in the form of him questioning if he had ever worked hard at the “Treasure Trove” in the form of a “little voice teased him whenever he feigned innocence” — the “voice” here being that of the conscious superego — going on pose another question — this one quite poignantly being “[w]hat happened to your moral compass?” (Ehateśāma et al. 6, 16). The narrator assumes this inner exchange as well, although the distinction lies in Zamir Ahmed Khan being privy to the same. Anna Freud goes on to state that, “[n]evertheless, our picture of the superego always tends to become hazy when harmonious relations exist between it and the ego” (18). And again, in examples mentioned above and the protagonist’s inner ramblings which follow the Doctor’s question regarding what he does for a living, these “harmonious relations” are to be found. His ego and superego are in agreement over what needs to be done, of what needs to be communicated, if only for a moment followed inevitably by a rejection of the same in light of his perception that the Doctor must not be “interested in … all that he’d been through, and had no time for his tale of woe” (Ehateśāma et al. 9). Thus, this rejection — which amounts to a confrontation between the superego and ego — results in making him aware of his current chunk of rambling; aware of his preconscious superego. This is further attested to by the fact that, he — or rather, his superego — is able to articulate “something shifting between his body and soul, a slipping” and do so in the process of another such slip taking place (Ehateśāma et al. 7); adding to which, his (the protagonist’s conscious self) supposed inability to detect the same after it has occurred. This disjunction is succinctly encased and visible in the following quote: “his thoughts broadcast on one channel while the other emitted nonstop chitchat with the doctor” (Ehateśāma et al. 5).
In accordance with the framework presented in the course of this paper, the logical step would be to uncover how in the text, does the protagonist’s unconscious superego make itself known. One such moment occurs when Zamir Ahmed Khan ponders over why the auto rickshaw driver had regarded him with “so much courtesy”. He speculates that the driver might have known him but fails to recognize the former, and after having “racked his brain for a long time”, still doesn’t remember him as Shaukat “who had [once] worked in his father’s sawmill, who would fetch him magazines on his instruction “when he was younger”. Once it starts “to gnaw at him” he terminates this endeavor to remember (Ehateśāma et al. 17, 18). Therefore, it is evident that the memory of Shaukat still exists somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind and since it clearly is neither consciously available to him nor can it be extracted from somewhere in his preconscious mind, given that he spends a copious amount of time in trying to unearth the same; and so, the only “institution” we are left with, which could harbor this memory would be that of the unconscious superego (Freud 18). To prove that it is indeed the second part to the name of the aforementioned “institution” that is, ‘superego’ is where this memory would reside, and not within perhaps, the id (it cannot lie within the domain of the ego as the memory is neither consciously or preconsciously available) the following turns out to be enough: seeing that “no external vicissitudes can be experienced or undergone by the id, except by way of the ego … [n]evertheless it is not possible to speak of [such] direct inheritance in the ego”, where “direct inheritance” refers to external information obtained from experience (Freud, and Berasaluce 19).
Works Cited
Ehateśāma, Mañzūra et al. the tale of the missing man: a novel / Manzoor Ahtesham; translated from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark. 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2018. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and Andrea Jones Berasaluce. The Ego and the Id. 1923. Pdf.
Freud, Anna. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. 6th ed., Hogarth Press Ltd., 1968. eBook.
