Gautam Basu Thakur, an associate professor of English, published an article titled “This Elaborate Make Belief of Imperfection: Nonsense, Excess, and Ab-sense in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol” in Jadavpur University Essays and Studies volume XXXIII, Special Issue on Literature and Lacan.
Published by the English department of Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, Jadavpur University Essays and Studies is one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in India.
Basu Thakur’s contribution to this special issue examines the nonsense writings of the twentieth-century Bengali poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Sukumar Ray (1887-1923). Basu Thakur argues that Ray’s “nonsense” represents worlds where the grip of logic is tenuous, meaning-making is impossible, and intersubjective communication non-existent. Yet this subject-depreciating universe is paradoxically responsible for producing readerly enjoyment. Readers enjoy Sukumar’s nonsense for its slanted representations of the real condition of being as marked by the radical negativity of the impossible or impassable.