Modern Bengali language poet Jibanananda Das’s short poem, “The Hunt” has been described as bitterly ironic yet appropriate to utter in especially benighted times (Radice 2003):

“…To warm their bodies through the cold night, up-country menials kept a fire going

In the field – red fire like a cockscomb blossom,

Still burning, contorting dry asvattha leaves.

Its color in the light of the sun is no longer that of saffron

But has become like wan desires of a sickly salik bird’s heart.

…

All night long a sleek brown buck, bounding from sundari through arjun forests

In starless, mahogany darkness, avoids the cheetah’s grasp.

He has been waiting for this dawn.

Down he came in its glow,

Ripping, munching fragrant grass, green as green pomelo.

Down he came to the river’s stinging, tingling ripples,

To instill his sleepless, weary, bewildered body with the current’s drive,

To feel a thrill like that of dawn bursting through the cold and wizened

womb of darkness,

To wake like gold sun-spears beneath this sky of blue and

Dazzle doe after doe with beauty, boldness, desire.

 

A strange sound.

The river’s water red as macaka flower petals.

Again the fire crackled – red venison served warm.

Many an old dew-dampened yarn, while seated on a bed of grass beneath the stars.

Cigarette smoke.

Several human heads, hair neatly parted.

Guns here and there. Ice, calm, guiltless sleep.

I wouldn’t say what’s going on here amounts to false consciousness, not either on the part of the buck or the ‘up-country menials.’ To say so would demonstrate an adherence to a propaganda model in that any Marxist account has long been appropriated by mass media and private commercial interests. Besides which, merely to point to false consciousness is not nearly as penetrating an analysis as it once may have seemed. Now it seems more accurate to interpret such misdirection and/or misrecognition as the very condition allowing for actualization of possibility in a historical sense. Yet without the aid of nuance even that reading seems crudely to circle back on the cunning of reason that made of Napoleon a useful idiot.

So what accounts for the dissatisfaction within the poem, for poet and for reader? What makes this a bitter, ironic work? If the opening line — “Sky, the soft blue of a grasshopper’s belly” — cues the New Age motto ‘as above, so below,’ to read this faithfully as a disillusionment narrative seems fine, but nowadays somehow incomplete, as if to say the jig is up with the very notion of cosmic fate as well.

What the poem seems to accomplish quite effectively is the marking out of a distance in a way that speaks to the modern angst of self-referentiality, a fatal flaw in logic that Bertrand Russell is said to have flagged in a letter to Frege (Byrd 1994, 277). Irving Wohlfarth revives this question in his essay marking the 1992 centenary of Walter Benjamin’s birth:

“What, then, are we to make of our revolutionary chance – that of a geopolitical conjuncture which allows for no more revolutionary transformations, except possibly those that are confined to catching up with the bourgeois revolutions of yesteryear? The more pointed question which confronts us here is whether we – but who are we? – can extract from this conference the modest opportunity it affords…”

C. Gupta writes that Jibanananda Das was Bengal’s most important poet of the post-Tagore era and that his work signaled an “anguished awareness of modernity” for Bengali poetry (2006). In “The Hunt,” his antipathy for the men portrayed is hard to miss. Independently of his permission, though, can it be claimed that we are looking on a class of men who have seized on some revolutionary chance in the Benjaminian sense of actuality? Can their fire be likened to a “metaphysical hearth” around which we can “still actually warm ourselves,” that Nietzschean ‘old fire’ from which “we all still live” (Wohlfarth)? Unless such a possibility only ever was intended to be the mark and the arrival of the recession of a prior permissibility, I think few would agree that the poem rekindles a revolutionary fire, though it might speak to an economizing of its last sparks to reach this far-flung corner.

Rather it seems a certain kind of conceit is put into question. That is, if the action of the hunters signifies a ‘blessed’ state in which man is the ultimate beneficiary of nature’s sacred mantle (“Guns here and there. Icy, calm, guiltless sleep”), this blessedness seems to be denied to both nature as depicted and poet, the latter two forming a set or class that suffer the assault and its witnessing. The distinction between this ‘we’ and the actors who are free to act with an icy calmness rings familiar with what American politicians say after every fresh incident of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil: ‘That’s not who we are.’

Byrd has described ‘self-justifying recursivity’ as an infinite regress marking a definitive modern event. Das’s poem allows for the recognition of this in a sense that offers an alternative narrative to the notion of a pre-authorized founding act of violence. If such an act marks an infinite regression that reverberates into an infinite number of micro-aggressions, what’s being traced out is a vicious circle, however ‘domesticated’ this may seem. More refined but still cruel, by its own ‘logic’ nothing can be learned from this tracing. The bitter irony of “The Hunt,” then, resides in the realization of a fallen state that, owing to a technologically mediated condition, only feels like a blessing.

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