The End may be Near but so is the Beginning: An Ecological Reading of the Proxemics of Death in the Fictions of Pira Canning Sudham Stephen Conlon Textual Overview This essay offers a reading of Pira Canning Sudham’s Shadowed Country (2004). All direct quotations from Sudham’s work are referenced in parentheses only by a page number from this novel. The text of this novel absorbs other, previously published, fictions and non-fictions written by Sudham. As the reader of this essay may not be familiar with the prior versions or lives of these texts, it is necessary to provide here a brief contextual overview of them. The body of Shadowed Country includes two major sections. The first is titled Monsoon Country and the second is The Force of Karma. The text of Monsoon Country was first published in 1993 and later reformed and re-published in 2002 before being again reformed and reborn in Shadowed Country. The second major section is a reformation of The Force of Karma (2002 ). The argument offered in this essay is that a critical awareness of these texts in their prior incarnations may help the reader understand that Sudham’s Buddhist and literary approach to the theme of death in Shadowed Country is embodied as a textual metaphor in the way he creates new fictions out of the bodies of his already published works. While many non-fiction writers may change their texts as second or third editions, this willingness to transform his fictions is a distinguishing characteristic of Sudham the factionalist who incorporates in a seemingly incorporeal form his fictions and non-fictions in subsequent writings in a re-creative way that makes sense once his Buddhist approaches to death are understood. The mutability of his texts is apropos in his work in the context of his concerns with how things may (or may not) change in the material world of Thailand and in that world as it is metamorphosed in his work. For a Buddhist, the birth and death of texts is conceivable. So is the idea that as a text is incorporated into another text, both texts change in a way that suggest the unfolding of a lotus: as texts are reborn, new information that was previously buried in either the texts’ prior lives or the writer’s experience is brought to the reborn textual surface. To mark this rebirth, the author has also expanded or metamorphosed his name, adding “Canning” to it for Shadowed Country, suggesting the rebirth of the author as much as of the work. Introduction To a Western reader, Pira Canning Sudham’s novel Shadowed Country may seem to represent death in a culturally alien way. Sudham’s approach to the experience of death, unsentimental and detached as it is, does not offer the reader the opportunity to share through empathy or sympathy the central character of the novel, Prem Surin’s death experiences. The distance between Prem and those who die seems emotionally neutral if not cold. There is no dwelling on the moment of death or any introspection on the meaning of the experience itself. The novelist often only registers the fact that a person has died; and this usually is conveyed to the reader after the fact in terms of the narrative time. The deaths witnessed by Prem, of those who have shaped his experience and been close to him, do not lead him to any Hamlet, Lear, Othello or Cleopatra moments, there are no Antony-like orations or reflections on the glory of the dead. Such impassioned moments of eulogy, while in place or appropriate in a Christian Western tragic experience of death, are foreign to the Thai experience where funerals are silently experienced except for the chanting of Pali scriptures by the monks. Death in the West seems to be a time to turn back to the life of those who have died; but for the Thai, the moment of death is understood as a time for the dead to move on into the between, the time-space through which the dead move towards their next life. Sudham is conscious of this difference and how it will shape his intended Western readers as he writes his novel in English. He opens Shadowed Country with a prologue in which the thoughts of the dying Marquess of Wealdon are couched in terms of what a Western reader would be familiar with when thinking of the death of a major character in a novel. Wealdon is on his death bed, lying “fretfully” enervated by “voices and images of things past” in an echo of Shakespeare’s Sonnet (XXX) as much as of the Scott Moncrief translation of Marcel’s Proust’s novel of memory and time as The Remembrance of Things Past. Wealdon’s dying moments are filled with a clinging regret for the loss of his children and the sentiments he feels when he recalls times with them which failed to deliver the happiness he hoped for. He addresses his dead son in the second person, as he echoes Lear’s “nothing comes of nothing” response to his daughter Cordelia: Gerald, I planted those rhododendrons and azaleas for you and yours to enjoy and to walk on a carpet of bluebells. Alas… It came to nothing. Nothing at all. (24) He is filled with anger and attachment when he remembers the death of his children in India where he worked in the Raj: But now I wouldn’t even go near the damned trees he planted to remind us of that God-forsaken country. It’s bad enough for me just to think of Anne and you both buried there. They gave me some dubious reasons as to why they would not let me bring you back…Health? Political? (24) This dramatic monologue addressed to the dead goes on until he dies, alone and in pain: At this point, the unattended cardiac patient gaped, gasped and convulsed, making a vain attempt to breathe. A moment later, the long-suffering Marquess passed out of our troublesome world. (26) In this, the only passage in the novel where death is described in terms of the dying person’s immediate physical experience, Sudham offers this image of dying as an entrée to his novel; it activates the schemata of the Western reader of the novel written in English with a number of familiar cultural elements related to death which stress the English or Western frame of reference in which Wealdon lives and dies. Much of the bitterness and clinging exhibited by Wealdon explains his bad karmic forces that will lead to his birth again as a lowly Esarn peasant. The sentiments and sensibilities enervate Wealdon’s death. But the expectations evoked by such a representation are deliberately disappointed by Sudham in his narrative of the life of Prem Surin, the reincarnation of the Marquess of Wealdon who grows up as a peasant in Esarn, the poorest part of Thailand, and inherits part of Wealdon’s estate as he works off the karma Wealdon had brought onto himself in his colonial service when he massacred hundreds of Indians. Through the frame of the prologue, Sudham establishes how far apart Wealdon and Prem are: the world of an English aristocrat in the nineteenth century and the world of an Esarn peasant in the twentieth century are related through the experience of reincarnation. The connection is not dwelt on by Sudham; it is meant to be understood by the reader who is aware of the Buddhist frame-of-reference in the novel. And this experience is meant to be understood and felt by the reader as a natural thing; not as a magical device that makes the narrative exotic or spectacularly post-modern in the way say Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) works through the co-incidence of many Indian children being born at precisely the same moment when India and Pakistan separated from the English empire at midnight. At a deeper level of cultural significance, the two novelists’ visions are even more alien to each other. While Rusdie’s Western novel of India represents the birth of a new land free from its colonial past, Sudham’s work looks at a land dying under the forces of a corrupt oppression which is turning the world of the novel into a wasteland. Rushdie’s world is that of fertility myth; Sudham’s is more that of the quest undertaken by a hero which will eventually lead to a just reuniting of things that were falling apart in colonial India. The novels of Rushdie and Sudham seem worlds apart; Rushdie’s myth revolves around the magical element of time while Sudham’s is grounded in the typical cultural space of the Thais. The linearity of Rushdie’s novel seems alien to the polychronic sense of time and space in Sudham’s vision. The bringing together of Muslim and Hindu characters and experience in Rushdie is not matched in Sudham’s novel where the world of the novel is more a blend of animism and Buddhism. These differences seem to stem from the different perspectives of the two novelists. Rushdie sees things as an English writer while Sudham writes as a Thai. For all the strangeness of Rushdie’s magic realist narrative, his work is culturally closer to the experience of a Western reader than is Sudham’s. A reader can enter or access the more post-modern logic of Midnight’s Children without a deep understanding of Islam or Hinduism but a reader cannot enter the narrative space of Shadowed Country, its plotting and characterization, without a deep feel or sense for the ways things are in Thailand. While Rushdie relies on a first person narration to bring the reader into the mind of his characters who telepathically read each other’s minds, Sudham’s third person narration, even with its strong autobiographical presences, allows Sudham to establish a distance between the reader, the writer and the written text. The foregrounding of the English setting and its Anglo-Saxon attitudes in the Prologue to Shadowed Country suggests that Sudham is aware of the distance of his reader from what will follow in the novel in terms of how Prem will experience his life and the deaths of those around him. The expectations of the Western reader are evoked, only to be challenged by the experience of reading the novel. The representation of death in Shadowed Country is organically related to Sudham’s methods of composition and to the roles he sees for himself as much as for his hero Prem as a shaman, a teacher, an artist and a reincarnated person. The transitions between these various lives are major organizing forces in the novel’s narrative voice. To understand the ways Sudham works, the reader needs to have more of a personal sense of the experience of life in Thailand than the reader needs of India to enter, for example, Rushdie’s world. Much of this difference stems from the reader’s degree of familiarity with many of the schemata the two novelists draw on in their work. An English reader of some breadth would know of the ways of Indians but not so much of the Thais. The distance between the reader and the text is not an accidental fault of the novel; it is one of the novel’s liet motifs To understand this proxemics of the novel, its representation of distance, it is necessary to place the novel in its own cultural and historical contexts that go far beyond the stereotype of Thailand as the Land of Smiles; there is much more to Thailand and to Thai attitudes than meets the casual eye of an accidental tourist or reader of Western pulp novels set in Thailand or Asia for that matter. Without a knowledge of, or at least a familiarity with these schemata, a reader may often feel alienated from the responses of the characters in the novel who, because of their differences to the ways a Western reader would interpret the Thai world, may seem distant, artificial or cold; even unrealistic, because of the characters’ lack of psychological attachment to the world they live in. The closeness we have been accustomed to feeling with the text of a novel in the West is not the same as the relationship between a Thai reader or writer in English. How a Thai understands the patterns of life and death are nothing like the patterns or ways of understanding a Western reader has experienced. After describing Thai experience, this essay will look at the ways death structures the writing of Sudham, not in Western terms of finality and permanence, but in Thai terms of flux and impermanence. A Western need for closure and for a strong sense of a fixed terminus or ending is challenged in Shadowed Country by Sudham’s alien, un-Western approach to living and writing. If the reader can overcome his or her prejudices and experience the novel in a different way, the reader may learn much about the art of dying as a way off the wheel of suffering, attachment and the need for permanence in one’s life which we in the West seem to understand in terms of our notion of Self or Ego. Once such an experience of reading can be attained, the reader may find that Sudham’s claim to significance is that his work offers a spiritual path of liberation from the oppressive presence of death’s shadow and from the commensurately oppressive demythologizing ways we have read fiction in the West as an unreal and distant thing that bears no immediate relation to the life we live in the real world. Cultural Space and the Place of Death in the Thai Mind Thai everyday experience is much more shaped by forces that have been downplayed in the West since the time of the Enlightenment with the power of the logos over the mythos. The world, as observed by Mulder (1989), is split between different forces of power; the often chaotic powers of the spirit world (umnart) and the moral force of the mother, the teacher and others (khuna). This division of the world is as much Buddhist as it is animist. The sing saksit (supernatural ceremonial) powers of the spirit world are amoral, contradictory and chaotic. They are to be ameliorated or influenced by right ceremony, offerings. These powers have no logical rules or reasons for influencing things in one’s life. They are whimsical. The person who deals with such power is distant to it; there is no personal relationship between the power and the person. One’s world is divided into local, district and wider powers, each with its own zone of proximal distance from the person. This power is not to be confused with itiphon, the dark power of gangsters and criminals, though the danger of offending a person who is itiphon is similar to the danger of offending animistic power. Both can bring about death. The major difference is that the umnart power is always mollified with the right ceremonial initiative of the person who wants to placate that power. The power of the local spirits, the praphuum, is limited by the distance of their power reach. Once one moves away from their place of power, their power diminishes. One then moves into the zone of another power. These zones also shape one’s life spaces. The ultimate threat of chaos is death, where one goes through the various cycles of hell (narok). To ensure one’s safety in this chaos, one follows certain death rituals (phithii anamongkhun). These powers are not of the dead; they are supernatural spirits that exist beyond the natural world. The animistic world view divides social space into the inside and the outside; one is inside or outside the power zone of the spirit. In social terms, this division informs the way a Thai speaks of two types of friends: eating friends and dying friends (pern gin har ngai and pern die har yak). Dying friends are one’s inner family while one’s eating friends are in the public sphere outside one’s intimate personal space. The outside world is the world of power, flux and instability while the inside world is the moral (khuna) world of the mother and the teacher who care for one. In Thai culture, the teacher (crue, the Pali form of “guru”) often has more moral authority than a parent. The teacher has no need of saksit power, as his or her moral force protects the teacher from any animistic influences. While power is supernatural, moral force is natural. Khuna is the moral obligation one has to one’s teacher or parent. There can be no sin (bap) in disobeying supernatural power, but sin is the ingratitude one may display towards one’s teacher or mother, one’s inner circle. Khuna is the devotion given by a teacher or a student to a child. It too is ritualistic. The mother gives love while the teacher gives knowledge. Both enable the child to lead a moral life that will have karmic benefits. The mother and teacher are to sacrifice themselves, their happiness and well-being for the good of those in their care. By doing this, there is a bond of moral debt between the child and the mother or teacher. This bond is the source of the order of one’s life which is balanced by the chaotic flux of life outside the inner circle. The purest form of order for a Thai is Buddhism. This order is beyond the order of human relationships marked by passion and prejudice (kilesa or defilement). Buddhism is the way to truth; it is the highest form of goodness (khun) understood as wisdom, virtue and compassion. This goodness is the source of liberation. By making merit (thumboon), one accumulates power as merit to protect oneself against the saksit powers of umnart. The contradictions and conflicts between the inside and outside worlds, between umnart and khuna, are not resolvable. This view leads to a belief in the chaotic world around one which seems to blend with the Buddhist notion of flux or impermanence (annicata). In a world of flux, when one clings to things to seek ownership or permanence, one is asserting that one has a self or ego (atta). In such a state of illusion or maya, one clings (upadana) to things, including the belief in one’s ego which leads one to believe in the possession of things that are actually defilements (saniyojana) that lead to selfishness mamamkara ( possessiveness) which is moha (delusion). The person who is clinging to things for the sake of permanence is in a state of dukka (suffering) that can only be broken when he or she realizes the annata (not-self). Without annata, one is in a state of ignorance (avijja) and selfishness; one cannot accept the sunnata or voidness of all things including the concept of a self. When one is in a mindful state (samadhi) of sunnata, one realizes a state of coolness or nirodha. The Thais value a cool heart (jai yen) and not the hot heart or jai ron which causes one to lose face by being attached to the way things happen which produces only dukkha or suffering. Only in a cool mind may one reach nirvana (nibbana in Pali) and so be free of dependence on birth, decay and death (jaramaraya). Samsara or the transmigration of the soul or spirit occurs throughout one’s life. Each day, the self dies and is born by another form of the self. In this way, the self is understood as impermanent. The karma of yesterday produces the results one experiences today. The wheel of life and death occurs in one’s life spans, not only in the death of the body as such. Death-in-life is a closer analogy for samsara than reincarnation as understood in the West as rebirth. Samsara is a state of flux, not permanence and is ego-free, selfless. This value is linked to the bunkhun (moral goodness) of the mother and the teacher who in sacrificing themselves create khuna or morality. Sorrow, despair, pain and suffering exist because one is still under the delusion that one’s self is a permanent thing that actually can remain the same throughout one’s life. In Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree (1962), Buddhadasa Bhikkhu explains the problem created by a desire for birth or death: If we really understand Dharma we’ll shake our heads; we’ll want neither birth nor death. However, ordinary people don’t want to die. They only want to be born. They want birth without death, and what’s more, they want eternal life. Or, if they must die, they want to be reborn. This indeed is grasping and clinging. In short, the person born suffers one way and the person dying suffers another way. Only when there is neither birth nor death, when there is sunnata, will there be an end to dukkha. (1962: 118-119) To be free from birth and non-birth is to be void, without a self or ego. He points out that at the moment of death, the mind should be free of desire or clinging: When the time of death has truly come, let this feeling [coolness] be present. You should remember that when close to death the mind will gradually slip away. As the body runs down near its end, awareness will gradually disappear. You will forget more and more until you forget everything. You won’t know what time it is, whether it’s day or night; you won’t be able to tell where you are or whose house you are in; you won’t even be able to remember your name. But the awareness that nothing is worth having can stay on as the mind’s companion to the very end. Volunteer for the remainderless quenching! … With this skilful means, the mind will be able to dissolve itself into the sunnata which is nibbana. (1962: 124-125) This quenching of desire comes with a correct understanding of the void there is in place of the illusion of a self. Vipassana is the clear insight into the true nature of things, the what’s what of life and death. Without this insight, one will be in the wilderness of vattasamsara which are the endless cycles of wandering, birth and death. When one has jati or ego-birth, one is exposed to the accompanying delusion of death; there is a self that is prone to die and this self clings to life or death. In such a mind, one lacks the insight to accept the voidness of one’s self. The worlds of umnart and khuna are not understood as in opposition; they are blended in the Thai world view as complimentary contradictions. While Buddhism deals with the world inside oneself, the saksit rituals deal with the world outside. The division of the world is between the inside and the outside. Order is not the victory of the Buddhist inside over the chaotic outside; it is not a question of Buddhist science or philosophy prevailing over an animistic prior world. The contradictions that exist are part of the world; not to be resolved logically but to be kept in balance. Death, the ultimate force that threatens or embodies chaos, is not a thing but a transitional space or distance, a process which is interpersonal, not ideational. Like power, death has no “cause” as it is a saksit force. There is no moral aspect to death. Such power cannot be controlled or explained away (demythologized). In Keys to Natural Truth (1988), Buddhadasa Bhikkhu considers the types of language we need to understand the world and dharma: Everyday language is based on physical things, and on experience accessible to the ordinary person. Being based on the physical rather than the spiritual, it serves only for discussion of physical, wordly matters and situations. It serves only for the tangible things perceived under ordinary everyday circumstances. By contrast, Dhamma language has to do with the mental world, with the intangible, non-physical world. (1988: 16) While Bhikkhu does not explicitly say that the physical world is the world of saksit and that the Dharma language is for the khuna, the Thai view of the physical world as saksit, which is echoed in the Buddhist view of the world of dukkha, parallels this contradiction. There is a bilingualism in the approach used by Bhikkhu which stems from the Pali language used by Thai Buddhism and the Thai language rooted in an older Tai language used in the everyday world. But it would be wrong to see the two languages as totally separate from each other. What makes the Thai language of death so rich is the roots of many Thai everyday words in the Pali Buddhist texts, the Tripitaka. By speaking everyday Thai, one is often unconsciously using words with a Tai husk and a Pali kernel. In other words, the Thai language is a blend of the everyday and the spiritual, the animistic and the Buddhist. It would be too hasty a demythologization to separate the two by suggesting that the saksit, animistic meanings are the mythical while the Buddhist meanings are the logical and that the task is to decide which meaning is to be used. Such a monochronic solution is un-Thai. There is no either-or choice here, but rather a “both”. If this is the case, then we must avoid seeing the issue of the language of death, our specific focus here, in terms of monochronic structural stages between superstition and science, primitive logic/ science and modern science, as Levi-Strauss (1962: 16-22) sees the relationship between myth and reason. In the Thai world, the contradictions exist and are unresolveable. Both worlds exist together, side by side, polysynchronically. For Bhikkhu, we should be speaking both languages by referring to a sutta from the Summyatta nikaya: It is essential always to interpret the Buddha’s teaching in terms of Dhamma language as well as in terms of everyday language. Both meanings must be considered. Please take careful note of the following passages: Appamatto ubho atthe adhiganhati pandito Ditthi dhamma ca yo attho, yo ca’ttho samparayuko Atthabhisamayadhiro pandito ti pavuccati The wise and heedful person is familiar with both modes of speaking; the meaning seen by ordinary people and the meaning which they can’t understand. One who is fluent in the various modes of speaking is a wise person. (1988: 17) Bhikkhu stresses the importance of not choosing one meaning at the expense of the other: “A discerning person must consider both meanings or modes of speaking and not just one of them alone.” (1988: 17) In a sense, this double meaning, or double voice, is a form of yoga, understood as yoking things together. In this sense, there is a metaphorical organization of meaning. This is a specifically Buddhist approach to language, semantics, voice and poetics. When we place this linguistics in the context of the Thai world view discussed above, it may be suggested that the Thai view of the two contradictory worlds of saksit and khuna are built into the Thai language. In colloquial Thai, death (die) is a physical thing, but in Buddhism death is dukkha which comes from being trapped in the false binary opposition of ordinary semantic sense when we recognize good and evil: When there is no knowledge of good and evil, we can’t attach to them, we’re void and free of dukkha. Once we know about good and evil, we attach to them and must suffer dukkha. The fruit of that tree is this attachment to good and evil. This causes dukkha and dukkha is death, spiritual death. (1962: 101) The Pali voice in Thai language is heard along side the voice of the everyday words. They are inside each other. As a result, there remains a mythic presence, an ambiguity of voices which embodies this dialectical contradiction. Without going into the implications this dialectic has for teaching English in Thailand in detail (see Conlon 2009 for a discussion of this issue) the Thai approach to language is pertinent to the study of the work of Sudham as he writes his novels in a foreign language, English. The point in this essay is to stress that if one is to understand the approach to death embodied in Sudham’s language, one needs to reconsider many of the ideas we in the West associate with mythoi and logoi in order not to impose Western post-Enlightenment divisions which demand a choice between the two languages of saksit and khunna, or between Pali and Thai or Thai and English. In Sudham’s writings, there is the double voice of Lao and Thai which is related to the identification of the relationship between Prem the Esarn child and the country of Thailand under the shadow of which the land of Esarn is exploited. These issues are related to another theme in Sudham’s work: exile. Sudham’s hero Prem experiences the animistic world of Esarn and the Buddhist world of the wat (temple) in which he is schooled in Bangkok. He does not choose one over the other. Instead of René Gerard’s (1988) demythologization of death as a sacrifice ritual which works to protect the victim, and instead of Levi-Strauss’ view of death myths as taboos that classify the physical world, a more sympathetic approach to the ways a Thai may see the rituals of death is Ernst Cassirer’s: The original bond between the linguistic and the mythico-religious consciousness is primarily expressed in the fact that all verbal structures appear as also mythical entities, endowed with certain powers, that the Word, in fact, becomes a sort of primary force, in which all being and doing originate. (Language and Myth: 44-45) Cassirer locates this nexus of mythical thought and verbal thought in the power of metaphorical thinking (84). This needs to be expanded when discussing the double voice of Thai language in Shadowed Country. Whenever language has been used or changed, there is an implicit double mind at work. In the world of orality and myth, before language was written down, two or more people talked to each other in dialogue. This interpersonal exchange has always been open to contradiction. There is implicit in the act or art of dialogue a schizophrenic doubleness which is natural, not a disease or psychological barrier. (See Ong 1982: 68 for a discussion of the split between internal and external voices. See also Bakhtin (1984) for the double voice and its relationship to the dialogical function of writing.) To communicate is to be in two minds; one’s own and in the mind of one’s interlocutor. Dialogue is the yoking together of two minds or two world views. The discourse which embodies this dialogue holds both minds: that of the first person and the second person. It is not just two “I’s” speaking. The dialogue partners are sharing their worlds, blending them. In this sense, all speech has a metaphorical organization. Unless the dialogue partners recognize this, they will not understand that what they are doing when they turn-take or code-switch is experiencing a form of linguistic death. In terms of the Buddhist approach, death occurs at every moment in one’s experience, and this holds true for one’s language too. To stop talking or thinking in language is to die. When one starts to talk again, one undergoes a birth. At the heart of ritual and myth is the dialogue we make, with ourselves and each other. And that dialogue forms our narrative with a sense of an ending; we are talking in death and to death. In a way, language is a saksit ritual to control the chaos of an amoral world. But it is also a moral good (khunna) that allows us to move beyond the consciousness of death. The stories we tell to control death are mythoi. The telling of the story is a way to control death, to conquer it. Karen Armstrong (2005: 1) suggests that our creation of myth comes from our fear of death; we tell stories to explain death, the forces that threaten us in the world we experience in nature. What she could have said to extend this point is that the shaman, the artist, and the philosopher as teacher do this as they embody death for us in their various linguistic rituals. By absorbing death into language, we create mimetically a world in which the chaos of nature is embodied in a form which can be communicated to others. At the root of language, this force remains. The rhetorical practices of speech, writing, logic and grammar are all rituals we employ to order our mythic mind and to yoke together the amoral world of nature and the moral world of culture. When we try to divorce these worlds into science and art, reason and myth, we do violence to language and hide the truth that it still embodies, at least for humanists such as Cassirer: language is a magical ritual we practice unconsciously from the depths of our mind which remains undivided, even though it is in a schizophrenic state which is neither good nor evil. Patterns of Life and Death in the Textual Cycles of Shadowed Country Monsoon Country, the second part of Shadowed Country, opens with the hero Prem Surin’s birth. The village khamnan or headman notes that the child’s birth in the Year of the Horse is auspicious as achanai or achanaya, literary words for “horse” mean “intelligence or knowledge” (30). As a young child, Prem is withdrawn, almost autistic; he is silent and keeps his eyes closed. He is given the nickname of Tadpole by his family, but others call him the Mute. The other children in the village say he is as mute as a tree or a buffalo. This name is inauspicious in Thai as to call a person a buffalo or kwai is considered to be the worst insult with connotations of extreme stupidity. Prem’s first word is “look” (bueng) when he points to rain clouds, “grotesque shadows”, and sees that “rain was nigh” (36). In English the word “nigh” collocates heavily with the word “death” from the books of the Hebrew prophets and the Apocalypse of John. He is attracted by the beauty of the clouds as they changed “from form to form, shadow to shadow” (36). His sister Piang is upset as the wind rises when he utters his word and points. She thinks Prem has broken a taboo and tells Prem that he must not look at, listen to or speak about the “Power of Darkness” (37). But Prem has no fear of death (38). When he falls as he chases the village girls, as boys did in a primitive time (39), he starts to speak more, but his words are not in order. It is not until he falls into a lotus pond, with its collocations to the Buddha, and is near death that his speech starts to flow. The seer Tatip Henkai is consulted and barters with the local “mother ghost” Pramae who adopts Prem and so saves his life from “the jaws of death” and makes his life bearable in the living hell of his “tormented” (45) life in the village in Isarn. Tatip sees that Prem is not one of the villagers, “not one of us” (42), and that he is an outcast (42) from the West. From this point, Prem starts to see himself inside Etan, his buffalo, and so sees with Etan’s eye. What he sees is the corruption of the headman in the village which the other villagers refuse to recognize openly as they suffer from ignorance under the Power of Darkness (74). He is given another name, “Luke-pi” or child of the spirit or mother goddess. He also takes on the buffalo’s power of “dumb endurance” (109). When his teacher Kumjai sends him to Krueng Thep (the Celestial City or the City of Angels in Thai known as Bangkok in English) he is given yet another name, Luke-sith or Temple Boy (110). Away from Napo, Prem learns well, especially English, although he is punished at school and at university for asking his teachers questions. He is offered a scholarship to study in England. As he prepares for this third move in his life, he returns to Napo to take leave of his family. While there, Tatip Henkai, the village shaman, tells Prem “My end is nigh” (135). The pattern established by Sudham in the narrative is to focus on those moments in Prem’s life when he moves from one life to another. These are the khwan points in Thai life experience. (Others are becoming a monk, getting married, etc.) Physically, the khwan (747) is the soul or essence one has in the crown of the head. With each transition he gains a new name. He learns that he has changed; he sees that man sheds his skin like a snake and takes on a new identity (95). He thinks to himself about this pattern of chaos as he debates whether to sit for the university entrance examinations: Must I strive for higher learning? Prem pondered. It would be a pity to revert into the darkness after having done so well in the high school examinations. I have come this far. Alone, I boarded that train to come to the maze of this chaotic city. Now I am afraid of going further. I could not stop that train then as it took me away from my father and my teacher. The journey must continue. (113-114) To win a scholarship to England while he is at university, he has to distance himself from the 14th October 1973 Uprising. He is asked about his involvement by the scholarship board. He tells the board that he stayed at the Wat (Temple) to learn how to read a Pali script. But Sudham then enters Prem’s mind as he answers the question and we see the language of the Mute is different to his appearance to the “Judge” as he “projected a look of being absolutely harmless (125)): I wanted to rebel against every notion, every ounce of my blood that made me a Siamese, against the life of an obedient boy who had to behave, to be mindless and voiceless under the tyrannical suppression of the despots. On the other hand I am alive today because I have been obedient and because of my own lack of critical thinking and a political belief. Come with me, Rit said, and you will know what LIBERTY on an American coin means. But then Rit died along with hundreds of students, shot down by troops and tanks and helicopters. (129) Sudham has not narrated this uprising which occurred at an earlier time. Nor has he told the reader that Rit, Prem’s best friend at the Wat, was killed. We learn these things at a distance, in Prem’s memory as he is being interviewed for a scholarship to leave Siam. This is the first time in the novel that we learn of the death of someone close to Prem. It is not narrated in chronological time and is heavily contextualized in terms of Prem’s current position of being interviewed by the scholarship board. The emotion of anger is there, but not the sorrow for the loss of his friend. His external calmness is contrasted with the hot feelings he keeps inside. Much of this tension is a result of the fact that hee was not with Rit when he was murdered by the soldiers. This pattern of organization whereby the writer keeps back certain information in order to distance it from the reader is homologous to the way the writer re-organizes his fiction. The passages cited above are not in the earlier version of Monsoon Country. What we see is the new life of the story in Prem’s mindfulness. We are given italicized interior monologues which stress the space between Prem’s outside and inside worlds. This enters the new form of Monsoon Country when it is re-embodied in Shadowed Country where Prem is instructed in Vipassana by Pra Sungwian, the “venerable monk” who is his ajarn at the temple: Meditation or Vipassana is a form of mental culture to achieve mindfulness, clarity and knowledge. When you are mindful you know exactly what you are doing. You are mindful of your actions, your words, your thoughts and you see things clearly as they are. (115) This mindfulness is represented by Sudham in Prem’s increasing exposure to the reader through the interior monologues. Reading such passages after having read Monsoon Country in its earlier forms of life, the reader experiences a sense of the text being reborn as well as a sense that the earlier forms of the story were palimpsests under which the story now coming out to life were overwritten or submerged in the earlier lives of the text. This may be a form of the cycle of life and death that informs Sudham’s narrative method or strategy. The patterns of birth and death are not linear constructs; they are only seen when later events occur that bring the past back to life in ways that enable the reader to see the proxemic closeness of events from a Thai cultural perspective. Meaning or significance is generated through the repetition of the cycle, not by the chronologically linear development of a cause and effect pattern. The reader learns of things only when they become significant to Prem as he goes on his Vipisanna quest-journey for liberation through knowledge. Things that seem isolated in mundane time take on both saksit and khuna significance when they are experienced later under the impact of the force of karma. In the interview with the scholarship board, we see the student protest, the death of Rit and Prem’s change of life being yoked together: they give each other meaning by their proxemic relationship in Prem’s mindful state (Samadhi) during the interior monologue he experiences at the interview. We see why he is doing the things he does when he wants to leave the chaos of the city and the darkness of the shadow of Siam for England. Prem’s last meeting with the shaman Tatip represents the end of a cycle of twelve years from the time Tatip became his spiritual father by dedicating his new life to the Mother Goddess. The next time Tatip comes into the story is now, when he is dying as Prem is preparing to leave Napo, Isarn and Siam. When he returns to Napo, Prem learns of his teacher Kumjai’s fate as he has been driven out of the village and his school has been destroyed by his ex-students who accused him of being a communist. Prem is “drowning in a sea of pain” (131) when he learns of these events. What we as readers do not know yet, and will not learn for hundreds of pages, is that these events occurred as a result of the student uprising too. In his interior monologue, Prem addresses Kumjai in the second person: Teacher, teacher, you should be careful in giving out books to your students, and you should never tell anyone that they must try to reach for the light. Words cannot be eaten. (133) But he closes his monologue by talking of Kumjai in the third person: Remember, it’s a sacrifice you’re making, he once wrote. Could it be that he would be arming himself with truth, to speak truthfully on our behalf without fear? LIBERTY is a foreign word found on a coin a good-looking American man dropped in the palm of my hand, an irony coming from a free land to remind me that I have been living in fear under a despotic regime that Siam has had for decades. But it is the death of Rit, a fair boy from Chiangrai, and the disappearance of Kroo Kumjai that have made me understand fully the meaning of LIBERTY. (135) Three Characters This essay will look at the deaths of three male characters in Shadowed Country, each of whom seems to be offered as a type of authority or power figure: Tatip the shaman, Regnitz the artist, and Kumjai the teacher. All three of these characters function as surrogate father figures who play significant roles in Prem’s life and his learning processes. The biological father, the taciturn Kum, has little to do to help his son. How and why these three surrogate figures die seem to form a pattern in the narrative which points towards a repressed theme that may be unfolded in subsequent (expanded) iterations of the novel which seem to be linked to a grail-like ethos revolving around the Fisher King’s wound and the wasteland he reigns over. The complications evoked by the pattern of death revolving around only male characters who remain pure and die in moments that confirm their power are refracted through another theme; that of homosexuality and its attendant recognition of the Thai patriarchal social structure which must be left for a subsequent political discussion of Sudham’s work. Mothers, wives and lovers survive their men folk. The only female character who faces death is Prem’s lover Lizzy, who disappears from the narrative only to re-emerge as a D.E.A. agent who had to be spirited out of Thailand in the aftermath of a drugs operation in Pattaya. Her disappearance is also complex, coming as it does in terms of references to Wuthering Heights where Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance is represented in part in terms of absence and reunion on a spiritual level. This level of intertextuality will also have to wait for a subsequent discussion of Sudham’s Romantic vision. The Death of the Shaman The monologue addressed to his teacher segues into Prem’s last meeting with the shaman Tatip which occurs the day before he leaves Napo. The death of his only friend Rit and the fate of his teacher Kumjai are proxemically related to this meeting in terms of the textual space and time and the thematic significance of the three as a group in Prem’s life. This meeting represents the end of a cycle of twelve years from the time Tatip became his spiritual father by dedicating Prem’s new life to the Mother Goddess. The next time Tatip comes into the story is now, when he is dying as Prem is preparing to leave Napo, Isarn and Siam. Tatip’s first words to Prem at their last meeting are stammered out: “Very goo, good of you to co.come to say goo.goodbye to me, ‘luke-pi” (135). While these words may be the expected speech pattern of a man in pain as he dies, they take on another meaning for a reader of Monsoon Country (1993) where Prem is the one who stammers until he falls into the pond. This speech has been passed onto Tatip in this scene which has been unfolded or added in the Monsoon Country part of Shadowed Country. Tatip sees Prem’s premae hovering over him and observes, “She is looking kindly at me now, knowing tha.that my end is nigh.” (135) The pramae was not with Prem in Bangkok; she is only with him when he returns to the zone of her protection in Napo. Tatip’s echo of Prem’s thought that the “rain was nigh” (35) collocates the words “rain” and “end” (death). The reaction of the teenager who has been caring for the dying Tatip is significant; he wants to leave Prem and Tatip at the mention of the spirit and death. He does this by observing the Thai proxemic rule of gom hua by bending himself as he passes between them so that his head is lower than theirs’ as a sign of respect for invading the space between them. When he has moved three yards away, he stands to jump away: “he fled from pramae’s vision” (136) to “confirm the tale of the luke-pi” (136) passed on by his father to him when he was younger. Alone with Tatip, Prem feels the juxtaposition of their two visions: “the 20th century scholar who had been striving steadily forwards towards the light, succumbed to the lure of ancient mystique.” (136) Apart from the sense of movement and direction in Prem’s thought processes, there is the attraction (lure) of the ancient wisdom. Despite his education at university, Prem still feels that it is possible to move between the light (with its connotations of enlightenment) and the darker side, as connoted by the word “mystique”. There is a sense of privacy mixed with shame in Prem at this point; “But before asking the impinging question, he turned to look over both shoulders to see whether there was anyone listening.” (136). It is his bodily reaction which communicates his wavering intentions. The question that is said to be “impinging” is given a sense of proxemic movement too. The reader is not prepared for this question; it remains in Prem’s mind. Like the teenager who has moved out of the personal space between Tatip and Prem moments before, Prem senses that he must also make a physical gesture recognizing that his question too will impinge on Tatip’s space in the form of a verbal gom hua which is linked to the Thai concept of griengjai (an unwillingness to inconvenience a person with higher status). The pattern of physical distance between the two has been established already in this meeting: Prem “seemed to be glowing with an aura of health and holiness”, “in contrast to the dying” (136). Prem’s voice is clear and exact in its pronunciation of the Lao language while Tatip’s “wavering voice trailed off in the dark cavern of time.” (136). The juxtaposition of life and death felt by Prem is contextualized in the series of contrasts between age and youth, confident and wavering voices, reason and superstition, the present and the past. The distances evoked by these juxtapositions creates a sense of the malleable space between the two men in which Prem can move from the one life to the other. The duality in this is suggested by his looking over both his shoulders when he makes sure that no one else is impinging on their conversation. When he finally asks his “impinging question”, there is no concrete context for it: “What else could you see, Grandpa?” (136) Time, both narrative and chronological, is breached by the question as Prem refers back several years and nearly ninety pages of the novel to when Tatip tells him of his vision regarding Prem’s past life. Time for both men is polysynchronic. And the reader is meant to understand the context without any scaffolding being supplied by Sudham. Tatip tells Prem “I’ve almost forgotten now. It’s so..so long ago since I had a look.” (137). Prem nervously fidgets, looks around behind him again, and asked Tatip to look again. He knows that Tatip is dying, but wants to know what he sees. Tatip resists this at first: The weary soul and the youth locked eyes to test each other’s inner strength. Under the glare of Prem’s piercing pupils, the dying man yielded. (137) The violence of the space between them is registered in the proxemic language (“locked eyes” as in a battle, “strength”, “glare”, piercing” and “yielded”). The sense of a grail-like contest of strength, as in a rite of passage, is strengthened by what Tatip then does as he prepares to look back at Prem’s previous life. He “cupped” his hands “to symbolize a blossoming lotus flower” (137), thus suggesting not only “a votive offering in worshipping the Spirits of the Universe” (the animistic saksit powers that surround him in the village), but the legends of Buddha sitting on the lotus leaf in a pond and Prem’s falling into a lotus pond which led to Tatip’s intervention in his life ninety pages and twelve years before. Prem’s heart “thumped to the tempo of Tatip’s voice “chanting” of the “magical mantra” while Tatip’s lips “moved as if his life was ebbing away”. (137). Here, the saksit and the Buddhist elements are blended or flow together, as is suggested by the water imagery of “pond” and “ebbing”. Tatip forsees the end of the novel when he tells of how Prem will again meet some of those involved with his previous life in England and how he will live in his “grand old house” again, after he has “done go..good deeds to compensate for the bad karma” (138). As soon as he says this, he announces “now I must go” (138). Tatip dies in the middle of blessing Prem: “May pramae, your sacred mother goddess pro..protect you always…” (138). We then see Prem preparing the body and to tell the relatives of what has happened: Luke-pi closed the dilated eyes and the gaping mouth. Then he drew an old blanket over the body before leaving the hut. Having climbed down the ladder, he looked for the relatives of the dead to give them sad news. (138) Not “the dead man” or “the dead seer”; Tatip’s corpse is no longer that of a person. This is a Thai view of the dead, full stop. The generalized and almost euphemistic space left says much about this view of a dead person. This distance is prolonged in the next sentence when Prem “delayed his departure from Napo two more days in order to attend the funeral.” (138). Again, not “Tatip’s funeral” or “the funeral of the dead man”; just “the funeral”. The pattern in this death scene is one of absence, of words left out, of the empty spaces of language. We do not see any tears or sorrow in Prem. The news is “sad”, not Prem. Death is part of the cycle which Prem has just had an intense experience of with Tatip. His words are reported, not direct; we are not shown him telling the relatives of Tatip’s death: the death of his “grandpa” is distanced from us, as it is distanced from Prem. While this tone of silence is appropriate given the ritualistic circumstances of the scene, there is no awe or grief in Prem. He sees death in a different, Thai, way – as the completion of the ritual Tatip has just performed for him that links Prem’s past and future to the seer’s death vision. The khwan time of transition in which Prem leaves the village for England, is ritualistically marked by the ceremony of “the funeral” as such, not “Tatip’s funeral”. There is no sense of finality or ending. Instead, Tatip says that he must “go” with the implication that he is entering the next stage in the cycle of karma. Sudham feels no need to depict the funeral in detail. He implies that the funeral is not special as it occurs in less than three days after Tatip’s death. In Thai culture, at least three days are required for the ceremony, with a week being more common. The higher the status the dead person had in life, the longer the funeral rites. The short time frame here suggests that Tatip was not regarded as an exceptional person in the village. His function as seer is not experienced by any of the villagers as awesome or noble. His role as the village shaman is a matter of fact, a mundane thing. On a deeper level of culture, the representation of Tatip’s funeral would be irrelevant as the only thing left at a Thai funeral is the body of the dead; the mind has already left the body; it is not there to witness the funeral of its body. As a Thai, Prem would not consider it possible to talk to Tatip after he has died in the way Western people sometimes address the dead as if they were still present. In a similar way, neither Tatip nor Prem consider the possibility of Tatip talking to the Marquess of Wealdon, Prem’s former embodiment. The spirit of the Marquess is already in Prem’s body. It is no longer part of the body that was the Marquess’. Death of the Artist The death of the shaman Tatip marks a transition phase in the narrative: Prem leaves for Europe where he finds a new life when meets Dani Pilakol, a research fellow at the London School of Economics. Through Dani, Prem is invited to Germany where he meets the composer Helmut von Regnitz. The invitation comes at an auspicious time, when Prem (whose name means joy in Thai) is listening to the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, the libretto of which is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”. These details have been added since the 1993 edition of Monsoon Country. The invitation arrives at a nadir in Prem’s writing attempts: He wanted to be able to give Toon [his childhood sweetheart] a poem to celebrate her beauty and to uplift her weary heart from drudgery. He wished to remark on simple things that were beautiful and to give a few ballads and songs to a band of buffalo boys so that they could sing to praise the magical monsoon. Now he held a lot of conflicting ideas and had not been able to create those songs except bitter words in a foreign language to celebrate nothing but the pain and despair in the heart. Yes, it would be difficult now to go back to the desk to face that piece of paper on which idealistic words had been arrogantly written. What could one do with the mumbo-jumbo of words passed off as verse? (176-177) His poetry seems distant and empty to him; an idealistic and arrogant fraud. The narration of the episode at Heeringen where Prem witnesses the death of the composer Helmut is the most extensive one in the novel (177-214). It represents the first major crucible or watershed of Prem’s art where he is involved in the death of the artist Regnitz. With the composer’s son, Danny leaves his adopted foster father, Helmut, for a skiing holiday and asks Prem to look after the sick composer. (Note the changed spelling of the name suggesting corporeal impermanence, at least in the English language/ Latin script.This fluidity of the body is also sounded in Prem’s reference to Tatip as his grandfather quoted above in this essay.) Here a parallel is set up between Prem’s relationship with Tatip, his spiritual grandfather and Danny’s relationship with Helmut. In Shadowed Country, unlike in Monsoon Country (1993), Prem arrives in Germany as Luke-pi and as “the son of the mother goddess” (178). It “dawns on him” that Dani/ Danny (Dhani, a more orthodox Thai spelling, in the 1993 version) “could be a farang in the guise of a Siamese” (179). There is more modality in the 2003 version compared to Prem’s 1993 observation that “Dhani was in fact a farang in the guise of a Siamese” (1993: 169). Without making an exhaustive comparison of the many changes of words between the two versions of the episode, the point to be made is that Sudham sees his words as malleable, changeable, in a state of flux. While the death of Tatip is a new episode added in a macro way to Shadowed Country, the death of Regnitz is carried on from the earlier version and changed internally or in a more micro manner. By adding details about Prem’s spirit life in Napo, Sudham is stressing the relationship between the two deaths. There is a formal, ritualistic atmosphere in the composer’s house. Prem celebrates Gemütlich, a “rite of Christmas” (179), with Danny and the composer’s son before Helmut, in a candlelit room: A few minutes later, Herr Helmut von Regnitz made an appearance. Because the father moved rather slowly through the dark passages of his great house, the three young men did not see or hear him until he was ready to sit down with them. (179) Helmut’s ghostly appearance is stressed: “His eyes had deepened in their sockets; however, there was a sign of life in them as they flickered against the dancing candlelight.” (179) After the rite of Christmas has been completed, Prem walks outside. Through a window, he sees a “perplexing scene” with Regnitz moving in his study:\ It was a movement of a man in pain, staggering and stumbling and falling. Coming closer to the window, the observer saw that the composer had lain on the bed gasping like a stranded fish. (180) The other two young men prepare dinner, leaving Prem alone. He worries that the old man needs assistance: With such a care in mind, Luke-pi sat upright in the manner of meditation and channeled his thoughts into an intense beam at the image of Reinhard von Regnitz. And thus Reiner became aware of his father and went into the study. (181) Danny asks Prem to “be an angel” (182) and look after the composer while the other two go skiing. In the morning, Prem meets what he guesses is the housekeeper who comes only occassionally and what he guesses is a doctor who checks on Regnitz. They do not recognize or respond to Prem. To get out of their way, he walks outside: He wandered from the track into the snow-laden forest, wanting to look for the mystery. One knew intimately the monsoon plains, the desiccation, the croaking of frogs and the humming of insects, but the strange shapes of leafless beech, elm, and birch trees in the mist and the young spruces hiding under the snow had to be treated with awe. The secret and the exotic beauty lured him deep into the forest. (182) When the composer does not come out for dinner, Prem decides that “the silent night would be perfect for composing a song.” He sits in his room, listening to the “murmuring of the great house” (183) while the snow falls outside and his words too “were descending like the snow, flake by flake, word by word.” (183) His song begins: In an ancient room foreclosed with doom in monsoon country I lay in disuse, in need of bravery while vile portent and disaster and lustrous laughter of armed men and thieves come with the rustling of leaves. (183-184) Here, he blends his immediate surroundings in Germany in the opening two lines with his memories of Esarn that follow. He sees himself as “weakened,/ silenced and saddened” and in the “doldrums” (184). The song ends with “Manora’s use of cunning/ to regain her sequestered wings.” (184), thus moving the narrative onto an explicitly mythic level of significance. Manora, one of the kinarries or winged goddesses or half-bird women who lived on Mount Meru, the centerpiece of the “Hindu-Buddhist cosmological model” surrounded by circles of oceans and continents (Jumsai: 12) from where the world was created. The three counter-clockwise moves around the pyre at a Thai funeral is the death cycle movement winding back up to Mount Meru. For Prem, her significance is that she was captured by a hunter who used a serpent to entwine her and was given as an “offering to the king” (184). As an alien, she is blamed for bringing “war, plague and economic crisis” (185) to the land. The courtiers tie her to a pyre and plan to sacrifice her to lift the curse. As part of her “last rite”, she asks to wear her wings so that she can perform “the kinarry’s Dance of Death” (185). In Prem’s dream, Danny is led like Manora to a pyre. In a passion-like scene (“His skull was cracked, bleeding; his face was dripping with blood and his clothes were torn and splattered with excrement”) recorded in poetry in the dream, the men who want to make Danny the scapegoat yell: Burn him, the alien who is dangerous, becoming grossly prosperous; and yet his heart is bent upon destroying, guise and bribes employing! He is a dead weight on the land! Such a man cannot live in our land! (185) All of this mythologizing about Danny is new to Shadowed Country. The “fiends” “pierced his heart with a sharp stake” (vampire-like), douse him with petrol, and hang him as he burns. In his prophetic buffalo eye of Etan, Prem sees Danny’s “soul rise with the flames and smoke” (186). The call of Danny’s soul makes him weep in the dream. When he awakes from the dream, he is still weeping. This shocks him, as he asks “Was his despair so refined now that he could cry only in dreams?” This question highlights the point that this is the only time Prem weeps for the dead in the novel. He regrets his inability “to reason, to question, to discuss, to make a critical appraisal. Like a Strasbourg goose, he had been force-fed with rote-learning.” (186). He does not know what to make of this experience; he is perplexed by it. He cries at the prophesied death of his brother-like friend Danny, but not at Tatip’s death. The impact of the mythic extension on Prem’s psyche traumatically generates his looking at himself as a sacrificial bird too. Unlike Danny, whose sacrifice is bodily, Prem sees his own mind as the victim sacrificed by the Thai education system. This too is new to Shadowed Country. He looks at two passages of his own writing, one in Thai and the other in English and sees the proxemic space between them as a reflection of his maimed mind: But now writing in English translated from the Siamese original draft, he could see the obvious contrast of the two languages placed side by side. As opposed to English, Siamese has no punctuation marks, no capital letters, no sentences, Primo pondered, glancing at the pages of the two written languages. Siamese words are strung tightly together. At times one can say or write at the beginning without a noun. Such an omission relies on guesswork to be understood, whereas in English a sentence has a beginning and an end, the noun and the verb, or the verbs and a full stop. It must not rely on guessing or convoluted speculation. Each word is individual, with spaces in between. Yes, each word is individualistic, just like each of the farangs who have their own minds, their own opinions and their own mental spaces. Siamese words can be tightly knitted together into lines without breathing space unless one wants to make a gap at any chosen spot, just like most Siamese who are extremely gregarious, adoring ‘togetherness’ in what they do. If one seeks to be an individual, to be alone, to read alone, or even to think, it is considered an anomaly. How language reflects the minds of the peoples! Now I understand why Danny often taunted me with: ‘Don’t say it in that muddled, wailing and weakly way. The voice of the maimed mind makes me cringe! Say it in English; its grammatical order and discipline will certainly reform and reorganize your mind, believe me.’ (186-187) In this passage, the epithet characterizing Prem is “Primo”, Danny’s nickname for him; he thinks in character, as he always does, depending on the epithet he is named by. His personality is fluid and in flux all the time. As “the monsoon man” (187), Prem smiles at the look of English written in a Thai way without punctuation or capitalization. As he shifts from one personality or persona to another, his mood changes. His old self dies and a new self takes over temporarily. His breakthrough regards the proxemic qualities of the two languages which he sees in terms remarkably similar to Geert Hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimensions of power distance, individual versus the collective, uncertainty avoidance and masculine versus feminine tone of voice. In a moment of insight, he now understands “what it was like to go from one empty room to another, to be left alone without feeling lonely in this immense mansion surrounded by shivering leafless trees, isolated by snow” (187). The death references are unmistakable, as are the mythic tones of the grail story. He empathizes with Helmut, the dead fish, and learns to be alone without being lonely in the death season of winter surrounded by leafless trees in the forest. The mystery of the house, the grail castle, however, remains: “All the while the mystery remained in the room in which the recluse stayed.” (187) Parzival-like, he sees things he does not understand or respond to. He is undergoing a mystical experience couched in the imagery of myth. When Helmut opens the door to his secret chamber, Prem is surprised as he is caught in the foolish act of being a “peeping tom” spying through the key hole of the door. He is also surprised by Helmut’s (with that name’s medieval knightly connotations) changed appearance, dressed as a “grandee of the old world” (188). Prem asks himself “Whoever this awesome personage could be” (188). The composer has just completed his last work, a tone poem titled Tod (Death). Now Helmut is full of life, rejuvenated as a result of his composition, to such an extent that Prem thinks of the previous vision he had of the composer moving painfully as like a “nightmare” (189). Prem’s reaction continues the suggestion or implication that he is undergoing a transformation or metamorphosis in this mansion: When the composer had been totally wrapped up in the creation called Death, being aware of it in every breath he inhaled and exhaled, it had become an old familiar name. But to the budding poet who had been trying to conjure up the shape and form of the romantic-sounding tone poem it was staggering to know that it could encompass such a morbid theme. (189-190) To write about death, and one’s own death at that, is morbid to the Siamese Prem. Like a grail knight, Prem stares at the composer who is standing in the doorway, a place of transition, in a state of “dumb amazement” (190). For Prem, the theme of a dying man “struggling with Death” makes death seem “tangible” (190). Such concreteness would be alien to the Siamese Buddhist Prem. As they sit together drinking wine in celebration of the tone poem’s completion, Prem wishes he is “worthy of the event and that he would not ask silly questions and act clumsy and knock the glass over.” (190). Again, the grail echoes are there: the glass/ grail, the foolishness of the grail knight, the wish to be “worthy” of receiving the grail knowledge. The initiation ceremony continues: “What did you want to know?” Helmut inquired, tilting his head slightly. (190) Prem reverts to a speech pattern reminiscent of Tatip’s dying speech pattern: Oh, ai..I wanted to..to know what’s in this room, to..to see if there were any photographs, books, albums, things of Danny’s childhood.” (191) Prem’s use of the word “childhood” stimulates the composer who is transformed, as in a trance, immediately back into another time and back to his tone poem which he now realizes cannot be completed: Helmut pursed his lips as if to commit to himself an understanding of his own. His eyes were out of focus and he murmured in German what could be understood as: So it is childhood then, the recollection of it and the happy moments of his life, his memories of the loved ones. Death could not take control all the time; there must be moments when Death relaxes it grip. The transfiguration would be possible… (190) Prem “watched in amazement a peculiar expression on his host’s face” (190). The epithet of “host” is only used in the novel in reference to Helmut; its Christian significance is another link with the grail – this time to the meal. When the composer excuses himself to change the ending of his tone poem, Prem thinks “morbidly”: Every time I open my big mouth, the English and the German shudder for fear at what might come out next. (192) He still does not understand the significance of what has just occurred; he has participated in Helmut’s creation of Death. The atmosphere outside transforms into a Brontë-esque (Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is Prem’s favourite book) objective correlative of his inner state of mind: [H]e saw how the day had deteriorated, now being threatened by a snowstorm. The eves moaned and whined, the whole mansion shook and shuddered. The trees swayed and swirled with the fury. The tempest was lashing everything in its path. Prem tried to put his mind in order by using the techniques of Vipassana learned and practiced in Wat Borombopit. (192) He realizes that the people of Esarn are happier than he is now, as he must go through the trials and tests of “culture conflict” (192). He remembers Kumjai telling him that this trial was “a sacrifice he was to make, following a dream.” (192). He now sees his mission is to pursue his dream of being a writer, not an academic. But he is immediately confronted by his awareness of the gap between himself and Helmut: He [Helmut} was gifted, much encouraged and fully supported by his parents and teachers to follow his training and career in music. Moreover, the society in which he belonged provided the stimulus and the impetus that worked positively for him, not against him, whereas thinking Siamese such as writer and thinker Jit Pumisak had to be killed. Far-sighted leader and educator Pridi Panomyong had to flee the country to die in exile in France. Intellectual and educator Puey Ungpakorn had to escape to England, where he died. And writer Khamsing Srinok had to take flight across the Maekong River to Lao and sought asylum in Sweden, only to return to make a pact with the devil that he would be silent to stay alive. (192-193) The mythic quest theme is stressed by Prem’s reference to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when he asks how he can survive in such a society that will not tolerate artistic or intellectual freedom or criticism: What cloak or camouflage must the little hobbit Frodo-Primo use to disguise his efforts for survival and reaching his goal? (193) Later that night, Helmut calls out for Prem to help him as he is now too sick to medicate himself. As he leaves the composer’s room, he glances at “the disorder of the writing desk and the scattered papers on the floor”. He decides to “keep the door ajar” to help his “host” (194) if needs be. There is a space left in the novel marking a shift of scene; the tone changes with shorter sentences breaking up the information and making the scene more distant from the reader: Gradually the dawn made the outlines of the branches and snowy landscape visible. It was a bleak morning. Nothing moved; nothing broke the silence. At about ten o’clock the telephone rang. “Good morning,” Primo answered calmly. “Sorry, I can’t speak German. Can you speak English? Yes, he told me that you would drop in on us yesterday. Can you make it this morning? Please come as soon as you can and call his doctor for me too. Herr von Regnitz is dead.” (194) Regnitz dies in the hiatus of the narrative. Prem’s response is cold on the telephone. While there are similarities to the way Tatip’s death is described, there are differences which mark the changes Prem has undergone in this part of his quest: Before the outsiders could arrive, the little man put the house in order, then he covered the corpse with an eiderdown. Standing at the bedside, he looked sadly at the body. It seems I have the knack of conveying death to people, he feared. Then he touched Helmut’s forehead and brushed the snow-white hair so that the dead would be presentable to the visitors. “Goodbye, old man,” Primo whispered, and left the room. (194) At first, Prem sees Regnitz’s body like he sees Tatip’s corpse: both are husks, devoid of any person or emotional tie. He recognizes the pattern of being the one who witnesses death, which he describes ambiguously as having the ‘knack of conveying death to people”. While he covers Tatip’s body with an old blanket, he pulls an eiderdown over Regitz’s body. He makes both men’s corpses presentable to others. Things must look correct. The difference in the scene with Regnitz’s corpse is that Prem looks “sadly” at Regnitz and talks to his body. We hear his thoughts as he is with the dead now. The death-scape of blank snow is linked to Regnitz’s snow-white hair. Sudham defamiliarizes the death scene by suppressing information which makes the reader respond to the strangeness of the words. He seemingly coldly makes coffee for the doctor and the conductor whose names we are not given, as in a romance. We assume that the conductor is the person Prem has informed about the death over the phone, in a distant way. He does not show any emotion, thus raising the doctor’s suspicions: It was not only the foreigner’s passive tone of voice that bothered the doctor, who fidgeted, but also the seemingly calm, inscrutable Oriental face that aroused his annoyance. (196) Prem’s jai yen yen manner, his cool appearance in the face of death, is culturally alien to the Germans. Prem sees that the composer’s death “weighed heavily on all of them” (195) He thinks that he should speak first as it would “break the spell”. We are still in the enchanted world of the grail-like story. The gap Sudham creates in the text by not describing the last minutes of Regnitz’s life leads to the trial by ordeal which follows for the rest of the chapter in the novel. There are repercussions to this death, unlike in the death of the shaman. In a scene reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, Prem is interviewed by the police who are suspicious of his role in Regnitz’s death. Prem’s emotional detachment is the source of the police inspectors’ suspicions. Alone in the interrogation room with the composer who has now introduced himself as Wilhelm Hagenbach, Prem hears Tatip’s voice coming to his mind: At that moment the insignificant little monkey heard the ancient seer say: “You’d wince at the sight of those good-looking big men. They’d remind you of your former self, your tall and strong stature, your golden hair and blue eyes which were lost to you in this life.” (198) In this passage added to Shadowed Country, the links between the two deaths echoe in a way that refers back to Prem’s previous life as Wealdon. The three deaths are being spun together here where Prem has his first independent memory of his previous life in India that has been forshadowed in the novel’s prologue. At this stage of the trial, Prem is seeing with Etan’s eye; he is using his supernatural powers to deal with the police who he recognizes as hostile (199). With his back up at the surliness of the interrogator, Prem makes another breakthrough: For the first time in his life, the buffalo boy wanted to express his defiance, to stand up against the authority. The nature of the wild beast in him surged, rearing its dangerous head and sharp horns. To use his own devices, allowing the eyes of Etan to glare and with the horns in readiness for an attack, he was in his own element. (199-200) In this passage added in Shadowed Country, Prem’s transformation into a wild beast suggests the mythic qualities he is drawing on to survive this ordeal and to buck at authority. He is the sacrificial animal fighting for survival in the ritual in which he refuses to be the victim. In his interrogation, Prem adds more details about the death of Regnitz. For example, we learn that Regnitz explained why he was leaving his Tod unfinished: “How could I know Death for real until it comes to take me away. So I will leave it unfinished and when I lie dying, then I will know.” (202) This passage, with its allusion to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) is new to Shadowed Country. Other details emerge in Prem’s interrogation and subsequent conversation with Wilhelm: there is a suspicion that Prem assisted Regnitz’s death because the composer was left handed and the injection that killed him was in his left arm; Prem worries that he will be accused of murder. These issues are problematically left open-ended in the novel. Prem’s private knowledge is left secret, as part of an initiation ceremony or ritual perhaps. He senses Wilhelm is using him and plans to flee from Germany. In an echo from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (“ ‘Away! Away!’ Prem heard a cry”: 212) Sudham is representing Prem responding to the death and its aftermath in terms of Western Romantic literary traditions of death. Other more distant allusions are to D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love with Gerald’s suicide by walking into the snow and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus with Adrian Leverkusen’s pact with the Nazis/ Mephistopheles for his gift as a composer. Prem is learning to think as a Westerner; he now feels sadness for the dead, though he had known Regnitz for only three days: “What a tragedy to die in the arms of a stranger” (213), he laments. He contrasts Helmut’s created (assisted) artistic death (a tragedy full of artistic allusions) with the ways of death in Napo: If Death could be made tangible, you would be tearing at it, protecting the old man from its approach. In Napo a mohpifa [witch doctor] would be throwing magic rice all over the room to ward off Death, but here you had nothing except bare hands and tears. (213) The capitalization of death suggests its personification as much as it does its presence as an abstract concept. The lack of italicization in these words breaks the pattern of representing Prem’s internalized thoughts in that way. It suggests that the writer Sudham is directly addressing Prem in the second person for the first time in the novel. The pattern is stressed by the next sentences in the passage which revert to italics to represent a character’s inner thoughts. These thoughts end the chapter and the episode of a Western death scene: My unguarded soul wants to fly free…to hover in the celestial dome of light…to soar upward, carried by the divine light. But beware, we must not go astray in this solitude…Oh, I am so weary from wandering. Could this possibly be death? Look! Death! Death is exactly what I have perceived for Tod. Look! Die Verklärung…(213-214) The weariness Prem (or Regnitz, if this passage is Prem’s insight into the composer’s mind or a memory of words actually spoken but suppressed in his police interrogation) feels in his spiritual wandering is viewed as a possible form of death. Real or actual death is perceived as the meaning of the tone poem Tod. The art is about the creative energy of death seen specifically in Romantic terms. The repeated allusion to Keats’ ode which is reminiscent of the poet’s pathetic attempt to fly “on the viewless wings of Poesy” strengthens this frame of reference which we are reminded of a few pages later when Prem tells Elizabeth, his lover, that he sees his relationship to her in terms of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights which her dismissal of leads him to silence her “as if the wandering soul of Emily Brontë might hear.” (217) These Romantic layers suggest that Prem is seeing his experience through the eyes of Western artistic responses now. The last words in the chapter re-embody Richard Strauss’ tone poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transformation). The lesson of this experience for Prem is that he is in a “twilight zone somewhere between two worlds”. He addresses himself in his thoughts: You see, while Lord Buddha preached detachment, the Europeans uphold involvement, desire and craving. One must crave to expand and produce, to make the world go round, so to speak. (215) Regnitz’s craving for death and Prem’s involvement in that death have released and transformed Prem’s artistic powers. As a product of this experience, he writes A Cantata, “to give his German experience a form” (216), which wins first prize in a poetry competition and so is his first successful work of art: he has been transformed and has left behind his old life of failed poetry that he had tried to write up to the time of Regnitz’s death. He has learned to exploit the space between the two worlds of the West and the East and between life and death as a creative force. There is life after death when that death is transformed in the romantic image of art. Prem has learned to embrace the “morbid” perspective that had repelled him up to the time he became involved with Regnitz. His seemingly innocent question about childhood which inspired Regnitz to leave his tone poem unfinished and to see that Death could be transformed in the memory of previous episodes or forms of life and so could transform one’s whole life into a work of art seems to be an underground stream back to the Prologue of Shadowed Country with its echoes of Shakespeare and Proust. It also seems to voice Sudham’s own artistic vision in the novel. Later, Prem apparently uses his own childhood when writing Monsoon People, much as Sudham did when he wrote Monsoon Country. In this central passage to the novel, Sudham seems to be creating a palimpsest by writing over the original text another text; the artistic process works by adding layers of experience to enrich that experience and so transform the dead or old text. The text that remains concealed, and which may yet be revealed in a future life of Shadowed Country has much to do with the vaguely hinted at grail motif as much as it may relate to Prem’s physical actions of involvement at the time of the artist’s death which gives him life as an artist. The esoteric ritual that may have been enacted in Regnitz’s workshop remains a mystery and is a source of the deliberate romantic ambiguities Sudham is able to give to his work which still seems to exist in a “twilight zone” between fact and fiction, between the East and the West. Instead of Manora being Dani, it may be that Prem is the one who flies away at the moment of ritual death by means of a trick, albeit it an artistic one. The background to this possibility of art as a way of surviving has been hinted at in Prem’s remembrance of the novelists, social critics and thinkers who had been chased out of Thailand for daring to think for themselves. The exile of the scapegoat is the only way to avoid physical or intellectual death. Any action by an intellectual to remedy the maimed mind of the Thai is met with by the threat of a violent death. When Prem returns to London, he learns of the violent suppression of the 1976 protests in Thailand. Danny’s refusal to care about the deaths of the protesters leads Prem to break with him through violence when he punches him in anger, thus breaking the Buddha’s rules. He has yet to learn how to deal with the death of the teacher or political death. The Death of the Teacher Kumjai, whose name incorporates the name of Prem’s actual father (Kum) and the Thai word jai (which means both “heart” and “mind”) is the teacher who awakens Prem’s thirst for knowledge in the village school. As an activist teacher, he wants his pupils to think for themselves and is hampered in this by the Thai education system that he is a part of. He wants to empower the villagers to take control of their environment and end the corruption that is destroying their land. He sees the “Power of Darkness” (74) as the ignorance of the peasants who do not think critically of their power relations with their exploiters. This is one of the manifestations of the shadowed quality of the novel’s title. As an agent of change, Kumjai uses his position of authority to lead the peasants in protests against their exploitation. He has a dream vision of the future from which he awakes to see that: Change is inevitable and the agents of change could come in many forms, visible and invisible. Sometimes they arrive with a young man or woman wearing jeans, after having been in the Celestial City, or with a movie van, with plastic utensils and plastic bags, and sometimes with guns and grenades – the brutal change. (88) He decides to do something about making his students aware of the power of change by sending Prem to school in the Celestial City (Krueng Thep or the City of Angels, known in the West as Bangkok) (89). In doing this, Kumjai sets in motion a train of events which will shape much of Prem’s life. The power of his being a student is a moral one which comes from the reality that the crue or ajarn (teacher) in Thai culture often has more moral authority over the child than does the parent. Kumjai’s vision and subsequent decision to save Prem comes immediately after the village bully and his gang had torn up the book of poems given to Prem by Kumjai as a prize for writing his own poem. This destruction of the book is described as a “ritual” (83) as though it marks his move back from an educated way to the way of the past, the cyclical life of suffering as a peasant: Under the roof of the school he had had a chance to learn from the rote learning system for which the teacher had been trained. But on the barren plain, in the wilderness, the primeval forces became paramount. When he finished Pathom Four, he said goodbye to the school. Now he had to enter another life – that of a reckless youth destined to follow the path of peasantry ruled by thieves, scarcity, superstition, floods, drought, sickness, poverty, exploitation and injustice to which his father and his forefathers before him had been subjected. (79) Prem gathers the pages as though they were “precious stones” (83) just before Kumjai rescues him from the gang. These stones adumbrate the “David Stones” (668) or stories Prem gathers to use against Goliath-like Philistine corruption he struggles against in his adult life as a writer; his five stories that expose the corruption of the shadowed country which he uses to kill the “Dark Lord” of ignorance, the origin of corruption. It seems to be a deliberate choice by Sudham to frame the teacher Kumjai’s experience in a blend of the spirit powers of Tatip the shaman and Regnitz the artist in representing Kumjai’s dream-vision. The (Hegelian) Bildungsroman characteristics of the novel point towards the role of the writer as much as the experience of its central character as educators. At the end of the novel, Prem becomes a teacher who, to finish his karmic cycle, encourages his students to express their own opinions and to have a voice in the school he has decided to build in the village “as a monument to the murdered teachers” (745) who had raised their voices against the violence and corruption. The lesson of allowing students to speak and interact with their teacher was learned while he studied literature at university. His university tutor, Michael Wilding (Michael Wil in The Force of Karma 2002 life of the text), had encouraged him to express his own opinions about Milton’s Paradise Lost as long as he could support his views with evidence and logic (622-623). As soon as he has learned this lesson, he learns of Kumjai’s death back in Esarn (623). The choice of the breakthrough text is appropriate; he had decided earlier in his life that he would not serve or rebel against the Dark Lord (231); the lesson Milton seems to suggest in his poem. At first, Kumjai’s death, which takes up only one sentence in the text at this point, seems distanced and downplayed. Unlike with the deaths of Tatip and Regnitz, Prem was not there to witness his teacher’s murder. Charles Tregonning, one of Prem’s friends, keeps a journal in which we learn of the deaths of ten other teachers who had raised their voices against the exploitation of the peasants (631-632). This journal re-embodies an essay from an edition of Tales of Thailand in its 2002 shape. Teachers in rural Esarn do face the threat of death whenever they decide to teach in an ethical way. This point is reinforced by the death of the teacher in other Thai novelists’ work, such as in Khamman Khonkhai’s The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp (1978) where the teacher Piya is accused of being a Communist to silence his protests against the exploitation of the villagers (1978: 292) and is shot by a hired gunman. That novel ends: Piya had no thought of danger, suspected nothing. His thoughts were only on the school, on his pupils, and on Duangdaw. He rode through the village and had started the ascent to the school when there was the crack of an old World War II rifle. Just one shot. The bullet plowed into the young teacher’s chest and through his body. His body was thrown back and off his bicycle, Ai Krong, and he lay still on the ground, blood gushing. Duangdaw shrieked as she jumped at the sound of the rifle, as if she knew what had happened. The children streamed out, running one after the other, children and teacher dreading what they should find, heedless of danger to themselves. ‘Khun Piya! You’re gone from me!’ Duangdaw hugged the corpse to her, not caring who saw. The others stood, completely silent as if hypnotized. At last Caw Siang spoke. ‘Khru Piya is dead. Who is going to teach us now?’ ‘I am here. I’ll be here with you always.’ The young woman cradled the body, now bereft of consciousness, as a little girl would cradle a beloved doll. She sat there surrounded by children who could not understand why someone like Khru Piya should be shot and killed. (1978: 302) This emotion-filled pathetic climax is ambiguously charged. The gunman is not caught and the children are left with no explanation of why the assassination of such a good person, an ethical teacher, has taken place. Yet there is hope: an unidentified voice promises that the speaker will always be there to teach the children. While the speech format with its implicit cataphoric reference to the words that follow the recorded statement suggests that this is Piya’s beloved Duangdaw speaking, it could also be the spirit of the dead teacher speaking through her or the voice of the novelist who is clearly identifying with the dead teacher’s fate at this point. The cycle of death and life is here with the cradling of the dead body and the focus on the young children who are witnessing the end of the novel; but this cycle is not reinforced by the Thai world view, which has not been foregrounded in the novel. The novelist Khonkhai himself explained in his preface to the seventh printing of the novel that his aim was only to describe the causes of problems: I have only tried to set out those conditions which create problems in our society so that the members of society may recognize and understand them. I have no answers to these problems. (1978: xiii) He later left teaching and was promoted to the position of Deputy Secretary-General of the Teachers Council of Thailand as a part of the Thai Ministry of Education (xiv). Sudham’s representation of the death of the teacher is more clearly Thai and so is more complex for a Western reader. Prem is researching the deaths of those who had returned to the village as he plans to write stories about them and so turn their deaths into art. We learn that he is writing the death of Mana from AIDS as a story about a female impersonator for his book Tales of Siam which is actually “The Impersonator: A ‘kratoey’ speaks” in Tales of Thailand (2002: 97-101). The segue to the next paragraph may be awkward or not cohesive to a Western reader, but it seems to be deliberately so – Sudham keeps back Prem’s reasons for making the scene which gives Charles cause to question the appropriateness of his intentions: Meanwhile, a re-enactment of the killing of Kumjai must be staged. When Charles heard of it, he remonstrated, “It’s rather goulish, isn’t it? Don’t do it.” Yet the willful writer determined to go ahead with the plan. (667) The reader is given the plan after it has been made. Prem’s thinking out the plan is not represented in the text. The ensuing scene may look like a goulish farce that is intended to distance the reader from any emotional attachment to the description of the death. In this way, Sudham seems to distance himself from the nam nao (‘black water’ or soap opera) quality of the Khonkhai ending quoted above. The grammar of the segue is peculiarly Thai with the first word (‘Meanwhile”) seemingly a literal translation of nai khana tee or rawang tee. As a time adverbial, “meanwhile” often seems out of place when used by Thais in their written English. But when the polysynchronic aspects of Thai time are understood, the vagueness of the word hints at a relationship between the two deaths in the text. Kumjai’s death will also be absorbed in Prem’s book of stories as a story titled “The Gunman” (2005: 668. See Tales of Thailand: 80-85 for the story subtitled with a Buddhist frame as “Ignorance is a source of suffering”) The dramatization of the killing is foregrounded, pushing the emotional impact of the death back away from the reader and from Prem: For this [re-enactment], he sought help from Anucha to act as Kumjai. That fatal day the headmaster was leading his pupils from the school building along the ridge of the Mongkol Pond towards the village street to make a protest at the District Office against the Department of Forestry’s grant to a concessionaire to turn Chanlaiwood into a eucalyptus plantation. Where the hired gunman had awaited him, Prem stood askance in readiness to pull an imaginary trigger. (667) As the new headmaster who replaced Kumjai, Anucha seems to be in a fertility ritual (as described for instance by Frazer in The Golden Bough) which sees him being crowned or given the new leader’s role by playing the part of the dying leader. Prem, the pupil, assumes the role of the killer; the student is the killer of the teacher in the ritual re-enactment. The next paragraph which continues from this point seems to be in the mode of a detective story, but one where the physical facts are already known: Because Anucha, on that tragic day, had been assigned to protect seventy students at the far end of the march, he could not have noticed a man and a motorcyclist waiting at the spot where the road on the ridge dipped to meet the street. But Kumjai must have seen them, had perhaps smiled at his murderer and the accomplice, hoping that they would join the protest. As the spearhead of the protest march dipped with the road, Anucha had heard five gunshots. The children had screamed and ran wildly away from the scene while the motorcycle sped off, leaving the fatally wounded school teacher and its poisonous fumes behind. (667) This scene is symbolic, even in the matter of factness of the series of events deductively reconstructed in it. Anucha at the end of the spear-like column is juxtaposed with Kumjai at the “spearhead”. The sacrificed teacher smiles at his killers, seeming to misunderstand their intentions as benevolent. In place of the one bullet that kills Khonkai’s Piya, there are five bullets that kill Kumjai. These five bullets symbolically represent the evil counterpart to the five “David Stones” or stories, one of which Prem is developing in this scene. The ceremonial and militant aspects of the protest are highlighted by the description of the protest as a “march”. The symbolism is reinforced by the “poisonous” fumes left behind by the killers’ motorcycle which was polluting the air with its carbon monoxide exhaust fumes. Once the facts known to the participants on that day have been explained, the story is recounted for a second time. This repetition underscores the ritualistic aspect of the narrative event: Following Charles’ advice, the enactors agreed not to involve the schoolchildren in the resurrection of the killing scene. And so the new headmaster alone, in Kumjai’s shoes, moved conspicuously to the dip of the road where the hired gunman and the motorcyclist awaited their victim. Prem trembled with the effort to channel his inner vision into an invisible laser beam so as to penetrate the heart of the murderer. Thus he saw and felt and suffered the evil deed. With the buffalo’s eye still held fast, Prem approached and shook the teacher’s hand and held it while they gazed emotionally at each other. “I could see who are the real killers but I would not waste a curse on them. The late Napo seer, Grandpa Tatip forbade me to. So instead I shall hound them in my own way,” Prem promised, making Charles the witness. (667-668) In the second version of the event, Prem’s psychic powers, his Etan buffalo vision, is the centre of the story. The hand he shakes may be Anucha’s in the re-enactment, but it is also the symbolic hand of the dead Kumjai who is re-embodied in his successor Anucha, who is seems to be re-embodied in. Missing from the scene is any emotional response by Prem to the actual death he has had a vision of; he is focused on understanding the killer who performs the sacrifice, not the victim. There is no pathos for the grail-like dying god-king, the dead headmaster. The deaths of Regnitz, Tatip and Kumjai are bound together in this scene. As a dramatic work of art about death, as a dramatized ritual, it recalls Regnitz’z tone poem Tod, while Tatip’s injunction against Prem using his spirit power to curse those who do wrong is repeated to explain why Prem does not seek to punish Kumjai’s killers. What Prem sees is not included in the novel; we do not read Prem’s story. Instead, it is diverted out of the text and into the story “The Gunman” already published in Sudham’s Tales of Thailand. Another similarity between the three deaths is that we do not see Kumjai dying, or the reactions of others to his death. What is resurrected here is not Kumjai but the scene in which the killing occurred; it is a dramatic resurrection scene without the victim. The person who comes to life in Prem’s artistic and spiritual vision is the killer. As one of the enactors, Prem is involved in the scene when it is repeated; his mind enters the mind of the killer through being in the same physical space where Kumjai had earlier died. The teacher’s death has been de-centred and distanced; there is no emotional response such as we find in the death of the teacher in Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp. We do not see the schoolchildren crying in Prem’s re-enacted drama as they have been excluded from the resurrection as if to suggest that their emotional responses would have interfered with Prem’s vision. Sudham foregrounds this perspective when he describes Prem’s vision in this scene as an “invisible laser beam” focused on one point only. The scene has significance as the impetus for a work of art or New Journalism, Prem’s story which he subsequently writes. As such, Kumjai’s death is turned into material which helps Prem develop his own artistic skills. In the story “The Gunman” in Sudham’s Tales of Thailand, this decentering of Kumjai continues; he is not mentioned by name, although the scene of his assassination is the same as in the novel. The story is written in the first person, from the viewpoint of the killer who shows remorse when he reads of the teacher’s death in the newspaper. The killer in the short story decides to leave Thailand for Laos to avoid being killed himself. The lesson learned, as with Tatip and Regnitz, is from the living, not the dead. Suffering (dukkha) is a life experience, not a death one. The lives of the characters are significant in terms of how the experiences of the characters lead to their deaths. The characters return to life as works of art in Prem’s life and as characters in works of art in Sudham’s work, not as ghosts or vengeful spirits. The focus in Sudham’s vision is always on the life force where the force of karma works, not the fear of death. This intertextual chain of events is the cultural source of the mythic ritualistic quality of Sudham’s art. The reader of Shadowed Country is led exophorically out of the novel and perhaps back in time to other works by Sudham which change their meaning when read in the context of the novel. Nothing seems to die forever, at least for a Thai Buddhist novelist. The Ecology of a Wasteland The deaths of characters in Sudham’s novel are less significant in themselves and more significant as passage ways or transitions that enable Prem to grow as an artist and as a teacher. As such they are proxemic markers that organize the text’s space in terms of the deaths of those close to Prem. Sudham points the reader of the novel to read beyond or outside the text, to connect other stories already written by Sudham in order to understand the textual and cultural schemata being evoked by the writer. As with Prem’s five “David Stones”, the various works gain strength through their proxemic thematic closeness to one another while being textually distant from each other. In this organic movement, the novel explicates the stories as much as the stories explicate the novel. The previous lives of the stories which lead to the novel function in the same way as the lives of Tatip, Regnitz and Kumjai insofar as the prior lives of the art and the characters explains their significance in the novel. There is no linear path to a final goal or telos: the novels and the stories are always in a state of flux as they are refashioned and expanded in each other’s light, becoming parts of each other in an organic form that is particularly Thai in its shape. The growth of Sudham’s oeuvre in part is achieved through the deaths of the artist, the shaman and the teacher, each of whose roles seems to be taken up by Sudham the creative writer. Just as Wealdon’s life in the Prologue set in the nineteenth century is absorbed in Prem’s experience, so are the lives of the archetypes of the shaman, the artist and the teacher. Prem’s previous experiences shape his life as he grows into the artist Sudham, just as, in an autobiographical sense, Sudham’s previous experiences in life and in his work grow into Prem’s life as a character who embodies Sudham. The karmic wheel is the archetype of a learning experience, as is suggested by Wealdon’s name: the wheel is the don or teacher. The wheel which never stops turning suggests the writer’s view of his art as not having an ending or a death, but a cycle. Each time he writes, he changes the relations of all his other works through what may be understood in terms of what David Bohm (1980) calls the implicate order: that everything is connected is a lesson of Buddhism and Thai animism. When the lives of Tatip, Regnitz and Kumjai are placed together, they take on a wider mythic significance which is related to the land where Prem has grown as a buffalo boy who learns to live inside his own buffalo Etan’s eyes which are the source of his animistic visionary powers. What Prem sees and represents in his art, and what Sudham represents in the novel cycle with its intertextualized stories, is the “wasteland” (370, 508, 531, 666), the ‘cursed” (633) land, that is Esarn over which falls the shadow of the dark lord, a spirit power as much as a symbolic power representing corruption and political violence committed against the minds of the people of Esarn as students in the Thai education system and against the land itself which is destroyed by property developers. The mind and the land are inseparable or entwined aspects of the wasteland with its mythic echoes of Jessie L. Weston’s study of the Grail romances and with T.S. Eliot’s modernist epic mythic poem The Wasteland. Sudham, as Prem, sees Esarn as the “cursed land” (633) and seems to work to lift the curse through his own deeds which will work off the karma he has accrued as Wealdon. As a teacher in Esarn at the end of the novel, Prem works to ensure that his students have “growing minds”, “a wholesome and a well developed mind”, not “stunted and deformed as his had been” (747). He returns to England occasionally to see the mythically and epically suggestively named boy Priam who: must be free and untouched by a mind-maiming method aimed to foster subservience and mindlessness which in turn permitted corruption to progress punitively, enabling the Dark Lord to expand greatly and govern ruthlessly without challenge, without trammels. (747) The allusion to the myth of Troy in the child’s name links the ending of the novel to a mythic structure of meaning. The destruction of the land as a result of corruption and ignorance can only be fought with the education of the young. In performing this task, he is maintaining what Gregory Bateson (1982) refers to as the “ecology of the mind”, the destruction of which by the Dark Lord’s education system ensures that the cycle of dukkha (101) or suffering continues as a spiritual death of the minds of its victims. The novel itself both embodies Prem’s way, his education out of the darkness (585), and Sudham’s vision of his role as a writer who embodies the teacher, the artist and the seer. As such, both character and novelist create life out of death in a pattern of the karmic cycle. Sudham’s educative and ecological themes are entwined in the cyclical shape of his work. Change, understood in Buddhist terms as impermanence, comes as part of the cycle of life and death. Prem leaves Esarn only to return with the force of karma on his side once he has learned the lessons taught by the seer, the artist and the teacher. His survival is ensured under the protection of the Mother Spirit until he has worked out his karma (745) through his ecological acts of protecting the natural and mental environments of his village. Against the “corruption” (747) of death is the “conception” (747) or birth of Prem’s plans to keep his child, Priam, away from the Dark Lord who still rules the shadowed country where Prem works at “nurturing the growing minds” (747) of his students which would otherwise be “stunted and deformed” (747). The formal significance of the typically Thai continually morphing shapes of the novel is that the Thai view of life as the experience of impermanence as change is a symbolic assertion of the hope that while things can change for the worse, they can also be changed for the better through education and that writing is the novelist’s way of participating in the process. The rooting of the novel’s growth in terms of the creative changes it embodies in each of its new-born cyclical iterations seems, in the context of the ecology of the Thai mind, to offer hope that while things remain in flux that change at all levels of life is possible. The “death” of previous forms of the fictions that are embodied in Shadowed Country are transformed into their next life in the novel. Inanimate things, even novels, have a life force for the people of Esarn who see their environment animistically. In conclusion: the beginnings of Shadowed Country in previous fictions allow the writer to recycle and preserve his work. The beginnings and current endings are brought together to create a larger space that is the printed version of the novel Shadowed Country. This proxemic closeness of the re-embodied texts is a form of textual karma. Given Sudham’s emphasis on saving the ecology of Esarn and his Thai conceptions of the proxemic closeness of all things in time and space, his novel seems to be a major embodiment of Thai cultural values which are based on the death and rebirth of language and art as much as of people. All things from the apparently dead past are absorbed, expanded, and changed: nothing is wasted. This is the karmic principle that guides Sudham’s vision of life and death as he shapes this vision into his reborn fictions. Sudham’s essentially Thai vision of the novel as an art form shaped by death and rebirth, while seemingly foreign to a Western reader who expects novels to finish once they have been published and to conform in a way to Roland Barthes’ view of the “death of the writer” need to open themselves to the non-Western idea that things never die as such, once and for all, and that novels are open, not closed: while the author may die, the life force understood as the karmic creativity of the artist/ seer/ teacher who understands his role in terms that are firmly rooted in the soil from which he grows, means that the writer as artist lives on in his work which should be understood in ecological terms as part of the life/ death cycle which recognizes the proxemic closeness of the two forces as entangled in each other as part of the natural mythic cycle. This reading of the novel in terms of the social,cultural and religious ideas and beliefs that create, shape and reform its form and content suggests that a new way of reading and enjoying the new literatures of English is possible in terms of a way of seeing verbal art in the mythic patterns that are still alive in their elemental and real shapes as life is experienced in the Thailand of Pira Canning Sudham. References Armstrong, K. (2005). A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and Ed by C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London: Paladin Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Bikkhu, B. (1962). Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree: The Buddha’s Teachings on Voidness. Trans. Dhammavicayo. Bangkok: Dhammasapa ______, (1988). Keys to Natural Truth. Trans. by S. Bhikkhu and R. Bucknell. Bangkok: The Dhamma Study and Practice Group Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge Cassirer, E. (n.d.). Language and Myth. New York: Dover. Conlon, S. (2009). Chaos in the Classroom. Bangkok: Assumption University Press Frazer, J.G. (1987). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Papermac Girard, R. (1988). Violence and the Sacred. Trans. by P. Gregory. London: Continuum Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-related Values. Newbury park: Sage Jumsai, S. (1988). Naga: Cultural Origins in Siam and the West Pacific. Singapore: Oxford University Press Khonkhai, K. (1992). The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp. Trans. by G.Wijeyewarnede. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge Mulder, N. (1989). Inside Thai Society: An Interpretation of Everyday Life. Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol Sudham, P. (1993). Monsoon Country. Hailsham, East Sussex: Rother _______ (2002). Tales of Thailand. Bangkok: Shire Asia _______,(2002) Monsoon Country. Bangkok: Shire Asia _______ (2002). The Force of Karma. Bangkok: Shire Asia _______, (2004). Shadowed Kingdom. Bangkok: Shire Asia