God and The Writer

If you don’t believe in God… You might repress it, and wouldn’t the aspiration to the divine reappears on our existential path? The structure of consciousness would be such that it integrates a portion for the sacred, which aspires to the eternal, to the quest for meaning — I’m inspired in this post by a young Romanian man, M.E., who wrote a novel in the 20th century that I haven’t read, but whose name inspired me for the title of my novel: that is called « The Bengali Night* ». This young man went on to become a famous philosopher and historian of religions, after falling in love with a Bengali married woman, Maitreyi Devi, who wrote a novel — a rather murderous response — which I was lucky enough to read partly in Bengali. In short, all this to say that if the divine bubbles up in our « shadow » (the submerged, repressed part of our personality), it transforms it into action, into a desperate search for meaning. For what is the divine, the sacred, if not an exploration of metaphysical answers linked to man’s deepest aspirations for ultimate knowledge: why are we on earth? or for what?

In my first novel, « L’ami bengali » (The Bengali Friend), inspired by the title of the young Romanian man M.E., my heroine abandons everything to set off on an impossible and improbable search for her childhood friend Shadhin, who left Bangladesh and disappeared 10 years earlier. In a kind of trance, she begins to imagine (or is it real?) her own death, dreaming of her friends and Shadhin in extreme landscapes or through the history of Bangladesh, to answer the questions of her death, mirrored by her quest, questions that take her through a kind of romantic kaleidoscope, in the sense of lyricism or a tale about identity linked to friendship, influence and the learnt language.

When Shadhin disappears, and with him the very idea of meaning (of literature, which Léah pursues like a shadow alongside her friend Akeem and his death, but also of beauty, love, and a country she dreamed of through correspondence between Bangladesh and France during her childhood and adolescence), Léah’s life is « desacralized ». The desacralization of her existence linked to the disappearance of her childhood friend (literally and abstractly, when she finds him on the Internet, he seems to have abandoned his will to become Bangladesh best writer), leads her down the slope of madness, of the search for meaning: I haven’t spared my main character by giving her an extreme quest that borders on the absurd. Yet I believe that the sacred reappears in Léah’s life, through friendship and then literature, that it is possible to be aware of our shadow, of the unconscious processes at work in our psyche.

The Bengali Friend, my first novel, talks about religion from time to time. I quote the Koran, the scribe angels of the Koran, created from light, I quote the New Testament, yet what is religious in this text is merely the heroine’s quest for meaning to resacralize her life, after a loss of bearings, moral values, meaning linked to the disappearance of her childhood — through the disappearance of Shadhin, a trauma and a character evoked, through numerous letters from several characters and prisms, but whom she never meets despites her many adventures he set her on.

In the end, is life about finding a cause, a meaning beyond ourselves, a commitment according to Sartre, following the rites or precepts of a particular religion, or letting ourselves be carried along by the wave of a friendship or passion, in order to resacralize reality, to create our own symbols? I don’t know, but through this novel, I think every writer resacralizes reality through his writing — the sublime, as Freud would say mockingly. Somewhat novels are a cosy way to explore Jungian shadows or resacralize/sublime realities?

*Mircea Eliade