Self Beyond Self- Ethel Wilson and Indian Philosophical Thought (An Old and Rare Book)

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SELF BEYOND SELF - is an absorbing study of Canadian writer Ethel Wilson's works in the light of certain basic concepts in Indian philosophical thought. Readers unfamiliar with Wilson's fiction as well as Indian philosophy can, nevertheless, follow and enjoy this book which suggests new possibilities in comparative studies. Although the book proves that Wilson was familiar with the sacred Indian text Bhagvad Gita, its chief purpose is to establish parallels rather than influences. Accordingly, it convincingly demonstrates parallels between passages in Wilson's works and those in the Gita, the Upanishads and Nagarjuna in regard to the concepts of being the other, the relativity of things, the cosmic web of interconnectedness and the avatar. The writer has scrupulously examined the possibility that some of her instances of Wilson's thinking could have parallels in Christian religious texts and might therefore belong to a common stock of religious concepts and not to Indian philosophy alone.

The Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has observed that it is in the eyes of another culture that we see ourselves most clearly. For a Canadian like myself who has thought and written about the works of Ethel Wilson, Dr. Anjali Bhelande's study performs exactly that kind of cultural work. Examining the stories and novels of this writer in the light of Indian philosophical thought, Dr. Anjali Bhelande reveals to a Canadian reader a different Ethel Wilson, a writer who is at once more intellectually sophisticated and more directly responsive to the exigencies of daily living.

Ethel Wilson, South African born and English educated, has always eluded those critics who try to define the Canadianness of her fiction. Her heroines are not characterized by the defeat that Margaret Atwood describes in Survival, nor are they constrained by what Northrop Frye calls the country's "garrison mentality". Rather her heroines are survivors and they move circumspectly but freely in the worlds they have fashioned for themselves. The plots of her stories and novels are enticing in Swamp Angel, for example, a woman makes clandestine preparations to leave an abusive husband, in "From Flores" a fishboat battles the waves of a winter storm, but Ethel Wilson does not develop her stories in terms of action or even character, rather, as Dr. Anjali Bhelande shows us, they become meditations on language and epistemological issues, illuminated by a mature writer's fascination with a "timeless and impersonal" philosophical order.

Dr. Bhelande tells us that Ethel Wilson had some knowledge of Indian wisdom literature. She demonstrates convincingly and movingly that a passage in Wilson's The Innocent Traveller, taking a long view of events during the Second World War, draws directly from lines in the Bhagvad Gita, and she suggests that there is an echo of Nagarjuna's Chatushkoti in Hetty Dorval. But this is not an influence study, rather it is a cross-cultural one in which Wilson's preoccupation with such questions as "self and other," "being the other," and "involvement in mankind" are shown to have their parallels in traditions of eastern thought. They inform the language of Wilson's text with paradoxes and contradictions (similar to the 'four cornered logic' of Nagarjuna) and with modal adverbs like 'perhaps' and 'maybe' which are crucial to expressing the Jain philosophical principle that all knowledge is probable and all views are partial. This relativist thinking in turn shapes the narrator's quizzical estimates of her characters, and the stories' inconclusive endings. In the light of Wilson's philosophical interest in cosmic interconnectedness, Dr. Bhelande also explores the degree of Wilson's artistic involvement with social questions- with specifically women's issues, and with issues relating to class and race. She examines the author's limitations as well as strengths in these areas and defends her in terms of her historical moment.

Dr. Bhelande has worked with unpublished manuscript materials and has interviewed and corresponded with people who knew Ethel Wilson. Canadians, accordingly, will find that this book contains original and important scholarship. This very lucid study will also have interdisciplinary, cross-cultural value, for it will introduce the Indian reader to one of Canada's finest writers, while the Canadian reader will learn about Indian philosophical thought and come to a different way of appreciating Ethel Wilson., Both readers will find here in Dr. Bhelande's study what Wilson herself once hopefully described as "the common humanity of [her work], in perceptive language". She would not have wished for more.