2019
American Research Journal of Humanities Social Science (ARJHSS)R)
American Research Journal of Humanities & Social Science (ARJHSS) E-ISSN: 2378-702X Volume-02, Issue-10, pp-44-47 October-2019 www.arjhss.com Research Paper
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The Tragedy of Human Condition: the Anonymity of Modern Existence and Auden’s the Unknown Citizen Biswarup Das 1
Assistant Teacher in English, Jamaldaha T. D. High School Jamaldaha, Coochbehar, West Bengal, India
*Corresponding Author: Biswarup Das ABSTRACT:- The most precious possession of man is his identity.One toils for the greater part of his life to found and sustain it.But in the modern era of machines and technological development man is on the verge of losing it. Unconsciously a person takes for granted the teachings of the society and devotes his energy to build his identity in the socially directed way.What all his effort brings is his‘social identity.’But in the process, his ‘self’ is lost. Though he remains blissfully unaware of the fact, he becomes an object of the society by losing his subjective entity.He loses himself amidst the crowd, and becomes one among the many. He loses his ability to think, and with that his freedom. He is reduced to a follower of the system.In this way, he becomes a non-entity. In his famous poem, ‘The Unknown Citizen,’ the celebrated English-American poet W. H. Auden hasdealt with this predicament of modern humanity. The only remedy to this plight is to become aware of and try to know about the ‘individual self.’
Keywords:- Identity, Freedom, Self, Society, Consciousness, Existence, External object. I.
INTRODUCTION
The greatest tragedy of humanity is the lack of identity. Though seemingly against human reality, the statement is at bottom true.When a person is born, he is already defined by the society. The society acts like God,somethinghaving the qualities ofboth the inert ‘being -in-itself’ (Spade, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,’ 73) and the consciousness projecting meaning on it, the ‘being-for-itself’ (Spade, 80). The allpowerful society almost already knows what the newborn infant is going to be in future, for it isdetermined to mold him according to its own principle. Being the victim of social ‘interpellation’ (‘The term interpellation was an idea introduced by Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to explain the way in which ideas get into our heads and have an effect on our lives, so much so that cultural ideas have such a hold on us that we believe they are our own. Interpellation is a process, a process in which we encounter our culture‟s values and internalize them‟ [longwood.edu]),even his own family brings him up in the socially-determined way. With time he grows up,piling up in his heart one experience upon the other.He starts adapting himself to the system.The more he does that, the morethe ‘glory from the earth’ is faded away, and all his enterprise ‘fade into the light of common day‟ (Wordsworth, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, ‘lines, 18, 76).He devotes all his energy in acquiring an identity of his own. But the identity he acquires by his assiduous enterprise and dedicated engagement is his social identity, a determinant of his significance within a particular structural system.He is either a businessman or a service holder, a labour or a director, a dictator or a follower, a politically biased or a politically neutral person, a family man or a confirmed bachelor. Whatever he is, he is ultimately a product of the system, a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being.’ Therefore in him ‘essence – that is, the ensemble of both the production routine and the properties which enable it to be both produced and defined – precedes existence‟ (Sartre, ‘Existentialism and Human Emotions,’ 13). Gradually in this way he becomes a unit of the society lacking in real identity, his being as a ‘self.’ Even though he might become socially successful and even a responsible citizen, he is incomplete as an existent. He gains worldly reputation to lose himself.The cycle of his life is somewhat like this–he is born, he grows up studying or labouring, he comes to his youth and selects a profession, he gets married (usually) and begets children, devotes himself in earning money and maintaining his family, grows old and one day passes away from earth. His whole life is thus spent in role-playing, the role assigned to him by the society.Probably that is why Shakespeare’s Jaques made the
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