THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 47
middle class norms of sexuality may be rendered safe. The exquisite and self-deceptive pleasure of 'slumming' may be reproduced through fictional methods.
However, this symptomatic reading of a particular genre of Bengali fiction which was becoming popular in the 1930s and 1940s2 does not lead Manik to the too easy conclusion that the structure of fiction, because of its class-basis, will always tend to a 'deferral' of signification which goes beyond the interest of the dominant class, that the 'peasant' as fictional construct will always be an abstracted alienation from the peasant in actuality.
He rather sees the experiments of the above-mentioned naturalistic school in Bengali fiction as symptoms of the possible onset of a change in the structure of fictional discourse—a change responsive to certain changes in the objective historical situation. The fact that the representation of the peasant, the artisan, the factory worker or the fisherman, becomes such a crucial challenge to writers of fiction, itself shows a certain responsive-ness, willy-nilly, to social change. What Manik is more concerned with is the function that such representation might serve within the over-all structure of fiction. The new fictional construct, by its rootedncss in extra-fictional reality, may be made into a device for looking at the total structure from the "wrong9 end, for looking at it upside down, and thus disturbing the ideological relations which hold the edifice together. It may, in other words, in changing extra-aesthetic circumstances, resist absorption into the ideological ambience of bourgeois fiction. The problem that Manik faces as a writer is : how to make this new fictional construct, namely "the peasant9 perform this subversive act ?
In the same article a little later, he makes a reference to a specific crisis in the life of the peasant, which the naturalist writer makes extensive use of. The peasant woman sells off her body to a willing customer.8 Circumstances, which I will discuss later more specifically, had made this a relatively common phenomenon in Bengal in the 1940s. But the naturalist writer, with his deep but restricted acquaintance with the moral and emotional ambiguity of petty bourgeois life, transforms this problem into a purely moral and emotional one, while suppressing unwittingly the total interaction of social relations which forces the peasant woman towards such an exigency. Thus we have an expurgated version of peasant life where pathos is created exclusively out of 'the rape of moral values'. The tragedy of land relations' being enacted in the ] 940s in rural Bengal, the general pattern of economic and political oppression, embodied in the phenomenon of the peasant woman selling her body, is expunged from this reductive, abstracted presentation of peasant life.
Ideological Conventions
In his short stories, written in the 1940s, Manik tries to use the figure of the peasant as ^n analytical tool, to question th^ ideological