Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

Easterner like Kanan or Minou would recognise each mask as a screen superimposed over the
soul—certainly giving the self substance and voice, but no more—, acknowledge each as
illusory, and maintain some ambivalence towards them all.
The priest’s response to Judith’s attempted confession, that her sin was ‘against
yourself’ and will bring ‘nothing but sorrows and more sins’ (TB, 54), was, in fact, right on the
money. His repeated tag-question, ‘d’you understand?’, emphasises Judith’s ‘inability, or
unwillingness, to understand anything that goes beyond or beneath her “known” and safe
world’ (Riem, 172). When Kanan tries to explain basically the same thing in his own words,
‘Power over yourself is the only power’ (TB, 153), Judith rebukes him as well, and reiterates
her steadfast misunderstanding as if it were a principle, and yet she is rejecting the very
underlying principles of the feminism which she believes she is maintaining.
It is at this point, Riem argues, that ‘our “sympathies” as readers start slowly to move
away from Judith’. D’Alpuget provides other personalities, other points of view, and ‘differing
consciences’ for those sympathies (Riem, 172). Kanan especially, the professor of Indian
history, a man of deep spiritual instincts, who can express without fear his love for both
Judith—his lover—and Ralph—his drinking partner. Kanan ‘is the perfect counterpoint to
Judith, both on the socio-cultural and psychological levels’ (Riem, 172). He is a man of deep
insight, who ‘can know and understand others because he knows and understands himself’, a
capacity Judith and the other Westerns, who, at best, know only the most superficial of their
masks, do not share. Riem notes how d’Alpuget’s ‘omniscient’ narrator ironically identifies
Kanan’s recognition of his ability ‘to read the human heart’ as vanity.
While Kanan ‘has reached, through Yogic meditation, that still, unshakable inner centre
where everything is perfect and pure—universal consciousness—the pure inner source’, Judith
remains stubbornly caught in her misunderstanding, both attracted to his ‘distracting beauty’
and angered by his beliefs, which she considers ‘superlative garbage’ while inevitably pointing
out her own lack of ‘at-one-ment’ (Riem, 174). In contrast, d’Alpuget develops the similarities
of philosophical bearing between Kanan and Minou, and does so principally to emphasise the
- 236 -