Peer Webinar: Chapter 9

The Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College organized Peer Webinar: Chapter 9 on 21st July, 2022 at 7 pm. The speaker was Mr. Soumyajit Chandra; his paper was entitled The Himalayan Cryptid: The Yeti confronted with Tintin and Tenida. The webinar was held on Google Meet; it was attended by the faculty members of the Department of English.

Since November 2021, Peer Webinar has functioned as a platform for the exchange of research-based ideas for faculty members and students alike. In the current peer webinar session, Mr. Soumyajit Chandra talked about the representation of the Yeti in two works of popular literature namely, Tintin in Tibet by Herge, serialized in the Tintin Magazine from 1958-59, and published in 1960, and Tenida ar Yeti by Narayan Gangopadhyay, published in 1968. The paper focused on the politics of otherization and alterity in the representation of the Yeti by the respective authors and also in the position of the narrator vis-à-vis the members of the audience within the work of fiction.

In the initial section, the paper situated the Yeti within the discourse of Cryptozoology—a branch of fringe-science or pseudoscience which is devoted to the search for “hidden animals”. A yeti-like creature was sighted for the first time in the Himalayas by Brian Hodgson in 1832. The incident was followed by several other explorers and Yeti-enthusiasts who embarked on Yeti-hunts. The 1950s was “the golden age of yeti-hunting”; Eric Shipton’s 1951 photograph of a Yeti-footprint remained as an influential artefact signifying the Yeti’s existence for a long time, though it was later proved to be a hoax. The initial section brought out the deep-seated human desire for creating fiction in connection with the Yeti legend: both European travellers and Sherpa porters have shown inclination to use deception, chicanery and subterfuge in order to affirm the existence of the cryptid. Folklore engenders “fakelore” and within the literary context, it serves as an important tool for the perpetuation of power-dynamics, mostly in favour of the author/narrator.

In Tintin in Tibet, the Yeti is initially constructed as a terrible monstrosity and a formidable other to the Asian and the European characters alike. However, over the course of time, the Yeti is shown to be imbued with human characteristics of pain, fear, wonder and love since it takes care of Chang after the latter survives the plane crash. Herge portrays a steady collapse of the demarcation between the self and the other, and therefore one notes how the other is defined from the standpoint of the self; it is appropriated for the purpose of “epistemological, ontological and veridical comprehension”. Tenida ar Yeti constructs the Yeti in the role of God, the Other—the “wholly other”—one which shows radical alterity according to Immanuel Levinas. Through a subtle deployment of theological categories, the Yeti is represented as wholly other; when Tenida, the narrator claims to have confronted the Yeti, he has experienced a “rupture” or a “breach”, thus partaking of the formidable grandeur of this “God-like” figure and adopting an exalted position in the eyes of the audience. Tenida upholds a type of Yeti-fakelore which qualifies as fiction and a product of human imagination. The objective of such an endeavour is identified to be a desire for inhabiting a simpler world which one understands better, and to have a sense of power over one’s own life, not to mention, over others as well. The power-dynamic which exists between narrator and audience therefore turns out to be an enactment of the unconscious human desire for plenitude which permeates every possible dimension of the human existence.

The session was moderated by Mr. Pema Gyalchen Tamang, the youngest member of the department. Peer Webinar has enabled scholars with diverse research interests to exchange their ideas on this platform, thus enriching the audience through an exposure to multiform academic disciplines and possible approaches to textual research.