Kūno apylankos Rohinto Mistry apsakyme „Plaukimo pamokos“

Abstract

The present reading of Rohinton Mistry’s short story Swimming Lessons is a modest attempt to apply the phenomenological approach to the aesthetic interpretation of the immigrant experience in fiction. By way of looking at the body as incorporated consciousness, this analysis of Mistry’s narrative focuses on the ways in which the Parsi protagonist’s senses articulate the complex process of his adaptation in Canadian society. In other words, the immigrant’s body is seen as a site of collision between India and Canada, past and present, reality and fiction. This reading of Mistry’s narrative suggests that rather than unfolding the experience of cultural displacement characteristic of contemporary multicultural fiction in Canada, Swimming Lessons problematises the issue of the immigrant experience by way of exploring the issues of the nature and source of writing. Anchored in the body, the immigrant experience here reveals the anxieties of the creative consciousness which is trying to find balance between past and present, Bombay and Toronto, empirical experience and talent for fiction.