Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Competing Versions of a Love Story: Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi

At first glance Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi seem less like a literary couple than literary combatants. In 1933 the renowned scholar Mircea Eliade wrote what he claimed to be a semiautobiographical novel about his romance with a young Bengali poet, which he originally entitled Maitreyi but later retitled Bengal Nights.1 This novel, as the rather suggestive title implies, is a story of young love and steamy, passionate nights, as well as of cultural conflict. Devi’s 1974 novel It Does Not Die is her response to Eliade. Reading it in the light of Bengal Nights, the reader is forced to examine the racial and colonial assumptions that shape Eliade’s text. Taken together, these two works compete for the right to name, to narrate, to determine what the “truth” is—and to invent. Reading these literary creations intertextually illuminates the racial, colonial , and sexual power dynamics underlying both narratives. In the introduction to his Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration , Wayne Koestenbaum argues that male-male literary collaboration is inherently erotic. He posits the theory that male-male literary collaborators “express homoeroticism and they strive to conceal it,” 243 Competing Versions of a Love Story Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi   terming the kind of writing that ensues “double talk”: “When two men write together . . . they rapidly patter to obscure their erotic burden.” In his view, “collaboration is always a sublimation of erotic entanglement .”2 This theory seems debatable even with regard to collaborative writing considered in its strictest sense. Clearly another theoretical model is needed to describe the relationship between writers like Eliade and Devi, where the two are not equal collaborators but rather sensationalistic first writer and reluctant respondent, and where the erotic component of their relationship is not sublimated but the explicit subject of Eliade’s writing. Given the high value placed on chastity within Bengali culture, Eliade’s novel would be more accurately described as a metaphorical act of violence and violation than an act of “metaphorical sexual intercourse,” as Koestenbaum claims. Interestingly, however, Devi does not respond to Eliade’s act of inscriptive violence with an act of equally violent revenge. Instead, she rewrites his story on her own terms, firmly repudiating his inscription of her as the exotic, erotic oriental Other yet preserving his representation of their relationship as something more significant than such a brief, youthful alliance would normally be. Precisely what the relationship signifies becomes the subject of contestation. Rather than merely refuting Eliade’s version of events, Devi combines strategies of contradiction and correction with strategies of integration, fusion, and complementarity. She weaves her story around his, alternately correcting and confirming, reinterpreting and reinforcing, rejecting and elaborating. In so doing, Devi asserts her right to equal authorial power. Race, Gender, and Power Eliade’s text is a novel of Western conquest. His work invites the European reader to participate in his sensual experience of seducing and being seduced by an exotic Other and by the mysterious culture of Bengal . Eliade is not entirely unaware of the nature of his subject position and is self-aware enough to mock some of his initial assumptions, as well as the more overt racism of his compatriots. Nonetheless, his text reproduces many of the standard tropes common to Western representations of the East. Eliade exoticizes and eroticizes the teenage Maitreyi, simultaneously emphasizing her innocence and instinctive sexual talents, her mysteriousness, and her difference. Although Maitreyi is described as 244   passionate and eager to give her body to Eliade, she is also frequently described as “primitive,” “enigmatic,” “unfathomable,” “a savage,” and “a barbarian.” Eliade’s impressions of Maitreyi are clearly shaped by a preexisting colonial discourse that defines the mysterious, sensual East as the opposite of the rational, sensible West. Bengal Nights demonstrates the power of prevailing orientalist mythologies and provides an excellent opportunity to interrogate and question representations of the sexuality of Eastern women in texts by European writers. Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die presents a compelling voice leading this interrogation. Reversing the usual power dynamic of colonialism, it is Devi, the Bengali woman, who gets the last word in this debate, and thus is in the position of correcting, of presenting the authoritative version of these distant events. She also calls the reader’s attention to the fictionality inherent even in Eliade’s supposedly autobiographical account by wickedly reversing one of Eliade’s most tactless authorial decisions...