11. Being and Nothing in A Passage to India

Abstract

" Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary." 1 We are pre sented from the outset with the structure of a reality divided in two, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary. Chandrapore is typical of what is ordinary: it is the city, the place of human habitation, and has no things that can be called " extraordinary." But outside the ordinary there is the ex£ra-or dinar y; it is there in addition to the ordinary. The realm of human life is not only a presence of the ordinary but also an absence of the extraordinary. In this state of absence the ordinary realm " presents nothing." But it does so in an extraordinary way: " nothing " becomes a presence when presented. Primary reality, then, is both what is there and what is not there; it is something (something ordinary) and it is nothing ("nothing extraordinary"). As an excep tion to the ordinary, the city also presents the Caves, which are extra ordinary but which contain nothing. There is the same co-presence of nothing and something as in the city, and this allows it to be said that the city presents the Caves, even though they are twenty miles off. Yet the Caves are an exception, different from the ordinary things that Chandrapore presents. "Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely." The circumference of this ordinary