Bodily and Spiritual Borders in the Parsi Males of Rohinton Mistry’s <i>Tales from Firozsha Baag</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this essay, I am going to read the bodies of the Parsi male characters in Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject. According to Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, a reaction elicited by bodily fluids such as excrement, blood or even semen. The bodies of the Parsi males in Tales of Firozsha Baag are a site of awareness in which the “bodily borders” (Moreno-Álvarez 2014: 39) explode. In the first section of the essay, I will discuss the stories “One Sunday”, “The Collectors” and “Exercisers”. In the second section, I will delve into Mistry’s Canadian trilogy — ”Squatter”, “Lend Me Your Light” and “Swimming Lessons” — whose main subject is the young Parsi male striving for happiness and individual liberation (moksha) through emigration to North America. I will conclude that these Parsi men have difficulties integrating themselves in their Indian and North American contexts because the realms of the corporeal and the spiritual are, quoting Frantz Fanon’s phrase, “zones of occult instability” (Fanon 1967: 21).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".