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Utsana Phloengtham's The Story of Jan Dara as a Buddhist modernist novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2023
Abstract
Utsana Phloengtham's The Story of Jan Dara is one of the most widely known stories in Thailand. It is remembered as ‘erotic fiction’ as well as an ‘immortal classic’. It has also been praised as a Buddhist treatise. Yet, despite being replete with Buddhist terminology and references, it has never been analysed in English as a work of Buddhist fiction. This article argues that Jan Dara is one of the very few examples of Thai Buddhist modernist literature, and a highly original and highly layered one at that. The novel employs a diverse number of techniques and concerns derived from modernist authors such as D.H. Lawrence to explore sexual life in an aristocratic mansion of the 1930s. Understood with reference to the literary modernist tropes it employs and the debates in Buddhist cosmology and morality at the time of writing, it can be shown to be a scathing indictment of old-fashioned moralistic ‘hypocrites’ who practice decadent lives ‘while mouthing the Buddhist precepts’.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2023
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Mark Bookman, Justin McDaniel, Joe Littler and Thomas Bruce.
References
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21 Utsana Phloengtham, Rueang khong Chan Dara [The story of Jan Dara] (Bangkok: Matichon, 2013), pp. 412–6. This is the edition that I have referenced and all translations from the novel are my own. This edition also includes interviews with the author, which were originally published separately: Utsana Phloengtham, ‘Poet thep samphaat Utsana Phloengtham’ [A taped interview with Utsana Phloengtham], Thanon nangseu 3, 3 (1985): 28–34.
22 This is in fact a quote from one of Joyce's letters to his wife Nora, but could quite readily apply to his unwillingness to censor his literary works.
23 Phloengtham, Rueang khong Chan Dara, p. 414.
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26 M. Delly or Delly was the pseudonym of the French brothers Jeanne Marie Henriette Petitjean de la Rosiére (1875–1947) and Frédéric Henri Petitjean de la Rosiére (1870–1949).
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28 Translations of some extracts from the novel as well as a helpful summary can be found in: Susan Fulop Kepner, The lioness in bloom: Modern Thai fiction about women (Oakland: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 81–3.
29 Dokmai Sot, Phu Di [Persons of quality] (Bangkok: Silapa Bannaakaan,1973), p. 11.
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31 Ibid., p. 77.
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35 Albert Camus, The fall (London: Penguin, 2013). The quote itself is by Samuel Johnson.
36 Phloengtham, The story of Jan Dara, trans. Jiangphatthanarkit, p. 379.
37 Ibid., p. 129.
38 Italics my own.
39 Phloengtham, The story of Jan Dara, p. 377.
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