UNRAVELING THE PSYCHE OF MODERNITY: AN INQUIRY OF EXISTENTIAL ANGST AND POETIC DISSONANCE IN JAUN ELIA'S POETRY

Abstract

The present research aims to trace the elements of the modernist era in the poetry of the famous Pakistani Urdu poet, Jaun Elia. Elia is renowned for his absurdity, individualism, experimentation, and symbolism in his poetry (Shams, 2021). Jaun Elia was a rebellious, revolutionary, modernist, and traditional poet. It was an exceptionally challenging task for a writer to convey the lively form of elaborate and aesthetic excellence in poetry during the modern period. However, a poet and a writer make something of an additional standard, which makes art completely incomprehensible and conceivable by bringing a laurel of pearls from the profundity of the sea to grant an unused and imaginative mode of expression (Elia, 2023).  As modernist philosophy focused on 'I think before I am,' the research has been conducted using Charles Mauron's psychoanalytic framework to interpret literary works and examine the relationship between the text and the author. The paper focuses on the concept of individual aloofness, anguish, isolation, modernism, revolution, and the elements of ambiguity in Jaun Elia's poetry that made him not only a notable modern poet of Pakistan, but also a widely read poet of Urdu in South Asia. Through a close analysis of linguistic features, the paper establishes how the use of lexical elements, syntactic fragmentation, and ironic registers used by Jaun Elia creates a discourse of existential angst and poetic dissonance. Using the psychoanalytic model of Charles Mauron (Mauron, 1962), the study reveals certain common motifs of loss, negation, and irony that connect the poetic voice of Elia with his personal psyche and with the general fears of modernity. The results indicate that Elia not only incorporates the lack of clarity and distress of the modernist state but also reinvents the forms of revolutionary modernism in Urdu literature.