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'.
目次
Why interpret Jan Dara as a Buddhist modernist novel? 4 The author and literary modernism 5 Buddhist debate in 1960s Thailand 8 Jan Dara as a satire of Thai realist aristocratic novels 11 Jan as an opapātikā in the metaphorical sense 15 Buddhist modernist and Freudian births in Jan Dara 16 Jan's karma 18 Conclusion 21
