Amitav Ghosh’s tangled paths of modernity

[Part 2]

So far, I have been discussing the nature and significance of Amitav Ghosh as a writer and his recognisable strengths and weaknesses. What I wish to do now is to examine possible ways in which we in Sri Lanka - both writers and readers - can draw important lessons from his creative and interpretive efforts. To understand him and see possible ways of drawing upon his writings, we need to re-contextualise him and examine the most productive ways in which he can be turned into an object of critical study. There is a crying need, in his case, for bold re-contextualisations and imaginative re-interpretations of his work.

Terry Eagleton the distinguished British literary critic once said that, ‘criticism is not an instrument or passage to the truth of a text, but a transformative labor which makes its object appear other than it is.’ This transformative labor, when reading Amitav Ghosh’s writings, needs be prized very highly.

What this means is that we need to correlate his formal experimentations and linguistic innovations with the content and animating ideology of his work. How social contradictions and historical anxieties impinge on his consciousness and shape his narrative structures and linguistic registers have to be de-coded very carefully. In other words it is of paramount importance that we engage in a symptomatic reading. As Fredric Jameson rightly points out, a symptomatic reading seeks ‘to restore to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history.’

I said earlier that it is important that we examine experimentations in language and narrative strategy as a way of gaining entry into the deeper layers of meaning embedded in the content. As I pointed out earlier, Ghosh very often forsakes a straightforward and linear narrative and fashions a fragmented narrative with complex temporal juxtapositions. This is a way of enacting his doubts about unified histories, historical certitudes that we very often have unquestioningly taken for granted. His reluctance to subscribe to a unified and authoritative history and instead foreground a relative, fragmented and provisional one is important. And this desire finds articulation in his technique and verbal registers. Here is one instance where we as Sri Lankan writers and readers can draw on his work.

Authorial choices

It is evident that very often narrative structures carry within themselves certain authorial choices that illuminate the writer’s value systems. We as readers should be alert to this phenomenon. When we explore the narrative structures in novels such as The Shadow Lines, The Circle of Reason and Calcutta Chromosome, we see haw they embody and enact certain constellation of values. This offers us useful insights into the dynamics of productive reading. This question of narrative structure is intimately related to the power of descriptions which Ghosh possesses in abundance. In his novels, as indeed in most well-crafted novels, descriptions come across as subjective, partial, value-laden; descriptions can be regarded as sites of meaning which draw in the reader inexorably.

And any ideological reading of a novel by Ghosh or any other novelist should engage the ideology invariably embedded in it. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind the fact that descriptions, forms and ideologies do not always cohere; at times, they generate tension. We must be alert, as readers, to these diverse possibilities. These are useful lessons for Sri Lankan writers and readers of fiction.

Attention

Another facet of Ghosh’s writing that merits our closest attention is the way he approaches the problems of post-coloniality. Although some of the incidents in his fiction take place before the de- colonisation process had begun, his works can be usefully located within an analytical frame of post-colonilaity. Broadly speaking, there are two main approaches to questions of fiction and post-colonialism. The first can be described as the liberal-humanistic approach which focuses in individual consciousness and cross-cultural issues. The second can be described as the colonial deterministic approach which focuses on the discursive production of colonial and post-colonial societies; it can be said that Ghosh favors the second approach, although he is fully aware of its limitations.

Amitav Ghosh seeks to transcend the limitations associated with the discursive determinism of the second approach by granting the reader a great measure of interpretive freedom. Texts invariably contain, despite the best intentions of their authors, gaps, fissures, fault lines and ambivalences, and it is the duty of the reader to occupy these gaps and make use of them for the purpose of advancing his or her interpretations. In addition, Ghosh, like Homi Bhabha and other cultural critics, believe that there is no simple antipathy between coloniser and colonised; the interaction is far more complex than a surface acquaintance would have us believe. The ambitions and desires of the colonizer intersect with the ambitions of and desire of the colonized. This idea runs through many of Ghosh’s novels. Hence, when we in Sri Lanka seek to construct frame of intelligibility to encompass and give definition to post-colonial texts we can turn to Amitav Ghosh for some guidance.

The idea of modernity, or to be more specific cultural modernity, as I stated earlier, is central to Amitav Ghosh’s body of writings.

To be continued