The novels of Amitav Ghosh : interpreration in literary geography

Abstract

Franco Moretti in his book Atlas of the European Novel (1998), explains rather succinctly how literary geography could refer to either space in literature which is fictional in nature, or literature in space which is a historical space and alludes to a provincial library to cite an example. This thesis falls under the category of discovering and understanding space(s) in literature, though the approach it takes especially in regards to engaging with geography is different in its treatment from Moretti’s engagement with the discipline. A literature survey of the field suggests that the term ‘literary geography’ in itself has meandered through many methodological debates. Though geographers relied heavily on creative expressions of landscapes in novels, the text was always held as an unauthentic, unscientific source of data and never equivalent to an accurate description of a given landscape, however appealing be its subjective description. The 1970s saw a major change in this direction especially after the structural movement and the rise of the social sciences that invited interdisciplinary approaches and the text was now seen as far more contextualized and grounded in literary theories and consequently available to multiple interpretations. Bertrand Westphal (2007) explains how the postmodern condition involves in the study of space, a coherence through heterogeneity since the understanding of space is so variegated. Space could be absolute space, or space could be imbued with values as Yi Fu Tuan (2001) suggests or space could be social borne out of the human activities as proposed by Neil Smith (1984). Sheila Hones (2014) in her recent work in the area of literary geography justifies that for this interdisciplinary approach to work , “space—whether geographical, narrative, or literary— has to be understood not as a fixed and measurable frame within which action takes place but rather as the product of action: an active dimension of interrelations,intertextualities, and multiplicity” (5). This thesis is a maiden research attempt in the direction of such an inter-disciplinary approach and takes a small step towards contributing to the corpus of literary geography, through a study of Amitav Ghosh’s novels using the notion of scales. The works of Amitav Ghosh are chosen since it is hard to categorise them under a single rubric of national or postcolonial or any other because of the way they appropriate space. The author himself is averse to all manner of categorization and considers the novel as the fullest expression of dealing with human experience whatever be the subtext of the narrative. Events surrounding history, anthropology, environment, travel or nation are enlivened only through the characters’ experience of the same and it is this experience that steers the narrative or builds the story. Given such an environment for all of Ghosh’s texts, fictional space and geographical space become two significant components of explicating the variability of reading what Ghosh’s texts offer. However, this study is weary of methodological gaps in application of a purely geographic concept such as scale to the narrative which comprise two chapters. Theories found appropriate to the context at hand are applied to elicit the desired interpretations.