Recognition and Ethics in World Literature

Religion, Violence, and the Human

Vincent van Bever Donker

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783838268477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Recognition and Ethics in World Literature is a critical comparative study of contemporary world literature, focusing on the importance of the ethical turn (or return) in literary theory. The book examines the ethical engagement of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, exploring the overlap and divergence between Levinasian/Derridean and Aristotelian ethics. Recognitions and emotional responses are integral to the unfolding of ethical concerns, and the ethics they explore are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic. Recognition is particularly suitable for the concerns of world literature authors in its interconnection of the universal and the particular—a binary that has been crucial in postcolonialism and remains important for the wider field of world literature. This study builds its analysis around three broad themes: religion, the memory of violence, and the human.

Chapter One
Anagnorisis and the Clash of Values

I came back to the houseboat with my head in a whirl: when Jodu's eyes met mine, in the Consoo House, it was as if our lives had changed. A strange and powerful thing is recognition!

(Ghosh 2015, 266)

I

Amitav Ghosh, more than any of the other authors considered in this book, has invested in the idea and power of recognition. As the epigraph reflects, recognition enters his work as an explicit theme in the final book of the Ibis Trilogy. Ghosh's work is thus an excellent point at which to begin refining the approach to ethics in world literature outlined in the introduction. I will focus my attention on two of his works, namely The Hungry Tide (2005a)[17] and Sea of Poppies (2008), as both deploy anagnorisis as a narrative mechanism, as well as engaging all three of the ethical themes that I have introduced. Least directly engaged, however, is the question of religion. In his study of Amitav Ghosh, Anshuman Mondal (2007) argues that Ghosh's engagement with religion and secularism are caught up in his negotiation of the tension between modernism/humanism and postmodernism. While the "authoritarianism, violence and coercive reflexes" of the postcolonial State need to be criticised, the "Nehruvian vision of a secular, democratic nation-state that accommodates India's 'diversity' into a syncretic unity" nevertheless remains essential for Ghosh as a "bulwark against the forces of religious and ethnic chauvinism" and the political and ethical risks these entail (28). The accuracy of this assessment is borne out by the observation that religion in these two novels tends to be either a syncretic fusion of different languages and beliefs, as in the Bon Bibi myth in The Hungry Tide, or is subjected to critique when used as an alibi for violence and coercion, which we see with Mr Burnham's Christianity in Sea of Poppies (Hoydis 2011, 329). Ghosh's negotiation of religion in these novels is not, however, an engagement with religion as such, and therefore functions more, as it were, as a prelude to the engagement in the work of Chimamanda Adichie that will be observed in the next chapter—at which point I will explore more fully questions of the relationship between religion and colonialism.

Of greater concern to Ghosh are the themes of history and humanism. The meticulous historical research that characterises his oeuvre has been well documented by critics. Mondal and Hoydis both observe that Ghosh is most concerned with histories or stories that fall beyond the pale of historical narratives, involved as they are with the grand narrative of "modernity, development and Progress"; his interest is in "'fragments' of human experience that have been occluded from the historical record, and which find no place in such grand designs" (Mondal 2007, 21).[18] It has been observed that Ghosh challenges traditional historiography on two levels. Noting the proximity of Ghosh's work to that of the Subaltern Studies collective, Mondal argues that a consideration of the necessarily increasing self-reflexivity of Subaltern Studies clarifies the effectiveness of Ghosh's fictionalizing of history. "Indeed, it could be argued that Ghosh [as a writer] has the licence to explore areas of the Subaltern Studies project that the historians themselves are prohibited from by virtue of their investment in 'historiography'" (27). The two novels under consideration here continue this concern with elided and forgotten narratives.[19] In each case, there is a "forgotten history" that is fictionalised. With regard to Sea of Poppies Ghosh comments, "The Ghazipur and Patna opium factories between them produced the wealth of Britain. It is astonishing to think of it but the Empire was really founded on opium" (quoted in Hoydis 2011, 330). It is this "forgotten history" of the fundamental importance of opium to the British Empire—and its devastating effects on her subjects—that Hoydis argues Ghosh seeks to recover. Similarly with The Hungry Tide: though less directly connected to colonialism, in this novel it is the incident of the Morichjhãpi massacre in the Sundarbans that is recovered, an event that until the publication of the novel "had all but lapsed into oblivion" (Tomsky 2009, 57).

To limit Ghosh's engagement with history to the recuperation of forgotten stories would, however, produce an impoverished understanding of his work. Ghosh's concern with history exceeds a recounting of events, of cause and causality (Bose 2003, 18). The second challenge that Ghosh directs towards traditional history resides in his humanizing it, which brings us to the third ethical theme and the main focus in this chapter. In an interview with Vijay Kumar (2007), Ghosh comments that what he finds useful in his research is the recreation of singular "predicaments":

I think what is interesting about, say, history in terms of a novel is that history gives us particular predicaments which are unique predicamen...