A Study of Historiographic Metafiction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
Abstract
The paper examines the relationship of history and fiction through the postmodern perspective in Amitav Ghosh’s famous novel The Shadow Lines. Postmodern writers popularized the bond of history and fiction using the concept ‘historiographic metafiction’, coined and developed by Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon. In present study, the well known Sahitya Academy award-winning novel The Shadow Lines is analyzed and examined through the light of postmodern concept ‘historiographic metafiction’. To what extent the postmodern characteristics and techniques influenced Amitav Ghosh is a significant concern in this study. To achieve the goal of the present study, parameters such as intertextuality of history, temporal distortion, self-reflexive metafiction and fragmentation are set to examine the relationship between history and fiction.
Keywords: Postmodernism, Historiographic Metafiction, Temporal distortion, Self-reflexive metafiction, Intertextuality
Introduction
Amitav Ghosh is one of the well-known writers in the field of Indian English literature. He has written many fictional and non-fictional works. He was born in Calcutta on 11th July 1956 and educated at University of Delhi and University of Oxford. His fictional works include: The Circle of Reason, his debut novel published in 1986; The Shadow Lines, won him Sahitya Academy award in 1989; The Calcutta Chromosome in 1995, The Glass Palace in 2000 and Ibis trilogy which includes three volumes namely Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire published in 2008, 2011 and 2015 respectively. His non-fictional works include: In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma, Countdown, The Imam and the Indian and the most recent non-fictional book is The Great Derangement: Climate change and the Unthinkable. He was honored with the Padma Shri award by Govt. of India in 2007. He is also the winner of 54th Jnanpith award which was conferred to him for his novel The Shadow Lines published in 1988. Of many notable fictional works by Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines is analyzed through the light of the postmodern concept ‘Historiographic metafiction’, coined by one of well-known literary theorists Linda Hutcheon in her book entitled A Poetics of Postmodernism published in 1988. The core aim of the present paper is to find out the historiographic metafiction through examining the parameters such as intertextuality of history, self-reflexive metafiction, temporal distortion and fragmentation. These characteristics are examined in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, although these techniques are related to postmodern novels in particular. The Shadow Lines is the second fictional creation of Amitav Ghosh with historical background in it after his debut novel The Circle of Reason. The novel won him Sahitya Academy Award and placed the author in the mind of people permanently. Divided into two parts, namely Going Away and Coming Home, the story is told by an unnamed narrator who through his memories connects the historical incidents and parsonages. The novel is set in the background of Indian modern history and the Second World War. Some of the significant historical incidents shown as the backdrop are: Indian Swadeshi Movement, the partition of India in 1947, The Second world war 1939-45, the communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Calcutta.
Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction
Roughly, postmodernism in English literature started after the end of the Second World War. This period might be considered as the reaction against modernism, yet it does not reject modernism entirely. Techniques like ‘temporal distortion’ and ‘fragmentation’ are modified and adopted by the postmodern writers in their fiction. Literary giants such as T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner repeatedly used fragmentation in their works to show the disintegration of the society of the modern world. Later, this tradition was led by postmodernists such as Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie from Indian subcontinent in their work. The term ‘Historiographic Metafiction’ is the offshoot of postmodernism. Many postmodern writers used this in their novels such as Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children; Shashi Tharoor in The Great Indian Novel; Michael Ondaatje in world-famous masterpiece The English Patient; Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude; John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman; E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Linda Hutcheon discusses the term ‘Historiographic Metafiction’ in her work A Poetics of Postmodernism,
While all forms of contemporary art and thought offer examples of this kind of postmodernist contradiction, this book (like majority others on the subject) will be privileging the novel genre, and one form, in particular, a form that I want to call "historiographic metafiction.” By this I mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Midnight’s Children, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words. In most of the critical work on postmodernism, it is narrative—be it in literature, history, or theory—that has usually been the central focus of attention. Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past (5)
It is not another form of historical novel and it is not a non-fictional novel. The present study uses postmodern techniques which are also applicable to historiographic metafiction as she further points out in Historiographic Metafiction Parody and the Intertextuality of History that, “The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it ‘historiographic metafiction’” (3).
Intertextuality of History
In literature, intertextuality is one of the techniques used by postmodern writers for the understanding of one particular text through another reference text. It is used by most of the postmodernist novelists in their fiction. Without the knowledge of the reference text, one may not be able to understand the full-fledged meaning of the primary text. Many critics have commented as postmodern literature lacks originality; therefore, it is used so frequently in most of the writings of the postmodern novel. There is one more technique related to intertextuality is ‘pastiche’ which means to yoke together two or more genres such as history with fiction. Michel Foucault has steered out in his The Archaeology of Knowledge saying that, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (25-26).
There is one of the incidents where one can easily find intertextuality of history when the narrator visits London, where he meets his cousin Ila. She led him to Covent Garden and a couple of other places where the narrator spotted an office where a woman was seated, looking them up surprisingly. Narrator asks her, “Could you tell me, please . . . whether this is where the Left Book Club used to be, before the war?” (Ghosh 34). Later, he goes back to the past recalling the events which his uncle Tridib had told when they were in Calcutta,
So, as we stood outside on the pavement, I tried to recall for her how Tridib had told us that Alan Tresawsen, Mrs Price’s brother, had worked there before the war, in the Left Book Club; that it must have been right there, perhaps even in that office which we had just entered, for the Club had been a part of Victor Gollancz’s publishing house (Ghosh 34)
Another example of ‘pastiche’ and intertextuality of history is when Tham’ma, the narrator's grandmother, recalls her college days with her sister Mayadebi in their early twenties. While she thought where to start the incidents of her college days, Tridib says to the narrator about terrorist movements.
So then, because she was rolling her eyes and did not know where to begin, Tridib, who had been listening intently, told me a little about the terrorist movement amongst nationalists in Bengal in the first few decades of this century: about secret terrorist societies like Anushilan and Jugantar and all their offshoots, their clandestine networks, and the home-made bombs with which they tried to assassinate British officials and police officers; and a little about the arrests, deportations and executions with which the British had retaliated. My grandmother sat perched on the edge of her chair while he was talking, as fragile as a porcelain bird, smiling at the growing astonishment on my face as I tried to fit her into that extraordinary history. (Ghosh 41)
The communal riots of Calcutta, Delhi and Dhaka as represented in the novel throwing light on bitter historical events. Hawley points out about this in his book Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction mentioning Amitav Ghosh’s own words, "The Shadow Lines…became a book not about anyone event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them…I had to resolve a dilemma, between being a writer and being a citizen" (60). There is a vivid description of the historical personages of freedom struggle like Gandhi, Khudiram Bose, and Bagha Jatin. The novel also talks about the effects of the Second World War globally.
Self-reflexive Metafiction
Self-reflexivity means a writer of a particular genre tries to reflect his artificiality in the composition of work. Self-reflexivity connected to metafiction. Critic Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as "The term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality" (2). She further says that the metafictional works are those who “explore a theory of writing fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (2). Metafictional self-reflexivity was used continuously in most of the postmodernists' writings to problematize the relationship of fiction and reality. The author has tried to rewrite the history showing some bitter events of modern history mixing with fiction that shows self-reflexive metafiction in the novel. The reader continually is aware of reading fiction and at the same time facts which show paradox about the past and present, fiction and reality. Narrator’s efforts to know about the communal riots of Khulna and Dhaka through the reports in newspapers going back in the past shows the best example of self-reflexive metafiction.
Temporal distortion and Fragmentation
Primarily, for the sake of irony, modern and postmodern writers used this technique in a very convenient way. The non-linear account of any work is considered to be temporal distortion in which time may repeat and overlap. The writer shows multiple possible events coinciding. The Shadow Lines too is no exception from this postmodern technique. An unnamed narrator tells the whole story of the novel. Amitav Ghosh has created a web of events co-occurring at one place and another. There is always a shift in time, events, places and actions. Time is one of the crucial aspects to catch in this novel. The author has woven time with historical events and setting through flashbacks and reminiscences, i.e., the Swadeshi movement, Partition of India, Second World War and Communal riots in 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta. The first part of the novel begins by going back in 1939. The narrator begins the novel specifying the exact time, “In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib” (Ghosh 3). And the second part also starts with specifying an exact time, the narrator says, “In 1962, the year I turned ten, my grandmother retired, upon reaching the age of sixty. She had taught in a girls’ high school since 1936” (Ghosh 127). Again, saying, “When I go past Gole Park now I often wonder whether that would happen today. I do not know, I cannot tell: that world is closed to me, shut off by too many years spent away” (Ghosh 8). Then again back to London “Later, when we were eating out dinner, I discovered that in 1959, when he was twenty-seven and she nineteen, they had begun a long correspondence. Tridib had written; first, she told me. He had always sent Mrs Price cards at Christmas, ever since they left London in 1940” (Ghosh 19).
The whole novel is divided into two parts, namely Going Away and Coming Home. Both these fragmented parts are linked together by the narration of the unnamed narrator in the novel. Historical background in the novel creates a web in narration; sometimes, the same event as described by another character's point of view. The constant shift in narration and events establishes that the novel follows the technique called 'fragmentation' which was used to modern technique later, postmodernists tend to use it in novels specifically. The narration in the novel is divided into two parts by an unnamed narrator, connecting various historical and fictional events.
Conclusion
Thus, the amalgamation of history and fiction in novel writing in the postmodern era not only fascinated the western writers but also writers such as Shashi Tharoor, Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh from Indian subcontinent. Adapting postmodern concepts in most of the fictional writings, Ghosh has woven modern history in his fictional work The Shadow Lines. It establishes him as one of the postmodern novelists in English fiction writing. Techniques like fragmentation, temporal distortion, self-reflexivity, metafiction, intertextuality and pastiche have aptly been used in the novel. There is a constant shift in time and place; various points of views describing the same situation differently. Historiographic metafiction is double self-reflexive because at the one hand it shows the fictionality of the characters and events; on the other hand, it indicates towards historiography and history. So, it reflects and problematizes history simultaneously.
Work Cited