A novel genre: polylingualism and magical realism in Amitav Ghosh's 'The circle of reason'
A novel genre: polylingualism and magical realism in Amitav Ghosh's 'The circle of reason'
This paper traces how Amitav Ghosh's novel The circle of reason (1986) inscribes what might be termed a ‘magical real’ sensibility of quotidian extreme, wild coincidence and tangential, picaresque epic against bounded ideas of language, history and genre. The perception of a linear shift from the British Empire into a postcolonial world of discrete nations is challenged by Ghosh's portrayal of a teeming world of transverse histories. This diffusion of ‘big history’ into the long movements and strange moments of diaspora is most crucially drawn out through Ghosh's heightened, sometimes perplexed and at other times enchanted, exploration of what might be described—using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—as the ‘polylingualism’ of language. Ghosh portrays a world in which the smaller terms of community belie the ideologies of nation impressed by the ‘traditional’ realist novel form—and the apparently organic, rooted terms of ‘community’ are themselves collapsed into a recognition that all people can be traced back to histories of displacement and migration.
431-441
Jones, Stephanie
19fbdd53-fdd0-43ad-9203-7462e5f658c6
October 2003
Jones, Stephanie
19fbdd53-fdd0-43ad-9203-7462e5f658c6
Jones, Stephanie
(2003)
A novel genre: polylingualism and magical realism in Amitav Ghosh's 'The circle of reason'.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 66 (3), .
(doi:10.1017/S0041977X03000302).
Abstract
This paper traces how Amitav Ghosh's novel The circle of reason (1986) inscribes what might be termed a ‘magical real’ sensibility of quotidian extreme, wild coincidence and tangential, picaresque epic against bounded ideas of language, history and genre. The perception of a linear shift from the British Empire into a postcolonial world of discrete nations is challenged by Ghosh's portrayal of a teeming world of transverse histories. This diffusion of ‘big history’ into the long movements and strange moments of diaspora is most crucially drawn out through Ghosh's heightened, sometimes perplexed and at other times enchanted, exploration of what might be described—using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—as the ‘polylingualism’ of language. Ghosh portrays a world in which the smaller terms of community belie the ideologies of nation impressed by the ‘traditional’ realist novel form—and the apparently organic, rooted terms of ‘community’ are themselves collapsed into a recognition that all people can be traced back to histories of displacement and migration.
Text
1851216.pdf
- Version of Record
Restricted to Repository staff only
Request a copy
More information
Published date: October 2003
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 48038
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/48038
ISSN: 0041-977X
PURE UUID: 7a91b8a5-b9a8-4c1e-8828-ca71343851ab
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 24 Aug 2007
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 09:42
Export record
Altmetrics
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics