Review of Related Studies

6

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF LITERATURE

A. Review of Related Studies

The Glass Palace is notably a historical novel. It is stated By F. L. Aldama in Unraveling the Nation from Narration in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace 2005. That assumption thus justifies for the ‘fictionalizing’ of real historical occurrences found in the novel. On the other words, The Glass Palace moves beyond the demands of truth and the facts found in archival, autobiographical sources, “the author of the historical novel is free to imagine and invent the ‘facts’” Aldama, 2005:7. It is evident in a third-person narrator that “relates a story in a helical fashion that simultaneously fictionalizes and makes real historical subject and event” Aldama, 2005:7. The parcel of this consensus is that historical event can give cause for deep psychological probing of the character’s inferiority. Also on the convention of narratorial basis, Aldama argues that The Glass Palace ’s story is shaped by Romance genre convention. The evidence is the love- story, between an Indian, Rajkumar, and a beautiful maid named Dolly, which has set them forth to a quest which leads to the rise and fall of three generations family in a great epic proportion. This argument tries to explain Pankay Mishra’s remarks on the novel that the characters are seldom described in round characteristics; so “the king and peasant alike in The Glass Palace lack a complex inner life” Aldama, 2005:10. 7 Postcoloniality becomes a subsequent issue when The Glass Palace takes the history of British sovereignty over India as its basis. Aldama described The Glass Palace as a story “chock full of hyphenated [South Asian hybrid] characters who seek a sense of place and belonging – a home – within homelands torn apart by colonialist and imperialist invasions and civil wars” Aldama, 2005:6. It is resonant with Tuomas Huttunen’s study 2003, stating that: one of the central themes in The Glass Palace is the way colonial discourses primarily the military discourse have moulded the subaltern identity and resulted in severe alienation Huttunen, 2003:65. According to Huttunen, this self-alienation is most apparent in Arjun after he lives inside the British Indian Army. Huttunen confesses how colonial discourse and military system become so disabling and dooms Arjun, who has been inexplicably molded to be a war-machine under the imperialist discourse: Arjun,.. can initially express himself only within the discourse of the military culture. As he finally realizes his condition as a puppet of this colonial discourse and manages to create some distance from it, he is left with nothing. He has nowhere to place his allegiances Huttunen, 2003:65. This finding shows how mimicry works unconsciously. The feeling just creeps up in him, and at the end military discourse has eaten up all his sense of self. He has been slowly alienated in his pleasure of being almost British. For me, it is enticing, and creating skeptical questioning, to know that Arjun ‘is left with nothing’. In what justification can we say that this mimic man is left with nothing, so “no language would help him build a new self with other affiliations” Huttunen, 2003:65? 8 Huttunen in The Ethics of Representation in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh 2003. Huttunen’s Ethics is influenced by Radhakhrisnan’s theory 2003 and Levinas’ view of ontological problem of the Other 1969 which push Huttunen to discover the mission of ethical levelling in the novel. In it he tries to show how Ghosh explicates indigenous tradition and values, Other’s culture, in order to make it intelligible. To achieve its aim, Huttunen focuses on Amitav Ghosh’s narrative strategy for an ethical representation of the colonized Others “across myriad discursive divides and asymmetries in various circumstances” Huttunen, 2003:4. By ‘ethical representation’, Huttunen points out to Ghosh’s characters in the novels which stem “from varying social backgrounds” and come through as “caricatures of the ideologies they represent” Huttunen, 2003:62. So, the characters become the symbols of diverse ideologies existing in the novel. Another study considering the ethical representation in Ghosh’s novels has been done by Shameem Black 2010. Black comments on Ghosh’s narrative style as an instance of ‘flattened aesthetics’ meant to make the linguistically diverse characters sound alike. This changing of style, as commented by Huttunen, markedly corresponds to the shift in the emphasis of concern “from the narrative appropriation of the target of representation to that of readerly openness” Huttunen, 2003:62. Thus, we can infer that Ghosh in The Glass Palace has managed to use English as its linguistic medium in order to ethically represent the marginalized culture within the body of English philosophical system . Another unique quality of Ghosh’s narrative style is that his narration offers a sensitive and multifaceted view on contemporary problems. In his 9 monograph of Ghosh’s works, John C. Hawley 2005 suggests that any critics working on Ghosh’s novels should acknowledge their generic heterogeneity and discursive inventiveness which enable Ghosh to attain such sensitivity to multifaceted colonial problems. By the same view, Radhakhrisnan examines the concept of imagination and space in Ghosh’s novels: Space in Ghosh‘s narratives is manifested as a many-faceted problematic that brings together time, place imaginary and real dimensions, location whether geographical or discursive and identity both personal and nationalcommunalcollective Radhakhrisnan, 2003: pp. 27-28. These studies that I have reviewed give me an idea that any conceptual literary theories are challenged to examine the alterity found in The Glass Palace. Most studies of The Glass Palace regards the evocation of colonialism from the colonised’s point of view, embodied by Ghosh as an Indian writer, as an ethical representation of Eastern culture, the Other of European ontology. Hence, when I found that some characters in The Glass Palace are narrated as having complex self-questioning which is caused by severe alienation done by British imperialists, I then dedicate my own study to ethically represent Indian Self by examining his identity re-negotiation which is a struggle to counter colonial alienation. I imagined that by doing this, we can open up an opportunity for postcolonial societies in our present day, to have a chance to speak their thoughts.

B. Review of Related Theories 1. Elements of Fiction