Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction

5. The Art of Enchantment: Zulfikar Ghose

Zulfikar Ghose’s recent collection of short stories, Veronica and the Gongora Passion, includes a story called “Lila of the Butterflies and Her Chronicler” which was originally written for inclusion in a special volume honouring Gabriel García Márquez, published by the Latin American Literary Review in 1985. The story is, given the occasion, overtly intertextual, its ostensible imitation intended as a tribute to a major exponent of magic realism.1 An important aspect of the story, however, is that it ends with a quotation from The Winter’s Tale, included almost as an aside, with the obvious suggestion that if one were to look for the origins of magic realism, one could go back to Shakespeare. The allusion to Shakespeare suddenly alters the intertextual field, revealing that if certain moments in the story are reminiscent of One Hundred Years of Solitude, others emphasize the presence and influence of The Winter’s Tale. Once the comparison is made, the story becomes both a tribute to a major writer and an act of subversion, not so much to deny Márquez the reputation he enjoys so much as to signal to the reader the multiple sources of Ghose’s own literary tradition. As a descriptive term, magic realism has been immensely popular with critics as a way of characterizing Ghose’s writing. The combiNotes to chapter 5 are on pp. 193-94. 99 CHAPTER 5 The Art of Enchantment: Zulfikar Ghose nation of subject matter that is often located in Latin America and a narrative mode that is clearly outside the tradition of expressive realism has a great deal to do with Ghose’s work being described as deriving from or beholden to the magic realist tradition. The label has curiously not been courted by Ghose, although he has, on various occasions, drawn attention to Latin American authors in laudatory terms. In his critical works, particularly The Fiction of Reality and The Art of Creating Fiction, the references to major and minor writers are, predictably, numerous. He has unreserved praise for Machado de Assis, and laudatory references to Unamuno, Borges, and several others, but among Latin American authors, Márquez is referred to only sparingly.2 In fact, the references are often to Proust, Flaubert, Joyce, Henry James, Beckett, Faulkner, and so forth, all of whom are shown to be innovators in their own right. By the same token, Hemingway, Greene, Bellow and, on occasion, D.H. Lawrence are shown to be much weaker than they have been made out to be. Curiously, Eastern influences are minimal in Ghose’s corpus, although there is some reference to Urdu sources in his early poetry. Vernacular traditions–epic, puranic, or oral–are hardly ever present in Ghose’s work. The artifice in Ghose is shaped by occidental rather than oriental sources. Regardless of how convincing the final result may be, the concern with subject matter, according to Ghose, can lead only to inferior writing. Remarkably unconventional and often wilfully provocative, Ghose’s views about fiction are dictated by the conviction that a loss of artistic worth is in direct proportion to the literary pursuit of transparency . Adopting a very uncompromising stance in his criticism, he maintains that realist representation is best left to journalism, television , or political rhetoric. Literature concerns itself only with language and never with empirical realities. His own work does not entirely abandon the outside world, but his uncompromising stance is often a way of signalling to the reader that he has no patience with criticism that uses the outside world as its sole criterion. In 1989, The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted a special issue to Ghose and Milan Kundera. The appropriateness of putting these 100 Counterrealism in Indo-Anglian Fiction two writers from very different backgrounds together has become increasingly evident in the last several years. Despite the ostensible differences in their narrative strategies and subject matter, the two writers share a penchant for seeing themselves as participants in and contributors to a literary tradition rather than as proponents of a particular belief. The dictates of history may be unavoidable as elements of the plot, but the artistic pursuit is neither subservient to nor shaped by it. In fact, history and art adopt oppositional stances. As Kundera puts it, “because of its personal nature, the history of art is a revenge by man against the impersonality of the history of humanity” (16). Speaking of the...