History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

11. Intertexuality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

145 11 Intertexuality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide SHAO-PIN LUO Ah, who can we turn to, then? Neither angels nor men, and the animals already know by instinct we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies “THE WORLD IS WIDE” WHAT IS STRIKING in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide, aside from the stunning descriptions of the “hungry tides” that overwhelm the archipelago of the Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal, the kind of vivid and minute descriptions one has come to expect from Ghosh’s writings, and aside from the associations one would make of river journeys and “scientific” expeditions , is the intricate intertextuality in the novel, from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, to Nirmal’s testimonies, to Kanai’s translations, to Kusum’s folklore of the “Bon Bibi,” to Piya’s scientific notebooks, and to Fokir’s mystical chants and songs. Intertextuality, a term introduced by Kristeva, is defined in Revolution in Poetic Language as the “transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (59–60): If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), one then understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy 146 SHAO-PIN LUO can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence—an adherence to different sign systems. (60) One of the examples Kristeva gives of intertextual practice is the “transposition from a carnival scene to the written text, for instance. In this connection we examined the formation of a specific signifying system—the novel—as the result of a redistribution of several different sign systems: carnival , courtly poetry, scholastic discourse” (59). In this sense, the concept of intertextuality becomes very useful in the discussion of Ghosh’s use of polyphonic discourses or a plurality of types of narratives in his novel—poetry, scientific notebooks, testimonial memoirs, myths and legends, and so on. Further, as should become clear in this chapter, Ghosh’s purpose in bringing together or transposing the different strands of “signifying systems” is to demonstrate ultimately the diverse ways of contact and communication in the world and the heterogeneity of human reality. In her essay “Word, Dialogue , and Novel” in Desire in Language, Kristeva discusses the dialogic nature of intertextuality: The notion of dialogism . . . must not be confused with Hegelian dialectics, based on a triad and thus on struggle and projection (a movement of transcendence), which does not transgress the Aristotelian tradition founded on substance and causality. Dialogism replaces these concepts by absorbing them within the concept of relation. It does not strive towards transcendence but rather toward harmony, all the while implying an idea of rupture (of opposition and analogy) as a modality of transformation. (88–89) Ghosh’s emphasis is as well on relationship, interaction, and interconnection , and, what Ghosh achieves, in his exploration of words and worlds, of history and imagination, is a “worlding” of the textual and a desire to see languages and cultures transform in relation to one another. This essay examines in the novel, first, Ghosh’s intense occupation with words, languages , and texts; second, the interplay of the diverse literary “genres” and the plurality of narrative voices; and third and most important, how Ghosh’s practice of intertextuality in The Hungry Tide fits in his larger project of “provincializing Europe,” in the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term. Published in Radical History Review is a twenty-seven-page correspondence between Ghosh and Chakrabarty. These exchanges began as Ghosh’s response to Chakrabarty’s seminal book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference and his recognition of the book’s richness, insight, and “singular achievement” (168). Although inevitably they have differences , both Ghosh and Chakrabarty appreciate their fruitful intellectual Intertextuality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide 147 exchange and feel the immense connection underlying their thinking about history, modernity, race, empire, and most crucially about the importance of alternative intellectual traditions. Chakrabarty points out in his book “the simultaneous indispensability and the inadequacy of [European] social science thought” (6) and explains that the idea of provincializing Europe is not a “nationalist, nativist, or atavistic project” (43), but rather an attempt to begin to move “toward providing plural or conjoined genealogies for our analytical categories...