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14. Inner Circles and the Voice of the Shuttle: Native Forms and Narrative Structure in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
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205 14 Inner Circles and the Voice of the Shuttle Native Forms and Narrative Structure in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason ROBBIE B. H. GOH IN A FAMOUS ESSAY on poetic language, Geoffrey Hartman—referring to the literary archetype of Sophocles’ Philomela and her tapestry-tale, which narrates her violation in ways that her mutilated tongue cannot—speaks of the “voice of the shuttle” in which certain key literary scenes seem “to exist prior to the plays that embody them,” constituting “a part greater than the whole of which it is a part, a text that demands a context yet is not reducible to it” (338–339). While Hartman’s point was that a certain irreducible signification (“tmesis”) obtains in key archetypal poetic structures, his essay also points to the power and persuasiveness of repetition—of literary “shuttling,” which (as Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues of the stanzaic form) is “fundamentally a force for continuation” (56). In a way, these structuralist accounts of poetry might be usefully applied to Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, not merely because of the title’s invocation of the figure of the circle, but because repetitions and returns figure significantly at various levels in this heavily symbolic and archetypal novel. The first of Ghosh’s novels, published in 1986, The Circle of Reason has a narrative quality which Ghosh reluctantly acknowledges to be “fantastical,” and which has tended to be perceived (at least by “European” readers and publishers) as part of the “non-European” wave of “magic realist” novels (Aldama 87). A narrative of rather extravagant journeys which are often also returns, and transformations which do not conceal a fundamental and unchanging quality to the 206 ROBBIE B. H. GOH reality of life in the society of Indian migrant and rural workers, the novel not only raises provocative questions about the possibilities and limits of globalization, but also of the function of writing from and about the (“nonEuropean ”) periphery. The Circle of Reason tells the story of Nachiketa Bose, an orphan whose extravagant cranial dimensions and contours earn him the lasting nickname “Alu” (meaning “potato”), who comes to live with his eccentric uncle Balaram in a village in West Bengal. A series of mishaps and misunderstandings seems to shape the actions and destinies of the majority of characters in the novel, including those of Balaram and Alu, leading to the former’s violent death and the latter’s flight to the Middle Eastern city of al-Ghazira, where he connects with a community of Indian and Arab migrant workers. Pursued by an Indian policeman (Jyoti Das) deeply ambivalent about his own position, and caught up in the instabilities of sociopolitical life in alGhazira , Alu and some of his friends are forced to flee once again, ending up in Algeria where they connect with other diasporic Indians. There, however, the death of one of their number is the last straw that brings about a longing for “home” on the part of Alu and the few remaining members of his community (and a decision to resign and emigrate to Germany on the part of Jyoti Das). The novel is thus very much a description of the unsettled transnational realities of humble working people of the developing world within a globalized milieu. Alu’s life and career as the plaything of fate (working in fantastic and scarcely credible ways at times) really point to the contingent and dependent lives of lowly rural workers within the puissant and often exploitative workings of international commerce and capitalism. Alu’s haplessness, although (like his renegade body with its inexplicable blots, blemishes, and dysfunctions) exaggerated to a fantastical point, is paralleled (and thus made more realistic) by the similarly hapless lives not just of Arab laborers like Zindi and Abu Fahl, but even reflected to a certain extent in the alienated lives of middle-class functionaries like Jyoti Das, and commercial and professional émigrés like the Indian doctors Uma Verma and Mishra in Algiers, and the eccentric businessman Jeevanbhai in al-Ghazira. Despite Ghosh’s assent to an interviewer’s observation that his characters “seem to float between boundaries of both geography and class”—to which Ghosh adds that “class was often the key to mobility” both “in the British Empire” as well as “to this day” (Caswell 1)—in The Circle of Reason abject working-class characters repeatedly cross national boundaries as much as middle-class ones, and for both groups the experience is more often negative...