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Love and Figure/Ground: Reading Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies

  • Murray Baumgarten

Abstract:

Amitav Ghosh puts the history of the individualist love ethic of the western novel into dialogue with the "oceanic" sense of identity and love in Indian cultural traditions, pitting the idea of character against that of "life-force" and the idea of individual happiness against that of communal energy. When romantic lovers embrace in this contemporary novel set in India in 1838 - at a turning point in the history of the English Empire of opium which is being forced on a China that has outlawed the poppy, we hear echoes of the great Victorian fictions: the storm of love remakes identities as it choreographs collisions across cultural, social, and class boundaries that undermine stable social arrangements. The potential for cross-over encounters inheres in the heteroglossia created in the novel. The "chutnification of language" echoes the love jumble, as it invites a rethinking of the past, of culture, and identities, reframing the boundaries of the language of fiction in the exploration of literary form. Are we in a dialectical or a dialogical discourse? What is the figure and what the ground in this exploration of love within cultural multiplicity?

 

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

 

Updated: March 20, 2016

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 12, Issue 2 Literature and Theories of Love
Last updated on 04/14/2020