| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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In writing of the European novel, Milan Kundera claims that “the spirit of an age cannot be judged exclusively by its ideas, its theoretical concepts, without considering its art, and particularly the novel”, a literary form whose genesis, he asserts, can be located where the “bridge” between “cause” and “effect” has collapsed and “thought wanders off ”.4 Many of the novels discussed in this collection bear witness to this act of wandering, to a multiplicity of narrative responses to the intellectual positing prevalent in the cultural climate addressed by this collection. Thus Sheila Ghose’s consideration of the stress generated by a clash between representational framing and historical unpredictability in Atima Srivastava’s Transmission (1992) alerts one to the centrality of epistemological doubt in many contemporary fictional works. Similarly, Cordula Lemke offers a reading of Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge (2002) by working through the lens provided by poststructural analysis. In so doing, she draws our attention to the uneasy relationship between postmodernism and politics and reveals a tension that is often at the heart of contemporary literature. This strain is also apparent in Ronie Parciack’s essay on Sunetra Gupta’s Moonlight into Marzipan (1995). Parciack allows that the salient features of the novel appear to align it with postmodernism—with an intellectual and artistic tradition that sees in nonmimetic writing an adumbration of epistemological doubt. Nevertheless, she argues that these features (rejection of coherent point-of-view narration and temporal sequencing) are more usefully read against the backdrop provided by traditional Indian thought and literature. In particular, she aligns them with a body of ethicoreligious writing that considers the phenomenal world itself an illusion and which seeks in art an access to “a transempiric, other-worldy” realm. This explains the radically fragmented nature of Gupta’s intriguing experimental novel.
Sometimes the lens through which the world is reflected and refracted is scientific in nature, as is evident in Gerd Bayer’s focus on the “epistemological crisis of scientific procedure”. Using Homi Bhabha’s concept of Entstellung (taken from Freud and Derrida), Bayer analyses how Gunesekera’s novel Reef (1994) appropriates Western scientific discourse and uses it to mount cultural resistance. The deep resonance that scientific discourse has for Gunesekera is further explored in J. Edward Mallot’s investigation of the influence of thermodynamics on the thematic and structural shape of The Sandglass (1998).