Ambivalence in the Fiction of Jonathan Franzen and Amitav Ghosh

Durham E-Theses The View from Somewhere: Ambivalence in The Fiction of Jonathan Franzen and Amitav Ghosh CHOU, MEGUMI,GRACE How to cite: CHOU, MEGUMI,GRACE (2019) The View from Somewhere: Ambivalence in The Fiction of Jonathan Franzen and Amitav Ghosh, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/13619/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The View from Somewhere: Ambivalence in The Fiction of Jonathan Franzen and Amitav Ghosh Megumi Grace Chou Submitted for: M.A. by Research Department of English Studies, University of Durham November 2019 Thesis Abstract This thesis seeks to understand experiential ambivalence in the later works of American novelist Jonathan Franzen (1959-) and Indian writer of English Amitav Ghosh (1956-). Both authors note that there is an uncertainty and resistance inherent to our experience of the world, as rooted in contested notions of the past. In Franzen’s The Corrections (2000), Freedom (2013), and Purity (2016), a disturbing picture of an America at the mercy of financial markets, rampant surveillance technology, and cultural trauma caused by 9/11 emerges. In Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Ibis Trilogy (the final volume published in 2016), we also find individuals reaching for an authentic cultural memory only to find such memory imbued with the experience of the British Empire, which often works actively against India’s attempts at self-understanding and self-identity. Following the tenets that Peter Boxall has set out in his Critical Introduction to Twenty-First Century Fiction, I suggest that the first decades of the new millennium are unmoored from, yet still haunted by, the recent past. Experience and ideas become unsettled, rendering them transient and newly dependent upon liquid definitions of power, to borrow a term from Zygmunt Bauman. While the novels of Franzen and Ghosh address different aspects of contemporary existence and approach the implications of these issues from diametric positions, it is, I contest, a deliberate and positive mode of ambivalence which places these two authors and their writings in conversation with one another. Such modes of ambivalence find expression within intimate spheres of the individual subject (through revised notions of self and society), the self as a function of family, and those anxieties that impinge on individual liberty and, finally, that systemic institutions of knowledge that promote more flexible thinking about, and towards, the future. Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One: Views From Somewhere: Navigating Identity and the Self Introduction: Deterritorialised Subjects 23 “Whose Language?”: Circumscribing Margins in Narrative 28 “Is That Your Real Name?”: On Expectations and Uncertainty 37 “Her Face is Everywhere”: Postcoloniality in The Hungry Tide 51 “At the Suggestion of Her Therapist”: Loss of Self in Freedom 56 Chapter Two: Political Views and Family Values Introduction: Families in Crisis 65 The Lear Model: Understanding the Crisis of Degree 75 “America’s Basement”: Franzen’s Shrinking Family Values 81 “Ship-Siblings”: Beyond Traditional Family Structures in The Ibis Trilogy 86 Scenes From a Marriage 91 Chapter Three: Ambivalence, Anxiety, and Freedom Introduction: Three Modes of Freedom 97 Zachary Reid: “No Small Pride” 102 Joey Berglund: “Something Deeply Wrong” 113 Andreas Wolf: Freedom, Privacy and the Gothic 119 Coda: “A Really Serious Glitch”: Competing Views of Knowledge 125 Bibliography 148 Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank Professor Mark Sandy for his invaluable guidance and utmost patience as my supervisor. This thesis has suffered everything under the sun, thanks for sticking with me. Thanks to my family, Merry, Becky and Grady for being available despite being transatlantic. Thanks to the Widners especially Sarah. I am unbelievably fortunate to have someone like you in my life. I have met such wonderful people in the UK and now I can’t imagine my life without all of you. By no means a complete list, many thanks go to Rebecca Bristow and Neil Riley, Andrew Dobrzanski, James Lewis, Robert Pain, Alex Opie, Hana Kobayashi, Curtis Runstedler, Sophie Newman, and Jude Thompson. Further afield, I would like to thank Sheila Wang, Luming Chen, Martina Sommerer, and Tam Ngo. I am greatly indebted to Andrew Correia for putting up with me in times of seamless madness and for hotpot. Last, but certainly not least, a heartfelt thank you to the Donworths, Mum, Dad, Gramma, Catherine, and Joe, who have become my family away from home. And to Liam: big hugs, and aren’t you glad you got on that train? I am certainly glad you did. 4 Introduction “An Illegible Present”: Ambivalence, Resistance, and the Novel When Amitav Ghosh, a writer of Indian background, who writes predominantly in English, found out that his 2000 novel The Glass Palace was submitted, without his knowledge by his publishers to the 2001 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (then run by the Commonwealth Foundation), he wrote an open letter of polite protest to Sandra Vince, the Prize Manager of the Commonwealth Foundation. In this letter Ghosh objected to being named the Eurasia regional winner and, therefore, by implication, a finalist for the prize.1 Ghosh expands upon his objections to being associated with the prize in his letter but, in doing so, was careful to draw a fine line between noting that “[his] objections to the term 'Commonwealth Literature' are [his] alone”, as well as tempering his criticism with a laudatory note, recognising that many of the individuals associated with the Commonwealth Prize, including previous recipients and judges are “writers whom [Ghosh] greatly admire[s].” Despite being in good company, Ghosh seems to have felt it appropriate to remove himself from consideration for the prize in order to uphold a certain set of principles and keeping in line with his public opinion. Furthermore, Ghosh explicitly questions the genealogy of the term “Commonwealth,” which he takes to represent a “disputed aspect of the past” and its continued assured presence as a prize of some literary repute (past winners of the Prize have included J. M. Coetzee and Salmon Rushdie, the lattermost who has been identified as a precursor to Ghosh’s writing) does not inspire a future wherein these disputes might be challenged on a deeper level. Ghosh draws a telling, if ironic, comparison meant to highlight the problematic designation, as if the “familiar category” of English literature be renamed literature “of the Norman conquest.” This observation sheds valuable 1 Amitav Ghosh, “The Conscientious Objector”, Outlook India, 19 March 2001. 5 light on how language, both in this particular example and throughout this thesis, often times embodies a singular and narrow set of concerns, which depends on questionable histories amplified in the present as fact. At the heart of Ghosh’s critique, he is not only concerned with the precarious position of the English language, but also alludes to the ways in which such precariousness is maintained at the expense of other spectres and across other venues of knowledge. If language is not flexible, then it runs the real risk of alienating communicable human experiences. These questions about colouring the past with an ambivalent understanding of what could be considered “colonial” history is paramount for Ghosh as he himself identifies this kind of dubious curation of cultural memory as central to The Glass Palace and other novels since. Anshuman A. Mondal has written extensively on Ghosh’s oeuvre in light of the author’s reluctance to participate in politics. This brand of reluctance naturally extends itself into an enriching textual ambivalence in his novels. For Mondal, Ghosh is continuously interested in “problematising the ‘givenness’ of the ‘Western historiographical record.’”2 Ghosh sees the term “Commonwealth” as one such means of “givenness,” preserving the past which ignores “choices” and “judgments” that make possible a more nuanced understanding of the present. In 2001, around the same time, as Ghosh was objecting to the nomination of The Glass Palace, the American writer Jonathan Franzen’s third novel, The Corrections, won the National Book Prize. On the back of its commercial success (a far cry from his two previous novels) the novel was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, complete with a sticker of her book club affixed to the cover. Franzen was quoted as seeing the choice in a negative manner: “I see this book as my 2 Anshuman A. Mondal, “Allegories of Identity: “Postmodern” Anxiety and “Postcolonial” Ambivalence in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and The Shadow Lines”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38 (2003), 19-36 (p. 20). 6 creation and I didn't want that logo of corporate ownership on it.”3 On the back of these comments, The Corrections was swiftly de-selected as part of her book club and Franzen himself was similarly disinvited to appear on her show.

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