NARRATIVE SILENCE IN INCENDIARY CIRCUMSTANCES: A RETHINKING OF ECOCRITICAL EXPECTATIONS THAT PRIVILEGE PRESENCE, VOICE, AND AGENCY

Abstract

This paper critically revisits prevailing paradigms of ecocriticism that privilege presence, voice and agency as the main means of ecological representation. It claims that these structures cannot be used to deal with the modern environmental crisis, especially the one that Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh illustrates. Ecological catastrophes, climate change, and socio-political upheaval become the flames in these essays, the circumstances of fragmentation, ambiguity, and discontinuity of the story.

The paper is based on the idea of Jacques Derrida, which is known as différance and is reconceptualized by the author as a productive site of meaning, instead of as absence or failure. It also interacts with the concept of slow violence by Rob Nixon to show how environmental damage is usually made invisible and suppressed in the narrative. In the context of this, the paper presents a new notion of eco-absence to explain a structural absence and marginalization of nonhuman life in literature and culture.

The paper will apply the theory of structural injustice by Iris Marion Young to ecological settings to demonstrate how nonhuman entities are victims of the systems, which include capitalism and anthropocentrism. It contends that narrative silence and fragmentation are not weaknesses in the work of Ghosh; rather they are representational strategies that mirror the magnitude and the complexity of environmental disasters.