Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This is the first book-length scholarly and literary-critical treatment
of a versatile, prolific, extremely talented, but, as Kanaganayakam
notes, “relatively unacknowledged” novelist, poet, and general
essayist. Zulfikar Ghose was born in 1935 and spent his first 17 years
in India just before and after independence, “a Muslim in a Hindu
city”; the next 17 years were spent in England and he has lived for
the past 25 years in the United States. As a result he sees himself as a
“native-alien” or double exile, at home neither in the land of his
birth nor in the countries in which he has spent his adult and creative
life.

Kanaganayakam suggests that the complex quality of Ghose’s work
derives to a considerable extent from the psychological tensions
inherent in his biographical circumstances. He also argues that the main
reasons for the comparative neglect of Ghose’s writings at the present
time are twofold: first, he does not fit into the standard political
image of the so-called “post-colonial” writer, since he insists on
the primacy of literary excellence over ideological fervor; second, he
is an inveterate experimentalist in fictional modes, and cannot readily
be assigned to a single convenient slot such as “realist” or
“magic realist” or “metafictionist.”

Kanaganayakam is a careful, well-informed, quietly effective guide
through the constantly changing narrative styles and approaches that
Ghose employs. Like many readers, I suppose, I embarked on Structures of
Negation with a somewhat limited and hazy acquaintance with Ghose’s
work, and came out of the experience with an enlarged understanding and
appreciation. Kanaganayakam moves comfortably within contemporary theory
but is not bemused by it, and is for the most part free from jargon. I
only wish he had added a short chapter on Ghose’s literary criticism,
since the quotations scattered through the book were both provocative
and intriguingly independent.

The book has an extensive bibliography that will be invaluable for
subsequent researchers. Recommended for serious students of contemporary
writing.