india author m 1- a-nan - University of Wollongong

MOHAN, DEVINDER. "Arun Joshi: The Foreigner" in PRADHAN, N.S. ed. Major Indian
Novels: An Evaluation New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1986: 174-91. Also Atlantic
Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities, 1986.
MOHAN, DEVINDER. "The Language of the Splintered Mirror: The Fiction of Arun Joshi."
Ariel 14, no.4 (1983): 20-33.
Structuralist approach. Joshi's fictional voice maintains a dialogue betweeen what
Edward Said calls "molestation and authority". Mohan invokes Foucalt to show that Joshi's
language seeks the "extremity of silence, the silence of void, vacancy and death." Death and
madness are recurring presentational images in his work. The narrator finds himself in the
shattered mirror, looking deformed and distorted in each fragmented piece.
MOHAN, DEVINDER. "Arun Joshi: The Foreigner." In Major Indian Novels, edited by N.
S. Pradhan (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann,1985): 174-91.
Uses the critical formulations of Michel Foucalt in The Order of Things and The
Archeologv of Knowledge to analyse The Foreigner. Joshi presents an image of Death by
making it a fictional object as well as the manifestation of the presence which manipulates the
events and the characters. The protagonist, Sindi Oberoi, is both the object and metaphor of
man's unnameable madness, who maintains what Foucalt calls "finitude". He is also the signifier
of the author's structural point of view. The novel starts with Babu Khemka's death, and
Death as event is transformed as an aesthetic sign of its "presentational presence" (Susanne
Langer's phrase).
MOHAN, DEVINDER. "The Image of Fire in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas." In The
Fictional World of Arun Joshie, edited by R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Classical Publishing
Company,1986): 194-209.
Structurali analysis. Joshi is concerned with creating an aesthetic sign of man' s search
for a spiritual fulcrum. The image of the glow of fire on the top of a distant rock, Chandtola,
becomes the central signifying sign of the network of various signifiers represented by the
characters of binary nature and culture, tribal world and Western civilization, and the Jungian
signifiers of anima and animus integrated within the Hindu taxonomy of rituals and rites. The
narrator, Romesh Sahai, is like Melville's Ishmael in revealing the sustained balance of the
fictional discourse by experiencing and interpreting it.
MOHAN, DEVINDER."Beyond the Litany of Wants: Contexts of Arun Joshi's Fiction
towards The Last Labyrinth." In The New Indian Novel in English, edited by Viney Kirpal
(New Delhi:Allied Publishers, 1990): 83-90.
Arun Joshi's fictional voice is the voice of the "molestation" (Edward Said's phrase) of
the modern historical consciousness of Indianism. As in his other novels, Joshi presents an
authentic vision of contemporary Indian man in a multicultural society, his economic needs
clashing with traditional values. Som Bhaskar, the hero of The Last Labyrinth, cannot get out
of the labyrinth of the self; even his love for Anuradha, who embodies the Jungian anima, fails
to help him.
NARASIMHAIAH, SANJAY. "Arun Joshi: The Last Labyrinth" The Literary Criterion 16.2
(1981):81-9.