The Convergence of Sri Lankan Civil War Memories through Intertextual Allusions in Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

Abstract

The paper critically gazes at Arudpragasam’s second novel A Passage North (2021) as a fictive temple site to commemorate the traumatic memories (during and after) of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009). Taking cue from Gerard Genette’s structuralist theoretic observations as given in Graham Allen’s book Intertextuality (2022 [2000]) with regard to the key term of ‘Intertextuality’ along with its associated terms: ‘Hypotext’ and ‘Hypertext’, the paper highlights half a dozen texts (ranging across genres of poetry, biography, prose, and documentary film) as intertextual allusions (hypotexts) to Arudpragrasam’s novel (hypertext). The paper attempts to establish that Arudpragsam employs these intertextual allusions of the canonical literary and filmic texts as a conscious strategy, albeit labeled as ‘superfluous overlays’ or ‘digressions’ by some critics, to lead his readers to the cumulative significance of the novel as a converging temple site in memory of those Tamils lost directly during the war or indirectly consumed by their post-war traumas.