In Search of Knowledge: Voicing the Void in Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory P e t e r I . B a r t a U N I V E R S I T Y O F S U R R E Y , U K Born in 1971, TashAw is Malaysian by nationality, Chinese by origin, and British by education. Abilingual speaker of Chinese and English, he did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in law at Warwick and Cambridge Universities and, subsequently, studied creative writing at the University of EastAnglia. In the early spring of 2005, he made astriking debut with the publicationofTheHarmonySilkFactory.Thepaperbackversionandrelease in the United States followed in quick succession. By the summer of2005 it was translated and published in Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Greek; it is currently being translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish for forthcoming publi¬ cation in 2006. The novel was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize and won the prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award for 2005.' Fortunate indeed is a“first novel,” aproduct of “high culture” at that, to enjoy such rapid success and receive instant critical acclaim. The mostly enthusiastic book reviews to date concentrate on the novel’s plot and obedi¬ entlyfollowtheleadofthepersonawhose“Ich-Erzahlung”beginsPartOne inmediasres.Thereviewerssuggestthatthepresumedmainhero,Johnny, occupies the center of attention for the reader who is to decide whether he is acriminal, an innocent victim of events largely outside his control, aloving husband and father, or acynical crook (Gee, Hickling, Mukherjee, and Zaltzmann). This article will conduct its investigation elsewhere.Aw’s novel focuses predominantlyontheimpactofBritishcolonialismontherepresentative charactersofthecolonizingEnglishandthecolonizedMalaysianChinese civilizations.Undoubtedly,readersmayhearechoesofJosephConrad,Ford MadoxFord,andE.M.Foster.Also,perhapslessobviously,thevoicesof other modernist writers of the British Isles such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce,andVirginiaWoolfengagewiththistext.TheHarmonySilkFactory, however, is not anostalgic pastiche of modernist themes and techniques, nor does it claim to re-invent the disappearance of the omniscient Instead, it carefully interrogates assumptions, not only about the existence of aunified human subject, but, more importantly, about the very possibility of constructing any unified body of knowledge. For all his questions, howev¬ er, no release fi'om moral responsibility is envisaged, nor are evil and crime relativized in Aw’s world. Hence, even though he avoids many of the exter¬ nal features of philosophically conscious, often highly ornate, contemporary n a r r a t o r . Intertexts, Vol. 9, No. 2©2005 Texas Tech UniversiQ' Press 1 0 6 I N T E R T E X T S v literary prose writing as well as its blurring of the categories of ethics and aesthetics, his novel problematizes the relationship between narrative and epistemology in aprovocative, “post-modern,” manner. Three overdy partial storytelling voices comprise the novel. These three intradiegetic narrators alter, complement, and distort each other even as they provide accounts of the main events of the plot: the murder in the mine; the relationship between Johnny and Tiger; the friendship between Johnny and Peter; the story of the Soong family; the courtship between Johnny and Snow and the history of their marriage; Kunichika Mamoru’s role; the trip of all main characters to the islands called “Seven Maidens”; andfinallyJasper’s,Peter’s,andJohnny’slivesduringthefourdecadesafter Snow’sdeath.Thetimeframeofthenovelisroughlybetween1940andthe mid-1980s.Withinthedifferentnarrativerenderingsofthesameevents,as inJamesJoyce’sUlysses,weexperience“parallax,”thatis,whenthesame happeningorobjectisviewedfromdifferentspatio-temporalanglesbydif¬ ferent individuals in different places at different times. In the first part of the novel, Johnny is described as amurderer, his first de facto murder having been the one of the English factory manager in the mine, well before the events of the plot take place. But then we hear another account of this event wheretheidentityoftheChinesemanreactingagainsthisBritishsupervisor remains obscure. Neither of the other two narrators shares the first, and least knowledgeable,storyteller’scertaintyaboutthisandsubsequentmurders committedbyJohnny.OtherparallaxesrelatetoJohnny’sroleintheaccientandfireinwhichhisfather -in-lawgetsinjured,orthecomplexrelations ^ongSnow;herhusband,Johnny;andSnow’sparents.Butunlikein Joyce,differentpeople’sawarenessofwhathappenedcanbesostrikinglyat vanance in this novel that the “truth” becomes shrouded in complete mys¬ tery. The narrating voices belong to characters central to the novel’s conscmusness : to Jasper, who is Snow’s son, to Snow herself, and to Peter (who mersheisJasper’sfather).Peter’sgeneralunreliabilitymakeshisaccount p^ncularly suspect. Yet it is only his story that provides evidence concerning thecrucialquestionoftheidentityofJasper’sfather.ThestoryPetertells cou erelying on Snow’s diary that...