The Early Reception of Tash Aw’s Narrative in Malaysia: An Ecocritical Interpretation of Harmony within Dissonance in The Harmony Silk Factory

Abstract

This article is part of the current ecocritical research that is being conducted on Tash Aw’s works. It attempts to analyse Tash Aw’s first novel The Harmony Silk Factory and investigate how he customizes the concept of harmony and dissonance in relation to human beings from the perspective of the recent and growing theory of ecocriticism. Through examining Aw’s novel, the manipulation of nature in the hope of illustrating the plot of a novel is studied thoroughly. In this article, the ecocritical theory is used to approach the phenomenon of harmony and dissonance in nature in the context of human-nature relationship in the chosen novel. The ecocritical theory assists in revealing with what perspectives the nature is portrayed by Aw in his first novel.  The analysis of the novel reveals that there is a coherent harmony in dissonance in the bridge between human beings and their natural setting with the idea that human beings and nature are constantly influencing each other and causing different outcomes from even the slightest change. The implication of the research reveals that the human-nature relationship is indeed something that carries much weight and needs to be given much consideration to. It gives rise to the issue that human beings and nature are inextricably interconnected. By incorporating the Malaysian viewpoint and voice of Tash Aw in the current article, we have exposed how ecocriticism is instrumental in meeting its targeted scope in Malaysian literary context as a multinational area of scholarship.