History Novel Jameson

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History Is What Hurts:

History and The Individual Impasse

inThe God of Small Things

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The Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God

(cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly

at his temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became

resilient and truly indifferent.

------ Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (20)

I. Theory

Whoever lays his or her hand on the novel, The God of Small Things, is very likely

to wonder in the first place what the title suggests or implies. What does the god of

small things stand for? When asked the question, Arundhati Roy replied,

To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. Gods a big

thing and Gods in control. The God of small thingswhether it is

the way children see things or whether it is the insect life in the book,

or the fish or the stars --- there is a not accepting of what we think of

as adult boundaries (Interview with Kingsworth).

This statement is too general to answer ones inquiry. Especially in the novel, Velutha is

obviously referred to as the god of small things. And the identity of God is clearly left

unspecified. Is it the Christian God or Hindu God? The reader still has to look for the

answer on his or her own by reading the novel closely. Nevertheless, in anther interview,

Roy also revealed that the novel is not about small things but about how the smallest

things connect to the biggest things (Roy as quoted in Kingsnorth). Therefore, for thewriter, the novel places more weight on relations than on identities.

Echoing her utterance that there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult

boundaries, the Indian author winner of 1997 British Booker Prize manifested that her


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debut novel is not about history but biology and transgression, transgression upon all

sorts of boundaries, which adults have accepted. Assembling the above-mentioned

information collected in her interviews, a general picture about the theme ofThe God of

Small Things can be drawn that the novel puts stress on how the big things oppress thesmall ones and how the latter transgress upon the former, and the transgression is

intended for biological purpose.

The conceptualization above, though likely to be accused of committing the

intentional fallacy, serves the purpose of manifesting my interest in and motivation of

working on this topic. When reading the novel for the first time, I was obsessed with

what the god of small things is and what on earth the small things and big things are.

After the first close reading, I was especially saddened by the Kathakali dance episode,

reflecting upon what a degrading situation the dancers and their culture had been reduced

to by Capital on account of Necessity. An idea crossed my mind that the big things or

God can be encapsulated as History, even though Roy claimed that her novel is not

about history, while the small things, as the author herself has disclosed, refer to

biological things, including the nature, human beings and human desire. As far as I am

concerned, the novel centers on the antagonism between History and biology, with the

former oppressing the latter and the latter transgressing upon the former. And what

results from the interaction is what intrigues me most.To explore so totalitarian a concept like History in a Third World text like The God

of Small Things may seem problematic and controversial in the first place. The word in

capital H bears too strong an association with modernity, Eurocentrism and linear

teleological progress in the western sense, readily reminiscent of the Wests

colonialization and exploitation in the Third World, including India. In addition, its

tendency toward the construction of grand narratives carries the implication of western

universalism and epistemic imposition or violence. In consequence, many critics have

argued that history is the discourse through which the West has asserted its hegemony

over the rest of the world (Gandhi 170). Through historicizing the rest of the world,

the West can world the world as Europe (171), with the latter remaining the


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sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the one we call Indian,

Chinese, Kenyan, and so on (Chakrabarty, quoted from Gandhi 171). Ann

McClintock, in demystifying the pitfalls of the term postcolonialism, cautions that

though the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism,multi-dimensional time and so forth, the singularity of the term effects a re-centering of

global history around the singular rubric of European time (255). In terms of its

relation to the other, Robert Young argues, History, with a capital H, similarly cannot

tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion (1990:4); consequently

History is the realm of violence and war; it constitutes another form by which the other

is appropriated into the same (15). The histories of the marginals or of the subaltern

are more often than not deliberately distorted or trimmed in order to fit into the grand

history. Even an unwitting mis-representation, which is obviously unavoidable due to

ideological discrepancy, engenders equal epistemic abuse. With so many disputes and

with the advents of structuralism and poststructuralism, critics like Jacques Derrida,

Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, by means of linguistics, began to question

the totalizing system and totalitarian feature of History by foregrounding particularity

against universality and by underscoring petit recit, or little narrative, in place ofgrand

recit, or grand narrative. In a sense, History has been liquidated ever since.

Influenced by Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, postcolonial discourse, consideringits ground zero of deconstructing the subject/other binary and of resisting the Wests

homogenizing epistemic violence in the construction of the non-West, has turned its back

on grand history and homogeneity and consciously espoused petit history and

heterogeneity so that the previously unvoiced can speak or be spoken, and the

mis-represented can re-represent themselves or be reconstructed. For example, Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak, admitting Foucaults influence, consciously dwells on and attends to

ordinariness and the neglected details of the everyday in writing history:

Of what is history made as it happens? Of the differed-defered

identity of people in the deferred-differed unity of actions.

When


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we speak on this level of sophistication, attempting to grasp the

inaccessible intimacy of the least sophisticated, least self-conscious

way of being, it is the bits and pieces fond unspectacular by the

search for the Rani that are most rich in educative promise. I amspeaking of a history-writing that concentrates on the object-details of

everyday life rather than merely on narrative or intellectual analysis

of great events, although that is, indeed, a great gain. I am speaking

of a history that can attend to the details of the putting together of a

continuous-seeming self for everyday life (1999: 238).

With the attention to the neglected histories of the margins, Spivak believes that the

fadeout points obliterated by western hegemonic historical discourse can not only be

retrieved so that the subdued voice of the subaltern can be heard, but also serve as a

lesson to the grand historical accounts.

If western historicism is closely implicated in colonialism and imperialism, why is

History selected as the vantage point of scrutinizing The God of Small Things in this

paper? Because, as postcolonialism can be seen as a critique of History, the novel can

be viewed likewise. The novel is a national allegory in the Jamesonian sense, the

story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of

the public third-world culture and society (2000: 320), though I consider Roy asanti-national, anti-governmental or anarchistic concerning the nation-individual

relationship. As Roy herself comments, the novel is meant to be bring out how the

smallest things connect to the biggest things and a pattern of how in these small

events and in these small lives the world intrudesand because of this, because people

being unprotected, the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest

core of their being and changes their life (Interview with Kingsworth). Metonymic

about the construction of boundaries and the attempt to transgress upon them, the novel

deals with how History has exerted an irresistible sway on the individual and the latter

can just resist bodily. It also takes a materialistic approach, studying how the categories

of the political and the economic can thwart the personal by encroaching upon the


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subjective and the unconscious. From this perspective, History is the oppressive God

in control; History is what hurts (1981:102). It is the abstract totalitarian power

which hurts the individuals desire for Love by making the Love Law and determining

who is to be loved. History is what Ammu, Velutha, Rahel and Estha transgress upon.And the 1997 Booker Prize winner is a Jamesonian socially symbolic act, narrativizing

the sad state of affair in India.

Among a variety of definitions and interpretations of the concept of History,

Fredric Jamesons Marxist narrative of the mode of production serves well in giving

History a more specific and definitive representation so as to function as a point of

departure in the critical appraisal of the interaction between History and the individual in

The God of Small Things. Adopting Louis Althussers revision of Karl Marxs

economic determinism, Jameson incorporates Louis Althussers Marxist structuralism,

and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacans psychoanalysis to conceptualize his philosophy

of History. To the American Marxist, History is a structural totality analogous to the

Marxist notion of the mode of production, with one mode giving way to another

diachronically but the residual forces and relations of production coexisting

synchronically. It has neither direct cause nor hidden essence; that is, it has an absent

cause, with the subordinate levels semi-autonomously interacting with each other and

generating effects. Also it is an equivalent of Lacans conception of the real, featuringits abstraction, infinitude and resistance of symbolization, accessible only though its

effects and symptoms in textual form, because the slippage between the signifier and the

signified always happens.

As far as the subject or the individual is concerned, the Jamesonian History is

sublime, oppressive and alienating, for the formers desire for jouissance is always

deferred and suppressed. As a result, the desire is repressed into the unconscious.

Jamesons famous political unconscious should not be mistaken for Freuds sexual

unconscious, which is engendered due to censorship on sexual desire. Political

unconscious does not come into being in consequence of sexual repression but rather

due to the collective unawareness or lack of a clear knowledge of the hidden social forces


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working in the social structure or History. As Gabriele Schwab elaborates, No longer

the product of dynamic psychic energies, the political unconscious becomes a mere

product of concealed social forces (91). So the political unconscious denotes the

subjects inability to articulate the complex social forces, bearing resemble to theLacanian unconscious, which comes of the discontinuity between the signifier and the

signified. In terms the relationship between History and the subject or individual,

Jameson laments:

History is therefore the experience of NecessityHistory is what

hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to the

individual as well as collective praxis, which its ruses turn into

grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History

can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as

some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which

History as ground and untranscendable horizon need no particular

theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities

will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them

(1981: 102).

Before proceeding to engage in textual analyses on the antagonism between

History and the individual, I would like to defend myself with regard to my application ofJamesons concept of History as the point of departure of my critical task. Marxism has

long been accused of its unconscious Eurocentricism. Marxist literary criticism has

been criticized of understand[ing] social and historical phenomena not in their own

terms but in terms of an underlying system of structural relations which because it

contains within it internal mechanisms tensions and contradictions, is the source of

historical transformation (Ashcroft et al. 172). Aijaz Ahmad, in his famous essay

Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, argues that the Marxist

demand for totality makes the mistake that all ideological complexity is reduced to a

singular ideological formation and all narrativities are read as local expressions of a

metatext (121), and that the grand narrative of the mode of production does not operate


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in the same way in all the countries of Asia and Africa (120). He even accuses

Jamesons essay Third World Literature in the Era if Multinational Capital of being a

gendered and racial text. I think his criticism makes great sense. Therefore in the

critical operation of this paper, the teleological trope of Marxist criticism will be avoidedand Marxs periodization of modes of human society into primitive communism or tribal

society, the hierarchical kinship societies, the slaveholding society, the Asiatic mode of

production, feudalism, capitalism and communism will only serve as a loose reference.

Nevertheless, as Paul Connerton pinpoints in How Societies Remember that the

refusal of grand narratives should not lead to the total nullification of their lingering

covert influences:

Again, the fact that we no longer believe in the great subjects of

history --- the proletariat, the party, the West --- means, not the

disappearance of these great master-narratives, but rather their

continuing unconscious effectiveness as ways of thinking about and

acting in our contemporary situation: their persistence, in other words,

as unconscious collective memories (1).

Connerton continues to maintain that our past experience affects our reception and

perception of what we are experiencing at present, which means if we have a different

context of the past, we will experience the present differently. Namely, if we have adifferent memory of the past, then our attitude toward the present is different, too. This

process, he argues, reaches into the most minute and everyday details of our lives (2).

To put it in a collective context, the history of a nation affects how its citizens experience

the present and the influence goes down to the daily lives. In consequence, we can infer

that grand history legitimates petit history and reversibly the latter is closely connected to

the former.

A reference can be made to how ideology works. Ideology used to be an

equivalent of false consciousness, but Louis Althusser revised it and redefined it as,

Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real

conditions of existence (36). Fredric Jameson contends that each mode of production


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will produce a dominant form of ideological coding specific to it, which in turn

interpellates the individual as a good subject. This is advantageous to the

interpretation of the colonized under the interpellation of the colonizers dominant

ideology. However, the colonial epistemic violence does not result in a completereplacement of indigenous traditional ideology. Instead, they tend to coexist with each

other. And the coexistence of foreign and domestic ideologies is what Ernst Bloch coins

synchronicity of the non-synchronous, which designates the coexistence of several

modes of production and thus several forms of ideology. And the Blochian concept

bears resemblance to the postcolonial notion hybridity, which is endorsed by many

critics like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak.

Therefore, I think the proposition that hybridity rather than monolithicity in

history and ideology is the appropriate perspective to construe the novel The God of

Small Things. It in turn facilitates another of my propositions that postcolonial stress on

petit history should not neglect the influence from the grand history or even further that

petit history is also the effect of grand history. Reading the novel twice consolidates the

propositions.

Therefore, in my attempt to interpret the antagonism between History and the

individual and how the latter is entrapped in the former and tries to transgress upon the

laws made by the former, Fredric Jamesons conception of History as relations producedin a mode of production will be the vantage point on which the paper will be formulated.

However, I have to claim that the theoretical framework constructed here is not a

completely Jamesonian formula or model but a partial practice with a view to avoiding

theoretical imposition. In a sense, it is a theoretical hybrid.

II. Practice

Told from the perspective of children, the dizygotic twins Rahel and Estha, the

story ofThe God of Small Things centers on events prior and posterior to the visit and

drowning death of their half-English cousin, Sophie Mol. Due to the English girls

death, complicated by the twins mothers forbidden affair with an Untouchable, Velutha,


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the lives of the two Indian children as well as the whole family and Velutha are

completely changed forever. And the episodes are narrated by the 30-year-old Rahel,

who returns from the U. S. after a divorce and after a 23-year separation from her brother

Estha, and the narration weaves back and forth from the present in the 1992 to the past in1969 and even further back across centuries to bring out the plot, present histories about

the nation, the society, the religions, the village, the family and the characters, and most

important of all, scrutinize why a singular event can claim such a heavy toll on so many

peoples lives.

The heavy toll is not the penalty for a single accident. Instead, the deadly toll is

Historys punishment. It is the contingent outcome of covert contradictions among

residues of different ideologies particular to different modes of production. It is the

consequence of conflict between History and human desire for pleasure. It is the lesson

the Big God imposes on the Small God when the former demands obeisance but the latter

defies.

Since History is the real, infinite, dynamic and abstract, direct realistic

representations are impossible. It can only be manifested through its effects and

symptoms. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy employs two techniques to

represent History. One is spatialization; the other is personification.

In the novel, History is personified as a patriarchal, omnipotent and despotic male,who enforces his laws and imposes punishment on those who defies the laws mercilessly.

For example, when Estha and Rahel suffer the tragic consequence after Sophie Mols

death, Roy describes history as someone who negotiates its terms and collects its dues

from those who break its laws, generates sickening thud (Roy 54), and leaves smell

forever in ordinary things. When Ammu sees Rahel playing happily with Velutha,

which is forbidden between a Touchable and an Untouchable, History is depicted as

wrong-footed, caught off guard 167), but when Velutha and Ammu look in each others

eyes lovingly, Historys fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old,

scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay

down who should be loved. And how. And how much (168). It is Historys plan to


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have Vellya Paapen, Veluthas father, to report his sons secret affair with Ammu to

Mamachi and make it known. By the time he [Velutha] understood his part in

Historys Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps (190). History is cruel and

cold-blooded, malevolent about Love but insistent on Love Laws.Trained as an architect, Roy is surely space-minded and adept as well in using

architecture for symbolization in the novel. Susan Stanford Friedman argues,

Rather than history containing space, different spaces in the novel

contain history. The novel moves associatively in and out of these

spaces, rather than sequentially in linear timeReflecting, no doubt,

Roys profession as an architect, each space is architecturally

embodied. Buildings function as tropes in the novel --- that is, as

images of historical over-determination. They are more than

settings or backgrounds for human action. Instead, they are

locations that concretize the forces of history. They are places that

palimpsestically inscribe the social order as it changes over time.

Containing history, they constitute the identities of the people who

move through them (119).

Indeed, Roy draws a map of Ayemenem and Akkara, with the two villages and buildings

involved situated across the Meenachal River. The cartograpgy embodies complexjuxtaposition of grand history and petit history, nature and culture, power and desire,

domination and subjection, patriarchy and the subaltern women, colonizers and the

colonized. And it is a space that History comes concrete, the production of the inherent

social forces and ideologies.

The word history appears in the novel for the first time when Chacko told the

twins that they were a family of Anglophiles:

He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With

all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. To understand

history, Chacko said, we have to go inside and listen to what

theyre saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall.


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And smell the smellsBut we cant go inbecause weve been

locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see

are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering.

And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds havebeen invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The

very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams

them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise

ourselves (Roy 51-2).

Based on the passage, obviously what Chacko means by history is the Indian history,

which, according to him, is cut off from them by the British colonial rule. As a result,

the Ipe family, or suggestively the Indians, become Anglophiles, pointed in the wrong

direction, trapped outside their own country and unable to retrace their steps because their

footsteps had been swept away (51). However, I would rather take Chackos

lamentation for the loss of native history as a yes-no ambivalence. It is a no, for,

according to the book, the residues of Indian history are indeed very much alive as far as

caste and gender are concerned. The Raj did not induce a complete transformation of

the Indian society. It is a yes, because, it is impossible to reclaim a genuine pure

traditional Indian history, because its precolonial and postcolonial histories and cultures

are forever ruptured by the imposition of the colonizers episteme.Chackos old house is the History House in the novel. Built by an Englishman,

Kari Saipu, who had gone native like Kurtz in Joseph Conrads The Heart of Darkness,

the house serves as a symbol of History and its palimpsesticity. Locking the

whispering ancestors inside and thus denying the Indians access to their own

traditional history, the house first stands for colonialism. The haunting of Saipus spirit

in the house refers to the irredeemable influence of the British colonial rule on the Indian

culture and society. But later in 1992, when Rahel returned to Ayemenem, the house

had been renovated into Heritage Hotel by a hotel chain, surrounded by some smaller,

older wooden ancestral houses, transplanted for the enjoyment of wealthy guests from

elsewhere into the tourist complex, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English


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magistrate. One of the transplanted old houses had been the ancestral home of

Comrade E. M. S. Namboodoripad, Keralas Mao Tse-tung. In consequence, with

commercialization, capitalism and globalization, a form of spatial collage is inscribed in

the space of a rural Indian village Ayemenem. History and Literature enlisted bycommerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off

the boat (120).

This architectural collage in Heritage Hotel epitomizes the simultaneous but

antithetical processes of deterritorialization and reterritorializtion of capitalism proposed

by Deleuze and Guattari:

There is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing

flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorializing

on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes,

decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus values

from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government

bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to

reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger shape of

surplus value (Quoted from Young 169).

In order to obtain the maximum surplus value, capital has to deconstruct or destroy what

is on its way or the inefficient, and then reorganize or reproduce a geographical space thatbest suits its purpose. In the case of Heritage Hotel, in order to make profit by resorting

to nostalgia, capitalist tourism reinscribes the space of the History House by renovating it

into a hotel combined with the ancient houses transplanted from other places to produce a

new space providing nostalgia as the commodity.

The process of spatial reinscriptions, symbolizing Indias historical passage in

terms of the mode of production from semi-feudalism to colonialism and then to

multinationalism or globalization and thus the coexistence of different historical residues,

construes the Jamesonian concept of History or grand history, which is the point of

departure of my critical interpretation of the novel.

The performance of Kathakali dance at Heritage Hotel, the most saddening episode


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for me, is another example of dislocation and deculturation of indigenous cultural

production by multinational capitalism. In order to stave off starvation, the dancers

have to join tourism, which means they have play the rules set by capitalism. Originally

performed in temples, the dance is dislocated and performed beside a swimming pool.In order not to bore the tourists, the performance is truncated. So ancient stories were

collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos

(Roy 121). The indigenous culture, metonymically, is deterritorialized and deculturated.

Capital prevails, and a new cultural form for the commercial purpose is thus

reterritorialized and produced in the space of the History House.

Since different social forces produce different forms of space, the mutation of the

History House symbolizes different stages of History or different modes of production

and their political, cultural and economic influences on India: semi-feudalism,

colonialism (or imperial capitalism), Marxism, and multi-nationalism (or late capitalism

in Ernst Mandels term). The space of the house, inscribed with one historic layer upon

another, bears an implication of the diachronicity of History and the linearity of time,

which are Hegelian in essence and which postcolonialism is always mindful of

deconstructing by designating History as rupture and replacing grand history with petit

history. In the novel, Arundhati Roy is obviously conscious of the task, with History

always described negatively and with Rahels ambition to own a watch on which shecould change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time

was meant for in the first place) (37).

However, the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization do not result in

a wholesale erasure of past traits. Robert J. C. Young critiques Deleuze and Guattaris

conceptions by arguing:

The problem with the Anti-Oedipus as it stands for any form of

historical analysisis that the process of decoding, recoding and

overcoding imply a form of cultural appropriation that does not do

justice to the complexities of the way in which cultures interact,

degenerate and develop over time in relation to each other.


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Decoding and recoding implies too simplistic a grafting of one

culture to another (173).

Therefore, deterritorialization and reterritorialization produce not a complete foreign

space but one of reorganization, with the old and the new, domestic and alien juxtaposedtogether to produce a new form. So Young makes a revision on the model:

We need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription

and reinscription, an historical paradigm that will acknowledge the

extent to which cultures were not simply destroyed but rather layered

on top of each other, giving rise to struggles that themselves only

increased the imbrication of each with the other and their translation

into increasingly uncertain patchwork identities (173-74).

In the novel, the spatial collage of History House or Heritage Hotel is a composite of new

and ancient, indigenous and colonial components, with a childs [Rahels] plastic

wristwatch with the time painted on it (121). Consequently, synchronicity in effect

matters more than diachronicity, especially in uncovering the hidden connection between

space production and different social forces. Therefore, History, viewed synchronically,

is always a hybrid, with synchronicity of the non-synchronous and with different social

forces, dominant or residual, competing for primacy.

In the novel I think there is another history house; that is, the Ayemenem House,the house the Ipe family lives in. If the History House stands for grand history or the

stages of modes of production, then the Ayemenem House represents petit history, or the

synchronous, everyday, local history. If the former suggest the palimsestuality of

History, the latter is a dynamic structure of coexisting powers and ideologies

interpellating the individuals. Compared with the one, the other is its concretization, its

being put into practice by means of the individual. In contrast to History Houses being

renovated, the Ayemenem House is decaying, with most of its members living in the past

imagination. Just as Rahel thinks of Baby Kochamma, She is living her life

backwards (Roy 23).

The space in the Ayemenem House is a hybrid, too. Indian caste system and


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patriarchy, residues of Indian semi-feudalism, coalesce with Syrian Christianity and

colonial Anglophilia and later with capitalism. They exist simultaneously in and

constitute the space, which means colonialism and Christianity do not completely destroy

the Indian culture or eliminate Indian ideologies, and the individuals living in the spaceare interpellated by ideologies of different modes of production, both colonial and Indian,

and thus live based on the social laws enacted by the hybrid History. In a sense, the

Ayemenem House is the political unconscious of History House, with the everyday

histories going on in the former effects and symptoms of the latter.

As Chacko comments in the novel, the Ipe family is one of Anglophiles. Being

descendants of Reverend E. John Ipe, well known in the Christian community as the

man who had been blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of

the Syrian Christian Church (23) and elites in the Raj, most of the Ipes are so Anglicized

that they becomes nostalgic remnants of the Raj, unable to adapt themselves to the new

ideologies like Marxism and multinationalism. Papachi was an Imperial Entomologist

before independence; his mind had been brought into a state which made him like the

English (51). When Ammu tells him about the sexual request of an Englishman Mr.

Hollick, the manager of a tea plantation in Assam, he does not believe her story because

he didnt believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another mans wife

(42). Chacko frankly describes his father as an incurable CCP, which was short forchhi-chhi poach and in Hindu meant shit-wiper (42). Therefore, Papachis Anglopholia

is deeper rooted than his love toward his daughter, which means ideological interpellation

is stronger than biological or natural love or Love. He is objectified by colonial

discourse.

Chackos academic training in Oxford does not educate him well enough for

self-reflexivity to escape from the objectification of colonialism. He is also a colonial

subject, unconsciously addicted to quoting long passages from the books he has read for

no apparent reasons and to the nostalgia of his life and education at Oxford. The model

planes he buys and then crushes every month is his feeble connection with his mother

land, which he happily maintains. He marries a white woman, Margaret Kochamma,


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and seems to take pride in that, though the marriage ends up in divorce. When he

laments that Indians have all become prisoners of war, admiring their conquerors and

despising themselves, his indignation does not take him any step further to get rid of the

complex. Proclaiming himself a Marxist, he actually does nothing practicing thedoctrine but is finally reduced to a target of Marxist revolution. He, like Papachi, is an

outdated nostalgist. After Sophie Mols death and the bankruptcy of Paradise Pickle

factory, he virtually flees to Canada running an unsuccessful antique shop, abandoning

the family and the nation. When he says, To understand history, we have to go inside

and listen to what theyre saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall.

And Smell the smells (51), I think he is being deliberately bookish, because his

theoretical elaboration does not help elevate what is in his unconscious to the

consciousness for action. He always chooses to bury himself in memory and to be blind

to History. In the novel, this is suggested in his failure in running Paradise pickle

factory, which, I think, serves as a symbol of the preservation of past Indian cultural

heritage, though the jam Mamachi makes also implies hybridity. Both Papachi and

Chacko are actually the epitome of an Indian elite constructed by British colonial rule in

India, preserving their identity as an Indian and the consciousness of Indian culture on the

surface but unconsciously and irreversibly adoring his conquerors and their culture.

They are in effect both objectified agents of British colonialism.Papachi and Chacko are really epitomes of Historical hybridity. As is mentioned

above, the hybrid space of History House is concretized in the Ayemenem House. And

in turn it is reproduced in the fathers and sons spaces of mind. They are English and

Indian simultaneously: Anglophile, patriarchal and caste-conscious. Papachis

jealousy of Mamachis musical talent and business success, his habitual beating of his

wife as a protest against her achievement running the pickle factory, his denial of

Ammus further education manifests the influence of Indian patriarchal tradition.

Chacko, though a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, does not exempt himself from the

tradition. He forces sexual relationships on female workers in the pickle factory.

When he takes over the factory, he keeps referring it as my factory, my pineapple,


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my jam, in spite of the fact that it is Mamachi who starts the business and makes it

profitable. When Ammu and Veluthas affair is disclosed, Chacko gets so mad that he

batters down the door of Ammus room and orders her to Get out of my house before I

break every bone in your body! (214). The son is not less patriarchal than his father.As is mentioned above, space is the production of social forces, and then the

Ayemenem House is a hybrid space produced by imperialism, patriarchy and caste. And

to live in the space and to occupy a position in the space, one has to conform to the

laws enacted by the social forces. In the house, Papachi and Chacko are dominators;

they are objects constructed by colonialism but subjects by patriarchy and caste system.

Those who are not Touchable males, including Touchable females and Untouchables,

have to be reduced to objects with no identity, and are dominated by the two patriarchs

(This is why only they two have a study, suggestive of knowledge and power.) and the

Love Laws.

Women are the locus where the ideologies of colonialism and patriarchy converge,

and become the victims of double colonialization: the forgotten cauality of both

imperial ideology and native and foreign patriarchies (Gandhi 83). Patriarchy forces

them to accept the belief in mens superiority and his indispensability; colonialism

reduces them to be the gendered subaltern with no media to represent themselves.

Spivak, in Can the Subaltern Speak?, argues that contesting representational systemsviolently attempting to represent the gendered subaltern:

Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and

object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a

pristine nothingness, but a violent shuttling which is the displaced

figuration of the third-world woman caught between tradition and

modernization (306).

Not just the men but also the women perhaps except Ammu in the Ayemenem House are

Anglophile to a certain extent. Judging from the way she receives Sophie Mol at her

arrival, Mamachi is also Anglophile, regardless of her despisal of Margaret Kochamma

for the sake of jealousy of the latters marrying her son. When it comes to patriarchy,


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Mamachi has come to believe in it. She is used to Papachis habitual beating. Though

furious at Ammus affair with Velutha, she is tolerant of Chackos libertine relationships

with women in the factory by taking it as mans needs and thoughtfully has a separate

entrance built for her sons convenience. For Mamachi, a man has to always be there ina womans life. He is indispensable and his presence matters more than anything else

and is worth all the tolerance in spite of her talent in music and success in managing a

business. That is why on the day Chacko prevents Papachi from beating her, Mamachi

packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chackos care. From then onwards he

became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her Man. Her only Love (Roy

160). Unconsciously, she marries her son.

Baby Kochamma perhaps is the best example in the novel of double colonization

on women: women as the double victims of patriarchy and colonialism. Her lifelong

attachment to Father Mulligan is probably Anglophile love. After her return to

Ayemenem House, she gives up the desire of marriage but not the love for Mulligan. It

seems that the love has become a belief in the white God, not a desire anymore. Every

day, she prays to the God by writing I love you in her diary. She makes it a rule to

read English classics and is proud of the habit. She forbids Rahel and Estha from

reading English backward and gives them imposition. To occupy a position in the

house, she internalizes not only Anglophilia but also patriarchy, turning herself into anactive agent of the Love Laws. Her interior space is doubly colonized. Her resentment

against Ammus unrelenting desire in the search of love and coercion of Estha into

testifying against Velutha after the disclosure of his affair with Ammu result not only

from jealousy but also from the belief in the Love Laws so that those who do not

comply to the laws have to expelled and so that the purity of the space and the effective

functioning of the laws can be maintained. Again ideology prevails over biological love;

Love Laws regulate the individual and negotiates its terms and collects its dues from

those who breaks its laws (54).

Baby Kochamma lives long enough to welcome the advent of another more

powerful stage of History, multinationalism. When Rahel returns to Ayemenem


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twenty-three years after Sophie Mols death, she finds Baby has abandoned her original

habit of gardening and addicted herself to satellite TV, to American programs. This

signifies the invasion of globalizing multinationalism into the Ayemenem House and into

India, corresponding to the transformation of History House into Heritage Hotel. In thissense, Baby Kochamma does keep herself up with History, with her mind a space in

which History can take root. She is always an object constructed by History.

When the History House takes a new form, the Ayemenem House is declining, with

the pickle factory shut down, the garden deserted, the family members dead, expelled or

gone, and the nearby river polluted and shrunk. When grand history is entering a new

bourgeoning stage, petit history is also following suit but in a decaying manner. They

are closely related.

The Meenachal River is also shrunk and decaying. I think Roy posits a nature/

culture opposition with the river and the two history houses. For centuries, the river has

been the lifeblood of Ayemenem and its residents, providing livelihood but also powerful

enough to evoke fear and to change lives (119). It used to be where bathers bathed

and fishers fish, mothers washed clothes, farmers watered their fields, Ammu and velutha

had sex, Rahel and Estha played and hid and also where Sophie Mol was drowned. But

now the river is no more than a swollen drain (118), with a saltwater barrage built

under the pressure of influential paddy-farmer lobby in exchange for more rice.Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadultered factory effluents (119).

With the pollution of the Meenachal River, the Ayemenem villagers cannot cross the river

to the History House, and only tourists have the privilege to enter it. It has turned its

back on Ayemenem (119). The river is virtually dead, killed by economic growth and

by capitalistic spatialization. Nature, both natural landscape are human nature, is

destroyed by civilization.

Nature, I think, is the core ofThe God of Small Things. With a sad story relating

everyday histories to grand history, connecting family, community and nation, Arundhati

Roy tries to provoke readers to ponder over what effect culture or civilization has on the

nature and human beings. Is economic growth worthy of the price of a river? I think


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Roys answer is surely negative. The following passage describing the small things at

the place where Velutha and Ammu make love to each other reveals us why Velutha is

worthy of the name The god of small things and also Roys position between the choice

between nature and culture:They laughed at ant-bites on each others bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding

off the ends of leaves, at overturned beetles that couldnt right themselves. At the pair of

small fish that always sought Velutha out in the river and bit him. At a particularly devout

praying mantis. At the minute spider who lived in a crack in the wall of the back

verandah of the History House and camouflaged himself by covering his body with bits

of rubbish --- a silver of wasp wing. Part of a cobweb. Dust. Leaf rot. The empty

thorax of a dead bee. Chappu Thamburan, Velutha called him. Lord Rubbish (320)

These small natural things can bring so much joy in contrast to the terrible scenes and

smells caused by the pollution of the Meenachal River. Velutha indeed embodies more

love toward the nature compared with other characters in the novels Therefore, when it

comes to the nature, History is really what hurts, because the latter is so destructive and

the former so fragile.

However, I would argue that the attachment to natural small things is an effect of

History. If History is so dominant and destructive both to the nature and human desire,

then a return to the most vulnerable turns out to be the most necessary. Transference tothe basic, natural and small comes from the lack induced by being conscious of the

impossibility of coping with and coming to terms with the Big Things and of the

disappearance of the Small Things. Therefore, aware of their vulnerability to History or

Love Laws, Ammu and Velutha link their fates and futures to Chappu Thamburan: They

chose him because they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to

Smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each

other (321). They cannot help but cling to small things, for the big things, such as the

nation, world, History, are beyond their reach.

With Love Laws, historical and social rules, determining who should love and

who should be loved, do human beings love one another more? Just like culture or


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civilization betrays the nature, Love Laws betrays human nature, the Love, Madness,

Hope, and Infinnate Joy. When desire is hurt and refused by History, when desire is

caught in the liminality of historical residues, it either succumbs (like Baby Kochamma)

or revolts (like Ammu). Transgression, that is, is Utopian and inevitably an effect ofHistory.

As is mentioned, space is the production of social forces so that to enter a space,

one has to obey the forces; otherwise, one will be cast out and become an outcast or

outsider. This inside/outside distinction generates boundaries and brings about a

homogenizing effect on the subjects in a space. To be an insider, one has to accept the

laws and ideologies. In the novel, the Love Laws are what the insiders have to observe

in the Ayemenem House, so all the family members obey the rules without questioning

them, except Ammu, Rahel and Estha. They do not follow the Love Laws so they have

no identities and no positions in the house, so that finally, one after another they are

expelled. Love Laws prevail over love so that family members do love each other

naturally but based on the Law. This is a sad state of affair, and this is what Roy stands

up against through the novel.

However, the transgressive acts in the novel not only manifest the individual

impasse and but also strengthen the historical grip. Jamnet Thormann argues that

Ammus refusal of the laws of caste and the restrictions on women is an ethical act thatrefuses to betray desire (Janet 305). She refuses to accept the restrictions Love Laws

or History imposes on women in pursuit of her desire. Unlike Baby Kochomma, who

has given up on her desire for love in order to secure a place in the patriarchal space of

the Ayemenem House as a man-less woman, Ammu has an Unsafe Edge, an air of

unpredictabililty that emerges when she smokes, listens to songs on the radio, even

when her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk (Roy

43). The Unsafe Edge leads her to the affair with Velutha, an Untouchable who is not

satisfied with his position in the caste system, and consequently induces the transgressive

act of cross-caste affair. However, this personal history of transgression invoked

through personal desire against History not only leaves the latter unharmed but reinforces


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the latters constraint on the former. Jameson elaborates on the invalidity of the

fulfillment of individual desire:

in that case desire must always be transgressive must always have a

repressive norm or law through which to burst and against which todefine itself. Yet it is a commonplace that transgressions,

presupposing the laws or norms or taboos against which they function,

thereby end up precisely reconfirming such laws (1981:68).

Roys extravagant description of the sexual scene reveals a political ambition to

transgress against the historical space with the space of the individual body and to signify

the denial of historical domination and thus personal autonomy through an erotic act.

However, this feminist approach to rebel against patriarchy through bodily autonomy

betrays the predicament that resistance starts and ends in the individual, which rings truer

considering Ammu and Veluthas death after their failure in challenging the

feudal-patriarchal society.

Aijaz Ahmad, in Reading Arundhati Roy politically, accuses Roy of believing

that resistance can only be individual and fragilethe personal is the only arena of the

political. Roy may not really have the belief, but I think individual bodily

transgression is the out of proportion to the scope of the novels concern as a national

allegory, threading from family, community to nation. Ammu and Veluthas resort tobodily consummation as transgression upon the Love Laws and History manifests the

authors Utopian optimism that through love, the problems History has imposed on the

society and nation will be resolved, as Ahmad argues, Roy defines sexuality as that

transcendence which takes individual beyond history and society, straight right into the

real truth of their beings (quoted from Wilson). However, the couples addiction to

small things betrays their inability or helplessness to conduct such transcendence. The

Cost of Living, the title of the chapter which includes the 7-page long erotic scene,

succinctly shows the individuals impasse.

Similarly, the incest conducted by the twins Rahel and Estha is problematic. As

to the incest, chronologically the last event in the narrative of the novel, Janet Thormann


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considers it the only opening for their desire, a radical refusal of difference and time and

a nostalgic return to their connection to love, childhood, and the mother before the

devastating effects of perverse LawThe incest of the novel is then a radical challenge to

Law, because it challenges the very possibility of social being (304). However,conducted in a decaying house where only two objectified old women live, Baby

Kochamma and Kochu Maria, the incest means little concerning transgression in such a

space. I would rather believe that the incest shows the twins individual impasse after

being alienated by History through their childhood tragedy triggered by Sophie Mols

death but actually caused by various indifferent and merciless social forces and ideologies.

It is a grave that they enter.

The God of Small Things is a Jamesonian national allegory in that it places in

juxtaposition the personal, the local, the national and the global and weighs how the latter

two are implicated on the former two, how the big things are oppressive to the small

things, and how the individual is caught in the historical liminality. So Julie Mullaney

comments, It is noteworthy given the novels obsession with the small in relation to the

large that Roy chooses to more obviously excavate the persona and the local rather than

the wider public and national canvas directly (26). However, what is worthy of note is

that, instead of serving as a buffer against globalization and cultural imperialism for the

protection of the local and the personal, as Jameson proposes in Globalization andPolitical Strategy that one has to add that the nation-state today remains the only

concrete terrain and framework for political struggle [against globalization], the

nation-state in the novel (India of course) puts itself in complicity in its oppression on the

local and the individual. Recall in the novel the police violence on Velutha, Inspector

Thomas Mathews sexual harassment on Ammu, the nations inability to abolish the caste

system and its complicity with multinational companies in their economic invasion into

India, and one realizes that Jamesons strategy may not be valid in coping with History

and Roys novel is one realistic refutation.

In The Ethical Subject ofThe God of Small Things, Janet Thormann argues on

the relationship between grand history and petit history:


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Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Francis Baker, Peter Hulme

And Maragret Iversen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. 253-66.

Mullaney, Julie. The God of Small Things: A Readers Guide. New York:

Continuum, 2002.Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Schwab, Gabriele. The Subject of the Political Unconscious. Politics, Theory,

and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Mark Poster. New York: Columbia UP,

1993. 83-109

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.

London: MacMillan, 1988. 271-311.

- - -. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Thormann, Janet. The Ethical Subject ofThe God of Small Things. Journal for

the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. 8.2 (2003): 23 pars. Online.

EBSCOHOST. 23 Nov. 2004.

Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London:

Routledge, 1990.

- - -. Colonial Desire. London: Routledge, 1995.

Wilson, Kalpana. Arundhati Roy and Patriarchy. 35 pars. Online.Angelfire. 28 Dec. 2004.


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Documents

History Novel Jameson