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Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

2011; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cli.2011.0019

1548-9949

Elizabeth Outka,

Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics

Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things Elizabeth Outka (bio) Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, presents an often bewildering mix of different times. Images, stories, and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences. Critics have noted this temporal blending and have cited this feature as reflecting the novel's magical realism, or postcolonialism, or postmodernism, which are all associated with various forms of time play.1 Indeed, as writers from Joyce to Woolf to Rushdie remind us, time is always to some extent a mixture, as the present must be understood as a complex amalgamation and negotiation of past moments. Roy's novel reflects, [End Page 21] however, another critical aspect of blended time that the stylistic and political readings of the novel have so far missed: the central role of trauma in creating the temporal mix experienced by the characters.2 One of the most noted aftereffects of traumatic experience is, in fact, a disordering of time, when past events threaten to take over the present, returning repeatedly to haunt the current moment in the form of flashbacks, hallucinations, or dreams.3 Trauma reorders time itself, and thus in Roy's novel, the temporal mixture must be read not simply as a feature of a postmodern or postcolonial narrative, but also as the sign of traumatic experience.4 Roy depicts what I will call "temporal hybridity" both within her characters' lives and within her narrative structure, providing a vivid map of trauma's lingering damage. Roy also evokes, however, the possibility of another temporal zone apart from her characters, one accessible only to the reader, and one where time's hybridity—through this very access—might reflect not disruption but also the possibility of radical political and social change. In evaluating Roy's novel, I borrow the term "hybridity" from postcolonial theory deliberately, despite its controversial status within the field. Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridization demands that we view cultural meetings not as simple binaries, but as meetings where ambivalence and multiplicity are governing forces, and where the apparent sides might in fact represent [End Page 22] hybridizations themselves.5 Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others have further explored how time itself must be understood as multiple, with Bhabha positing "a dialectic of various temporalities" as a way to unsettle the repressive illusion of "fixed and stable forms of the nationalist narrative" ("DissemiNation" 303), and Chakrabarty exploring the idea of "time knots" of multiple moments that may disrupt the narrative of modern capitalist history.6 In this article, I bring together postcolonial theories of hybridity with the parallel critical work on time, proposing a temporal hybridity, one that in Roy's novel might hold a liberating power to disrupt existing narratives, but one that more often reflects the brutal aftereffects of traumatic events. For Roy's characters, time is not a binary meeting but a hybrid where different times become simultaneous, multiple, ambiguous. The present moment is at once a dangerous blending of many times, but also, paradoxically, a refusal of those moments to blend, signaling the past traumatic event's refusal to be integrated into an unfolding narrative. Considering the traumatic temporal hybridity of Roy's novel in turn offers a way to evaluate criticisms of Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridization, which has been taken to task for, among other things, eliding material realities of the colonizer/colonized binary.7 The temporal hybridity in Roy's novel does not ignore such realities but actually reflects the trauma that certain brutal [End Page 23] material realities may produce; in her depiction of collective trauma in particular, Roy pushes against nonmaterialist readings and explores the harmful effects of caste prejudice, sexism, and commercial and political colonizations. Roy's temporal hybrids indeed capture the often contradictory readings of hybridity within postcolonial theory. As Susan Stanford Friedman has recently summarized, hybridity has been read as a sign of oppression, as when one culture forces another to assimilate, or as a sign of progression, where rigid dichotomies are unsettled and new forms emerge.8 On a temporal level, Roy depicts these contradictions within her novel, exploring...