A martyrology of the abject: witnessing and trauma in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1920-1222
Autores Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
ResumoArundhati Roy's The God of Small Things enjoys tremendous international success but perhaps more significantly, it touches individual readers deeply; many find it profound beyond its poetics. This essay explores question of how it is that novel has such power; it advances suggestion that its literary power stems from particular narrative deployment of abject and traumatic. The narrative of The God of Small Things exhibits general characteristics of trauma, which may be defined as a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming or events, which takes form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling event (Caruth 4). Cathy Caruth also notes common delay or incompletion in knowing that is often present in trauma (5). These characteristics of trauma are found in content of Roy's novel but gain further force and significance by being repeated in its narrative structure. Events, especially most traumatic ones, are referred to over and over again. Specific details (such as the smell of old roses [14 and passim]) and phrases (Orangedrink, Lemondrink Man [98 and passim]) are repeated; related dreams (like Rahel's of Ammu [214]) are recounted; scenes are iterated and reiterated, fragmentally, in various stages of completion, but always absolutely true to event (Caruth 5). The traumatic structure of narrative forces readers to experience trauma of abject as if they are already to it. (1) Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's Testimony situates contemporary trauma studies at interstices of literature, psychoanalysis, and history; however, in it, role of abject, and its close relation to trauma, as well as to literature, psychoanalysis and history, is under-theorized. (2) The abject is everything that human body excretes in order to live, all that might endanger our lives should we touch or ingest it; it is things we must not do in order to be proper subjects in our societies. In exploring role of abject, both Julia Kristeva and, following her lead, Anne McClintock, have integrated aspects of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Freudian concepts to move towards social interpretation of psychoanalytic theories (3) that can be applied to modern imperialist and contemporary societies (McClintock 71-72). As Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror, leaving aside question of priority of one over other (the social does not represent subjective any more than subjective represents social), I shall posit that they both follow same logic, with no other goal than survival of both group and subject (68). Thus, abject is active not only in, for example, excrement, but also in social cast(e)ing out of groups, such as Untouchables in context of Roy's Kerala. That removal of bodily wastes is, historically, work that can only be performed by Untouchables reinforces aptness of social application of abjection theory to The God of Small Things, novel that concerns itself with politics of caste. The character of Velutha most particularly marks intersection of abject and trauma within novel, not only because his body becomes site of trauma that permeates novel, but because his body, as body of an Untouchable, also represents socially abject. Kristeva argues that is [abjection's] privileged signifier [...] literature as such, represents ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses (208). She further claims that literature may be seen as taking place of and that because it decks itself out in sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of abject. …
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