ENGLISH AS POETIC AND NARRATIVE EROS INTHE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
When
we read The God of Small Things we
will see how far the English language in Indian writing of narrative in
English, has come from an uneasy balance between language and context,
sometimes creating an alienation in the reader from the narrated realities of
the text, to a point where language and
context enact a magical coalescence. It is certainly narrative, in that it
tells a story; furthermore it is also a novel, because it holds up an entire
society, inflected as it is by specific socio economic modalities, for the
reader’s extension of her/his `own world. As Morrison says in a famous quote,
‘But narrative remains the best way to learn anything, whether history or
theology, so I continue with the narrative form’.1 This is specially so because it does it through
pleasure, through the medium of the story, and through affect, and that affect
is what often leads the auditor to cognition.
The God of Small Things(1997),
hereafter referred to as TGST, is also that
Indian novel in English which represents the arrival of the Indian novel in
English, in a definitive and resounding manner on the global scene of novel writing in
English. It is a consummate moment not
only validated through the author’s winning of the Booker Prize (1997), but
through the bridging of possible gaps
between language and context since the language is English and not and
indigenous one, between language and experience, between affect and cognition,
grammatical structure and the highest levels of poetry, a linguistic space
where the plenitude of imagination and that of language meet and reach
spectacular and dramatic heights.Of course, one needs to be an anglophile to a
certain extent to feel this subliminal reach of
the language, which takes us back to the old debates over whether English is at all a suitable medium for
artistic expression, within Indian contexts.
That
it is also a woman who performs this feat, is important if we wish to clinch
issues of gender and creativity. in the writing of novels in English in India,
where all doubts as to whether English is an adequate medium for representing
Indian realities, should be erased. The artistic continuum we are studying
here—peculiar triumph of gender and genre.
Ashapurna writes the definitive feminist novel in Bengali and Arundhati in
English.
No comments:
Post a Comment