Geography Is Not History: The Storyteller in the Age of Globalization

In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin claims that the catastrophe of history has robbed us of the “art of storytelling” and “the ability to exchange experiences” (Illuminations 83). Gone with this art is the capacity for collective memory building and the transmission of wisdom. At the heart of Benjamin’s lament is the transformation in the structure of experience itself.1 As Richard Wolin points out in his reading of “The Storyteller,” Benjamin’s assessment of the structure of experience in modern life is one “where events take on a desultory and isolated, overwhelmingly private character; where ‘experiences’ are at best meaningful for the individual, but have forfeited the attribute of universality from which the element of wisdom, the moral of the story, traditionally derived” (Walter Benjamin 219–20). The novel form, Benjamin contends, stems from the profound isolation of the novelist having no roots in or access to oral tradition, affording little more than the false and subjective coherence of the individual recollection that must substitute for the counsel and wisdom of the storyteller. In its sundering from the life and tradition of the community, the novel offers meaning by expending itself in the teleological structure of the “ending” that is “more proper to it . . . than to any story” and that “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’” (100). In the newest stage of capitalism, moreover, the novel form confronts a fresh crisis from new technologies of representation and broadcasting: “This new form of communication is information” (88). If it was “half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one produces it,” now it is impossible to relay narrative in its amplitude because “no event any longer comes to us without being already shot through with explanation” (89).

The subjugation of story to information has profound implications for postcolonial literature. In the age of globalization and commodifi-cation, the postcolonial novel is particularly susceptible to the new order that privileges information and emphasizes the subjective idea at the expense of the “multiplicity” that constitutes its truth-content (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 131).2 The stress on timeliness and novelty, and the over-representation of postcolonial literature in the novel form, moreover, promote the illusion of isolationist particularity because the text is seen as tethered to a historical context in a relatively unambiguous, unmediated relationship. When perceived in a philosophical relation to it, however, art has the capacity to negotiate the particular by transcending the individual subject and pointing “back to the collective subject” in a philosophical universality (131). A “contemporary consciousness fixated on the tangible and unmediated” disregards this aspect of artistic refraction, consigning it to the sterile category of information (131). “The value of information,” Benjamin states, “does not survive the moment in which it was new” (Illuminations 90). A determination of the value of post-colonial literature must, therefore, necessarily undertake an investigation of its struggle (failed or otherwise) to reconcile the individual with a collectivity, and information with intelligence. The focal center of the debate over representation thus involves the postcolonial novel’s stance toward social categories, its understanding of experience as both particular and withdrawn from the individual ego, and its placement of situational realities in a philosophical temporality where different rationalities may interact.

Arundhati Roy’s incorporation of the Kathakali Man (katha, story; kali, performance) in The God of Small Things introduces into the framework of the novel the figure of a Benjaminian storyteller to revivify the relation of the novel form to the fecund tradition of Great Stories and that of mimesis to experience.3 Indigenous to Kerala, Kathakali is a classical dance drama “based on subject matter from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and stories from Shaiva literature” (“Kathakali”). Endangered, like Benjamin’s storyteller, the Kathakali Man whose body and soul are “harnessed wholly to the task of storytelling,” the narrator laments, “These days has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods” (219). Derided by his children who “long to be everything that he is not,” the Kathakali Man is left dangling somewhere “between heaven and earth” (219). Since he cannot do what his children aspire to, “He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits,” the Kathakali Man turns in despair to tourism: “He hawks the only things he owns. The stories that his body can tell. He becomes a Regional Flavor” (219). He cannot retool “his only instrument,” the body that “has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of storytelling” (219). In his corporal integration of the product he produces, the Kathakali man is what he does: “he strives not to enter a part but to escape it. But this is what he cannot do. In his abject defeat lies his supreme triumph” (220). An increasingly powerful market system now seeks to bankrupt the artisan, alienate him from the story he has learned to become, and convert him and his art into labor, evaluating and transforming it through altered standards of value. Now catering to tourists’ “imported attention spans,” the Kathakali man dances to the market, selling amputated stories. The storyteller, we are reminded, “does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report” (Benjamin 91). Abbreviation and premature crystallization are heresy to the storyteller. The Kathakali Man who hurries through the story to its cameo essence knows that humiliation and rage follow from the corruption of the tale thus reduced. Like the Meenachal river, once described as a “wild thing,” but now shrunk and polluted by the stink of “shit and pesticides bought with world bank loans,” like the town of Ayemenem now sprouting Gulf-money houses and alien television antennae, the Kathakali Man, too, must enter a global marketplace dominated by “practical” considerations. His “hopelessly practical” acceptance of this reconditioning of his art ensures a minimal sort of survival but not his sanity, which the Kathakali Man struggles to retain by dancing for the temple gods—a pure community of listeners—in atonement “for corrupting their stories. For encashing their identities” (218). In the evenings, at the five-star Heritage Hotel that caters to a growing tourist industry, tourists are “treated to truncated kathakali performances (‘Small attention spans,’ the hotel people explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos” (121). In documenting the profound impact of changing market forces through the figure of the Kathakali Man and the world of Ayemenem, The God of Small Things obliges us to reengage the encounter between the traditional and modern world. The tradition from which the Kathakali Man derives his stories, moreover, shares the same scaffolding upon which the “story” of The God of Small Things is also built, the sameness belied by the persistent shifting of the weight of significance onto the small things that carry the protest of the particular against the general and the universal. The novel’s interest in documenting the “development” of a small town, its microscopic focus on the “scurry of small lives,” and its fidelity to the remembrance of things past—“small things” past in the scope of geological time and history—exhort a renewed understanding of the struggle of the postcolonial storyteller against socioeconomic forces that threaten the integrity of experience. The novel’s treatment of this theme, however, proceeds without an idealization of the storyteller or of tradition as such. The Kathakali Men, we are told, “took off their makeup and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts,” at the conclusion of the performance (224). It is the story that harnesses and gives shape to what is beautiful within the performer in the course of the performance. What is important, therefore, is the story and its repeated performance, the performance, indeed, of remembrance as the promise of a new future that neither tradition nor modernity, neither the past nor the present have been able to keep. As Aoi suggests in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the counsel is to “spin it out . . . every day we stay alive, we improve our chances of rescue” (421).

Richard Wolin contends that by the time Benjamin wrote his 1939 essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he had already revised some of the claims of the 1936 essay, “The Storyteller.” In the later essay, featuring a discussion of Baudelaire as well as Proust, Benjamin describes the labors Proust undertook to resuscitate the figure of the storyteller. Benjamin’s remarks on Baudelaire and Proust concede possibilities in modern art that he was unwilling to grant in “The Storyteller,” even if they are nevertheless conjoined with the dismantling of the aura. In the later essay, as Wolin explains, “no longer does Benjamin abstractly seek to counter-pose an idyllic past to the decadent present. Instead, he attempts to work through the dilemmas of modern social life in a more immanent fashion” (227). In “Some Motifs,” Benjamin targets for examination the crisis of experience in the modern age with specific attention to the “shocks” of modern life:

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlbenis). Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. (165)

The supplantation of experience as Gedächtnis (remembrance) by Erinnerung, its disintegration in consciousness, is a hallmark of the transformation that no longer permits direct experience.4 Its filtration through consciousness distances the experience, robbing it of “the integrity of its contents.” In Benjamin’s view, Proust’s deployment of mémoire involuntaire attempts to restore something of this integrity to “things past.”5 Benjamin’s modification of the antinomial scheme of “The Storyteller” in his essays on Baudelaire and Proust permit a more flexible understanding of the significance of modernist art, despite his propensity for idealizing the past and prehistory.6 However, Benjamin does not readily concede that the dismantling of the aura of distance (which the masses supposedly desired) could be countered by the creation of another sort of magical aura through the production of images and metaphors in the work of these authors.7 Although Benjamin lauds their ability to document the impact of historical change on artistic form, he is unable to conceive of aura in a dialectical framework that can incorporate its ersatz opposite without being completely superseded by it. The persistence in art of auratic elements that cannot be covered by other formal systems is the “true source,” as Raymond Williams explains, of “the specializing categories of ‘the aesthetic’” (133). The sociality of these elements is undeniable, but it is not an attribute that can explain away their power. In Adorno’s philosophically informed understanding of aesthetics, it is the status of artistic production in a dialectic with its sociality that must command our attention. Although the larger body of Benjamin’s work is likely to give us pause in dispatching too prematurely the debate on aura to conclusion, in “The Work of Art,” Benjamin’s formulations, moreover, generally proceed within a European understanding of the phenomena of tradition and modernity that does not always obtain for cultural productions issuing from other parts of the world (Illuminations). The global current ushering in the new phase of modernity worldwide proceeds at a variant rate in different contexts, sweeping local cultures even as it is resisted by them. In its interaction with multiple relations of production, the aesthetic among them, the postcolonial literary text produces an account of these relations, not so much or not only as a belated explanation of a phenomenon already past in the “developed” world, but as a multiply articulated structure that constitutes a formal challenge to its basic tenets and definitional boundaries.

In his reading of “The Storyteller,” Timothy Brennan has suggested that there are “three major areas in where Benjamin’s account seems contradicted by many novels of the contemporary Third World”: “As a negation of epic, he supposed the novel to stand against ‘memory’—the ‘epic faculty par excellence,’ whereas ‘memory’. . . is what many of these novels insist on preserving (Salman Rushdie 17). Brennan also suggests that moralizing is by no means at an end in the Third World novel. “Finally,” he suggests, “because information must always sound plausible, the novel was thought to oppose the inclination of the storyteller to borrow from the miraculous, which the wholesale success of so-called ‘magical realism’. . . has shown to be wrong” (17). Benjamin’s overwhelmingly dichotomous opposition between traditional and modern societies in “The Storyteller,” moreover, does not adequately accommodate the complexities of either, while his idealization of the past has incurred much criticism.8 In form and content, many postcolonial novels continue to engage the challenge of storytelling in the ongoing tussle between tradition and modernity. In the scheme of many postcolonial novels, such as Rushdie’s subcontinental works or Roy’s The God of Small Things, not only is there no sharp discernible break between these phases, but they are also complicated by internal inconsistencies. Besides, memory and the integrity of experience continue to be significant motifs in a great deal of postcolonial literature. The figure of the Benjaminian storyteller thus stands at the hinge of a new phase of the dialectic of modernism within the plotting of postcolonial spatiotemporality.

In its attempt to chronicle the ongoing struggle between global and local, traditional and modern, general and literary modes of production, The God of Small Things invites us to confront the formal challenges that are posed by this encounter for the novelist and the storyteller. “For practical purposes in a hopeless practical world” (Roy 34), the narrator admits, storytelling must succumb to abbreviation, because the labor of a “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” is no longer valued by its impatient and inattentive audience (Benjamin 93). In acknowledging this aspect of the spirit of the information age, the novel seems to accept the conditions of its production and their impact on its formal lineament. In the double gesture of seeming to concede the end of storytelling in its richness, and in straining against the impulse to abbreviation and cameo essence, however, the novel reveals the conditions of its productive origins without capitulating to them completely. If it thus surrenders some of its aura and authority, it also recalls that very aura and authority. The via media between auratic and nonauratic is skillfully traversed, recalling what was for Adorno the value of deaestheticization (Entkunstung) in the face of binary alternatives. The novel’s structural principle recalls precisely those “Great Stories” that Kathakali tells, even as it confronts the narrative order demanded by “a purely practical sense” (Roy 32, 34). Benjamin claims that

what differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature— the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella—is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. (Illuminations 87)

But Roy’s novel operates on a modal scheme that shows a deep kinship with the spirit of the storyteller so immersed in the tale that the “stories are his children and his childhood” even as it acknowledges the unfeasibility of the Kathakali Man (219; emphasis mine). In resorting to the prelinguistic communicative mode of abhinaya (from the Sanskrit abhi, toward plus ni. naya, to carry), however, the Kathakali man alerts us to the nonliteral transmission of meaning, one anterior to oral or other “linguistic” modes of communication. Often crudely translated as “acting,” “miming,” or “facial expression,” the complex codes of abhinaya imply the act of carrying the spectator toward the meaning through the immersion of the body itself in the communicative performance. The complete identification of the dancer with character and of the story-teller with the story seeks to collapse the boundaries between tale and teller, form and content. Roy’s paean to the Kathakali Man thus identifies a philosophical subscription that the novel as a whole attempts to approximate in its formal intelligence. The spirit of the communicative act is captured in the description of the Kathakali Man to the stories he tells:

To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up with them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells his story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. (219)

Through its structural integrity, the text tries to assimilate key elements of the great stories that modern life confines to tradition and threatens to consign to oblivion. In its slow circling around the events, the periodic return to its nodal moments, and its spinning away from the magnetic force of the events, the novel draws attention to its formal imperatives, through the labor of carrying meaning in the whole “body” of the text as a plangent and complex theater of communication. It is not only the content of the novel that reflects the experience of modern life, but its architectonic design that attempts to integrate experience into the creative process, which also echoes the weaving and unraveling of the work of unconscious memory. The use of the third person and the lack of a strictly progressive narrative divest it of the effect of Bildung, even if what is built, repatched, and rebuilt produces the effect of a house one might inhabit. The narrative continues its work ceaseless secreting recollected experience—a “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” from which the pearl emerges, its original essence amalgamated into its making (93). The great stories, the narrator confides “don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen” (218). In subscribing to this ethic, the novel eschews the thrill of novelty, the surprise of the unforeseen, even as it recounts and confronts exhilarating and horrific experiences. The formal design of the novel seeks to corrode the shock of the plot through a process of slowly familiarizing the reader with the events and their resonance as they reside in the register of regressive recollection. The known plot provides a basic frame upon which the text is woven, and fashioned, reworked, and refashioned. The story thus proceeds through a deliberate weaving rather than a reproduction of events as they happened in empirical experience. The novel’s formal organization and structural ethic of recollection as forecasting raise inevitable comparisons with the work of the storyteller at a time when such modes of exchanging experiences are facing extinction, by Benjamin’s account.

In The God of Small Things, the narrator’s haphazard return to small things past conveys an insistence on the integrity of the mundane, rendered significant through the power of remembrance. Refusing insulation from the force of the unconscious, the narrative instinctively and repeatedly returns to that which is hidden in the past. The rising of involuntary memories in the novel, time after time, in the arrested image of the watch that always registers the hour and the minute as “ten to two”—the time painted on its surface—unyokes the experience from the lived hour and casts it into the always of remembrance. Such is the force of remembrance that the events and sensations once experienced are presented through a structural inversion as if they are yet to be. There is no simple past to recover, but a future that must be foretold from the vantage of the past moment. It is, moreover, through a return to the unbuffered state of consciousness of childhood that the contact with experience is reestablished. In its refusal to close the book on the incident, preventing the closure that would assign it a place and time, the novel resorts not to the reproduction of the lived instant and its “meaning” but to the production of a textual weave that incorporates its incommensurable history, admittedly producing not its image but its “afterimage,” but through the mode of return via involuntary rather than organized, intellectualized memory. “The important thing for the remembering author,”Benjamin submits in his essay entitled “The Image of Proust,” “is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection” (Illuminations 204). Or, as Benjamin goes on to amend, “should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting?”

The narrator of The God of Small Things likens the work of memory to a woman seen on an upstate New York train:

Across the aisle from Rahel a woman with chapped cheeks and a mustache coughed up phlegm and wrapped it in twists of newspaper that she tore off the pile of Sunday papers on her lap. She arranged the little packages in neat rows on the empty seat in front of her as though she was setting up a phlegm stall.

“Memory,” the narrator proposes, “was that woman on the train”:

Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones—a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered. (69–70)

The lunatic activities of the woman convey something of the random order of memory, its careful arrangement of a chance assortment of memory bits, and its imbuing of information and news with the mucus of bodily effluence as the body coughs up what was once felt. The arbitrariness of recollection, of the partial access to the past is captured in the light and shade of memory. When Rahel thinks of home, it is “always in the colors of the dark, oiled wood of boats, and the empty cores of the tongues of flame that flickered in brass lamps” (70). This image offers a telling comparison with Proust’s narrative ethic that is founded on the belief that the trueness of the whole picture lies in “those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious recollection and conscious observation will never know how to attain” (Proust 475).

As I demonstrate in the concluding section of this essay, however, the device of “mémoire involuntaire” cannot be unproblematically grafted onto the structural weave of The God of Small Things. Roy’s particular deployment of the codes of memory and remembrance, through a third-person narrative, introduces several complications into the formulaic application of this concept from Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past. Nor, indeed, are the dancer and the dance, the teller and tale, the experience and the narrative joined in the sublime unities suggested by the Kathakali Man’s performance. The reformulation of “recollection” within the third-person mode performs a significantly different task from that undertaken by the first-person narrator of Proust’s great novel of remembrance. The conclusion to this chapter elucidates the import of this difference.

In its own work of weaving, The God of Small Things tells many stories great and small. Aijaz Ahmad isolates two plot lines in the story: “one that narrates the growing up of Rahel and the stunting of Estha, and the other which brings their mother [Ammu] so fatally close to [her untouchable lover] Velutha” (“Reading” 105). The catastrophic consequences of the latter for the lovers and the children constitute some of the primary tragic content of the story. The death of the children’s cousin, Uncle Chacko’s daughter Sophie Mol, and the discovery of Ammu’s illicit affair with Velutha result in Velutha’s death at the hands of the police, Ammu’s expulsion from the ancestral house in which she has no legal share as a woman, the returning of her son Estha to her divorced husband, and the marking of this tragedy on the lives of both the children. Playing an instrumental role in these tragedies is the children’s grandaunt, Baby Kochamma, herself embittered by frustrated love and frightened by the potential loss of her own class and caste benefits by the specter of Marxist revolution and the rising tide of a violent Naxalite insurgence. Rahel’s return to the scene of these tragedies twenty-three years later to reunite with her brother who has been Re-Returned by his father and has long ago stopped talking, “stopped talking altogether, that is,” begins the journey back through the past (12). The novel’s mode of telling, however, is better described as a retelling in its resolute effort to incorporate event and calamity into the register of memory, transforming them into a poetic experience that does not expire as the incident would in lived experience. The story is thus not told so much as it is retold, not even remembered so much as subjected to the more difficult manner of unforgetting. The narrator attempts to transmit the events in the story to divest them of the shock of instantaneous experience and pass them on to the register of enactment and production as a house one might inhabit or the smell one knows from a lover’s skin, but the experience returns, involuntarily, in the codes of remembrance, “like a fruit in season. Every season” (253). Basted with slogans and sparse statements that return in the rituals of memory and take away the raw shock of the horrific events through repetition and through the preparation of the consciousness against the shock of stimulus, the story as narrative is nevertheless inadequate to the experience. Acquiring a poetic and aphoristic resonance that function with the economy of a lyric, cryptic fragments, “old roses on a breeze,” “Locusts Stand I” “viable die-able age,” “Ten to Two,” “no ripples in water” inscribe grief with the incomplete text of truncated language while lessons and morals are woven into the texture of the tale in a tight weave: “Everything can change in a day,”“It’s best to be prepared,” “Anything can happen to anyone,” “If he fought he couldn’t win.” The foundational script for the tragedy to come is condensed into the fundamental “Love Laws” and the phrases, “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” As it lives in the multipronged modes of remembrance and involuntary memory, experience is simultaneously distanced by traumatized consciousness and constantly reabsorbed. “An experienced event,” Benjamin explains, “is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it” (204). The release of event from the sphere of lived experience into the aesthetic mode of recollection imbues it with a significance denied to its mundane character in real life.

In his assessment of Proust’s methods, Benjamin recalls the purpose of the story, “which is one of the oldest forms of communication”: “It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand” (Illuminations 161). The restoration of the figure of the storyteller in the age of information is a task of some difficulty, the measure of which is evident, as Benjamin points out, in Proust’s eight-volume work that struggles in its remembrance of things past to combine “certain contents of the individual past” with “material of the collective past” (161). “Things which could be told in very few words” become the most difficult of experiences as they join in an alternative relation with life and history in the alembic of reflection and imagination (209). Whether or not Roy’s “third world novel” can offer us the “satisfactions of Proust,” the formal structure of the novel and its relationship to the events to storytelling in the Benjaminian sense constitute a potent challenge to the reported exhaustion of novel even as they frustrate the attempt to consign the novel to information and regional flavor. In refusing to submit to the shock of the new, the novel recasts the singular event into the timeless framework of ever-presence; in refusing to surrender singularity, it takes individual “love, hope, and infinnate [sic] joy” to be the foundation of liberation.9 In this dual maneuver, the novel proposes a powerful alternative apprehension of the global as a mobile and durable trope morphed over time and space in terms that refuse to renounce the singular. In an age that subjugates story to information, tradition to novelty, and geography to globalism, the textual and narrative strategies used in The God of Small Things short-circuit these simple reductions, reconjugating the relation between the particular and the universal.

The temporal framework of the novel provides the first of the contexts in which it pursues this reconjugation. “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month” (3). Thus begins the Booker-prize winning novel. Although the author has stated in an interview that she begins thus in order to acquaint the reader with the setting of the story, the use of the habitual present tense in the phrases that follow suggests another sort of continuance as much as contextual commencement. Actional phrases such as “red bananas ripen” and “jackfruits burst” in the opening paragraph imply a temporal scheme that is at once static and dynamic. The narrative delay in introducing character—Rahel does not appear in this scene till the fourth paragraph—combined with the grammatical structure of representation together create the impression that this scene will survive the characters and the story. A silent “always” lurks in the connective verb between subject and a usually sensuous predicate. May is thus always a hot, brooding month and so forth at a certain time of the year in this “neverchanging everchanging” world, in Joyce’s phrase. The details are presented as familiar repetition rather than new information, and the scene is available not as timeless but as a point for endless return. Notwithstanding the literary tradition of reading nature descriptions as lyrical index of the character’s state of mind, particularly given personificatory epithets such as “brooding” and “sullen,” the represented world of these early passages functions as a map of individual emotion even as it provides a frame into which we and the character, as much as the story, can enter and exit. The concatenation of “events”—bananas ripening, jackfruit bursting, bluebottles dying—belongs to more than one specific season, the mood of “sloth and sullen expectation” to more than one story to come or one already past. Although specific references to “electric poles” and “highways” in subsequent paragraphs locate the ensuing narrative historically, the mood of the opening paragraph fixes the scene as always there in its tenor, if dynamic in its passing through time.10

Structured by time in its variant cognitive modal units—memory, regression, remembrance, forecasting, and forgetting—the novel is formally and substantively occupied with the emotional and empirical import of time. The last word in the novel is given to “tomorrow,” which is dually construed as a promissory pledge between lovers and a threat by a sociohistorical order that awaits its dues. Hope and catastrophe both belong to tomorrow. Or, as the events of the novel have already relayed to us, they have both already been experienced in the past from which every novel must draw its narrative. Drawing the story into another cycle of regression with this deceptive device, however, the novel’s ending disrupts the expectation of progression from the plot and spirals the reader back into its recurrent vortex. The conscious cyclicality suggested by this novelistic move and the opening of the story with a description reliant on the scheme of ever-presence mediated by habitual return are part of a dialectical narrative and aesthetic structure. Inherent to it is that contradictory negotiation between the universal and particular that is the preserve of critical aesthetics. It is also, as critics such as Terry Eagleton have suggested, the foundational engine of an ethical negotiation with the other, which neither subsumes it in identity nor allows it to remain unaddressed in total nonidentity. In this sense, the new story emergent in the novel is ultimately a known story because it is saturated with the content of history and because in it emerge the repressed objects of time, memory, and consciousness. A novel “about a prosperous Indian family’s ruin,” as Alice Truax’s review in the New York Times describes it, The God of Small Things is also a deeply familiar story not so much because it instantiates a universal principle, but because it is presented as a story that happens, and has already happened within the narrative scheme, because it restores to the mundane the significance of remembrance, and because it communicates the power of involuntary memory through affective communication in a third-person mode that is nevertheless both personal and removed (5). In the galleries of emotional remembrance and the formal construction of return in the novel, it is always happening, suggesting continuity as the foundational element of a shared experience.11 Whether or not the novel works in a self-enclosed world “cut off from repetition,” the story itself is presented as if repeated (A. Benjamin 126). Whether this is repetition in the Nietzschean sense of repetition with difference or repetition of the same is the issue. If the “new” story codes itself as supplement by refusing to seal itself off from the collective experience (Kollectiverfahrung) of a larger humanity construed over space and geological time, by rejecting “uniqueness” while insisting upon particularity, it allows the framing of experience upon the chassis of continuity. In disregarding the narrative code that would emplot and terminate the story “by writing ‘Finis,’” the novel wrests the story out of its empirical chronological context and reconfigures it aesthetically in a stubborn refusal of social semantics and philosophically in a resistance to the forgetting and alienation threatened by the present. It is the particular experience that returns, evernewnevernew, to challenge the isolation of novelty without relinquishing its difference.

Like the novel’s formal ending, which is no descending curtain to the story, its narrative beginning is conceded only as a concession to the genealogical imperative of “a purely practical sense” (32). In this sense “it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem” (32). But that would be telling only one story, a modus operandi rejected in John Berger’s epigraph to the book: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” “To say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem,” the narrator objects, “is only one way of looking at it” (32). A prior beginning is then posited that wrenches the narrative first out of its temporal and then out of its posited spatial frame:

Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch ascendancy, before Vasca da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.

In the backward passage through historical time, moments of beginning are sought and then superseded by prior beginnings, fast-backwarding to a point close to the beginning of Christian historical time (St. Thomas is said to have arrived in Kerala in 52 a.d.). But even this point of origin does not suggest when it “really” began. Equally, then, “it could be argued”

that it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much. (33)

In telescoping the beginning back to a period several centuries prior, and then to the days before numbered time, the narrator moves us into the archive of natural history and its precession. The beginning is, in fact, rendered insignificant by this elaborate excursion through beginnings. This sentiment recurs in a later meditation on “Great Stories”:

It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. (218)

Secular evolutionary time and the salvational time of Judeo-Christianity are spliced together with the mythical timeless to locate the beginning of the story in an unknown moment when the love laws were made. The fundamentals of the story are available to us even before we embark upon this particular rendition of it. “Who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t” are thus already known, the narrator insists, “but one listens as if one doesn’t” (218). This compulsion to listen to what is known and to know it again is the revolt of the aesthetic particular against the habit of forgetting.

Even before this unknown moment of the origin of the Rahel and Estha’s story, however, there is a story in progress that is beyond our usual historical perspective. In his Thesis XVIII on the philosophy of history, Benjamin observes that:

“In relation to the history of organic life on earth,” writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe. (Illuminations 265)

In The God of Small Things, there is an analogous story of the earth that Uncle Chacko tells his wide-eyed niece and nephew to give them “a sense of Historical Perspective (though Perspective was something which, in the weeks to follow Chacko himself would sorely lack)”:

He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six year old woman. . . . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was only forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth. (52)

The setting of history, human existence, individual joy and sorrow within this perspective compresses “the whole of contemporary history, the World of Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge” into “no more than a blink in the Earth Woman’s eye” (53). It is, as Chacko says, “an awe-inspiring and humbling thought” that exposes the vanity both of individual lives and the histories made by man. Against this perspective on the globe, however, stand the small things and individual experiences that will not fade in the persistence of memory. The children may have learned about geological global time, but the smell of history that will “lurk forever in ordinary things” dwarfs the import of this expansionist perspective.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought. (54)

A global scale, geological or geographical, offers no solace for lifetimes of earthly suffering, for the “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin 257).

Two parallel moves being made in the above passages constitute the material for my discussion of the novel’s reinflection of the global in terms both historical and philosophical. I will broach first that aspect of historical globalism that has been understood as intercultural connectivity, before moving on to globalism understood through the framework of universalism. The history of Kerala that is condensed into the catalog of beginnings introduces the concept of a prior globalism that seldom features in the presentist views of historical globalization. We are told today that the transnational condition is readily educed from the mounting statistics of global migrations, the lightening dawn of the digital diaspora, our growing technological connectivity, and the increasingly rapid flow of culture, capital, and labor enabled by new technologies. These contemporary “global” phenomena are cited as the signs of globalization. The champions of financial globalization announce a new economic world order (the Greek kosmos, incidentally, means both “world” and “order” or “adornment”) with a postbellum triumphalism—Robert Reich declares that “the major American company knows ‘no national boundaries, feels no geographic constraints’” (quoted in Jilberto 2). Indeed, if we are to trust the insights of the advertising team for British Telecom, geography is history (O’Brien 1). A new cosmopolitanism is in the making, and the world is being conceived of as global as “never before.” Its boundaries are appearing ever-more transparent to our gaze, as they must have done to empire builders of a century before, to natural historians of a century before that, and to the circumnavigators of the two centuries before. Inherent and undeniable to the current one worldism is something that surely reminds us of the sense of epistemological conquest that characterized earlier versions of the phenomenon. Expressive of one more stage in what Max Weber referred to as the process of the “disenchantment of the world,” the rhetoric of globalization nevertheless capitalizes on the idea of its unprecedented novelty. If the market is “the First Cause of contemporary thinking,” novelty is the index of value in the capitalist marketplace (Malcolmson 239).

Is globalization a new phenomenon? Every age considers itself at the brink of calamitous change, near extinction, glorious revelation, complete regeneration. The AIDS disaster of today was the smallpox of yesterday and the plague of the day before. The end of the world is always imminent, the new science of today obsolete by tomorrow; Ptolemy gives way to Copernicus, Newtonian physics to quantum. If novelty were not the dominant index of value, the current “new” wave of globalism might be profitably contrasted with the “new” internationalism of the period following the almost forgotten First World War, as compared to the “system of internationalism” that prevailed a hundred years before this war and was postulated on a principle that sounds suspiciously similar to that guiding today’s World Trade Organization, that “efficiency in production and distribution demanded that everybody buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest” (Foreman ix). Even the simplest of surveys back across history reveals several “global” moments when imperial/ managerial, technological, scientific, religious, or philosophical globe girding, or some combination thereof, was in full motion. If the global is a matter of interconnectivity, surely ours is not the first such moment in global history. Daniel Headrick offers the following examples of globalization, nineteenth-century style:

Physicians in Africa published their findings in France and Britain. American gun manufacturers exhibited their wares in London, British experts traveled to America to study gunmaking, and General Wolseley paid a visit to the American inventor Hiram Maxim to offer suggestions. Macgregor Laird was inspired by news of events on the Niger to try out a new kind of ship. Dutch and British botanists journeyed to South America to obtain plants to be grown in Asia. Scientists in Indonesia published a journal in French and German for an international readership. The latest rifles were copied in every country and sent to the colonies for testing. (208)

A century prior, Carl Linnaeus was making the following observations in a communiqué to a colleague in the field of natural history:

My pupil Spaarman has just sailed for the Cape of Good Hope, and another of my pupils, Thunbeg, is to accompany a Dutch embassy to Japan. . . . The younger Gmelin is still in Persia, and my friend Falck is in Tartary. Mutis is making splendid botanical discoveries in Mexico. Koenig has found a lot of new things in Tranquebar. Professor Friis Rottboll of Copenhagen is publishing the plants found in Surinam by Rolander. The Arabian discoveries of Forsskal will soon be sent to press in Copenhagen. (quoted in Pratt 27)

To be sure, Linnaeus’s reference is to a global classificatory project that would bring the diversity of nature itself into one ordering episteme, imposing organizational closure not only on the discovered but on the as yet unknown. Nevertheless, the project of making meaning on a global scale—the business of most First World epistemological enterprises— initiates a globalism avant la lettre.

No less significant is the idea of premodern modernity structured around slavery that is explored by Paul Gilroy in the Black Atlantic, or that ordered by the plantation industry in Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, or that recently posited by Gyan Prakash in “A Different Modernity” with regard to the protonational modernities of indigenous Indian communities. More revolutionary yet is Andre Gunder Frank’s advocacy in ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age of a holistic global (i.e., non-Eurocentric) perspective that he uses to adumbrate the global order that existed in Afroeurasia between 1400 and 1800; an even earlier Indian Ocean internationalism is referred to by Kirti Chaudhuri as “Asia before Europe” in a book of the same name. If novelty were not the dominant index of value, and if ersatz global discourses did not sport so doggedly tenacious a First World centric orientation, contemporary post-colonial history might be seen not merely as a colonial concussion but as a part of a perpetual negotiation with change. The depressing reality of a system that produces “a phenomenology of the present so alluring in its immediacy as to seduce the consumer to forget the past and bracket the future” is that increasingly, whether or not geography is history, the danger is that it is history that is history (Radhakrishnan 225). The time is now long past when we might ask, with Edouard Glissant, “Is not every era ‘modern’ in relation to the preceding one?,” and to add, with him, that “it seems that at least one of the components of ‘our’ relation to modernity is the spread of the awareness we have of it. The awareness of our awareness (the double, the second degree) is our source of strength and our torment” (quoted in Gilroy 1).

In The Age of Empire 1875–1914, Eric Hobsbawm asks, “How did the world of the 1880s compare with that of the 1780s?” “In the first place,” he responds, “it was now genuinely global. Almost all parts of it were now known and more or less adequately or approximately mapped” (13). More than a century later, how are we to respond to a similarly posed comparative question? Our hyperawareness tells us that this one is new and different, modern in a novel way because it is marked by a globality of unprecedented scale and scope, not to mention, dizzying speed—all of which impact the Great Stories and our attention spans. The somewhat long detour I have made through a selective survey of previous “global” historical moments is intended not to diminish the difference of the present in its singular manifestations but to introduce the dangers inherent in the ideology of “never-before” in the relation of the First World to its economic and developmental others. The isolation of the postcolonial literary text that is also implicit in a critical stance that privileges presentist empirical contexts is as much my subject as the discussion of the maneuvers of neocolonialism.

The discovery by the First World of the cultural and other productions of the rest of the world in the context of our foregoing discussion on novelty is rendered considerably more sinister in light of the current battles over intellectual property rights. In the current formation of globality with its quirky sense of proportion, the marginal is the sign of the global in the name of novelty, the First World is cognitively larger than the whole world, the hitherto unknown is reworked as new, and that which is not readily known—like nature—becomes the desired object of conquest.

It is in this ideological context with its manifestations in realpolitik that the aesthetic interventions of The God of Small Things must be located. If the novel introduces the expanded perspective of geological time as a corrective to micrological understanding and blinding presentism, it nevertheless insists on the centrality of small things and the integrity of small lives. If it insists that place and time and small things matter, that geography is not history, it also communicates their place within a much larger scopic order. Aesthetic remembrance, which is the motor of the novel, communicates another sense of the global universal in what remains when the historical has passed on, when the experienced event is over, when the “Finis” of the plot is revealed as spurious end. The story is part of the Great Stories already in progress, the ones we are all familiar with. To be certain, the narrator’s tale is not the same tale as that of the Great Stories, nor is it an example or type that fulfills the genre. In the dual sense of adherence and splitting, the story of Rahel and Estha and those they loved cleaves to and from the ideal form of the Great Stories the narrator extols. This relation of the universal and particular, one of nonidentity without disengagement, also informs the novel’s stance toward the individual in relationship to conceptual categories. This relation is defined neither by radical particularity nor a preestablished universality of the particular, which would either subsume the object or relegate it to absolute indifference. Rather, it rests on a place for the sensate life of individual experience within the broad sweep of categories as the incommensurate and unknown that art yet seeks to imitate. It rests on the relation of the particular to other particulars in a constellation out of which we might grow a sense of the universal as that which is not already given. The content of this universal is that which is available in nature, not as an abstract theory of human nature or of natural beauty but by virtue of receptivity to that which is beautiful in nature. “What is beautiful in nature,” then, is “what appears to be more than what is literally there. . . . art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 71). In the unknowableness of nature, its Nichtidentischen (nonidentity), “nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is” (78). Clarifying its relation to nature, Adorno insists that “art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature’s promise” (65). It is the image of what is not there in nature—yet—that inspires art by its negativity. The promise of “tomorrow” is all too tenaciously kept by history, the promise of redemption is all too regretfully broken. In casting experience in the mode of something close to Benjamin’s notion of Gedächtnis, Adorno shared with Benjamin the hope “for a type of experience that would recapture the proper mimetic relationship between man and nature” and thus recall the promise of fulfillment that art reveals as a broken promise. In Adorno, remembrance is a notion that unites with the principle of nonidentity and the unrepresentability of utopia:

The object of art’s longing, the reality of what is not, is metamorphosed in art as remembrance. In remembrance what is qua what was combines with the nonexisting because what was no longer is. Ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis the non-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance, which alone concretizes utopia without betraying it into existence. Remembrance remains bound up in semblance: for even in the past the dream was not reality. (132)

Artistic transcendence consists precisely in the capacity of art to erode the unity of Begriff (concept) and object. In its ability to maintain the tension between the actuality of the object and its rendition in artistic projection, art resists the pressure of identity thinking that would subsume the particular into the universal general concept. As Adorno points out, “Certainly the mimetic element that is indispensable to art is, as regards its substance, universal, but it cannot be reached other than by way of the inextinguishably idiosyncratic particular subject” (41–42).12 It is not surprising, then, that the novel keeps faith with the small things, understanding the ways in which the smallest of joys and sorrows can be invaded by “big things.” In a global conspectus, from the “Historical Perspective,” “Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened . . . Worse Things kept happening” (20). As Ammu points out to her children, “Human beings were creatures of habit” and could become inured to anything, even suffering: “It was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases [which the children’s grandmother Mammachi routinely suffers at the hands of her husband] were the least of them” (49). The second tragedy that follows the first is that the unrelenting accretion of human suffering and its cauterization of human sensibility permit us to forget the individual loss as the next catastrophe gathers force, “piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin, Illuminations 257). It is the inconsequential god of small things who fights but cannot win and who leaves no trace, no footprints, no ripples in the water that the novel knows must not be allowed to be forgotten in the broad sweep of human suffering. A liberation project that cannot attend to “small things” can never accomplish the “big” task that awaits it.

The novel’s critique of a politics that is indifferent to the individual, that is heedless of the singular story, is encapsulated in the bitter comments that follow the brutal beating of Velutha on false charges of kidnapping and attempted rape. As the policemen enact “a clinical demonstration . . . of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy,” Velutha is smashed and broken (292–93). Surveying their work, the agents of history step away from him, “Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance” (294).13 “Their Work,” the narrator reminds us, “lay folded on the floor, . . . abandoned by God and History, by Marx, by Man, by Woman and (in the hours to come) by Children [it is Estha who is blackmailed into betraying the memory of Velutha by identifying him to the police as an abductor]” (294).

In implicating god and history, Marx, man, woman, and children, the narrator leaves no one blameless. Velutha’s Christianity, embraced by his family “to escape the scourge of Untouchability,” is no defense against the persistent memory of the caste system: Converted untouchables are “known as the Rice-Christians. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire” (71). Because of its uniquely promising doctrine, it is the potentially protective system of communism, however, that incurs the most sustained critique because it is supposed to have sheltered those whom the weakness of human nature has routinely sacrificed to its lust for ascendancy. The exhaustion of the Marxist spirit is symbolized somewhat transparently in the description of the flag at the Communist Party local office: “The flag that fluttered on the roof had grown limp and old. The red had bled away” (15). The failure of communism to rise above the destructive forces of the caste system is assaulted through the merciless portrayal of Comrade Pillai, owner of the Lucky Press who used to print labels for Uncle Chacko’s now-defunct Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory. He is also, moreover, a Marxist politician who emerges “through chaos unscathed” and dismisses his role in the story’s tragedy as “the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics. The old omelette-and-eggs thing” (15). The “Necessary Politics” that sacrifices the individual to a greater cause is at the heart of Roy’s indictment of communism.

It is Comrade Pillai who pulls down the last protective shield between Velutha and the impersonal forces of order and history when he intentionally misleads Inspector Thomas Mathew. Before he can act on Baby Kochamma’s allegations of abduction and rape, Inspector Mathew of the Kottayam Police, “a prudent man, . . . took one precaution. He sent a jeep to fetch Comrade K. N. M. Pillai. . . . It was crucial for him to know whether the Paravan had any political support or whether he was operating alone. Though he himself was a Congress man, he did not intend to risk any run-ins with the Marxist government” (248). Comrade Pillai’s selective information seals Velutha’s fate:

Comrade Pillai told Inspector Thomas Mathew that he was acquainted with Velutha, but omitted to mention that Velutha was a member of the Communist Party, or that Velutha had knocked on his door late the previous night, which made Comrade Pillai the last person to have seen Velutha before he disappeared. Nor, though he knew it to be untrue, did Comrade Pillai refute the allegation of attempted rape in Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. He merely assured Inspector Thomas Mathew that as far as he was concerned Velutha did not have the patronage of the protection of the Communist Party. (248)

Comrade Pillai’s decision to surrender Velutha to the vengeful forces of history, to which the policemen are impersonal “henchmen,” stems from his cunning appraisal of the danger to party unity posed by the untouchable. He has earlier attempted to persuade pickle-factory proprietor Chacko to “send him off” because “other workers are not happy with him. . . . ‘You see, comrade,’ he confides, ‘from local standpoint, these caste issues are very deep-rooted’” (263). The narrator informs us that “Velutha’s last visit to Comrade Pillai—after his confrontation with Mammachi and Baby Kochamma—and what had passed between them, remained a secret” (267). It is this final damning breach of faith that seals Velutha’s fate, “the last betrayal that sent Velutha across the river, swimming against the current, in the dark and rain, well in time for his blind date with history” (267). In Comrade Pillai’s manual for liberation, the individual case, which Velutha brings to him for appeal, is a hindrance to the progress of the revolution:14

It is not in the Party’s interest to take up such matters.

Individual’s interest is subordinate to the organization’s interest.

Violating Party Discipline means violating Party Unity. . . . Progress of the Revolution.

Annihilation of the Class Enemy.

Comprador capitalist

Spring-thunder.

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature. (271–72)

If Comrade Pillai’s professional omletteering is the stuff of tragedy, Chacko’s flirtations with Marxism offer an indictment of a bourgeois socialism that “contains” the radical potential of communism. In Chacko’s interactions with factory women, the tragedy of exploitation is rendered mundane by its unremarkable dailyness:

Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously. He would called them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). (63)

In Ammu’s estimation, this “case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade! Comrade!” is no more than “hogwash”: “An Oxford avatar of the old Zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood” (63). Chacko’s enthusiasm for the Marxist cause is, rightly enough, of little significance to Comrade Pillai who himself is not averse to humoring him on occasion without sacrificing his interest or classism: “Having bagged the contract for the Synthetic Cooking Vinegar labels, he deftly banished Chacko from the fighting ranks of the Overthrowers to the treacherous ranks of the To Be Overthrown” (265).15 Roy’s critique of a compromised Marxism is even less veiled in an earlier assessment of the success of Marxism in Kerala:

The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. (64)

Roy nevertheless concedes that “the high literacy level” that Kerala boasts of along with high life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate in India was “because of the Communist movement” (64). This concession aside, the indictment of Marxism is unmitigated by any further allowances for what is generally acknowledged as the relatively successful experience of communism in Kerala.

The novel has come in for some very harsh criticism precisely because of its negative portrayal of communism. Veteran Communist Party of India leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad describes it as “nothing more or less than anti-Communist propaganda” amounting on occasion to “libel and defamation” (“Now, It Is EMS’s Turn”). In a very even-handed, even laudatory critique of the novel, Aijaz Ahmad takes serious issue with its anticommunism. Apart from some “overwriting,” he claims, “the relatively more serious failing is in the way the book panders to the prevailing anti-Communist sentiment, which damages it both ideologically and formally” (Ahmad, “Reading” 103). Roy’s “implacable hostility,” he charges, has cost her as an artist.

First, there is the breakdown of Realism itself, which is the main formal virtue of the book. . . . the virtue of good Realist literature is that it strives to portray the world realistically, so that the literary product can rise above the ideological prejudices of the author. In Arundhati Roy’s case the opposite has happened. Her ideological prejudice masters and makes nonsense of the Realist’s commitment to verisimilitude. (104)

Namboodiripad has also argued that the “unrealistic presentation” of the communist movement in Kerala conforms to the prevailing anticommunist sentiment in the transnational market (“Now, It Is EMS’s Turn”). The charges of “unrealism,” however, may have to contend with the widespread criticism of the Kerala model by the Dalit movement (Omvedt). The Kerala Dalit Sahitya Akademi has honored Roy for “her deep-seated sympathies for Dalits,” while others agree that “upper-caste dominance has not been fundamentally changed by Kerala’s history of social reform and Communist rule” (Omvedt).

Given the disproportionate burden of representation borne by elite postcolonial fiction, particularly through the medium of the Western press, Ahmad’s fears are nevertheless unfortunately well founded. When Ahmad notes that Roy’s “ideological opposition to Communism is not in itself surprising; it is very much a sign of the times, in the sense that hostility toward the Communist movement is now fairly common among radical sections of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, in India and abroad,” he also voices his lament for the worldwide decline of faith in Marxist ideals (“Reading” 103). The failures of Marxism in practice, which the novel exposes, have been used well before now to discredit the doctrine wholesale at a time when it remains one of few challenges against the unbridled march of capitalism and its growing acceptance. The potential role played by this powerful novel in reinforcing contempt for Marxist ideology can scarcely be discounted, bolstered as it is likely to be by the progressive smothering of opposition to global capitalism.

The novel’s contribution to the neutralization of the force of Marxist ideas is a part of the interpretive grid used to explicate its “meaning.” Its structural logic, however, is no less significant to a reconsideration of liberatory projects. The novel’s sympathy for “small lives” forces it into a quarrel with the big ideology that cannot accommodate individual suffering or joy. Roy’s subsequent antidevelopment essay, “The Greater Common Good,” continues the quarrel with big ideology, this time in the denouncement of democracy, Indian-style, the ostensibly desirable alternative to communism (Cost of Living). If it is the author’s intention that is under scrutiny, this denunciation would leave us yet again with the uncomfortable conclusion that it is greed and human nature that emerge as the culprits, regardless of the various ideological guises available to it. In the novel itself, it would seem that Marxism is only one among the human religions bankrupted by the contradictions introduced by the “pursuit of ascendancy” (God of Small Things 293). Its attempts to escape the specificities of place and time, its more general indictment of human nature for failing its own potential, and its preoccupation with biology and nature are intended to short-circuit the immediacy of historical context. These aesthetic mediations, however, may not be much of a match for the force field of representation within which the post-colonial text exists, unless we shift the emphasis in the poetics/politics nexus to poetics and its constitutively incommensurate relation to politics.

At the level of the novel’s internal organization, that is, at the level of form broadly conceived, the emphasis on the small and the particular inevitably constitutes something of a retreat from pragmatic affairs. This relation of art to praxis is insightfully explored by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. Although artworks, Adorno argues, must be considered “less than praxis” because “they recoil before what must be done, perhaps even thwart it,” they are also in excess of it (241). Art “is more than praxis because by its aversion to praxis it simultaneously denounces the narrow untruth of the practical world” (241). In critiquing action “as a cryptogram of domination,” art rejects it for its inability to avoid domination. Artworks “are a constant indictment of the workaday bustle and the practical individual, back of which is concealed the barbaric appetite of the species, which is not human as long as it permits itself to be ruled by this appetite and is fused with domination” (242). In the novel, one might suggest, this practice is partially coded as omletteering, radical practice that proceeds at the expense of the eggs, so to speak, and without having overcome the appetite of the humans for ascendancy. To remain blind to the susceptibility of revolution to “the same abuses and temptations, manipulative frauds and wishful self-deceptions, as any other promotional line,” as Berman explains in his evaluation of Marxist doctrine, is to dishonor Marx’s commitment to the rending of delusory veils from social activity (130). Nevertheless, if Roy’s indictment exposes the inability of praxis to defeat its immanent violence, it also constitutes a withdrawal from “what must be done”: “Their [artworks’] principle, of which they cannot rid themselves,” Adorno confides, “stalls the immediate practical impulse” (243). In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse underscores the principle of nonequivalence to instrumental reason:

The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions. (6–7)

Adorno concedes that it is “doubtful” if “artworks intervene politically.” If they do so at all, it is rather through “an extremely indirect participation in spirit that by way of subterranean processes contributes to social transformation” (242). The fundamentally asymmetrical relation of art to ersatz “reality” is thus the source of its power as well as its constraints. Adorno extols the capacity of art to communicate the already-known in ways that reinforce its “a priori distance from the empirical” (247). The social “content” is consumed within the logic of the artworks. The transformation of “hardly dewy-fresh insights” through aesthetic gestures is what gives art its tone.

Brecht taught nothing that could not have been understood apart from his didactic plays, indeed, that could not have been understood more concisely through theory, or that was not already well known to his audience: That the rich are better off than the poor; that the way of the world is unjust; that repression persists within formal equality. (247)

If art cannot lend its tone to these jaded insights, if the content does not enter into the formal innovations of art, we should not recognize it as art. Nor, Adorno would suggest, would it have the value that is unique to art-in-itself. In discussing love in Romeo and Juliet, Adorno argues that

Without the longing for a situation in which love would no longer be mutilated and condemned by patriarchal or any other powers, the presence of the two lost in one another would not have the sweetness— the wordless, imageless utopia—over which, to this day, the centuries have been powerless; the taboo that prohibits knowledge of any positive utopia also reigns over artworks. (247)

This is hardly the stuff of praxis, but it nevertheless comprises what Adorno refers to as the “truth-content” of art.16 In light of the above remarks, the ending of The God of Small Things attains especial poignance. It is precisely the ending, however, that Ahmad finds “a pity” for many of the reasons that Adorno praises in his reading of Shakespeare (105). Ahmad’s description of the final scene of the novel, a meeting between Ammu and Velutha, recalls something of “the wordless, imageless utopia” Adorno found in Romeo and Juliet:

Without a word spoken or any other indication passing between them, both arrive, in the thickness of the night, at the spot where they are to meet, as if by predestination. Night after night they return to the same spot, for a series of unions brief and utopic and so self-sufficient that the pasts simply fall away and the future is at once feared and ignored with the terrors of the Romantic Sublime. They become pure embodiments of desire, and significantly, not a word of intelligent conversation passes between them. (Ahmad, “Reading” 105)17

Ahmad’s critique of the ending, moreover, is founded on the lack of “practical impulse” evinced by the characters:

What is most striking about the final phallic encounter between Ammu and Velutha is how little it has to do with decision . . . the difference between decision and fatal attraction is that whereas decision, even the decision to accept suffering and or death, is anchored in praxis, in history, in social relationships chosen and lived in a complex interplay of necessities and freedoms, fatal attractions can never cope with such complexities and must be acted out simply in terms of a libidinal drive. (105–6)

Roy’s “preoccupation with sexuality,”Ahmad complains, privatizes “pleasure and politics, which leads then to sheer aggrandisement of the erotic relation in human life, as a utopic moment of private transgression and pleasure so intense that it transcends all social conflicts of class, caste and race” (104).

Ahmad is quite right, of course, in describing the ending as a relegation of struggle to the province of “private transgression and pleasure.” It might well seem that The God of Small Things aggrandizes the sorrows and joys of love, when the perceptive poet knows that “there are sorrows other than those of love,” with a greater claim on our minds and souls, as Faiz argues in his inimitable lyric. But what is lost in the selective rendition of the novel’s dénouement as purely private is the way in which libidinal pleasure is suffused with the other sorrows and joys of the world. Nor does the isolation of private pleasure to a purely private realm recognize the administration to which it is subject from the supposedly “external” world in which it struggles to find fulfillment. Faiz, too, would acknowledge these fetters in “A Few Days More” [Chand Roz Aur, Meri Jan] in the lines: “Jism par quaid hai, jazbat pe zanjiren hain / Fikr mahbus hai, guftar pe taziren hai” [Our bodies in prison, our feelings in chains / thoughts captive, our speech another’s claim] (Poems by Faiz 79–81; my translation).

What Max Weber describes as “the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love” glosses precisely that ascetic rationality that the world adminsters so brutally and seeks to neutralize (343). Nor, indeed, is this a mode of administration unique to the “modern” world with its new technologies of surveillance and a market-money economy. The caste system had initiated a division of labor avant la lettre and the small scale of village and town communities have provided an efficient mode of surveillance and containment of individual activities for centuries. The problem, then, is hardly one confined to the unique conditions of modern life; it is one that is bound up with the now timeless “love laws” that survive particular relations of production. The struggle, by the same token, can hardly define itself without a scope that encompasses this much longer history of the administration of human lives and feelings.

Moreover, an isolationist description of the import of the ending neglects to consider the aesthetic modality through which art is nevertheless able to achieve its “true social effect” that impacts politics but obliquely, through a possible rather than the probable praxis corresponding to the real:

The effect of artworks is not that they present a latent praxis that corresponds to a manifest one, for their autonomy has moved far beyond such immediacy; rather, their effect is that of recollection . . . the process enacted internally by each and every artwork works back on society as the model of a possible praxis in which something on the order of a collective subject is constituted. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 242)

The appeal of art proceeds precisely though “the affront to reigning needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar,” and it is through this mode of operation that artworks “correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality” (243). In having separated itself from “the prevailing realm of purposes,” the artwork is able to imply “the promise of a condition in which freedom were realised” (Adorno, Prisms 23). In recomposing the given events into another order that derives from them and is yet other to the existing world, art communicates through its design that which could, but does not exist in actuality. It is important that we recall this composition as illusion, for it is in the alienation of this aesthetic reorganization from the reality principle that we might glimpse possibilities alternative to it.

If it is the zone of the merely erotic that offends, moreover, Chacko’s unspecified adventures with the women from the pickle factory should occasion far more concern. These conjugations are offered as a contrast within the design of the text from which we might adduce the relation between sex and love, needs and feelings, desiring subjects and desired objects. Chacko’s “libertine relations with the women in the factory” are accepted by Baby Kochamma and his mother as undeniable in the scheme of “Man’s Needs.” They see no “contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido.” Their worries are confined to the potential threat to the security afforded by their class: “They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to force men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made pregnant” (160). The ironic use of “Good” in the arbitrarily capitalized “Good Families” reveals the narrator’s contempt for their alleged goodness while also typifying the conventionality of these habits among young men from “Good Families” who can entertain their libidinal needs without sacrificing bourgeois respectability. Chacko’s mother not only connives at her son’s Needs, she builds a separate entrance for his room, “so that the objects of his ‘Needs’ wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the house” (160–61). The social and cultural house can thus maintain its façade of bourgeois values without accounting for these peripheral disruptions to its integrity. She also slips the women some money because this transactional device relegates Chacko’s affairs to their proper sphere: “The arrangements suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings” (161).

It is not my purpose to argue that the encounter between Ammu and Velutha devalues need. It does not discount need at all. Indeed, it expands and elevates need into biological compulsion: Ammu moves toward Velutha “like an insect following a chemical trail” (312). It is biology that undoubtedly orchestrates their desire, their consummation stems no less from Need than Chacko’s. Chacko’s and Ammu’s encounters are nevertheless rendered different by the social administration to which these needs are subject. Within the design of the novel, moreover, this difference is signaled in part through the strategy of specification, the making of a story from what is but one event among many, and all too apt to be lost among the worse things that have happened and will keep happening. The most defining difference from Chacko’s dalliances arises from the social contract that is vectored toward “Man’s Needs,” when they are affordable to him. Neither Ammu, who has no “Locusts Stand I” in Ayemenem society, nor Velutha, who not only has no place but leaves no trace at all, no footprints, no ripples in the water, can afford the luxury of their biological Needs.18 As they make love, we are told that “the cost of living climbed to unaffordable heights” (318). Without the knowledge of the tremendous price to be paid, admittedly more so for the untouchable Velutha than the upper class/caste Ammu, there is no “story” in their affair. It is by imbuing their encounter with narrative structure and juxtaposing this story with Chacko’s miscellaneous adventures as summary description that the narrator expands incident into experience, event into story, sex into the idiom of love, madness, hope, and joy. The narrator’s studied attempt to establish need as mutual is also part of the attempt to redefine the need structure in the Ammu/Velutha relation. In the moment in which Velutha sees Ammu as “a woman, . . . He saw. . . that he was not necessarily the only giver of gifts. That she had gifts to give him, too” (168). In this “escape” from the administered world of exchange, the man’s “relation to the world” is “taken to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc.” (Marx, Early Writings 193–94). The human rate of exchange contrasts sharply with that which prevails in the world of commodities. In re-presenting the events, the narrator chooses to leave us in an uncomfortable zone of libidinal desire, a rejected arena in which Adorno finds traces of the “petty bourgeois’ hatred of sex,” a realm of sensuousness that has historically invited the venom of critics (quoted in Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension 66).

Autonomous art is condemned as infamous sensuality. “Release of aesthetic-sensuous stimuli,” “artistic tickling of the senses” are presented as “basic conditions for the autonomization of art.” (67)

The rejection of sensuous experience as false affirmation and false reconciliation constitutes a denial of that which makes art suggestive, for this “hostility against happiness . . . does not want aesthetic autonomy” (Adorno, quoted in Marcuse 67). The hopeless hopefulness of the lover’s promise and history’s warning, “‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow” recuperates that which is lost in the tragedy of suffering. The promise serves as a compensation that can only emphasize loss, even if it cannot erase promise completely. “Even the cry of despair” and record of tragic events “still contains the potential to wring out enjoyment” (Adorno, quoted in Marcuse 66).19 All may be lost in the world of instrumental reason, but something of love and joy yet remain in aesthetic sublimation:

Art creates the realm in which subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality. This experience culminates in extreme situations (of love and death, guilt and failure, but also joy, happiness, and fulfillment) which explode the given reality in the name of a truth normally denied or even unheard. (Marcuse 67)

The novel’s ending signals a fragile transcendence of the realm of historical life through the intensification of felt experience as redemptive, of a more equal exchange in which the sensuous structure is momentarily released from the press of social administration. The mutual objectification of the lovers, despite their variant class positions, takes feeling into the realm of the sensuous experience felt through the very pores of the skin. It is precisely this affective and sensuous dimension of Ammu’s lovemaking with Velutha that Baby Kochamma seizes upon for opprobrium:

She said (among other things), “How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans?”

And she shuddered theatrically, like a child being force-fed spinach. She preferred an Irish-Jesuit smell to a particular Paravan smell.

By far. By far. (75)

Baby Kochamma is well aware that it is at the level of the sensual that she can most successfully hope to instigate Mammachi’s revulsion. The narrator reveals that “with that olfactory observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled” (244). The narrator’s editorial on the role of this detail in the mechanism of terror exposes the extent to which society has come to administer the most basic of our instinctual responses, adjudicating one sort of contact as repulsive and another as desirable, or at least as acceptable when conducted in the approved fashion. The very last segment of the novel focuses precisely on that dimension of Ammu and Velutha’s contact that Baby Kochamma will isolate with the unique instinct of the social being who understands that the management of enjoyment is at least one of the dominant modes by which society not only regulates human behavior but also preserves its hierarchies.

That first night, on the day that Sophie Mol came, Velutha watched his lover dress. When she was ready she squatted facing him. She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. . . . He took her face in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and smelled her skin. Ammu laughed.

Yes, Margaret, she thought. We do it to each other too. (321)

Earlier when the cook Kochu Maria greets Sophie Mol by taking her hands, raising them to her face, and inhaling deeply, Chacko explains to his daughter, “That’s her way of kissing you.” Margaret responds by saying “It’s a sort of sniffing!” and asking, “Do the Men and Women do it to each other too?” (170). Ammu responds with a sarcastic “That’s how we make babies” and an indignant “Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?” when she is asked to apologize (170–71). Ammu’s belated second response, which will not be heard by Margaret, makes reference to her earlier self-consciousness about being perceived as less than equal to the “civilized”; it also acknowledges a world of the senses beyond the register of civilization and primitivism, one she and others struggle to keep at bay in their inordinate fear of nature itself. It is from this register of an unintelligible world that the novel’s closing section draws its script for another world, “a better, happier place” that is yet to be (314).

The God of Small Things re-composes the possibilities in human nature into the cryptogram of yet another repetitive phrase in the novel: “Love, Madness, Hope, and Infinnate [sic] Joy.” In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse suggests that “the inexorable entanglement of joy and sorrow, celebration and despair, Eros and Thanatos cannot be dissolved into problems of class struggle” (16). It is in the “life instincts” of love, madness, hope, and joy that society must seek its emancipation. Without this rooting “in the instinctual structure of individuals,” Marcuse warns, “solidarity would be on weak grounds” (18).20 Love, madness, hope and joy may not be “forces of production,” but they connect with the realities of aesthetic experience and what Adorno calls “aesthetic comportment” as the basis for a renewed engagement with the other “that assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it” (Aesthetic Theory 331). These intensely personal emotions are nevertheless expansively human in an alternatively global sense. No less universal is their repression through the course of history. An atomistic ethics focused on or confined to the realism of the law or political rights for a group cannot incorporate the limitless range of freedom implied in the aesthetic. When nature lavishes on us “more than the bare necessities of existence,” as Eagleton argues in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, freedom conceived on the order of instrumental reason as exemplified in the law, for instance, affords but a limited glimpse of another prize in which law and desire, reason and the body are able to be reconciled. It may be well to recall that for Marx himself, communism was “the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the goal of human development—the form of human society” (Early Writings 167). Marx had set his eyes on a greater prize in which the goal was the “the real life of man” (Fischer 42), even if it is also true that communism was a “real and necessary factor in the emancipation and rehabilitation of man” (Marx, Early Writings 167). Ultimately, however, sense experience, sense perception, and sensuous need, “[proceeding] from nature,” were to form the basis of this emancipation (164).

In the scheme of Roy’s novel, moreover, love, madness, hope, and joy are transported beyond the human into the elemental world of nature itself. It is the smallest of creatures, “a minute spider who lived in a crack in the wall” that the lovers choose for their connection beyond themselves:

Without admitting it to each other or themselves, they linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate Joy), to his. They checked on him every night (with growing panic as time went by) to see if he had survived the day. They fretted over his frailty. His smallness. (321)

As it turns out, its is the spider who survives the uncertainties of the natural world: “He outlived Velutha. He fathered future generations. He died of natural causes” (321). It is man for whom “nothing like ‘nature,’” idealized through the capacity for perceiving in it the shape of beauty, “yet exists” (Adorno, quoted in Jarvis 100). In sticking “to the Small Things” on the fourteen nights of their escape from history, the lovers acknowledge its burden without conceding its proscriptions. This is one of the more notable instances in the novel when the use of capitalization serves to redistribute the weight of significance from objective to aesthetic reality, from the “Big Things that ever lurked inside” to the “Small Things” that do not survive in the unequal struggle between Big and Small. That is why, the narrator tells us, “Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other: Tomorrow? Tomorrow” (321). In days to come, the small things will be forgotten, the loss of love, hope, and joy will be consigned to oblivion, and the single big story will survive in the historical record with due abridgment. In the aesthetic accounting, however, “those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined” (32). Those “little events, ordinary things” must be “Preserved. Accounted for” (32).

In unplotting the story and the little events, the narrator leaves us with the culminating vision of “tomorrow,” transforming the already past through the workings of memory frozen at a moment when the morrow is yet to dawn. As Marcuse describes it,

Art cannot show the present without showing it as past. What has become form in the work of art has happened: it is recalled, re-presented. The mimesis translates reality into memory. In this remembrance, art has recognized what is and what could be, within and beyond the social conditions. (Aesthetic Dimension 67)

Although I am hesitant to accord desire the status of political power as such, it is nevertheless in the longing that lingers when the known story is over, when the ones we know would die have died, that the promise of a better world that could have been is briefly exposed.21 “Only in memory and longing,” Adorno writes, “not as a copy or as an immediate effect, is pleasure absorbed by art” (Aesthetic Theory 14). It is in “reading backwards”—a habit the children develop early in life—into the events already past that the narrator recuperates the moment of longing that does not survive in the known record. This aesthetic “reconciliation” serves to emphasize the distance between suffering and the prospect of justice rather than to relegate the social world to irrelevance. A “redemptive” reading that seeks to recuperate this moment, however, resolves the problems of the social world as little as the aesthetic resolution of the text. It is precisely the distance between the prospect of love, hope, and joy and its realization in lived reality that such a reading can identify.

The fragile transcendence of the ending, suffused as it is with apprehensions of the terror to come, arises out of the way things are, without losing its capacity to know how they might be. Adorno describes this relation of art to material history as “the double character of art”: “something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society’s functional context and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society’s functional context.” Aesthetic phenomena, “which are both aesthetic and faits sociaux” are unable to provide an alternative to the given conditions of real life, yet unable to conceal their longing for the new (252). To seek from art a legible script for a better world is to capitulate to the very order that we hope is contradicted by art: “The necessity of art . . . is its nonnecessity. To evaluate art according to the standard of necessity covertly prolongs the principle of exchange, the philistine’s concern of what can be gotten for it” (251–52). As Eagleton submits, “The transcendence of the artefact lies in its power to dislocate things from their empirical contexts and reconfigurate them in the image of freedom; but this also means that art works ‘kill what they objectify’” (Ideology of the Aesthetic 351).

The inherent disproportionality between the matter of art and its aesthetic transformation does not deny its historical character; it merely contests our propensity to assign it a transparently social function construed by its exchange-value in the world of commodities. Based on an understanding of this principle of disproportionality and disadequation, a critical theory of aesthetics must recognize the limits of aesthetic representation as well its gestures of transcendence.22 A theory that attempts to recuperate the redemptive capacity of art must nevertheless concede the location of art within the immanent and inescapable context of an administered society. At the same time, it must grant a meaningful space for the protest of the particular against the universal.23

The text itself suggests this dual character of art as a fait social. One of the lessons the children have learned from their Uncle Chacko is that “anything’s possible in Human Nature . . . Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy” (112). Rahel’s reaction to Chacko’s observation is to isolate joy as the prospect most imbued with the air of tragedy:

Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.

Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over. (113)

The child’s unconscious conjoinment of joy with a vaguely messianic reference is replete with the longing of an insecure childhood as well as the yearning that is retrospective to the knowledge of a tragedy already past. The descriptions of Ammu and Velutha’s identification of “their Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate Joy” with those of a minute spider’s, evokes Rahel’s childish distortion of the final phrase in the litany. Laden with the resonance of a utopia that has disappeared from human religions, the phrase is an orthographic and grammatical anomaly as well. For reasons of language and instrumental reason, as things stand, infinnate joy cannot be.24 This profound understanding is nevertheless communicated with the heaviness of a longing that survives despite the tragedy already past. As Julia Kristeva notes in her reading of Proust,

Childhood is indeed “the age when Names [offer] an image of the unknowable,” which is let down by the reality of people and things but can . . . be recovered by the memory beneath the sound that once entranced the child’s ear. (34)

The persistence of a child’s sound-sense in the term “infinnate joy” remains a possibility to the very end, were it possible to recompose our language and our reason for that which is not yet, in the unknown image of that which has never been. The sound of the word, heard and misheard by the child Rahel, rings through in the supposedly anonymous report of the final scene of the novel, the anomaly now ranging beyond language and reason to the realm of the rules of novelistic narration.

In my earlier discussion of the concept of mémoire involuntaire in Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, I have suggested the potential difficulty of realizing its power in the novel under discussion. In proposing the power of involuntary memory in the structural shape of The God of Small Things—a novel so dramatically formed by the psychic nonorder of memory as to seem a textbook illustration of it—however, we are faced with a troublesome question: given that the narrative is delivered in the third person, whose memories are being rewoven, recollected, remembranced? Where is the remembering “I” who is lucky enough to have stumbled upon the treasure of recollection by the coincidence of association, the accident of encounter with that very material object in which the past is unmistakably present? Why is Rahel’s memory of “infinnate joy”—revealed in the orthographic anomaly of the last passages— voiced by a third person, even though it is clearly focalized through her? No intact “I” is made available in The God of Small Things to unify experience in the psyche of the one in search of lost time. There are memories but there is no remembering self. To put it another way, even though there is no unifying remembering self, there are memories. Is the textual device of the third person a response to the dissociative mechanisms of the psyche in response to traumatic events, or does the text thus signal the fundamental separation of the experience and its representation through anonymous narration? The narrative voice seems irresistibly drawn to identification with the persona of Rahel—for it is she who hears the word as “infinnate”; yet it resists this identification and the integration of remembrance with a remembering subject. The text’s refusal to establish an exclusive relationship between memory and person suggests that the custodian of memories is neither one self nor a collective subject but a dramatically third person who can remember, or remembrance, what it did not, could not have experienced, at least in its entirety.

What is the possible significance of this stance in helping us to reconceptualize the existing axiomatic vocabulary for dealing with trauma that is both personal and profoundly historical? As the classic choice of nineteenth-century realism, the third-person account has been much reviled for its misleading propositions about ontological reality and its disregard for individual subjectivity and its constitutive historical and psychological coordinates. Organized by the principle of explanation, as opposed to the first-person account’s privileging of understanding, would it not be fair to conclude that the third-person account capitulates to the reductive new order of the development of capital in which no event comes to us “without already being shot through with explanation,” as Benjamin bemoans (Illuminations 89)? One response to this desperate impasse is to recover a poststructuralist conception of subjectivity that alerts us to subjectivity as constructing and constructed, in other words, as it operates in an always already third-person mode, signaling its fundamental fragmentation. Another is to propose a psychoanalytic model in which the necessarily dissociative machinery of the traumatized psyche projects both experience and the experiencing subject outside the self. Neither account would be sufficient for Roy’s project, which does not confine itself to the experiences of a single self, which transcends the notion of a constructed subjectivity by engaging in remembrance of things not only long past but beyond the reach of historical time and its determinative influence on subjectivity, and which insists on an understanding of small things in the concurrent scale of geological time and personal experience.

What kind of ethical positions might we adduce from the novel’s dedication to “preserving,” pickled and indistinguishably jam-jelly like in their indeterminacy, the integrity of memories that move toward and yet resist identification with any single character or narrating self? Why does the novel make it so difficult for us to answer the question, whose memories unite the narrative, given the mixture of omniscient narration, editorial description, and excessive focalization (first and second order)? The choice of third-person narration is sometimes recommended by instructors of creative writing because it gains the writer the flexibility of subplot, a plot that can be detached from the “principal” experiences of the protagonist. It permits the writer to explore the memories and experiences of an “other.” In The God of Small Things, the narrator alerts us to another sort of capacity for having memories of events that could not have happened to oneself.

Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.

She has other memories too that she has no right to have.

She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches—Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate—on the Madras Mail to Madras.

And these are only the small things. (5)

What does it mean to refuse these boundaries between the first and an other, third person, at the intimate level of memory? This particular coincidence of memory apart (which may after all be explained away as the special gift of “Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities”), the entire novel relies on memory as the scaffolding for the building of the plot (5). The device of omniscient narration that is often associated with the choice of the third person is dramatically at odds with the underlying structure of a novel organized by the principle of memory. But without the self to remember, to be stirred by memories, and to return to “a place in time,” remembrance must necessarily be construed as deeply ambivalent. Kristeva explains in Proust and the Sense of Time,

What the narrator calls an “enhanced” place in time—perceived by the senses, inaccessible no doubt but, as the prepositional form of “à la” indicates, always beckoning to us, remaining open and disposable as the self revolves around it—is the notion of embodied time. The time in which all of our sensations are reflected upon, as they tie the knot between subjectivity and the external world and recover once again the sounds that lie beneath the masks of appearance. (24)

The relation of the “self” to this sense of embodied time is integral to the remembrance of things past. As Proust himself describes it,

This notion of Time Embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work. (quoted in Kristeva 24)

In what sense is it possible to discuss embodied time without the body to which its sounds and memories and smells are meaningful? The answer in the case of The God of Small Things may lie in a different dimension altogether. If personal history cannot be invoked as the unifying membrane that holds the memories together in a questing self, the answer may lie instead in unifying geography, in embodied space rather than in embodied time alone. In an earlier segment of this chapter, I pointed out that the first and last words of the novel, “May” and “tomorrow,” are both “given” to time. I have also proposed, however, that the narrative use of the habitual present retains space as the focal unifier for the unfolding events. Point of view, which implies the spatial position of the narrator, is here supplemented by space as the fulcrum for the narrative. If we were to insist that focalization (who sees or who remembers, in this case) must be distinguished from voice (who tells), we would nevertheless remain with the quandary we began with, that is, the proliferation of memories presented that no one single character has the right to have, in a temporal scale that aspires to encompass geological time itself. In a scheme of zero focalization, associated with the third person, the intrusion of internal focalization associated with one character, but assiduously never merging with it, complicates an identification of the narrator as a heterodiegetic narrator. It is not unusual, of course, for the internal and external modes of narration to merge: as Wayne Booth suggests, “Any sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator” (164). A reverse process, however, appears to be in operation in The God of Small Things. It is not character, or character alone, that is necessarily transformed into narrator through multiple focalization, but the narrator who is obliged to carry the memory load of multiple characters, all-knowing but also all-feeling, collecting rather than re-collecting memories that exist in space as well as in embodied time. The “smell of old roses on a breeze,” “history’s smell,” lingers through space as well as time, a lesson as well as a memory. Focalized through the perceptions and feeling of the children, two lessons are presented by the third-person narrative voice:

Lesson Number One:

Blood barely shows on a black man. (Dum dum)

And

Lesson Number Two:

It smells though,

Sicksweet.

Like old roses on a breeze. (Dum dum). (293)

The narrator’s lingering descriptions of the scene of events make of space and nature itself the repository of memory, each spot alive with its plangent resonance, recalling the terror that has taken place, as well as the remembrance and promise of things so deep into the past that they cannot be recalled so much as invented. The tarrying smell of old roses on a breeze remains long after the work of history through humans has completed its dire purpose, confined to no one memory but to geography and place itself as abiding history. Within nature and its abundance lies the germinative power of recall, “like a fruit in season. Every season,” rather than in the linear dimension of time and history (253). Locus itself is the locum tenens, the placeholder for memories, each house in Ayemenem “a tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own” (14). As Frances Yates points out in The Art of Memory, loci are “like the wax tablets which remain when what is written on them has been effaced and are ready to be written on again” (23). This conjunction is suggested on at least one occasion in the novel:

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, teacolored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds. (11)

It is nature that provides the living text and this capacity for recalling the terror of the past, and the promise of a lost paradise that never was. When Velutha senses that the terror is beginning, his mind floats away and observes his body “walk through the darkness and the driving rain”:

More than anything else that body wanted to sleep. Sleep and wake up in another world. With the smell of her skin in the air that he breathed. (270)

In that other world transposed upon the same geographical space, the air itself would carry another smell, no longer the stale, sick-sweet smell of “old roses on a breeze” but that smell which this world will not allow him to enjoy without punishment. The “tomorrow” that is promised between lovers is one that must necessarily belong to another world and another place, another space, for in the dimension of time it belongs to history and its henchmen. “What will never happen, can never be,” Adorno reminds us in quoting Valéry, “has a fragrance of its own, scents the air” (Notes to Literature, I, 172). This sense of utopia (from the Greek, ou, not, no plus topos, place), cast within the scheme of memory and remembrance, is not so much one that must be recovered anamnestically, but which is conceived of as the remembrance (Gedächtnis) of “the not-yet-existing” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 132).

In a very important narrative sense, the novel, any novel, is constructed by a remembrance of things past that did not happen and could not have happened outside its closed circuit. The foundational premise of fiction is the absence of the referent. Any self constructed by the narrative is necessarily in a third-person relation to it by definition because it must acknowledge narrativity as a condition of its “being.” This logic of narrative representation establishes a narrator who stands in a precarious relationship to what happens in the world beyond because it can only relate what has happened as it has happened within the pages of the text, however similar to what happens in the real world. The nowhereness of the novel and the no-place of utopia are both composed, in some sense, from the grammar of noninstrumental rationality. The remembrance of things past thus includes that remembrance of paradise that never was, which is paradise because it never was. It is the nature that does not yet exist, the smell in the air that is yet to be, the tomorrow that never comes in which—paradoxically—individual love, hope, and infinite joy can exist. This is the never-known that must be remembered and redeemed from the past precisely as fiction. Adorno explains this relation to the new on the model of “a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord, however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard” (Aesthetic Theory 32). The ability of the postcolonial novel to convey this longing, this sense of wanting, is the content of what is new. The work of memory and remembrance in The God of Small Things operates within this relation to the new as other and to memory itself as profoundly other to the subject unhappily alienated from it.25 The sensuous intelligence communicated by this longing for a new smell, a new air, must necessarily recall us to memory, but not the memory of one remembering self, nor many. In the “third” narrative that longs to join with a remembering self, but cannot, remembrance thus survives as a fragmentary possibility of that which never was, and therefore could not have belonged to one remembering self. At the same time, the narrative longs to be free of the remembering self but cannot, thus warning us that remembrance is meaningless unless it can be grafted onto the remembering self or selves who must collectively learn to attribute meaning to memory in these redemptive terms. In negotiating this delicate balance, the narrative of the novel veers between identification with a self through focalization and disidentification through the transference of memory to spatialized collectivity, to place as its most eloquent repository.

Geography is not history because it continues to be the repository of local and particular experience; precisely because it functions thus, because every house in Ayemenem is its own epic, because the air its people breathe even today carries the stale-sweet smell of old roses on a breeze—“history’s smell”—because the river Meenachal tells the story of human domination of nature in its own unique idiom, it is geography that has become history in its absorption of experience. Place will tell, as much as time, if the history written, trapped, and sedimented within it is released from the spell of oblivion. The descriptions of landscape that commence the novel, therefore, suggest its capacity for sensuous remembrance, as a place filled with the scurry of small lives and with narrative, before and after one story of particular hopes of love, madness, hope, and infinite joy has unfolded. It is not simply, or not only, in the symbolic enervation of the Meenachal river that the story of human domination of nature parallels that of human domination of humans, but that the river, the trees, and the ground hold a memory in which “the inexorable entanglement of joy and sorrow, celebration and despair, Eros and Thanatos” must be constructed by the storyteller. This forceful conjunction of the land with the instinctual structure of human beings roots the emancipatory project in the illegible and overwritten text of nature itself.

The physical location provides and contains the discursive shape of the story, making location newly relevant not only as the resistance of the local to the global but as written space, the geographic, with its own history. Local geography and landscape and the construction of memory from the narratives stored within them provide a structural framework for remembrance that can move beyond self and family to a larger collectivity, precisely through local inflection. The formal tension introduced by the author’s choice of a third voice dramatizes the extraordinary relation between the individual particular and the universal that must conjugate in its particularity the shape of liberation, the liberation of the “whole, the total man.” The dislocation of remembrance from self to space/place conjugates the relation between topos, locus, and topoi, between space (in memory or geography) as the means of argument and persuasion.26 The import of the particular story is the creation of an enthymeme, a syllogism in which the gaps can be filled in, allowing for something like the universal collective subject through a recourse to what Aristotle calls koinoi topoi, or common topics.27 Remembrance as a common topic or mode of thought in its longing for another, better conclusion to self-interest (a commonplace longing, as it were) is thus connected in these etymological junctions. The central question then is how space means. The domination and transformation of the landscape may well be of a piece with the pursuit of human self-interest, but part and parcel of the creative energy from which self-interest springs is the capacity for summoning up remembrance—not so much as a universal principle but as a doubling of locus within and without, of reading local signs for the commonplaces of collectivized remembrance. The memory of unknown loss—and therefore unknown fulfillment—is what the artist appeals to through the instantiation of a particular set of events reexperienced in memory, fictionalized so to speak, and thus remade while gesturing at what is still wanting. The author’s now notorious interest in environmentalism and the destruction of rivers and land through maldevelopment projects suggest a proclivity for keeping an ear to the ground, for knowing the local to be the space from which to speak.28 This “real” interest aside, the use of local geography and memory in the novel presents a formal argument for the relation between the universal and particular through this conjugation of space and time, geography and history, nature and humans.

The rewriting of space as the time of loss and longing unites topos with locus. The place of remembrance is thus both localized and commonplace, topos and locus/topoi, the land and nature something like the country of imagination. Our collective removal from this remembrance casts us necessarily in a third-person relationship to it. In the novel, the spurious authority of the third-person narrator and the consequent elision of the elite bourgeois mediator may well constitute a species of evasion and mystification, the abundant use of focalization through Rahel’s memory an overdeft manipulation of the emotive power of the remembering self, and the conjunction of third-person narration with focalization a blatant exploitation of depersonalized authority without sacrificing the personal, but another function of memory cast into a third voice could surely be to remind us of this remove and our commonplace longings. The excessively fictional register of the third person and its placement within the structural logic of memory reinforce the need to continue the exchange between the self and its others, to invent and reinvent loss and longing, the evernew as nevernew, the work of mourning and invention never done. For the Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno in particular, reification is “not merely a relationship among men,” but also “the domination of the otherness of the natural world” (Jay, Adorno 69). As a symptom of alienation, the third-person narrator signals not only the separation of self from memory and experience, but a more profound severance of humanity from nature itself, a forgetting and a failure of the intelligence that we must figuratively reimagine as inborn and native, a severance that the conditions of modernity have rendered all the more dramatic. The quest for another history in which the aesthetic shape of human liberation might be imagined must be rooted in a response to an other geography in which we may read the script of domination in small things past as well as the trace of a utopia that is yet to be. This world that exists neither in the present, nor existed in the past, must continuously be unforgotten. In an age in which the globe is more closely girded by capital than ever before, the literature that recalls us to this purpose may well be dubbed “third world” literature.