Saturday, February 20, 2010
Prompt 4
For this week, you might consider how The God Of Small Things relies on a linguistic "defamiliarization technique" (Brecht) in order to draw attention to language as simultaneously infinitely (or "infinnately") malleable and impervious to manipulation. What is the relationship between the ways that the novel attempts to use language (to reference memory, history, culture, etc.) and the way that the novel deals with issues of tragedy (caste, poverty, sexism, etc.)?
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Roy's language is striking in its consistency in themes, repetition and general malleability. At times it feels like the child explaining to the adult at others the adult to the child, at the best of times the child to itself. I've said before how the narrative structure made me feel as if I were drowning only to spit me out to safety in the end. Nowhere is that more interesting than when considering that the ending is the middle and the beginning the preliminary end. Now considering the language the author employs to get there, the time jumps and narrative shifts seem de rigeur. Of course it's all over the place for it seems to be written on a child's terms. That's not to say for or as a child, but entirely embodying a child's perspective and subsequently the grown character's perspective. The two voices of the book feel as if they reside in the same persona with either localized or global knowledge driving the view and it is the varied language and scattered structure that define those terms.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that the two voices are intended to feel as if they reside in the same persona. The non-linear structure, as with Faulkner's "the Sound and the Fury," provides often a better perspective on events as the past intrudes on our present, even eclipsing it entirely. What seems in other words to be happening to you, is not what is really happening for you at that moment. Lexical devices such as repeating the name "Orange drink Lemon drink man," serve to remind us of this intrusion. From adult perspectives within the novel, had he been referred to as an unreformable sexual predator or something, this would denote part of an adult experience, the recontextualization and attempts at explanations from resources unavailable to a child. The shattering of innocence is not subsumed by an adult perspective, continuing usage of the lyrical childhood nickname, Roy gives us immediate access to the character's interior sensations and motivations. And, that past experiences can live in us unaltered, conjured/triggered up by any "small thing," or in his case never leave at all...
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