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Two PU T T I NG T H E F IC T ION BAC K I N TO A RU N DH AT I ROY World Systems of Literature For Peter Hitchcock, the postcolonial condition finds expression in the genre of the novel; it is this genre of postcoloniality that uncovers “the lie of colonialism” (“The Genre of Postcoloniality,” 326) and at the same time questions the very category of the novel as a genre. Thus the novel both threatens its own erasure as a genre—those “divisions that have produced it” (327)—and, given that it is bound up with a postcolonial identity, points to the threat of erasure of the “postcolonial ” identity itself in its articulation. Whew, what a mind-full—a seeming aim of Hitchcock’s rhetoric that uses tautology to confuse categories of narrative fiction (genres) with subjectivity and reality (ontology). This is not a path I want to follow . In this chapter, I am interested in questions of narrativity (genre, style, voice, temporal, and spatial play) in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. However, I begin with Hitchcock to point to a dominant trend in postcolonial literary studies that one way or another conflate concepts pertaining to narrative fiction (genre, point of view, fictional characters, and direct, indirect, and free indirect thought, for instance) with those pertaining to so-identified postcolonial subjectivity, geography , sociology, and history. While Hitchcock’s exaggerated rhetoric that gives with one hand and takes with the other is a near-cliché of this approach, other critics are less inclined to follow this path. For example, Laura Moss’s intentions are good and expressed with clarity in “‘The Plague of Normality’: Reconfiguring Realism in Postcolonial Theory.” She seeks to recuperate the realist novel “as a viable form for resistance narratives” (n.p.). For Moss, realism should not be weighed down with the ideological baggage of a Western individualism à la Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that reinforces a “conservative ideology” and instead should be 50 A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction considered as another form for postcolonial authors to resist and radically oppose politics of containment. Whether realistic or not, in the scholarship of Moss and others the postcolonial novel becomes a politics by other means. In Elleke Boehmer ’s Stories of Women it is the technique used by Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things—her “extravagant realism and exuberant wordplay ” (164)—that reproduces a “neo-orientalism” and simultaneously uproots such a restrictive impulse in its celebration of the private and public spaces where “women’s politics can be located” (203). Boehmer finds that Roy’s novel serves as an example of how women, too, can use “symbolic vocabularies of entitlement . . . to lay claim to the nation’s public and imaginary spaces” (219). And Susan Stanford Friedman focuses on how Roy’s “spatial poetics” reveals ways in which the novelist uses the local, Kerala, to address the “politics of regional, national and transnational landscapes through time” (198). By different means and focusing on different narrative features, Hitchcock, Moss, Boehmer, and Friedman, then, apply the same procedure: one way or another they conflate or confuse devices of narrative fiction with ontological identity categories. Given that I have already said much on this topic in earlier books (Postethnic Narrative Criticism and Brown on Brown), I shall only add that the questions, problems, and deliberations mentioned briefly above are ultimately not interesting. Whether we decide that it is Roy’s use of realism , symbolic vocabularies of entitlement, or spatial poetics, together or individually, that animate in compelling ways her storytelling, the fact remains that those narrative devices and her novel as a whole do not have the material power to open doors for postcolonial women to become full-fledged citizens (Boehmer) or change the world (Friedman and Moss). Yet nothing in the world is alien to fiction. Everything we make and do and which transforms the world and in turn transforms us sooner or later finds its proper place in a work of fiction. Given that we are constituted through and through as social beings and that we transform ourselves and the world we inhabit in a social way and create thus our own sociality by doing so, it is no surprise that postcoloniality, oppression, and exploitation in their myriad most contemporary forms—wars, class struggles, financial unraveling of capitalism and imperialism, and the innumerable effects of these phenomena—are reflected and represented in all sorts of narratives and...

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