History Is What Hurts - History and The Individual Impasse

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雄中學報第八期

94 年 11 月 1 日

“History Is What Hurts”:


History and The Individual Impasse
in The God of Small Things
薛建福*
The Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God
(cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly
at his temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became
resilient and truly indifferent.
------ Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (20)

I. Theory

Whoever lays his or her hand on the novel, The God of Small Things, is very likely
to wonder in the first place what the title suggests or implies. What does “the god of
small things” stand for? When asked the question, Arundhati Roy replied,
To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big
thing and God’s in control. The God of small things…whether it is
the way children see things or whether it is the insect life in the book,
or the fish or the stars --- there is a not accepting of what we think of
as adult boundaries (Interview with Kingsworth).
This statement is too general to answer one’s inquiry. Especially in the novel, Velutha is
obviously referred to as the god of small things. And the identity of God is clearly left
unspecified. Is it the Christian God or Hindu God? The reader still has to look for the
answer on his or her own by reading the novel closely. Nevertheless, in anther interview,
Roy also revealed that the novel is not about small things but about “how the smallest
things connect to the biggest things” (Roy as quoted in Kingsnorth). Therefore, for the
writer, the novel places more weight on relations than on identities.
Echoing her utterance that “there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult
boundaries,” the Indian author winner of 1997 British Booker Prize manifested that her

*高雄中學教師
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debut novel is not about history but biology and transgression, transgression upon all
sorts of boundaries, which adults have accepted. Assembling the above-mentioned
information collected in her interviews, a general picture about the theme of The God of
Small Things can be drawn that the novel puts stress on how the big things oppress the
small ones and how the latter transgress upon the former, and the transgression is
intended for biological purpose.
The conceptualization above, though likely to be accused of committing “the
intentional fallacy,” serves the purpose of manifesting my interest in and motivation of
working on this topic. When reading the novel for the first time, I was obsessed with
what the god of small things is and what on earth the small things and big things are.
After the first close reading, I was especially saddened by the Kathakali dance episode,
reflecting upon what a degrading situation the dancers and their culture had been reduced
to by Capital on account of Necessity. An idea crossed my mind that the big things or
“God” can be encapsulated as History, even though Roy claimed that her novel is not
about history, while the small things, as the author herself has disclosed, refer to
biological things, including the nature, human beings and human desire. As far as I am
concerned, the novel centers on the antagonism between History and biology, with the
former oppressing the latter and the latter transgressing upon the former. And what
results from the interaction is what intrigues me most.
To explore so totalitarian a concept like History in a Third World text like The God
of Small Things may seem problematic and controversial in the first place. The word in
capital H bears too strong an association with modernity, Eurocentrism and linear
teleological progress in the western sense, readily reminiscent of the West’s
colonialization and exploitation in the Third World, including India. In addition, its
tendency toward the construction of grand narratives carries the implication of western
universalism and epistemic imposition or violence. In consequence, many critics have
argued that “’history’ is the discourse through which the West has asserted its hegemony
over the rest of the world” (Gandhi 170). Through “historicizing” the rest of the world,
the West can “’world’ the world as Europe” (171), with the latter remaining “the

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“History Is What Hurts”: History and The Individual Impasse in The God of Small Things

sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the one we call ‘Indian’,
‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’, and so on” (Chakrabarty, quoted from Gandhi 171). Ann
McClintock, in demystifying the pitfalls of the term “postcolonialism”, cautions that
though “the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism,
multi-dimensional time and so forth, the singularity of the term effects a re-centering of
global history around the singular rubric of European time” (255). In terms of its
relation to the other, Robert Young argues, “History, with a capital H, similarly cannot
tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion” (1990:4); consequently
“History is the realm of violence and war; it constitutes another form by which the other
is appropriated into the same” (15). The histories of the marginals or of the subaltern
are more often than not deliberately distorted or trimmed in order to fit into the grand
history. Even an unwitting mis-representation, which is obviously unavoidable due to
ideological discrepancy, engenders equal epistemic abuse. With so many disputes and
with the advents of structuralism and poststructuralism, critics like Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, by means of linguistics, began to question
the totalizing system and totalitarian feature of History by foregrounding particularity
against universality and by underscoring petit recit, or little narrative, in place of grand
recit, or grand narrative. In a sense, History has been liquidated ever since.
Influenced by Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, postcolonial discourse, considering
its ground zero of deconstructing the subject/other binary and of resisting the West’s
homogenizing epistemic violence in the construction of the non-West, has turned its back
on grand history and homogeneity and consciously espoused petit history and
heterogeneity so that the previously unvoiced can speak or be spoken, and the
mis-represented can re-represent themselves or be reconstructed. For example, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, admitting Foucault’s influence, consciously dwells on and attends to
“ordinariness” and “the neglected details of the everyday” in writing history:
Of what is history made as it happens? Of the differed-defered
“identity” of people in the deferred-differed “unity” of actions.
When

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we speak on this level of sophistication, attempting to grasp the


inaccessible intimacy of the least sophisticated, least self-conscious
way of being, it is the bits and pieces fond unspectacular by the
search for the Rani that are most rich in educative promise. I am
speaking of a history-writing that concentrates on the object-details of
everyday life rather than merely on narrative or intellectual analysis
of great events, although that is, indeed, a great gain. I am speaking
of a history that can attend to the details of the putting together of a
continuous-seeming self for everyday life (1999: 238).
With the attention to the neglected histories of the margins, Spivak believes that the
“fadeout points” obliterated by western hegemonic historical discourse can not only be
retrieved so that the subdued voice of the subaltern can be heard, but also serve as a
lesson to the grand historical accounts.
If western historicism is closely implicated in colonialism and imperialism, why is
History selected as the vantage point of scrutinizing The God of Small Things in this
paper? Because, as postcolonialism can be seen as a critique of History, the novel can
be viewed likewise. The novel is a “national allegory” in the Jamesonian sense, “the
story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society” (2000: 320), though I consider Roy as
anti-national, anti-governmental or anarchistic concerning the nation-individual
relationship. As Roy herself comments, the novel is meant to be bring out “how the
smallest things connect to the biggest things” and “a pattern… of how in these small
events and in these small lives the world intrudes…and because of this, because people
being unprotected, the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest
core of their being and changes their life” (Interview with Kingsworth). Metonymic
about the construction of boundaries and the attempt to transgress upon them, the novel
deals with how History has exerted an irresistible sway on the individual and the latter
can just resist bodily. It also takes a materialistic approach, studying how the categories
of the political and the economic can thwart the personal by encroaching upon the

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“History Is What Hurts”: History and The Individual Impasse in The God of Small Things

subjective and the unconscious. From this perspective, History is the oppressive “God
in control”; “History is what hurts” (1981:102). It is the abstract totalitarian power
which hurts the individual’s desire for Love by making the Love Law and determining
who is to be loved. History is what Ammu, Velutha, Rahel and Estha transgress upon.
And the 1997 Booker Prize winner is a Jamesonian “socially symbolic act,” narrativizing
the sad state of affair in India.
Among a variety of definitions and interpretations of the concept of History,
Fredric Jameson’s Marxist narrative of the mode of production serves well in giving
“History” a more specific and definitive representation so as to function as a point of
departure in the critical appraisal of the interaction between History and the individual in
The God of Small Things. Adopting Louis Althusser’s revision of Karl Marx’s
economic determinism, Jameson incorporates Louis Althusser’s Marxist structuralism,
and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis to conceptualize his philosophy
of History. To the American Marxist, History is a structural totality analogous to the
Marxist notion of “the mode of production”, with one mode giving way to another
diachronically but the residual forces and relations of production coexisting
synchronically. It has neither direct cause nor hidden essence; that is, it has an “absent
cause”, with the subordinate levels semi-autonomously interacting with each other and
generating effects. Also it is an equivalent of Lacan’s conception of the real, featuring
its abstraction, infinitude and resistance of symbolization, accessible only though its
effects and symptoms in textual form, because the slippage between the signifier and the
signified always happens.
As far as the subject or the individual is concerned, the Jamesonian History is
sublime, oppressive and alienating, for the former’s desire for jouissance is always
deferred and suppressed. As a result, the desire is repressed into the unconscious.
Jameson’s famous “political unconscious” should not be mistaken for Freud’s sexual
unconscious, which is engendered due to censorship on sexual desire. “Political
unconscious” does not come into being in consequence of sexual repression but rather
due to the collective unawareness or lack of a clear knowledge of the hidden social forces

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working in the social structure or History. As Gabriele Schwab elaborates, “No longer
the product of dynamic psychic energies, the political unconscious becomes a mere
product of concealed social forces” (91). So the political unconscious denotes the
subject’s inability to articulate the complex social forces, bearing resemble to the
Lacanian unconscious, which comes of the discontinuity between the signifier and the
signified. In terms the relationship between History and the subject or individual,
Jameson laments:
History is therefore the experience of Necessity…History is what
hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to the
individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into
grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History
can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as
some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which
History as ground and untranscendable horizon need no particular
theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities
will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them
(1981: 102).
Before proceeding to engage in textual analyses on the antagonism between
History and the individual, I would like to defend myself with regard to my application of
Jameson’s concept of History as the point of departure of my critical task. Marxism has
long been accused of its unconscious Eurocentricism. Marxist literary criticism has
been criticized of “understand[ing] social and historical phenomena not in their ‘own
terms’ but in terms of ‘an underlying system of structural relations which because it
contains within it internal mechanisms tensions and contradictions, is the source of
historical transformation” (Ashcroft et al. 172). Aijaz Ahmad, in his famous essay
“Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’”, argues that the Marxist
demand for totality makes the mistake that “all ideological complexity is reduced to a
singular ideological formation and all narrativities are read as local expressions of a
metatext” (121), and that the grand narrative of the mode of production “does not operate

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“History Is What Hurts”: History and The Individual Impasse in The God of Small Things

in the same way in all the countries of Asia and Africa” (120). He even accuses
Jameson’s essay “Third World Literature in the Era if Multinational Capital” of being a
“gendered” and “racial” text. I think his criticism makes great sense. Therefore in the
critical operation of this paper, the teleological trope of Marxist criticism will be avoided
and Marx’s periodization of modes of human society into primitive communism or tribal
society, the hierarchical kinship societies, the slaveholding society, the Asiatic mode of
production, feudalism, capitalism and communism will only serve as a loose reference.
Nevertheless, as Paul Connerton pinpoints in How Societies Remember that the
refusal of grand narratives should not lead to the total nullification of their lingering
covert influences:
Again, the fact that we no longer believe in the great “subjects” of
history --- the proletariat, the party, the West --- means, not the
disappearance of these great master-narratives, but rather their
continuing unconscious effectiveness as ways of thinking about and
acting in our contemporary situation: their persistence, in other words,
as unconscious collective memories (1).
Connerton continues to maintain that our past experience affects our reception and
perception of what we are experiencing at present, which means if we have a different
context of the past, we will experience the present differently. Namely, if we have a
different memory of the past, then our attitude toward the present is different, too. “This
process,” he argues, “reaches into the most minute and everyday details of our lives” (2).
To put it in a collective context, the history of a nation affects how its citizens experience
the present and the influence goes down to the daily lives. In consequence, we can infer
that grand history legitimates petit history and reversibly the latter is closely connected to
the former.
A reference can be made to how ideology works. Ideology used to be an
equivalent of “false consciousness”, but Louis Althusser revised it and redefined it as,
“Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence” (36). Fredric Jameson contends that each mode of production

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will produce a dominant form of ideological coding specific to it, which in turn
interpellates the individual as a “good” subject. This is advantageous to the
interpretation of the colonized under the interpellation of the colonizer’s dominant
ideology. However, the colonial epistemic violence does not result in a complete
replacement of indigenous traditional ideology. Instead, they tend to coexist with each
other. And the coexistence of foreign and domestic ideologies is what Ernst Bloch coins
“synchronicity of the non-synchronous”, which designates the coexistence of several
modes of production and thus several forms of ideology. And the Blochian concept
bears resemblance to the postcolonial notion “hybridity,” which is endorsed by many
critics like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak.
Therefore, I think the proposition that “hybridity” rather than monolithicity in
history and ideology is the appropriate perspective to construe the novel The God of
Small Things. It in turn facilitates another of my propositions that postcolonial stress on
petit history should not neglect the influence from the grand history or even further that
petit history is also the effect of grand history. Reading the novel twice consolidates the
propositions.
Therefore, in my attempt to interpret the antagonism between History and the
individual and how the latter is entrapped in the former and tries to transgress upon the
laws made by the former, Fredric Jameson’s conception of History as relations produced
in a mode of production will be the vantage point on which the paper will be formulated.
However, I have to claim that the theoretical framework constructed here is not a
completely Jamesonian formula or model but a partial practice with a view to avoiding
theoretical imposition. In a sense, it is a theoretical hybrid.

II. Practice

Told from the perspective of children, the dizygotic twins Rahel and Estha, the
story of The God of Small Things centers on events prior and posterior to the visit and
drowning death of their half-English cousin, Sophie Mol. Due to the English girl’s
death, complicated by the twins’ mother’s forbidden affair with an Untouchable, Velutha,

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“History Is What Hurts”: History and The Individual Impasse in The God of Small Things

the lives of the two Indian children as well as the whole family and Velutha are
completely changed forever. And the episodes are narrated by the 30-year-old Rahel,
who returns from the U. S. after a divorce and after a 23-year separation from her brother
Estha, and the narration weaves back and forth from the present in the 1992 to the past in
1969 and even further back across centuries to bring out the plot, present histories about
the nation, the society, the religions, the village, the family and the characters, and most
important of all, scrutinize why a singular event can claim such a heavy toll on so many
people’s lives.
The heavy toll is not the penalty for a single accident. Instead, the deadly toll is
History’s punishment. It is the contingent outcome of covert contradictions among
residues of different ideologies particular to different modes of production. It is the
consequence of conflict between History and human desire for pleasure. It is the lesson
the Big God imposes on the Small God when the former demands obeisance but the latter
defies.
Since History is the real, infinite, dynamic and abstract, direct realistic
representations are impossible. It can only be manifested through its effects and
symptoms. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy employs two techniques to
represent History. One is spatialization; the other is personification.
In the novel, History is personified as a patriarchal, omnipotent and despotic male,
who enforces his laws and imposes punishment on those who defies the laws mercilessly.
For example, when Estha and Rahel suffer the tragic consequence after Sophie Mol’s
death, Roy describes history as someone who “negotiates its terms and collects its dues
from those who break its laws,” generates “sickening thud” (Roy 54), and leaves smell
forever in ordinary things. When Ammu sees Rahel playing happily with Velutha,
which is forbidden between a Touchable and an Untouchable, History is depicted as
“wrong-footed, caught off guard” 167), but when Velutha and Ammu look in each other’s
eyes lovingly, “History’s fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old,
scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay
down who should be loved. And how. And how much” (168). It is History’s plan to

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have Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s father, to report his son’s secret affair with Ammu to
Mamachi and make it known. “By the time he [Velutha] understood his part in
History’s Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps” (190). History is cruel and
cold-blooded, malevolent about Love but insistent on Love Laws.
Trained as an architect, Roy is surely space-minded and adept as well in using
architecture for symbolization in the novel. Susan Stanford Friedman argues,
Rather than history containing space, different spaces in the novel
contain history. The novel moves associatively in and out of these
spaces, rather than sequentially in linear time…Reflecting, no doubt,
Roy’s profession as an architect, each space is architecturally
embodied. Buildings function as tropes in the novel --- that is, as
images of historical over-determination. They are more than
settings or backgrounds for human action. Instead, they are
locations that concretize the forces of history. They are places that
palimpsestically inscribe the social order as it changes over time.
Containing history, they constitute the identities of the people who
move through them (119).
Indeed, Roy draws a map of Ayemenem and Akkara, with the two villages and buildings
involved situated across the Meenachal River. The cartograpgy embodies complex
juxtaposition of grand history and petit history, nature and culture, power and desire,
domination and subjection, patriarchy and the subaltern women, colonizers and the
colonized. And it is a space that History comes concrete, the production of the inherent
social forces and ideologies.
The word “history” appears in the novel for the first time when Chacko told the
twins that they were a family of Anglophiles:
He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With
all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. ‘To understand
history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what
they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall.

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And smell the smells…’But we can’t go in…because we’ve been


locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see
are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering.
And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have
been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The
very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams
them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise
ourselves” (Roy 51-2).
Based on the passage, obviously what Chacko means by “history” is the Indian history,
which, according to him, is cut off from them by the British colonial rule. As a result,
the Ipe family, or suggestively the Indians, become Anglophiles, “pointed in the wrong
direction, trapped outside their own country and unable to retrace their steps because their
footsteps had been swept away” (51). However, I would rather take Chacko’s
lamentation for the loss of native history as a yes-no ambivalence. It is a no, for,
according to the book, the residues of Indian history are indeed very much alive as far as
caste and gender are concerned. The Raj did not induce a complete transformation of
the Indian society. It is a yes, because, it is impossible to reclaim a genuine pure
traditional Indian history, because its precolonial and postcolonial histories and cultures
are forever ruptured by the imposition of the colonizer’s episteme.
Chacko’s old house is the History House in the novel. Built by an Englishman,
Kari Saipu, who had “gone native” like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness,
the house serves as a symbol of History and its palimpsesticity. Locking the
“whispering ancestors” inside and thus denying the Indian’s access to their own
traditional history, the house first stands for colonialism. The haunting of Saipu’s spirit
in the house refers to the irredeemable influence of the British colonial rule on the Indian
culture and society. But later in 1992, when Rahel returned to Ayemenem, the house
had been renovated into Heritage Hotel by a hotel chain, surrounded by some smaller,
older wooden ancestral houses, transplanted for the enjoyment of wealthy guests from
elsewhere into the tourist complex, “like a press of eager natives petitioning an English

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magistrate.” One of the transplanted old houses “had been the ancestral home of
Comrade E. M. S. Namboodoripad, ‘Kerala’s Mao Tse-tung.’” In consequence, with
commercialization, capitalism and globalization, a form of spatial collage is inscribed in
the space of a rural Indian village Ayemenem. “History and Literature enlisted by
commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off
the boat” (120).
This architectural collage in Heritage Hotel epitomizes the simultaneous but
antithetical processes of deterritorialization and reterritorializtion of capitalism proposed
by Deleuze and Guattari:
There is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing
flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorializing
on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes,
decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus values
from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government
bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to
reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger shape of
surplus value (Quoted from Young 169).
In order to obtain the maximum surplus value, capital has to deconstruct or destroy what
is on its way or the inefficient, and then reorganize or reproduce a geographical space that
best suits its purpose. In the case of Heritage Hotel, in order to make profit by resorting
to nostalgia, capitalist tourism reinscribes the space of the History House by renovating it
into a hotel combined with the ancient houses transplanted from other places to produce a
new space providing nostalgia as the commodity.
The process of spatial reinscriptions, symbolizing India’s historical passage in
terms of the mode of production from semi-feudalism to colonialism and then to
multinationalism or globalization and thus the coexistence of different historical residues,
construes the Jamesonian concept of History or grand history, which is the point of
departure of my critical interpretation of the novel.
The performance of Kathakali dance at Heritage Hotel, the most saddening episode

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for me, is another example of dislocation and deculturation of indigenous cultural


production by multinational capitalism. In order to stave off starvation, the dancers
have to join tourism, which means they have play the rules set by capitalism. Originally
performed in temples, the dance is dislocated and performed beside a swimming pool.
In order not to bore the tourists, the performance is truncated. “So ancient stories were
collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos”
(Roy 121). The indigenous culture, metonymically, is deterritorialized and deculturated.
Capital prevails, and a new cultural form for the commercial purpose is thus
reterritorialized and produced in the space of the History House.
Since different social forces produce different forms of space, the mutation of the
History House symbolizes different stages of History or different modes of production
and their political, cultural and economic influences on India: semi-feudalism,
colonialism (or imperial capitalism), Marxism, and multi-nationalism (or late capitalism
in Ernst Mandel’s term). The space of the house, inscribed with one historic layer upon
another, bears an implication of the diachronicity of History and the linearity of time,
which are Hegelian in essence and which postcolonialism is always mindful of
deconstructing by designating History as rupture and replacing grand history with petit
history. In the novel, Arundhati Roy is obviously conscious of the task, with History
always described negatively and with Rahel’s ambition to “own a watch on which she
could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time
was meant for in the first place)” (37).
However, the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization do not result in
a wholesale erasure of past traits. Robert J. C. Young critiques Deleuze and Guattari’s
conceptions by arguing:
The problem with the Anti-Oedipus as it stands for any form of
historical analysis…is that the process of decoding, recoding and
overcoding imply a form of cultural appropriation that does not do
justice to the complexities of the way in which cultures interact,
degenerate and develop over time in relation to each other.

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Decoding and recoding implies too simplistic a grafting of one


culture to another (173).
Therefore, deterritorialization and reterritorialization produce not a complete foreign
space but one of reorganization, with the old and the new, domestic and alien juxtaposed
together to produce a new form. So Young makes a revision on the model:
We need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription
and reinscription, an historical paradigm that will acknowledge the
extent to which cultures were not simply destroyed but rather layered
on top of each other, giving rise to struggles that themselves only
increased the imbrication of each with the other and their translation
into increasingly uncertain patchwork identities (173-74).
In the novel, the spatial collage of History House or Heritage Hotel is a composite of new
and ancient, indigenous and colonial components, with “a child’s [Rahel’s] plastic
wristwatch with the time painted on it” (121). Consequently, synchronicity in effect
matters more than diachronicity, especially in uncovering the hidden connection between
space production and different social forces. Therefore, History, viewed synchronically,
is always a hybrid, with “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” and with different social
forces, dominant or residual, competing for primacy.
In the novel I think there is another history house; that is, the Ayemenem House,
the house the Ipe family lives in. If the History House stands for grand history or the
stages of modes of production, then the Ayemenem House represents petit history, or the
synchronous, everyday, local history. If the former suggest the palimsestuality of
History, the latter is a dynamic structure of coexisting powers and ideologies
interpellating the individuals. Compared with the one, the other is its concretization, its
being put into practice by means of the individual. In contrast to History House’s being
renovated, the Ayemenem House is decaying, with most of its members living in the past
imagination. Just as Rahel thinks of Baby Kochamma, “She is living her life
backwards” (Roy 23).
The space in the Ayemenem House is a hybrid, too. Indian caste system and

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patriarchy, residues of Indian semi-feudalism, coalesce with Syrian Christianity and


colonial Anglophilia and later with capitalism. They exist simultaneously in and
constitute the space, which means colonialism and Christianity do not completely destroy
the Indian culture or eliminate Indian ideologies, and the individuals living in the space
are interpellated by ideologies of different modes of production, both colonial and Indian,
and thus live based on the social laws enacted by the hybrid History. In a sense, the
Ayemenem House is the “political unconscious” of History House, with the everyday
histories going on in the former effects and symptoms of the latter.
As Chacko comments in the novel, the Ipe family is one of Anglophiles. Being
descendants of Reverend E. John Ipe, “well known in the Christian community as the
man who had been blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of
the Syrian Christian Church” (23) and elites in the Raj, most of the Ipes are so Anglicized
that they becomes nostalgic remnants of the Raj, unable to adapt themselves to the new
ideologies like Marxism and multinationalism. Papachi was an Imperial Entomologist
before independence; his mind “had been brought into a state which made him like the
English” (51). When Ammu tells him about the sexual request of an Englishman Mr.
Hollick, the manager of a tea plantation in Assam, he does not believe her story because
“he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife”
(42). Chacko frankly describes his father as “an incurable CCP, which was short for
chhi-chhi poach and in Hindu meant shit-wiper” (42). Therefore, Papachi’s Anglopholia
is deeper rooted than his love toward his daughter, which means ideological interpellation
is stronger than biological or natural love or Love. He is objectified by colonial
discourse.
Chacko’s academic training in Oxford does not educate him well enough for
self-reflexivity to escape from the objectification of colonialism. He is also a colonial
subject, unconsciously addicted to quoting long passages from the books he has read for
no apparent reasons and to the nostalgia of his life and education at Oxford. The model
planes he buys and then crushes every month is his feeble connection with his “mother
land,” which he happily maintains. He marries a white woman, Margaret Kochamma,

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and seems to take pride in that, though the marriage ends up in divorce. When he
laments that Indians have all become “prisoners of war”, admiring their conquerors and
despising themselves, his indignation does not take him any step further to get rid of the
complex. Proclaiming himself a Marxist, he actually does nothing practicing the
doctrine but is finally reduced to a target of Marxist revolution. He, like Papachi, is an
outdated nostalgist. After Sophie Mol’s death and the bankruptcy of Paradise Pickle
factory, he virtually flees to Canada running an unsuccessful antique shop, abandoning
the family and the nation. When he says, “To understand history, we have to go inside
and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall.
And Smell the smells” (51), I think he is being deliberately bookish, because his
theoretical elaboration does not help elevate what is in his unconscious to the
consciousness for action. He always chooses to bury himself in memory and to be blind
to History. In the novel, this is suggested in his failure in running Paradise pickle
factory, which, I think, serves as a symbol of the preservation of past Indian cultural
heritage, though the jam Mamachi makes also implies hybridity. Both Papachi and
Chacko are actually the epitome of an Indian elite constructed by British colonial rule in
India, preserving their identity as an Indian and the consciousness of Indian culture on the
surface but unconsciously and irreversibly adoring his conquerors and their culture.
They are in effect both objectified agents of British colonialism.
Papachi and Chacko are really epitomes of Historical hybridity. As is mentioned
above, the hybrid space of History House is concretized in the Ayemenem House. And
in turn it is reproduced in the father’s and son’s spaces of mind. They are “English” and
“Indian” simultaneously: Anglophile, patriarchal and caste-conscious. Papachi’s
jealousy of Mamachi’s musical talent and business success, his habitual beating of his
wife as a protest against her achievement running the pickle factory, his denial of
Ammu’s further education manifests the influence of Indian patriarchal tradition.
Chacko, though a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, does not exempt himself from the
“tradition.” He forces sexual relationships on female workers in the pickle factory.
When he takes over the factory, he keeps referring it as “my” factory, “my” pineapple,

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“my” jam, in spite of the fact that it is Mamachi who starts the business and makes it
profitable. When Ammu and Velutha’s affair is disclosed, Chacko gets so mad that he
batters down the door of Ammu’s room and orders her to “Get out of my house before I
break every bone in your body!” (214). The son is not less patriarchal than his father.
As is mentioned above, space is the production of social forces, and then the
Ayemenem House is a hybrid space produced by imperialism, patriarchy and caste. And
to live in the space and to occupy a position in the space, one has to conform to the
“laws” enacted by the social forces. In the house, Papachi and Chacko are dominators;
they are objects constructed by colonialism but subjects by patriarchy and caste system.
Those who are not Touchable males, including Touchable females and Untouchables,
have to be reduced to objects with no identity, and are dominated by the two patriarchs
(This is why only they two have a study, suggestive of knowledge and power.) and the
Love Laws.
Women are the locus where the ideologies of colonialism and patriarchy converge,
and become the victims of “double colonialization”: “the forgotten cauality of both
imperial ideology and native and foreign patriarchies” (Gandhi 83). Patriarchy forces
them to accept the belief in men’s superiority and his indispensability; colonialism
reduces them to be the gendered subaltern with no media to represent themselves.
Spivak, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, argues that contesting representational systems
violently attempting to represent the gendered subaltern:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and
object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a
pristine nothingness, but a violent shuttling which is the displaced
figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and
modernization” (306).
Not just the men but also the women perhaps except Ammu in the Ayemenem House are
Anglophile to a certain extent. Judging from the way she receives Sophie Mol at her
arrival, Mamachi is also Anglophile, regardless of her despisal of Margaret Kochamma
for the sake of jealousy of the latter’s marrying her son. When it comes to patriarchy,

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Mamachi has come to believe in it. She is used to Papachi’s habitual beating. Though
furious at Ammu’s affair with Velutha, she is tolerant of Chacko’s libertine relationships
with women in the factory by taking it as “man’s needs” and thoughtfully has a separate
entrance built for her son’s convenience. For Mamachi, a man has to always be there in
a woman’s life. He is indispensable and his presence matters more than anything else
and is worth all the tolerance in spite of her talent in music and success in managing a
business. That is why on the day Chacko prevents Papachi from beating her, Mamachi
“packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chacko’s care. From then onwards he
became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her Man. Her only Love” (Roy
160). Unconsciously, she marries her son.
Baby Kochamma perhaps is the best example in the novel of “double colonization”
on women: women as the double victims of patriarchy and colonialism. Her lifelong
attachment to Father Mulligan is probably Anglophile love. After her return to
Ayemenem House, she gives up the desire of marriage but not the love for Mulligan. It
seems that the love has become a belief in the white God, not a desire anymore. Every
day, she “prays” to the God by writing “I love you” in her diary. She makes it a rule to
read English classics and is proud of the habit. She forbids Rahel and Estha from
reading English backward and gives them “imposition”. To occupy a position in the
house, she internalizes not only Anglophilia but also patriarchy, turning herself into an
active agent of the Love Laws. Her interior space is doubly colonized. Her resentment
against Ammu’s unrelenting desire in the search of love and coercion of Estha into
testifying against Velutha after the disclosure of his affair with Ammu result not only
from jealousy but also from the belief in the “Love Laws” so that those who do not
comply to the laws have to expelled and so that the purity of the space and the effective
functioning of the laws can be maintained. Again ideology prevails over biological love;
Love Laws regulate the individual and “negotiates its terms and collects its dues from
those who breaks its laws” (54).
Baby Kochamma lives long enough to welcome the advent of another more
powerful stage of History, multinationalism. When Rahel returns to Ayemenem

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twenty-three years after Sophie Mol’s death, she finds Baby has abandoned her original
habit of gardening and addicted herself to satellite TV, to American programs. This
signifies the invasion of globalizing multinationalism into the Ayemenem House and into
India, corresponding to the transformation of History House into Heritage Hotel. In this
sense, Baby Kochamma does keep herself up with History, with her mind a space in
which History can take root. She is always an object constructed by History.
When the History House takes a new form, the Ayemenem House is declining, with
the pickle factory shut down, the garden deserted, the family members dead, expelled or
gone, and the nearby river polluted and shrunk. When grand history is entering a new
bourgeoning stage, petit history is also following suit but in a decaying manner. They
are closely related.
The Meenachal River is also shrunk and decaying. I think Roy posits a nature/
culture opposition with the river and the two history houses. For centuries, the river has
been the lifeblood of Ayemenem and its residents, providing livelihood but also powerful
enough to “evoke fear” and “to change lives” (119). It used to be where bathers bathed
and fishers fish, mothers washed clothes, farmers watered their fields, Ammu and velutha
had sex, Rahel and Estha played and hid and also where Sophie Mol was drowned. But
now the river is “no more than a swollen drain” (118), with a saltwater barrage built
under the pressure of influential paddy-farmer lobby in exchange for more rice.
“Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadultered factory effluents” (119).
With the pollution of the Meenachal River, the Ayemenem villagers cannot cross the river
to the History House, and only tourists have the privilege to enter it. “It has turned its
back on Ayemenem” (119). The river is virtually dead, killed by economic growth and
by capitalistic spatialization. Nature, both natural landscape are human nature, is
destroyed by civilization.
Nature, I think, is the core of The God of Small Things. With a sad story relating
everyday histories to grand history, connecting family, community and nation, Arundhati
Roy tries to provoke readers to ponder over what effect culture or civilization has on the
nature and human beings. Is economic growth worthy of the price of a river? I think

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Roy’s answer is surely negative. The following passage describing the small things at
the place where Velutha and Ammu make love to each other reveals us why Velutha is
worthy of the name “The god of small things” and also Roy’s position between the choice
between nature and culture:
They laughed at ant-bites on each other’s bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding
off the ends of leaves, at overturned beetles that couldn’t right themselves. At the pair of
small fish that always sought Velutha out in the river and bit him. At a particularly devout
praying mantis. At the minute spider who lived in a crack in the wall of the back
verandah of the History House and camouflaged himself by covering his body with bits
of rubbish --- a silver of wasp wing. Part of a cobweb. Dust. Leaf rot. The empty
thorax of a dead bee. Chappu Thamburan, Velutha called him. Lord Rubbish (320)
These small natural things can bring so much joy in contrast to the terrible scenes and
smells caused by the pollution of the Meenachal River. Velutha indeed embodies more
love toward the nature compared with other characters in the novels Therefore, when it
comes to the nature, History is really what hurts, because the latter is so destructive and
the former so fragile.
However, I would argue that the attachment to natural small things is an effect of
History. If History is so dominant and destructive both to the nature and human desire,
then a return to the most vulnerable turns out to be the most necessary. Transference to
the basic, natural and small comes from the lack induced by being conscious of the
impossibility of coping with and coming to terms with the Big Things and of the
disappearance of the Small Things. Therefore, aware of their vulnerability to History or
Love Laws, Ammu and Velutha link their fates and futures to Chappu Thamburan: “They
chose him because they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to
Smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each
other” (321). They cannot help but cling to small things, for the big things, such as the
nation, world, History, are beyond their reach.
With “Love Laws”, historical and social rules, determining who should love and
who should be loved, do human beings love one another more? Just like culture or

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civilization betrays the nature, “Love Laws” betrays human nature, the Love, Madness,
Hope, and Infinnate Joy. When desire is hurt and refused by History, when desire is
caught in the liminality of historical residues, it either succumbs (like Baby Kochamma)
or revolts (like Ammu). Transgression, that is, is Utopian and inevitably an effect of
History.
As is mentioned, space is the production of social forces so that to enter a space,
one has to obey the forces; otherwise, one will be cast out and become an outcast or
outsider. This inside/outside distinction generates boundaries and brings about a
homogenizing effect on the subjects in a space. To be an insider, one has to accept the
laws and ideologies. In the novel, the Love Laws are what the insiders have to observe
in the Ayemenem House, so all the family members obey the rules without questioning
them, except Ammu, Rahel and Estha. They do not follow the Love Laws so they have
no identities and no positions in the house, so that finally, one after another they are
expelled. Love Laws prevail over love so that family members do love each other
naturally but based on the Law. This is a sad state of affair, and this is what Roy stands
up against through the novel.
However, the transgressive acts in the novel not only manifest the individual
impasse and but also strengthen the historical grip. Jamnet Thormann argues that
“Ammu’s refusal of the laws of caste and the restrictions on women is an ethical act that
refuses to betray desire” (Janet 305). She refuses to accept the restrictions Love Laws
or History imposes on women in pursuit of her desire. Unlike Baby Kochomma, who
has given up on her desire for love in order to secure a place in the patriarchal space of
the Ayemenem House as a man-less woman, Ammu has an “Unsafe Edge, an “air of
unpredictabililty” that emerges when she smokes, listens to songs on the radio, even
when “her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk” (Roy
43). The “Unsafe Edge” leads her to the affair with Velutha, an Untouchable who is not
satisfied with his position in the caste system, and consequently induces the transgressive
act of cross-caste affair. However, this personal history of transgression invoked
through personal desire against History not only leaves the latter unharmed but reinforces

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the latter’s constraint on the former. Jameson elaborates on the invalidity of the
fulfillment of individual desire:
in that case desire must always be transgressive must always have a
repressive norm or law through which to burst and against which to
define itself. Yet it is a commonplace that transgressions,
presupposing the laws or norms or taboos against which they function,
thereby end up precisely reconfirming such laws (1981:68).
Roy’s extravagant description of the sexual scene reveals a political ambition to
transgress against the historical space with the space of the individual body and to signify
the denial of historical domination and thus personal autonomy through an erotic act.
However, this feminist approach to rebel against patriarchy through bodily autonomy
betrays the predicament that resistance starts and ends in the individual, which rings truer
considering Ammu and Velutha’s death after their failure in challenging the
feudal-patriarchal society.
Aijaz Ahmad, in “Reading Arundhati Roy politically,” accuses Roy of believing
that “resistance can only be individual and fragile…the personal is the only arena of the
political.” Roy may not really have the belief, but I think individual bodily
transgression is the out of proportion to the scope of the novel’s concern as a national
allegory, threading from family, community to nation. Ammu and Velutha’s resort to
bodily consummation as transgression upon the Love Laws and History manifests the
author’s Utopian optimism that through love, the problems History has imposed on the
society and nation will be resolved, as Ahmad argues, “Roy defines sexuality as that
transcendence which takes individual beyond history and society, straight right into the
real truth of their beings” (quoted from Wilson). However, the couple’s addiction to
small things betrays their inability or helplessness to conduct such transcendence. “The
Cost of Living,” the title of the chapter which includes the 7-page long erotic scene,
succinctly shows the individuals’ impasse.
Similarly, the incest conducted by the twins Rahel and Estha is problematic. As
to the incest, chronologically the last event in the narrative of the novel, Janet Thormann

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considers it “the only opening for their desire, a radical refusal of difference and time and
a nostalgic return to their connection to love, childhood, and the mother before the
devastating effects of perverse Law…The incest of the novel is then a radical challenge to
Law, because it challenges the very possibility of social being” (304). However,
conducted in a decaying house where only two objectified old women live, Baby
Kochamma and Kochu Maria, the incest means little concerning transgression in such a
space. I would rather believe that the incest shows the twins’ individual impasse after
being alienated by History through their childhood tragedy triggered by Sophie Mol’s
death but actually caused by various indifferent and merciless social forces and ideologies.
It is a grave that they enter.
The God of Small Things is a Jamesonian national allegory in that it places in
juxtaposition the personal, the local, the national and the global and weighs how the latter
two are implicated on the former two, how the big things are oppressive to the small
things, and how the individual is caught in the historical liminality. So Julie Mullaney
comments, “It is noteworthy given the novel’s obsession with the small in relation to the
large that Roy chooses to more obviously excavate the persona and the local rather than
the wider public and national canvas directly” (26). However, what is worthy of note is
that, instead of serving as a buffer against globalization and cultural imperialism for the
protection of the local and the personal, as Jameson proposes in “Globalization and
Political Strategy” that “one has to add that the nation-state today remains the only
concrete terrain and framework for political struggle [against globalization],” the
nation-state in the novel (India of course) puts itself in complicity in its oppression on the
local and the individual. Recall in the novel the police violence on Velutha, Inspector
Thomas Mathew’s sexual harassment on Ammu, the nation’s inability to abolish the caste
system and its complicity with multinational companies in their economic invasion into
India, and one realizes that Jameson’s strategy may not be valid in coping with History
and Roy’s novel is one realistic refutation.
In “The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things,” Janet Thormann argues on
the relationship between grand history and petit history:

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In The God of Small Things, history is the mechanical reproduction of


rules of exchange perpetuating power in everyday life, and the
narrative is just the enactment of the operations of history in and
through individual histories, as personal strategies, motives and needs
are caught up in social law and thereby to enact it…(303).

Therefore, petit history is inescapably involved in grand history and the individual is
arrested in the impasse History dictates. As a result, every individual is a historical
subject, either living by the social law or transgressing the law. Either way, one has not
chance to escape the historical web, which is the saddening lesson from The God of Small
Things.

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory. London: Verso, 1992.


Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984.
Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Friedman, Susan Standford. “Feminism, State Fictions and Violence: Gender,
Geopolitics and Transnationalism.” Communal/Plural. 9.1 (2001): 31 pars.
Online. EBSCOHOST. 23 Nov. 2004.
Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia
UP, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 1981.
- - -. “Third-World Literature in the Era if Multinational Capitalism.” The
Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell,
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- - -. “Globalization and Political Strategy.” New Left Review. Online.
(2000): 45 pars. 18 Jan. 2005.
McClintock, Ann. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism.”

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“History Is What Hurts”: History and The Individual Impasse in The God of Small Things

Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Francis Baker, Peter Hulme


And Maragret Iversen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. 253-66.
Mullaney, Julie. The God of Small Things: A Reader’s Guide. New York:
Continuum, 2002.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.
Schwab, Gabriele. “The Subject of the Political Unconscious.” Politics, Theory,
and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Mark Poster. New York: Columbia UP,
1993. 83-109
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.
London: MacMillan, 1988. 271-311.
- - -. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
Thormann, Janet. “The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things.” Journal for
the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. 8.2 (2003): 23 pars. Online.
EBSCOHOST. 23 Nov. 2004.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London:
Routledge, 1990.
- - -. Colonial Desire. London: Routledge, 1995.
Wilson, Kalpana. “Arundhati Roy and Patriarchy.” 35 pars. Online.
Angelfire. 28 Dec. 2004.

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