愛與創傷─阿蘭達蒂‧洛伊的《微物之神》

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(1)國立中山大學外國語文學研究所碩士論文 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY. 愛與創傷—阿蘭達蒂‧洛伊的《微物之神》 Love and Trauma: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. 研究生：陳柏慧撰 BY CHEN, PO-HUI 指導教授：張淑麗 Advisor: PROFESSOR CHANG, SHULI. 中華民國九十六年七月 July 2007.

(2) Acknowledgments. NSYSU is the last stop of my student life. The three years spent in NSYSU is just a very small part of my life, but it is in this period of time that for the first time in my life I think I am really doing something. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Shuli Chang. She has always been so patient with her students.. In every stage of my writing, she gave me. the most support I needed to overcome the difficulties I met. encouragement, I would not have finished my thesis.. Without her instruction and. Furthermore, I am grateful for the. examiners in my thesis defense, Professor Chun Fu and Professor Tee Kim Tong.. They. gave me insightful, constructive comments and advice for me to revise and improve my thesis. Also, I would like to thank the professors who taught me in the classes I took. gave me so much that I think it would cost me the rest of my life to digest.. They. Besides, I want. to give my special thanks to the assistants in the departmental office, Rosa, Shiang-hui and Maggie.. All of them were so kind and nice to me when I did my part-time job in the office.. For me, it is a precious and delightful experience to be a member of DFLL. My gratitude also goes to my dear roommates of 1352, Sabrina, Alice, Shinie, Pikac and Eric.. Friends forever! Last but not least, I am extremely obliged to my dearest parents, who give everything. they have to their beloved daughters. without their unceasing love and care.. I would never be able to achieve anything in my life.

(3) Abstract. Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things, set in a small village called Ayemenem in the southwestern India state of Kerala, where Roy was raised, tells a story of the Ipe family.. Nestled insides the centre of the family chronicle spanning from the. country’s colonial period to its independent present is a heartbreaking tragedy resulted from a profane romance involving a transgression of the Love Laws that takes the reader’s breath away.. Love Laws, an oxymoronic term Roy creates for her novel, points toward the cultural. basis upon which Indian society addresses its traditional and strict control of caste segregation and sexual discrimination.. In the cross-border tension caused by the conflict. between human desire and Indian socio-political constructs that suppress individual liberty Roy does not only depict the social reality in India but also proposes a scathing critique of the multilayer social restraints on Indians’ bodies and minds.. Individual bodies attached to the. culture, first of all, are the vehicles of various cultural signs that allotted according to the caste difference and gender asymmetry; at the same time, bodies are the specific location where the infliction of society’s power to discipline and to punish takes place.. Body contact. that pursues forbidden love as relief from the social oppressions leads to the ultimate penalty, death, which can destroy the body and also scar the witness’s mind.. Focusing on two. innocent children’s difficulty in piecing the memory fragments together to come up with a belated response to the tragedy and their melancholy fixation about the lost beloved, Roy tries to reveal the lingering effect of trauma and the symbolic death happening to the victims who can’t work through the trauma but trapped by it instead. Roy deliberately provides the novel a traumatic structure consisted of aesthetic poetics, sensual narratives, ungrammatical phrases, repeated images, fragmental passages, etc., to convey a literary experience of trauma to the reader as if they are dealing with trauma when reading the novel. Through discussing the Love Laws from a historical perspective, Roy purposes to suggest that the major trauma.

(4) in The God of Small Things doesn’t belong to a particular age or place. All Indians in the past, the present and the coming future share the same trauma because the Love Laws have already been a significant part of Indian culture and the practice of Love Laws will continue to traumatize Indian people from generation to generation. Besides tackling the Love Laws as the cause of Indians’ national trauma by presenting the oppression of laws, the novel also offers a remarkable point of view to discuss the cruel nature of love when love is employed as a conditional reward for the obedient in the rhetoric to command, to regulate, to threaten, to bargain, and to inspire loyalty.. People’s unceasing desire to win and to give love, against. our common belief in love’s sublime value, may bring about hurt, pain, fear, jealousy, mistrust, quarrels, etc., all of which can make a deep cut in any human relation or even cause more serious destruction what is generally considered as the consequence of the exercise of the power of law in its tug of war with love..

(5) 中文摘要. 阿蘭達蒂‧洛伊的處女作《微物之神》以作者的故鄉阿耶門連，一個位於印度南部喀拉拉省的小鎮為背景，述說一段發生在當地伊培家族中的故事。這段橫跨殖民歷史到獨立年代的家族史有一個核心，那是一齣導因於禁忌之戀的悲劇，其中牽涉了對「愛的法典」的逾越，深深地攝人心魂。洛伊特別在小說中創造出「愛的法典」這個名詞來指稱印度社會架構其傳統上在種姓隔離和性別差異上均嚴格管控的文化底石。在私慾衝撞印度社會政治的張力中，洛伊不單描繪出印度的社會現實面，同時也提出了針對印度人民在生理與心理上承受重重束縛的嚴厲批評。個人的肉體歸屬文化，首先是根據階級、性別差異給予不同文化符碼的運載體，同時也是社會展現規訓與懲罰力量的場所。追求禁忌之戀以圖解脫的肉體接觸將招致終極懲罰——死亡，死亡毀滅肉體，也重創了目擊者的心靈。洛伊藉著描寫兩名稚童苦於撿拾記憶的零散片段去拼湊出一個對那齣悲劇該有卻遲來的回應，以及他們對於亡故友人的冥頑愁思來揭示創傷的餘波蕩漾，還有一旦創傷受害者不得治癒反身陷其中所要遭逢的象徵性死亡。洛伊特意賦予小說富含美學詩意、感官記述、不合文法的語句、重複意象、斷簡殘篇的創傷論述結構來營造創傷的文學經驗，讓讀者在閱讀的同時就能感同身受。洛伊從歷史的角度去討論「愛的法典」，意圖暗示《微物之神》中最重大的創傷並非發生在特定年代或地區的個案，所有由古到今乃至未來的印度人民都有著同樣的傷痛。「愛的法典」早已深嵌進印度文化成為重要的一部份，並且持續地重創一代又一代的印度人。書中除了呈現「愛的法典」為印度民族創傷之源始的壓迫景況，更提出了探討愛之殘酷本質的特殊觀點。在以愛為名去命令、管理、恫嚇、協議、激發忠誠性的言語中，愛被當成一項有條件賜給順從者的獎賞。在一般的認知裡，愛有著崇高的價值。但是，人們對愛的取捨懷有永不止休的慾望卻可能引發傷害、痛楚、恐懼、妒忌、猜疑、爭吵……等等足以撕裂人際關係的產物，甚至造成通常是法律在和愛的拔河中施展權力才會造成的破壞性結果。.

(6) Table of Contents. I.. Introduction……………………………………………….............1. II.. Chapter One Writing Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things……………………………………………………............20. III.. Chapter Two Mapping Gender, Caste and Colonialism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things………………………..................................45. IV.. Chapter Three The Politics of Love: On Motherhood, Kinship and Romance in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things………………………72. V.. Conclusion……………………………………………………...108. VI.. Works Cited…………………………………………….............111.

(7) Chen 1. Introduction. The Author The biography of Arundhati Roy in itself is an engrossing story.. Born in Shillong,. Meghalaya, India on November 24, 1961, Roy was the second child in the family of Rajib, a tea plantation manager, and Mary Roy.. They divorced when Roy was just a toddler.. Mary,. as a liberal activist, founded an experiment school Roy attended “as a guinea pig” (qtd. in Fields-Meyer and Fernandez 108) in her childhood spent in Kerala, Roy says jokingly in an interview.. In Kerala, Roy spent lots of time playing with her brother Lalith in her. grandmother’s pickle factory.. Leaving home for Delhi as a teen at 16, Roy enrolled in the. School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.. After leaving the school without a degree in 1981, she saw her. life veering to an unexpected direction. “[S]he turned her back on the drafting table to become a baker, selling chocolate cakes to tourists in her native India.. Then came stints as a. government researcher, an actress, a movie-set designer and an aerobics teacher,” according to Fields-Meyer and Fernandez (107).. When Roy worked as a researcher at India’s Institute. of Urban Affairs in 1984, she met Pradip Krishen, a divorced father having two grown-up daughters and now her husband, who asked her to star in his film. Because of the marriage the couple became career collaborators to each other.. Roy wrote several screenplays that. Krishen directed. What really makes Roy a global celebrity is her literary success in her first and only work of fiction, The God of Small Things.. No second novel followed.. startling shift from a celebrated novelist to an embattled activist.. Roy made a. As Joy Press describes,. “[h]er stinging essays critiquing American actions in Afghanistan have been circulating all over the U.S. by e-mail” (58).. Roy, with her glossy black locks shorn to the skull as a. notable gesture of the progressive spirit she succeeded from her mother, dedicates herself to.

(8) Chen 2. the. current. international. political. issues. concerning. globalization,. capitalization,. post-colonization, etc. With the publication of The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2001), War Talk (2003) and her most recent release An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004) Roy expresses her opinions passionately and infectiously.. She “writes and acts like. someone with nothing left to lose” (Press 58). Though Roy recognizes that there is a lot of hostility towards her controversial acts, her participation in the anti-dam movement in India for example, she shows no aptness to compromise or to be quiet. Instead, she boldly declares that “[t]he only thing worth globalizing is dissent” (qtd. in Mullaney 14).. So. saying, Roy dismisses the unfavorable or hostile criticism pointing towards her with a single blow.. She appreciates dissent, but never yields to any dissenting opinion, and always dares. to express her own.. The Novel, The God of Small Things No doubt the tremendous success of The God of Small Things marks a momentous turn in Arundhati Roy’s life. Right before the composition of the novel, she was a screenplay writer struggling with a TV series about Indian’s nationalist movement. unexpected that the sponsor company of the project went bankrupt halfway. that she needed a change and she was ready for it.. It was quite Roy sensed. Roy said, “I wanted to do something. alone, without the endless negotiation that cinema involves” (qtd. in Fields-Meyer and Fernandez 108).. Moving to an isolated mountainside home in central India, she let her. free-ranging imagination go free to make her debut novel, The God of Small Things, possible. For Roy, a full-time literary writer sitting at the computer for five hours each morning for four and a half years at that time, the creation of the novel was an unusual experience and a revolutionary experiment.. Trained as an architect, “she structured her book more like a. building than a narrative” (Fields-Meyer and Fernandez 108).. Roy says, “It is almost. frightening to invest almost five years in something when you don’t know what the outcome.

(9) Chen 3. is going to be” (qtd. in Fields-Meyer and Fernandez 107).. The uncertainty she worried. about proved to be redundant when the novel came out in May, 1997.. The novel, released in. 29 countries, quickly became an international bestseller and sold several million copies. Masses of praise from the critics and readers flew in. William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.. Roy had even been compared with. Roy, as Press introduces her, “herself. seemed like a ready-baked literary icon: an articulate 36-year-old woman with a delicate face and glossy locks who spoke fragrantly accented English and expressed feisty opinions” (58). And in October the same year, The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize.. The money. she gained from the award, around 30,000 US. Dollars, was donated to one of the largest grassroots organizations in India, Narmada Bachao Andolan1.. The Story Set in a small village called Ayemenem in the southwestern India state of Kerala, where Roy was raised, The God of Small Things tells a story about the turmoil within a local, feudal family, the Ipe family, that resulted in its decline and eventual disintegration.. Elder. generations in the Ipe family used to take great pride in its family history in which there was the glory of the Patriarch’s blessing given to Reverend E. John Ipe as a little boy.. Since that,. John Ipe, who became a Syrian Christian priest, had been well known as “Punnyan Kunju--Little Blessed One” (23),2 and the family established its reputation and significance in Ayemenem.. John Ipe’s daughter Baby Kochamma, having a crush on her father’s good. friend, Father Mulligan, in her teenage, entered a convent in hopes of being close to him. The one-sided infatuation received no feedback. 1. Baby Kochamma returned to the family. According to the Wikipedia, Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or Save Narmada Movement in English is “a non governmental organisation (NGO) that mobilised tribal people, adivasis, farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists against the Sardar Sarovar Dam being built across the Narmada river, Gujarat, India. It originally focused on the environmental issues related to trees that would be submerged under the dam water. Recently it has re-focused with the aim to enable the poor citizens especially the oustees to get the full rehabilitation facilities from the government.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_Bachao_Andolan. 2 All references to The God of Small Things in this thesis will be to the Harper Perennial’s 1998 edition. Page numbers will be given parenthetically..

(10) Chen 4. and lived on the lasting memory of the unrequited love throughout her life. Pappachi, Baby Kochamma’s brother, moving to Ayemenem after his retirement from the respected job as “an Imperial Entomologist” during the colonial period and a “Joint Director, Entomology” (47-48) after Indian’s independence, was burning with fury at the fact that the new specie of moth he discovered twelve years ago was named after someone else.. Seeking outlets for his. ill-humor, Pappachi inflicted domestic violence upon his wife Mammachi and daughter Ammu; meanwhile, his patriarchal authority and sense of superiority were challenged by Mammachi’s thriving pickle career. Chacko, his only son, was sent to Oxford, where he became a self-conceited “Rhodes Scholar” (232) and then married a café waitress called Margaret. Soon after the birth of their daughter Sophie Mol they divorced. Margaret Kochamma had her second marriage with Joe, the man she met when she was pregnant. Chacko, a single man without a job, a home and money in England, returned to Ayemenem to take over his mother’s profitable pickles factory. However, his management of the business turned out to be a failure that he refused to admit. His sister Ammu, a witness and also a victim suffering Pappachi’s domestic violence and persistent neglect, married a Calcutta man working in a tea estate in haste in order to flee from “her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother” (38).. Unfortunately, she found that her husband was “a full-blown. alcoholic” (40) who was going to offer his wife to the English manager, Mr. Hollick, in exchange for his job. Ammu left and returned to Ayemenem with her seven-year-old twins, Estha and Rahel.. There in Ayemenem she fell in love with an untouchable worker named. Velutha, the son of Vellya Paapen. Estha and Rahel loved Velutha, too.. They visited him. during the day, whereas their mother visited him at night in secret. Margaret Kochamma and Sohpie Mol made a visit to Ayemenem as a healing tour after Joe died in a car accident. The Ipe family presented a showy welcome-home reception.. In this occasion, the twins. found that Sohpie Mol drew the family attention away from them, and they began to have the doubt about Ammu’s love for them.. They left the house to test Ammu’s love.. Sophie Mol,.

(11) Chen 5. who insisted on going with them as an expression of her friendship with them, drowned as they tried to cross the Meenachal River. In the meantime, Vellya Pappen came to the Ayemenem house to report his son’s illicit love affair with Ammu.. Baby Kochamma took. advantage of Mammchi’s fury at Ammu’s violation of the traditional social norm--the Love Laws--and Chacko’s grief for Sophie Mol’s death to portray Ammu as the person to blame and be responsible for what had happened. After Baby Kochamma and Inspector Thomas Mathew teamed up to charge Velutha with abduction to justify the violent arrest putting him to death, Ammu was expelled and died afterwards, alone in a hotel room.. Estha was sent to. his father in Calcutta. He waited quietly to be re-returned to Ayemenem after twenty-three years. Rahel, exhibiting discipline problems in her teenage school years, won admission into a mediocre college of architecture in Delhi, where she met her future husband Larry McCaslin. They married and moved to Boston. returned home to Ayemenem.. The marriage soon broke apart.. She. Finally, the twins reunited after their lengthy separation.. The Nation, India Known as a member of BRICs3, today’s India is commonly referred to as one of the economically biggest and strongest markets in the world.. Though India seems to be united,. democratic, well-off, and promising in many ways, it is still “the land of diversities par excellence” (Ram xi).. The rapid growth of national economy, like a blinding flash of light,. has made the unsolved social and cultural complexities, inconsistency and contractions within the country more invisible and obscure, and more aching to Roy: What is true is that India is an artificial State--a State that was created by a government, not a people.. A State created from the top down, not the bottom up.. The majority of India’s citizens will not (to this day) be able to identify her. 3. BRICs is the abbreviated term used to refer to the combination of Brazil, Russian, Indian, and China, four economically emerging markets nowadays..

(12) Chen 6. boundaries on a map, or say which language is spoken where or which god is worshiped in what region.. Most are too poor and too uneducated to have even an. elementary idea of the extent and complexity of their own country. impoverished, illiterate agrarian majority have no stake in the State.. The. (Roy xxv). For Roy, India as a nation in unity is barely an illusion. “Indian is, at best, a noisy slogan that comes around during the election,” so says Roy (xxvi).. Most Indians, especially those. from the underclass, have never developed a true sense of nation.. The fact is that Indians. are organized, not by any patriotic articulation or democratic discourse, but by a stratified and hierarchical socio-economic categorization of people that has been in use for thousands of years, that is, the caste system. fact of life at all times.. The Indian caste system has never been a fairy tale. It is a. It is an Indian way of looking at things, dealing with life and. interacting with people. It helps to keep a sense of order and peace among people.. Still. today the values of the caste system are held strongly in this emerging modern country. Many Indians have to endure different kinds of suffering in their lives, such as the exploitation, discrimination, marginalization, humiliation, etc., all of which are tactically justified and rationalized in the name of caste tradition.. The Caste System In one interview, Roy openly expresses her anxiety for her homeland, “India lives in several centuries at once” (qtd. in Bumiller C9).. Although India is economically speeding. up to win its title as a real developed country, it remains impotent in its dealings with many horrifying customs and ill inveteracy that are still so prevalent in its territory. problem of caste in India is such a plain and remarkable example.. For Roy, the. Caste as a cultural brand. has structured the Indian society into what it was in the ancient times and what it still is today. In some large cities, caste barriers are largely broken down as the modernization there grants the citizens much more exposure to the air of freedom.. However, the fastidiousness about.

(13) Chen 7. the caste and the loyalty paid to one’s caste are much difficult to eliminate, particularly in rural areas. Caste still provides a sense of community and belonging. Traditionally, there are four major caste divisions in the Indian caste system: Brahmins, Ksatriyas, Vaisyas and Sudras.. Caste roles are passed from the father to his children.. One’s birth defines everything, including one’s marriage and occupation.. Brahmins, the. highest rank, which literally denotes spiritual guidance or source of knowledge, include those who are priests, teachers or lawyers. landowner, in short, the nobility.. Ksatriyas work as the ruler, the warrior or the. Vaisyas take on the tasks of merchantry and agriculture.. Sudras are the manual and agricultural laborers, artisans, masons, etc. The four castes are classified according to one’s function, occupation and economic place in the society. Inter-caste marriage is generally not recognized, or customarily banned to keep a caste ritually clean. Outside the main caste levels live the Outcastes, also known as the Untouchables. They are recognized as the most lowly, impure and poor group of people, who make their living by scavenging, cleaning up human and animal wastes, dealing with dead bodies, killing or hunting animals for food, tanning in leather. Untouchables, as Roy compares them to the “Pariah kites” (210) that live on the perishing animal innards in The God of Small Things, work in unclean materials.. Those professions, according to Hinduism, involve too much. pollution. Though in the present-day India, Untouchability has been officially abolished by the law since the constitution of India in its preamble advocates justice, liberty, equality and fraternity shared among its entire people, the status of the Untouchables has very little improvement.. Most of them live the way of their untouchable forefathers, having no. opportunity to get rid of their inherited stigma and impoverishment.. The Casted Body As Robin Jeffrey notes in his observation on the Indian society, “[t]o maintain [caste].

(14) Chen 8. system, people ha[ve] to be recognisable” (20). Human body in the Indian caste system, as Robin Jeffery suggests, bears the regulations of caste and displays the mark of one’s caste identity.. The body is physically and symbolically casted. It is not a personal possession,. but the vehicle of cultural metaphor. First, there is an expectation in India that higher caste people will have lighter skin while the lower-caste people are dark skinned.. Besides, there. is a difference in the choice of fitting apparel for the body. “[People’s] costumes and styles of dress had to announce who they were,” says Jeffrey (20).. A European missionary in 1887. wrote, “Anyone after living a little while in the country can at first glance tell to what caste a stranger belongs by the way he or she wears the hair or their garments” (qtd. in Jeffrey 20). The subtleties of hairstyles and accessories ensure that one’s caste identity can be distinguished and recognized even at a quick glance.. The physical appearance “represent[s]. daily affirmation of the superiority of certain groups and the inferiority of others” (Jeffrey 20). Regulations or constraints of the caste system rule the surface of the body and decide different clothing for people in different social layers. activity is limited by one’s caste, too.. There are “boundaries on where particular people. might go; constraints on what they might do” (Jeffrey 19). work, eat or walk together.. More than that, one’s physical. People of different castes don’t. As Anupama Rao suggests, caste had better to. be understood as a form of embodiment, i.e., as the means through which the body as a form of “bare life” or a mere biological surface is rendered expressive and meaningful.. Caste ideologies draw on biological metaphors of stigma and. defilement to enable differentiated conceptions of personhood, and to render the body a culturally legible surface.. (5). In The God of Small Things, the concept of spatial segregation is conveyed straightforwardly in the scene when Kochu Maria kept Vellya Paapen waiting outside the Ayemenem house, “on the topmost step, almost inside the her Touchable kitchen” (241). Vellya Pappen was.

(15) Chen 9. prohibited from going into the places where the hosts did not welcome the other castes, especially the untouchables.. A further extension of the concept of spatial segregation. renders a great deal of regulations regarding physical contact, and therefore imposes a stigma on the untouchables’ bodies.. Pushed by Mammachi, Vellya Pappen “was taken completely. by surprise” when he “stumbled backwards down the kitchen steps and lay sprawled in the wet mud” (243) in the downpour.. “Part of the taboo of being an untouchable was expecting. not to be touched,” Roy writes (243). The taboo, most significantly, implies the premier and also the elementary emphasis on caste purity.. As Anupama Rao elaborates, “[t]aboo. regarding touch--ritual sanctioning of practices such as spatial segregation and taboos about physical contact--operate along the axes of purity and pollution that manage bodies and physical space” (5-6).. The Curse on Indian Women What the caste system involves is a kind of body politics.. Symbolic regulations. concerning the caste difference and the forms and the degree of intimacy imprint on the human body.. As a consequence, human bodies are more than “biological bodies,” but rather. “metaphorical collectivities” (Rao 6).. Most importantly, caste, as Rao argues, “is an. apparatus that regulates sexuality” (6).. “Such ideologies are embedded in material forms of. dispossession that are also always forms of symbolic dispossession,” Rao elaborates, “and they are mediated by the regulation of sexuality and gender identity through the rules of kinship and caste purity” (6).. Sexuality and the concern about caste purity are closely. linked together, and the complex relationship between gender and caste, without doubt, becomes the cause of the domination and oppression of the female bodies because of women’s natural ability of giving birth.. “In contrast to the tenuous and fleeting role of man. in the process of procreation,” as Leela Dube points out, “a woman’s role is long drawn and entails an involvement which is beyond extrication” (233).. Women’s role as a mother is.

(16) Chen 10. crucial for “maintaining and, to some extent, changing caste” (Dube 223).. Caste, based on. the principle of patrilineal descent, places emphasis on the purity of the mother, and by articulating the difference between male and female bodies in respect of procreation, constitutes and produces its control over women’s sexuality and marriage.. It is expectable. that the culturally and socially coded management of the Indian women’s sexuality “constitute[s] a central arena in which caste impinges on women’s lives” (Dube 233). Women, in some critics’ ethical considerations, “are objectified and become instruments in […] the structures and processes implicated in the reproduction of caste” (Dube 223). Their unalterable and inflexible duty of maintaining the caste, unfortunately, becomes a curse. Acting on the premise that the gender purity of women, especially the upper-caste women, guarantees a caste against the pollution from the without, Indians operate a scheme of caste principles of sexual asymmetry to discipline womanhood, to restrain women’s sexual desires and to arrange marriages for them. Indian women, as compared with men, are a disadvantaged group that is dispossessed of the right to choose the spouse, and is often silent on the issue of arranged marriage.4. Since her virginity is inextricably bound up with the. hierarchies and boundaries of caste, a woman is expected to devote herself to marriage only once in her lifetime, that is, her “primary marriage”: “A primary marriage connotes the marriage with full rites of a virgin with a man from an appropriate caste group. goes through such a marriage only once in her life” (Dube 236).. A woman. On the other hand, as Dube. observes, the cultural perception of sexual asymmetry allows loose management of man’s sexuality: “For a man, […] there are no restrictions on the number of times he can marry with full rites as long as the bride has not married before” (237). 4. However, men and women all. Marriage arranged by the parents is so common in India that less than 10 percent of the weddings there in the present India are love marriages. Arranged marriage that receives the support and blessings from both sides of the groom and brides’ parents and relatives is believed to be a happy and perfect union. The divorce rate in India is rather low, less than 2 percent. Refer to the web pages for the statistics, www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3321/win4a.htm and www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-in-india.html..

(17) Chen 11. comply with the rule that prohibits inter-caste unions. Inter-caste unions incur degradation to one caste, and the offspring of inter-caste marriages are supposed to be rendered a social status inferior to the children born to the eligible unions.. The Love Laws In The God of Small Things, Roy introduces to her reader the caste regulation of sexuality in the Indian society, which was referred to as The Love Laws, the oxymoronic term Roy ingeniously creates for the novel, with her close observation and sharp criticism on how the tradition disciplines people’s bodies, suppresses their individual desires, and traumatizes the rebellious hearts throbbing at the terrific punishment brought by “[t]he laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.. And how much” (33).. Basically, the Love Laws that. points toward the cultural basis upon which Indian society addresses its traditional and strict control of caste segregation and sexual discrimination is a form of power.. In the novel, the. characters had perceived, more or less, a suffocating atmosphere because the power of the Love Laws, like many other forms of power, was external or alien to its object. As Judith Butler contends that “[w]e are used to thinking or power as what presses on the subject from the outside” (2).. A feeling of being dominated was provoked, and the tension that grew. when the characters found contradictions between the ruler, the Love Laws, and themselves made the experience of subordination become more and more agonizing for them.. However,. as Judith Butler has contended in The Psychic Life of Power, it is really paradoxical that “what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another” (1-2). The power that is generally identified as the source of repression, coercion, and regulation pressing from the outside is internalized without a subject’s awareness, assimilated to be a part of the subject, and eventually “become essential to the formation, persistence, and continuity of the subject” (Butler 3). Power, after all, is not absolutely negative and contradictory for the subject. Following Butler’s Foucauldian.

(18) Chen 12. view, we should understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are.. …. [P]ower imposes itself on. us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms.… [T]he “we who accept such terms are fundamentally dependent on those terms for “our” existence.. (Butler 2). Then, the condition of being subject to a power signifies a process of becoming a subject. So unusual it is that the subject’s self-identity is formed by power, in the pain of submission. As a form of power, the Love Laws, in Butler’s sense, “first [appear] as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination” (3).. Most characters in the novel,. like many Indians that Roy has observed in the real world, were truly submissive to the customary practice of caste and sexual regulations.. Yet, there are still characters, Ammu. and Velutha for example, who once tried to be submissive, but finally failed in holding back their dissatisfaction and anger to which the submissive group responded with “outrage” (45) as well.. As the narrator utters, all the emotional reactions to the Love Laws, such as the. dissatisfaction and anger, are ambivalent in a way because it is the Love Laws, “[t]he laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, the jelly jelly” (31), grants them a meaningful position and constitutes the very condition for their living or existence. What they hated so much, sarcastically enough, is what they had to count on.. Without being noticed, a process of the internalization and reproduction of. the Love Laws proceeded.. The Indian Motherhood In her extensive and detailed description of the interactions between Ammu and her.

(19) Chen 13. twins, Roy seems to point out that motherhood as a site of cultural bearing is exactly where the content of the Love Laws was conveyed to the following generations.. Motherhood, both. in the novel and in the real life, carries the public expectation that a mother in her motherhood bears the pedagogic responsibility to pass down the cultural legacy. Motherhood is not just an institution of child nurturance and rearing, but also plays a significant role in the preservation of culture. Mothers are supposed to teach the children what their mothers had taught them before.. Ammu, as an Indian mother, was well aware. that she had to give her children a lesson on the deep-rooted ideology in regard to the caste and sexual differences in the Indian society. In the airport scene in which Ammu reproached Rahel for hiding herself behind “the dirty airport curtain” (139), she consciously fulfilled the maternal obligation. “And the other thing, Rahel,” Ammu said, “I think it’s high time that you learned the difference between CLEAN and DIRTY.. Especially in this country.”. …….. “Your dress is--was--CLEAN,” Ammu said. Those Kangaroos are DIRTY.. “That curtain is DIRTY.. Your hands are DIRTY.”. Rahel was frightened by the way Ammu said CLEAN and DIRTY so loudly. As though she was talking to a deaf person.. (142). Ammu raised volume to ensure that Rahel would catch the message in her speaking and not do the same thing again that would bring her the shame of being an incompetent mother. Indian mothers’ duty to instill respect and deference to the caste system and their eagerness to see their children behave in conformity with the cultural doctrines, to a considerable degree, complicate maternal love.. Maternal love can no longer be discussed. simply as a natural drive on the level of humanity.. As Roy tries to suggest in her depiction. of Ammu’s severe attitude towards raising her children, Indian maternal love has to be harsh, domineering and disciplinary sometimes so that the mother can train her child to be obedient.

(20) Chen 14. and loyal, first to the parents and the family, and then to the community and society.. The. cultivation of obedience as a focus in child rearing has transmuted the mother-child relation in the motherhood into another hierarchy within the hierarchy of caste. Maternal love can’t remain just as a self-sacrificing and ever-forgiving affection.. It appears to be a family. politics that aims to manage, discipline and manipulate the children’s behaviors with its rhetoric used to extract their obedience to the concept concerning caste segregation and gender purity at their early age. The seven-year old twin characters, Estha and Rahel, in the novel were too young to fully comprehend the meaning of Ammu’s severe reprimand by which she inculcated in them the essence of Indian caste system. The children’s innocent hearts hurt by their mother’s harsh words suffered the persistent anxiety about losing her love. Rahel in particular could not stop thinking whether Ammu loved her less. The unsaid soliloquy repeating in her mind, “A little less her Ammu loved her” (107), harassed and haunted her day and night. It is ironic that Ammu, who was always so earnest in correcting her children’s misbehaviors lest they should violate the CLEAN-DIRTY regulation in the caste system, found there was a contradiction within herself for she could not put what she had taught them into practice.. She was actually doing what she had forbidden her children to do and what. the Love Laws strictly forbade her to do, that is, falling in love with an untouchable.. In. Ammu’s secret love affair, Roy on one hand points out the universal problem that one’s deeds are usually out of accord with his or her words, and on the other hand Roy dramatizes the inhumanity of the caste system in which there is a perpetual conflict between one’s wish and the social codes that keep one away from what he or she wants.. The Conflict Ammu was a victim in this kind of conflict. As an upper-caste woman in the novel who had faced “[t]he ‘softer’ forms of gendered domination” that “were no less oppressive.

(21) Chen 15. than the expropriation of manual and sexual labour experienced by lover-caste women” (Rao 17) in Pappachi’s domestic violence, Mammachi’s preference for the son Chacko, her female relatives’ disdain for her divorcee identity, she was so discontent with the sexual oppression supported by the Love Laws.. Embraced by “multiple patriarchies” (Rao 27) and tormented. by them, she became an angry woman in whom there was an “Unsafe Edge” (44). “It was what she had battling inside her.. An unmixable mix.. motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (44).. The infinite tenderness of She was propagating and. promoting the philosophy of the Love Laws in her motherhood in the day time while she indulged herself in her secret love to unleash her anger in the night.. The love affair. embellished with a great deal of pornography in which the lovers vehemently communicated their anger at the social inequity with their bodies is itself a political gesture of resistance. The body contact Ammu has with an untouchable body allows her to temporarily shed her burden of chastity and caste purity, while enabling her to declare ownership of her body. Also, at the moment of the moonlight date, she could temporarily indulge herself in the delusion that she was the master, the god of her own life, the life filled with small, ordinary and trivial things. Ammu and Velutha were instinctively “stuck to the Small Things” (320) in their daily lives, as if they were hoping that by doing so they could escape from the realm of the big things, in which people rationally discuss the issues regarding the country, the society, the human history, etc.. The small things that fascinate the lovers “are the trivial diversions that. the characters focus upon in order to avoid confronting the pain of the big things” (Kendall and Silva 61).. However, as the narrator says, they were still caught by the big things. because there was the trace of the big things everywhere in the small things of the everyday. “The Big Things ever lurked inside” (320). The Big Things were internalized, performed and mediated through the small things of the everyday, for instance, Ammu reprimanding her twins, Kochu Maria keeping Vellya Pappen waiting outside the kitchen, and Vellya Pappen.

(22) Chen 16. reporting her son’s relation to the Ipe family.. Ammu and Velutha’s secret love affair. ostensibly was a small thing between two individuals in their private lives, but the transgression of one of the big things in the Indian society, the Love Laws, lurked inside. The ensuing punishment afflicted on the lovers’ bodies transgressing the boundaries of the Love Laws, unfortunately, caused a trauma on the witnesses Estha and Rahel, who witnessed the brutal death of Velutha and the gradual decline towards the death of Ammu.. Trauma Trauma has been generally described “as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (Caruth 1996, 3).. As Freud, the forerunner of the trauma theory nowadays, points. out in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the wound of the mind, unlike the wound of the body, can not be detected by the naked eyes, and therefore is hard to be healed or understood. Only through the inexplicably repeated nightmares or other behaviors the trauma victims suffered can the psychoanalyst trace the cause of trauma back to a catastrophic or overwhelming event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Caruth 1996, 4).. A traumatic event that. came too quickly when one was not prepared for it is not fully recognized or experienced at it occurrence.. There was no instant response to the event due to the lack of preparedness that. later results in the event’s lack of integration into consciousness.. The traumatic history,. which is not integrated but requests integration, has no way to go and return to the one who passed through it in an intrusive way, in a form of compulsive repetition “which seems to be entirely outside their wish or control” (Caruth 1996, 2).. The “unwished-for repetition”. (Caruth 1996, 2), which can also be termed as the traumatic symptom, constitutes the lingering effect of trauma.. The shocking reality of the traumatic event returns to haunt its. survivors in the symptomatic repetition, and the state of possession has made great harm to.

(23) Chen 17. the traumatic survivors’ health and lives. In The God of Small Things, Estha and Rahel demonstrated the typical features of trauma.. Roy carefully weaves her vivid and impressive descriptions of their traumatic. repetitions into the text, and in the opening of the nineteenth chapter she straightforwardly reveals her attempt to unfold a story of trauma: “[Inspector Thomas Mathew] sensed the growing incoherence in the children. He noted the dilated pupils. He had seen it all before … the human mind’s escape valve.. Its way of managing trauma” (297-98, emphasis. added). Sitting in the police station, the twins was ignorant of the impact of the traumatic event that they didn’t “fully [graspe] in the first time” (Caruth 1996, 62), the violent death of Velutha.. The impact didn’t lie in the shock and fright of the threat of death they were forced. to see in Velutha’s dying body, but in their reencounter with the traumatic scene in their traumatic survival, in their belated responses to the accident which were actually symptomatic repetitions.. Thesis Structure In the first chapter of this thesis, I endeavor to read The God of Small Things as a trauma narrative and focus on the characterization of the twin protagonists in which Roy develops her literary representation of trauma.. In Roy’s description there is the most difficult part of. traumatic survival, that is, the acting-out of trauma.. The body tells and expresses what is. unknown, inaccessible to the consciousness and what can’t be articulated by words but only through bodily performances.. Estha in his recurring image and Rahel in her repeated. nightmares re-experienced the traumatic past they shared but could not articulate because of “its very incomprehensibility” (Caruth 1995, 6).. “What returns to haunt the victim,”. according to Caruth, “is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (6).. The incomprehensibility plus the. inexpressibility of trauma results in Estha’s mutism.. In his silence, Estha continued to.

(24) Chen 18. recapture the fragments of the traumatic event; meanwhile, he kept on reproaching himself for his complicity with the real persecutor. In fact, the novel suggests that the persecutor is not a specific character, but the very mechanism of the social disciplinary power that Roy names as the Love Laws. In the following chapter, I intend to discuss how Roy presents the power of the Love Laws.. The Love Laws set its basis upon the Indian caste system and, at the same time, aims. to sustain the caste system.. Within the caste hierarchies, there is a rigid sexual hierarchy.. Women’s bodies are imprisoned and their sexuality is regulated against their own will to maintain the stability and purity of caste.. The caste oppression survived the colonial British. India and continues to torture its people even in today’s India.. In the novel, to keep the. Love Laws operating seems like a civic duty and public consensus.. Thus, the kinship love. between the parent and the child has to be subject to the Love Laws and makes necessary sacrifice.. Any illicit love relationship, of course, must be cut off.. In the tug of war. between love and laws, the transgressing lovers, Ammu and Velutha, were brought to face their inexorable fates by the mortal force of social discipline that is substantially unjust and merciless in Roy’s point of view. The final chapter is a rather ambitious piece. It deals with the two important love relationships in the novel at the same time, namely the mother-child bond between Ammu and her twins, and the romantic love affair between Ammu and Velutha. chapter, I will add a new perspective to the thesis.. There in this. From the perspective that suggests the. aggressiveness and brutality of love, I will scrutinize Ammu’s maternal behaviors and argues that love and laws are not all the time distinct from each other. As Roy says in an interview that love sometimes emerges as a “brutal” (qtd. in Abraham 1998, 91) power, Ammu’s maternal love that bore the social expectation that a mother must imbue in the child the essence of the caste system had provoked in her children the feeling of being hurt because she was always so eager to correct Estha and Rahel’s childish doings and to see them feed back.

(25) Chen 19. with obedience.. In the novel, maternal love in many occasions is not forgiving and gentle,. but punitive and tough.. It operates and functions like another form of laws.. Ammu in her. motherhood duplicated the Love Laws, but at the same time, she was resentful at the Love Laws.. Her detestation at the Love Laws became the dynamics of her love with Velutha.. is regrettable that the secret love affair was found out at last.. It. Although Roy at the end of the. book seems to show a positive attitude with which she looks forwards to a possible tomorrow in which inter-caste romance will be tolerated and blessed, there is still an air of pessimism pervading the novel because of Velutha’s death..

(26) Chen 20. Chapter One Writing Trauma in The God of Small Things. What lies at the heart of The God of Small Things is the twin characters’ encounter with the loss of their loved ones.. The family abandoned their mother Ammu, and then Ammu. abandoned herself to a silent death in despair.. Velutha, Ammu’s untouchable lover, was. beaten to death not long after the exposure of their love affair.. Estha and Rahel, bearing the. witness of the couple’s tragedy, continued to be afflicted by the traumatic past throughout their lives. As the narrative jumps back and forth between the twins’ childhood and their present adulthood the reader perceives the long-lasting effect of trauma.. Trauma, according. to Cathy Caruth, is “not simply a problem of destruction, but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival” (24).. Besides locating the very residence of trauma in the breath-taking scene. of Velutha’s violent death, Roy in the novel turns to explore the baffling relation between trauma and survival by presenting the twins’ lifelong hard battle with the enigma of their traumatic survival.. For Estha and Rahel, “those who undergo trauma, it is not only the. moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis” (Caruth 1995, 9).. What makes the survival a crisis is the suffering. of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Caruth defines concisely as a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of ) stimuli recalling the event.. (1995, 4). The characteristics of traumatic survival are found in Roy’s portrayal of the bizarre patterns of Estha and Rahel’s behaviors, which were disregarded by their family but carry outstanding significance for the critics and readers who are interested in the literary representation of.

(27) Chen 21. trauma.. The twins’ unusual behaviors, although seemingly different in some details,. embody the constellation of traumatic symptoms.. Those pathological symptoms all point. towards the trauma in this novel, which “is never assimilated or experienced fully at the time” it occurred, “but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 1995, 4). The traumatic history returned, belatedly, insistently, and against Estha and Rahel’s will. possessed by it.. The more they tried to repress it, the more they were grasped and The past made its intrusion into the twins’ lives over and over again in the. form of repeated dreams, images, thoughts and behaviors to remind them of the traumatic event that seemed to be forgotten but actually inhabited them all the time.. By reiterating, in. fragmented passages and phrases that appear over and over again in the novel, the twins’ involuntary flashback to the traumatic event occurred at their age of seven, Roy reveals the lingering effect of trauma and the ordeal of traumatic survival. Whenever Estha contemplated on the value of his survival the “memories of a broken man” (14) tiptoed into his brain: “[H]e carried inside him the memory … of a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile. reflected in it. him” (32).. Of a spreading pool of clear liquid with a bare bulb. Of a bloodshot eye that had opened, wandered and then fixed its gaze on. Though so many years had passed by, the image of Velutha’s broken body was. still fixed in Estha’s mind. As Caruth has asserted that “[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (1995, 4-5), the corpse image haunting Estha over the years confirmed his identity as a trauma victim. of science, is the utmost of abjection. Powers of Horror (4).. “The corpse, seen without God and outside. It is death infecting life,” so writes Julia Kristeva in. When Estha was brought to Velutha, a near-corpse lying like a. “pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down smile” in a pool of blood and urine spreading from him on “the scummy, slippery floor,” he retched because of “[t]he smell of shit” (303) there. Velutha with his trampled body, at this moment, became the abject that Estha as a living being must “permanently thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva 3). The act of retching or.

(28) Chen 22. vomiting had marked the border between life and death.. Estha “[thrust himself] to the side”. where the death was not and “turn[ed] [himself] away from defilement, sewage, and muck” (Kristeva 2).. Confronting the near-corpse that violently upset his stomach, Estha carried out. Baby Kochamma’s instruction to identify Velutha as an abductor. (303).. “Estha’s mouth said Yes”. He was forced to make the most painful choice in his lifetime: saving Ammu or. Velutha?. Velutha’s broken body right in front of him demonstrated the destructive power of. death and stirred his feeling of disgust at defilement.. He was clear that his mother Ammu’s. fate would very likely be the same as Velutha’s.. Without his complicity with Baby. Kochamma and Inspector Thomas Mathew, Ammu would become another corpse.. As. Kristeva has asserted, “[t]he corpse, that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death” (3).. To rescue Ammu from death and its contaminants that were going to engulf. her, Estha was forced by the others and even himself to give the false testimony. was him” (32).. “Yes, it. These words, together with the image of Velutha’s dying body, constituted. the core of Estha’s major trauma in the novel.. The traumatic event during its occurrence. was too overwhelming for Estha to “assimilate it to an established framework of understanding” (Levi 189) he already had at the age of seven.. The inaccessibility of a. cognitive and conscious knowledge about this traumatic experience and its reception persisted, through a period of latency, till the insistent return of the images, hallucinations and thoughts which were “absolutely true to the event” (Caruth 1995, 5) reconnected him to the horrible truth of the traumatic past in spite of fact that he was in another place and another time. Estha, in a very significant way, was the witness who held the truth of the traumatic accident.. “A witness,” notes Dori Laub, “is a witness to the truth of what happens during an. event” (65).. Velutha’s death was not a just treatment but a product of secret alliance of an. angry family and the police.. Estha’s dishonest testimony, “Yes, it was him” (32), completed. the complicit identification perfectly as Baby Kochamma and the inspector wished.. The.

(29) Chen 23. truth of the traumatic death of Velutha had been recorded in Estha’s memory, and for the rest of his life he kept on condemning himself for his participation in putting Velutha to death. In Estha’s case as in many other traumatized people’s, “the struggle to maintain the process of recording and of salvaging and safeguarding evidence was carried on relentlessly” (Laub 68). Like “the crematorium management” that “must have a system” (156) to take care of the ashes, Estha had his own system of protecting the evidence related to this traumatic event. In Roy’s portrayal of Estha, he was “the Keeper of Records” (156). His peculiar habit of keeping anything that could be served as a historical trace of his life, such as “bus tickets, bank receipts, cash memos, checkbook stubs” (156), apparently and directly reflected his insistence on recollecting the remainders of his past.. Among the evidence associated with. the truth of the event about Velutha’s death, the word “Yes” (32), because of its decisive contribution in the flagrant collaboration between Baby Kochamma and the inspector to declare Velutha a malicious criminal who deserved an ignoble death, was the one Estha unconsciously preserved with the most effort, and it was the only evidence he owned. “Hoovering didn’t seem to help. It was lodged there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars.. That couldn’t be worried loose” (32).. Paradoxically enough,. Estha was passively possessed by the evidence while he actively put the evidence in his safekeeping.. The sound of “Yes, it was him”, merging with the sicksweet smell of blood and. the image of Velutha’s deformed face, became a serial of “terrible pictures in his head” (32) visited him from time to time and imperiled his subjectivity. Like many other trauma victims, Estha seems to have the manipulative power to manage his memory components at will, yet the fact is that his autonomy, unknowingly, is taken over by the objects he thinks he can control.. Memories concerning the traumatic event “occupy. the psyche without being absorbed or assimilated compulsively return” (Di Prete 485).. The. compulsive return of the traumatic scene and the voice “Yes, it was him” buried yet buzzing, also the return of the “trauma of loss and guilt” (Di Prete 486) he experienced, is bestrewn.

(30) Chen 24. with some kind of specter or phantom quality. “The phantom’s periodic and compulsive return works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography,” so suggests Nicolas Abraham (173).. More significantly, as Di Prete extracts from. Abraham’s definition of phantom, the uncanny “‘stranger’ or ‘foreign body,’” (485) haunting the trauma victim as a speaking other living within the traumatized self and producing words against the subject’s willingness in his language, is “making subjectivity heterogeneous” (Abraham 1994, 175). As Laub points out in her research into the Holocaust witnesses’ attitudes towards their traumatic experiences that, “by never divulging their stories, they feel that the rest of the world will never come to know the real truth” (67), the traumatized survives not simply to salvage the historical evidence but also to tell their stories and have them listened. Though time goes by and ages the survivors, the traumatic scenes that they once witnessed don’t fade out of their memory.. Overwhelming events of the past come back to haunt them in the. forms of intrusive images, dreams, hallucination and thoughts, and awaken them to the need to meditate on the meaning of their traumatic survival, the roles they had played in the traumatic experiences and the responsibilities they have for easing the pain of the deceased and themselves.. The “imperative to tell and to be heard” (Laub 63) emerges hence.. The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive.. There is, in each survivor, an. imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself.. One has to know one’s. buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life. (Laub 63) The struggle to tell is a life-consuming task.. Through the telling and listening, the. traumatized or survivor relives the traumatic event.. The difference is that in the reenactment. of traumatic event he is no more the helpless witness as he was in the past. This time, he is a conscious narrator of history.. The act of telling, basically, is a required step during the.

(31) Chen 25. recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder because telling or narrating itself initiates the process of healing.. The healing process of trauma “cannot take place until the trauma is. brought to consciousness through narrative” (Berger 27).. With the operation of narrating. the trauma, a trauma victim can gradually remove himself from the shadow of pathological symptoms that was cast on his traumatic survival.. Finally, the thing that he could never. fully experience as it occurred is integrated into a part of his conscious understanding. However, most traumatized always find themselves meet the very limit of expressivity when they try to put the inner compulsion to tell their stories into action.. “There are never. enough words or the right words, there is never enough time or the right time, and never enough listening or the right listening to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory, and speech” (63), writes Laub.. In her observation on the Holocaust. survivors, many cases exhibit struggles with linguistic disability. They have little trust in the language they use. It seems that no adequate diction and statement is available for them to tell the things that they really want to express. Even a skillful speaker has his tongue tied when he endeavors to talk to the psychoanalyst about the kidnapping that traumatized him in his childhood.. Such linguistic obstacle may depress the trauma survivor to a certain degree,. and he gives up the attempt to tell and to be heard. ignored, and the traumatic truth remains buried.. The imperative to tell is repressed,. Like many other scholars, Laub shows. grave concern for this phenomenon because the impossibility of telling can lead to a commonly prevailing silence about the traumatic truth, especially the truth of some significant historical event such as the Holocaust.. Any breakthrough in the treatment of. traumatic mutism helps to construct a more complete, reliable and authentic version of human history or personal chronicle. Moreover, by getting rid of the pathological silence stemming from the impossibility to tell, the survivor acquires a healthier and easier life within which he values and gives a positive judgment on his traumatic survival. On the contrary, what the reader sees in The God of Small Things is how chronic silence.

(32) Chen 26. depraves a young witness’s quality of life after a traumatic event.. “Estha had always been a. quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when […] he had stopped talking. when.’. Stop talking altogether, that is.. The fact is that there wasn’t an ‘exactly. It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop.. A barely noticeable. quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say” (12).. Silence about the trauma in Estha’s situation was so stubborn that it had developed. into a permanent loss of language. For Estha, the silence came late. at the moment when he was brought to identify Velutha.. It should have come. Compelled to join in the complicit. act to incriminate Velutha, Estha was dispossessed of the right to be silent in order to save his mother Ammu.. Yet what he really gained from the sacrifice of fidelity to his friendship with. Velutha was not the well-being of Ammu, but a sense of guilt.. Guilt was internalized.. Eventually, spontaneous silence came to obsess him, and he paid not a bit of resistance to it as if he was making expiation for his treachery to Velutha many years ago. Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms.. It rocked him to the rhythm. of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue.. It stripped. his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable.. Numb.. (13). There was nothing wrong with Estha’s vocal organs. when he finally had the right and freedom to do so.. He just chose not to speak anymore What accompanied the silence, a. “dramatic deviation from societal norms of ‘healthy’ behaviour” (Fox 54), were other psychosomatic problems of disorder.. Within the envelopment of extreme silence from. which he derived unusual pleasure, Estha disconnected his relatedness with people, the elementary part of human relatedness that counts on conversation.. “Slowly, over the years,.

(33) Chen 27. Estha withdrew from the world” (13). a “very little space in the world” (12).. Autism and quietness altogether imprisoned Estha in In this little space there was nothing but complete. silence. Witness or survivor of a traumatic event, like Estha, who clearly could not articulate his traumatic story, takes refuge in a silent corner of his or her own.. This kind of sanctuary,. though alienated from the crowd, doesn’t guarantee an improved pattern of life.. In Laub’s. opinion, the trauma survivor that chooses to be silent is, at the same time, by his own hands placing himself in a more suffering and “endless struggle with and over a delusion” in which he wrongly takes himself as a supporter of the “external evil” (64) that causes trauma. “None finds peace in silence, even when it is their choice to remain silent,” says Laub (64). Holocaust survivors, for instance, “who do not tell their story become victims of a distorted memory” (Laub 64). The “not telling” of the story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny. The events become more and more distorted in their silent retention and pervasively invade and contaminate the survivor’s daily life.. The longer the story remains untold, the. more distorted it becomes in the survivor’s conception of it, so much so that the survivor doubts the reality of the actual events.. (Laub 64). The worst outcome, as Laub sees in one woman Holocaust survivor’s testimony, is that “[t]he untold events had become so distorted in [one’s] conscious memory as to make [one] believe that [he himself], and not the perpetrator, was responsible for the atrocities [he] witnessed” (65).. Understood by the way of Laub, Estha’s silence implies a masochistic life pattern.. By shutting himself in the silent space, he enjoyed himself in “steep[ing] in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man” (14).. He was prompted by the “Yes, it was. him” (32) hovering around in his mind to denounce himself as a traitor to the friendship he had with Velutha and also an accomplice in Baby Kochamma’s conspiracy to charge Velutha. The responsibility for Velutha’s death and Ammu’s sorrow descended on his heart: “It was his.

(34) Chen 28. fault that the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting. His fault that she died alone in the lodge with no one to lie at the back and talk to her” (308).. The italics in Estha’s. soliloquy indicate the great pressure of self-condemnation inside his psyche.. He had. ascribed Velutha and Ammu’s misfortunes to his compromise with Baby Kochamma and the inspector so that he assigned himself to a co-executioner role in the traumatic event.. A. distorted understanding of the traumatic event is created by the survivor’s traumatized self so much so that he or she tends to view the survival of the trauma as a disgrace.. To Estha,. there was an analogy between his survival and that of “Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel” (13). “[T]he fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle” (13), a miracle to which he gave bitter smiles because it was the prize for his complicity with the authorities at the expense of Velutha and Ammu’s lives.. Self-reproach led to self-disparagement. Estha. “had acquired the ability … to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye” (12). Throughout his traumatic survival he was in pursuit of neglect and apathy, either from the within or without, towards his own living. Rahel, too, displayed the propensity for emotional “self-imprisonment” (Laub 64) albeit that she seemed to be more vigorous and extroverted compared to Estha.. Roy “spent her. holidays in Ayemenem, largely ignored by Chacko and Mammachi … and largely ignoring Baby Kochamma” (16-17).. Thanks to her least degree of involvement in the false. identification of abduction criminal, she didn’t live a life of self-inflicted blame like that of her twin brother.. For Rahel, Baby Kochamma was the one to blame for the tragedy.. She. was the instigator, “doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with other people’s passions” (305).. Rahel insisted on her belief that “Chacko breaking. down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned” (305). During her stay in Ayemenem, Rahel by deliberately neglecting Baby Kochamma’s presence.

(35) Chen 29. in the family carried out her secret revenge and punishment for what she had done in the traumatic event.. Cruelty and mercilessness shown by Baby Kochamma and Chacko in their. handling of Ammu and Velutha had made so great an impact on Rahel that she tended to have a distrust of human relationship. In her mother’s example, she witnessed the vulnerability and unreliability of human relationship.. There was something inexplicable in human nature. that induced Baby Kochamma and Chacko to hurt Ammu. them didn’t help to prevent her from being the target.. Kinship that Ammu had with. As for the love relationship between. Ammu and her twins, Baby Kochamma made use of it to deceive the twins into cooperating. Putting too much faith in human relationship, to Rahel, could be very dangerous, and love relationship was especially dangerous. death” (307).. She knew well what it meant by “lov[ing] a man to. In Roy’s description of Rahel’s belated response to the traumatic death of. Velutha, Rahel, in many ways, resembles her twin brother Estha. Both were struck by “psychic numbing” (Caruth 136). Psychic numbness, so Robert Jay Lifton’s discusses with Caruth in an interview, “had elements of repression, elements of isolation, denial, […] but was primarily a cessation of feeling” (Caruth 136).. Estha, who was pleased with his. survival as “[a] quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise” (13), was fairly apathetic to human interactions. Rahel in her school years kept people out of her world since she would rather “decorat[e] a knob of fresh cow dung with small flowers” (17) than socialize with the schoolmates.. Plainly, she “[h]ad no friends” (18). Solitary as she was, whatever opinions. people had about her couldn’t bother her.. Emotionlessness was the extreme expression of. her self-defense against the uncertain quality of human relationship that she considered as the very reason why Velutha and Ammu were betrayed and hurt by their friends and family. It continued during the days Rahel spent in Delhi, and later impoverished her marriage with Larry McCaslin: “[W]hen they made love he was offended by her eyes. though they belonged to someone else.. Someone watching.. [….]. They behaved as. He was exasperated. because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference.

(36) Chen 30. and despair” (20). Rahel had kept Larry McCaslin in complete ignorance of the traumatic event happening in her childhood.. It seems that she and Estha reached an unspoken agreement to be always. reticent about it.. “[T]he emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the. other.. That the two things fitted together.. Like stacked spoons” (20-21).. Quietness was. imposed on Estha by himself as the penalty for his involvement in condemning Velutha to death while Rahel was fixated on the idea that, if she could have done or not done something, she might have changed the destinies of Velutha and Ammu. played was a powerless role in the traumatic scene.. In the end, what she really. She simply remained in the Inspector’s. office, listening to “the rude sound of Baby Kochamma’s relief dribbling down the sides of the Inspector’s pot in his attached toilet” (303).. “The Inspector’s pot” that accepted Baby. Kochamma’s “stool” (30), in its figurative sense, represents the harmonious collusion between Baby Kochamma and the inspector that Rahel had no ability to abort. Rahel, a flesh embodiment of the “Small God” (20) in Roy’s narrative, was filled with a feeling of remorse for her powerlessness and helplessness during the traumatic event of Velutha’s death for the rest of her life. That 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 own temerity.. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he. became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. mattered. enough.. Nothing much. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important Because Worse Things had happened. (20). Dominant social norms must be maintained regardless of the cost of living.. Any. individual’s tears, despair or misfortune is relatively a small matter, not worthy of the “Big God[’s]” (20) consideration as compared with the seriousness of necessary punishment for transgressors.. In order to live on in a place in which the societal wholeness is the priority.