Zusammenfassung der Ressource
The God of Small Things
- Historical and Political
- Caste
- Gender
- Ammu
- Reclaim and reposes
a world which
marginalizes women
- Kochamma's resentment to Ammu 'she saw her quarrelling with a fate
that she, Baby kKochamma herself, felt she had graciously accepted'
- Families rejection was punishment for
attempt to transgress moral + social
boundaries
- The encounters told by women: Baby
Kochamma 'Non-affair' Father Mulligan,
Ammu father beating Mammachi,
Chacko through Marget, Rahels
perception as 7yr old
- Westernisation
- Effect of a globalised media = exemplified by
Estha’s Elvis Puff, Baby Kochamma’s satellite
television addiction, or The Sound of Music
- Chacko’s description of the family’s distance: reminiscent of iconic western films and stories (Hansel
and Gretal + Wizard of Oz)
- Baby Kochamma obsession with soaps are a
familiarity; the dramatized life which she is used
to
- Post-colonialism
- Reference to HOD
- colonial culture 'haunting' the novel
- Conrad: Criticized moral basis of
imperial rule
- History house conversion
- Democracy = replaced by consumerism
(Urich Beck)
- A mutant variety of colonialism, only now technologically supported
- Helping those who had a head start -(Chacko)
- Epitomizing the rise in trade with 'paradise pickles' - an image of
globalization
- Rudyard Kipling
- By the late 19thC Eng. lit. expanded from
the ideas of moral superiority of
"Englishness", started to emerge imperialist
values
- Colonial work ethic taught in Raj fictions (Kipling)
- The Jungle Book
- Ironic reference
- Dislocating effect of colonialism
- But! Newman reminds us awareness of Shakesp.
'The Tempest' 'Julius Caesar' cultural pretensions
of Indian middle class
- Chacko: Anglophiles (admiration) or actual pain of
disinheritance
- 'We be of one blood'
- Metaphor ='mixed-blood'
hybridity like Mowgli the
'man-cub'
- Modernism Vs Post.
- Narrative
- 'India lives in several different countries at the
same time. Somehow we manage to progress
and regress simultaneously'
- 'Schizophrenic nature of it' -
Consumerism of cell phone,
advertising, warehouses + trade
and then molesting, burning wives
for dowry
- Fragmented/temporal/polyphonic narrative voices
- Events less shocking =prolepses anticipate
- Chappu Thomburan "Lord Rubbish" = Living in
the rubble of accepted ideas. Following law even if
it is old and prevailing. What Roy disagrees with,
must secede from her country
- THE ENDING: on word "tomorrow", wonderful
that it happened at all. Feudal nature of their
society the fact that it happened at all is a
fantastically hopeful thing
- Beauty in a world of global development + nuclear proliferation
- Roy as political activist
- India: poor exploited, police bribe seeking
+ predatory government officials
- There are huge political and social upheavals that limit its population
- demands they take futures back from
"experts" who colonize knowledge for their benefit
- 'Radical aesthetic' Armstrong
- Jameson: - De-construction
of expression. - Not
interested in moving
audience - Isolate the reader.
- Technology overrules us
- Sexual Transgression
- Velutha and Ammu
- Love laws
- Moment of ecapism
- abandonment of
class + caste
- Searching for
something past
sexual desire
- Laws are something ingrained in our
very being, subjected by history
- Aware fighting a loosing battle,
submission - settle for 'small things'
- Western audience: reaction to affair
seems irrational
- Analogy by Foucault: 'Silencing + controlling the one who
stands apart... lunatic/non-conformist imprisoned/reasoned'
- "Utopic transgression": 'dismisses constituted
field of politics as irrelevant/bad faith' - Bose