Joseph-Roy-3/30

1. in class we discussed connections between Roy's style and modernism? Firstly, what makes it quasi-modernist? 


I first wanted to talk about the issue of time and modernism in this work. One clear example is the twins habit of reading backwards and their love for palindromes( word, phrase, number or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction). Writing in a palindrome form would be an example of "constrained writing", which is a favorite of modernists(I'm thinking of Nabokov using acrostics in 'The Vane sisters', or Walter Abish's Alliterative Alphabetical Africa). In 'The Vane Sisters', such a technique is used to go backwards in time(or at least retrieve something that was once lost) as, through deciphering the acrostics, the reader discovers that the deceased Vane sisters are controlling the narrator from the grave.  The twins in 'God of Small Things' also seek to turn back the clock. Emilienne Baneth-Nouailheta comments: "reading a word or a phrase both ways allegorizes the universal desire for the reversibility of action. In this sense, language is the children's own field of power in which they can bring forth their fantasies--and for that reason, characters like Miss Mitten or Baby seek to confiscate them."


I also wanted to consider a point made by Cecile Oumhani, who observed 'God of Small Things' in a Bakthinian view("the Russian critic famous for his theory of the novel as a modern, hybrid literary form in which a multiplicity of voices coexist and intermix 'dialogically'). She posits that "the Ipe twins occupy a liminal zone in TGST, reminscent of the 'interrogatory, interstitial space between the act of representation(....) and the presence of community'. The structure of the novel as a whole could also be read as a continual intertwining of liminal viewpoints and marginal details." Just something to consider, and perhaps something more skilled than I can lend their thoughts to this critique.