Will - Roy - 3/30

If you remember the first reading from class, "Intro to the Indo-English Novel," a modernist ideology is supposedly morally untenable for a post-colonial writer.  Modernism represents a break with history and emphasizes solitariness and alienation as the human condition.  If that is true, then family and community have no meaning, which would not sit well with, say, Rushdie.  It is also an apolitical stance that will never help "liberate" people living in places with colonial history.  So, according to the writer of that essay, critical realism is the correct aesthetic for post-colonial writers because it shows the conflict between the individual and the social world.  But can we really say that Roy is morally wrong in using a modernist style?  Can't a modernist style be liberating?


If modernist heroes are alienated loners, Rahel and Estha seem to be perfect examples.  Estha, mute, sits out in the rain looking at the river, while Rahel is incapable of real human interaction (see her failed marriage, her interaction with Comrade Pillai on p. 122).  Another aspect of modernism which may have influenced Roy is the use of every-day, mundane subject matter for art, for example in the poetry of W.C. Williams.  Roy's novel is made up of ordinary, "small" moments.  The terseness of her sentences owes something to Hemingway.