A Tale from the Crypt: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
This essay seeks to read Arundhati Roy’s controversial novel, The God of Small Things (1997) from a Gothic perspective, especially in the way it depicts the transformation of a traumatic event into technologies of haunting. Deploying Derrida’s theory of the spectre and Abraham and Torok’s psychoanal...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2024
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| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | This essay seeks to read Arundhati Roy’s controversial novel, The God of Small Things (1997) from a Gothic perspective, especially in the way it depicts the transformation of a traumatic event into technologies of haunting. Deploying Derrida’s theory of the spectre and Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytically inflected concept of cryptomimesis, the essay argues that Rahel and Estha continue to remember through their bodies the repressed history of their mother and her forbidden lover, and in this way, keep alive their memory, even though ‘memory’ in this narrative is often wrought with fragments and distortion. That is, the twins serve as vanguards – as tombs – of their mother’s ghosts who, through their reunion twenty-three years after the tragic event that sparks the narrative, live once again to tell her tale that official records have silenced. |
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