In both The God of Small Things and Disgrace references to cultural products guide the reader to relate to the issues raised by these authors in a more intricate and multi-faceted way. For this special project I have chosen to analyse the significance of Baby Kochamma’s obsession with her satellite TV, the lurking reference of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the transformation of the History House into a hotel from Roy’s novel and David Lurie’s composition of a chamber opera as well as his new job as kennel attendant in Coetzee’s novel.
My approach has been primarily informed by a postcolonial and postmodernist perspective raising the issue of compliance to the colonial rule both within the context of the application of old and established traditions (Love Laws) that characterise the culture that is colonised as well as from the perspective of a liberal sensibility which unproblematically refers to the unapologetic ethical stance of the coloniser (the rights of desire). Both Baby Kochamma and David Lurie represent a certain notion of power that is mediated for the former through an obsessive habit that functions as the simulation of this power and corresponds to a degrading aspect of the culture of late capitalism, and for the latter through a plain illusion of creativity that helps him to identify with a dominant aspect of European culture (Romanticism and the genre of opera). In this context such cultural products make up the vehicles in order to understand the mechanisms of the perception of history as a dominating, oppressive force that as Needham says “saturates virtually all social and cultural space, including familial, intimate, and affective relationships” (Needham 372).
As I have shown, another element that is common in both novels is the effect to which the traumatic structure of the narrative is reflected on the use of the cultural products that I have chosen to analyse and the way in which these constitute an aesthetics of the traumatic experiences that the narrative deploys. By using Kristeva’s term ‘abject’ I have aimed to show how the intersection of abjection and trauma within the context of the two novels’ aesthetics involves a doubling back on the role of history as a discursive power that is forced upon experiences both personal and social. As Fox points out about the use of the term ‘abject, it is the abject “that brings literature into the realm of the sacred to make trauma the most natural subject of contemporary literature because to experience the abject is always, to some extent, traumatic” (Fox 37). In that sense the incorporation of the abject in the analysis consolidates the presence of the social application of abjection theory into the different levels of racial discourse that has shaped the history of wrongs in both the Indian and the South African society.
Lastly, as also evidenced, the concept of time is an equally important part of the analysis as it looms over the narrative of both novels not only as a conventional apparatus of historiography but also as a means of perceiving the borderline between the utopian nature of the aesthetics that dominate in the production of the novel as we know it and the critique of the contradictions and shortcomings of existing social and political conditions. Bhabha’s term ‘mimicry’ and Baudrillard’s analysis of the symbolic order of death have been used in this context in order to highlight the way in which power strategies overcome the dichotomies between colonised and coloniser, life and death and to allude to an artificial and unreliable allegiance in which the circularity of the aesthetics that the two novels evoke becomes increasingly untenable, ultimately signifying a closed routine, a perceptual and imaginative limit that ends up in a disjunctive and dissonant understanding of history.
2021. , p. 19