Writings

Preamble

Three things in life can drive a man to tears: the demise of one’s parents, holding one’s newborn in one’s arm, and reading Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? Such was the tragedy I found myself in for the second essay, in which I had to consider two novels and whether the subaltern “spoke”, in whatever sense of the word I defined. Two things to note – I miswrote the title for my essay as “I Sing my Body Politic” when I tried to show off some Whitman. Shame on me. That stain shall remain. More importantly, the word “subaltern” is used here in a very loose sense, which is why Jeanette was included. I will save the breakdown of this essay for another post.

I Sing My Body Politic: Rites, Recognition and the Subaltern in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The God of Small Things

The subaltern typically refers to marginalised people or groups of lower rank, lacking a political voice. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” claims that the subaltern cannot speak (Spivak 104) and that Vertretung (speaking for the subaltern) commonly gets conflated with Darstellung (portraying the subaltern) (Spivak 72). Spivak points to Bhuvaneswari to make her case – Bhuvaneswari timed her suicide to coincide with menstruation to make a point. Yet, her “speaking” remained unheard in the immediate aftermath as “a case of delirium” (Spivak 104); even when contextual information surfaced a decade later, her death remained framed as “illicit love” (Spivak 104), not legible as the political act she intended. These ideas are particularly salient in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Winterson’s novel concerns the narrator, Jeanette, and her experiences growing up in a conservative Pentecostal environment as a lesbian; Roy’s novel concerns the transgression between Ammu, a divorcee with two children and Velutha, an Untouchable, and the familial tragedy that results. Both novels stage a rupture of their respective governing metanarratives – compulsory heterosexuality in the former and gender/caste hierarchy in the latter. Drawing on the novels’ treatment of Jeanette, Ammu and Velutha (whose caste position places him closest to Spivak’s own paradigm), I argue that their transgressions are “heard” by institutional apparatuses, unlike Spivak’s paradigm. However, such subversions are ultimately perceived as threatening and recoded to preserve dominant power structures.

Jeanette’s homosexuality in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit destabilises the religious metanarrative of heterosexuality and natural order. This destabilisation is redefined in terms the church can understand and contain. In Joshua, Jeanette finds herself romantically involved with Melanie and becomes subject to an exorcism when the church finds out. The pastor claims both parties to “have fallen under Satan’s spell… fallen foul of their lusts… full of demons” (Winterson 102) before reading St Paul’s words about “unnatural passion and the mark of the demon” (Winterson 103). Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection as “rite of defilement and pollution” (17) applies here. The demonic diction used by the pastor serves to frame lusty lesbians in antagonistic terms that the church can understand and expel through its ritual apparatus, what Kristeva calls a “means of purifying the abject [that] make up the history of religions” (17).  Even as Jeanette realises her homosexuality is inseparable from her selfhood – “If they want to get at my demon they’ll have to get at me” (Winterson 106) – she feigns repentance and explicitly tells the orange demon (representing her queerness), “I’m not getting rid of you” (Winterson 107). This act positions her in a liminal state where she remains the subaltern but still legible within the church community. This is only resolved when Jeanette’s involvement with Katy comes to light and Jeanette’s mother demands she move out. This expulsion “had the backing of the pastor and most of the congregation, or so she said” (Winterson 125). Jeanette’s homosexuality thus represents a rupture that is perceived and purified vis-à-vis church rituals but when the abject proves impossible to purify, she is ejected to preserve the metanarrative.

Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things, destabilise the Love Laws that “lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” (Roy 33) when Ammu is involved with Velutha, a lower-caste untouchable. Their rupturing the metanarrative fails ultimately because familial and state apparatuses act to restore order.  When Ammu’s tryst comes to light, her family acts swiftly, “[locks] Ammu up (tricked her into her bedroom)” (Roy 258) and lodges a report. Here, diction and syntax work to enact the family’s containment – the diction “tricked” foregrounds deception as the mechanism of confinement; Ammu’s consent is actively manufactured away. Further, while parenthesis usually provides additional context as an aside, the most important detail of trickery is ironically encapsulated in brackets. This enacts the institution’s self-justification – locking up what disrupts order is of primary concern; the coercive means by which it is achieved is demoted as secondary in importance.

Likewise, the police violently subdue Velutha – “sent to square the books” (Roy 308) – and provide “a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions… Structure. Order. Complete monopoly” (Roy 309). While the actual violence is depicted in graphic terms, the diction of “squaring the books” and “clinical demonstration” suggests that Velutha’s subjugation is a routine, balance-restoring affair. The parataxis in “Structure. Order. Complete monopoly” accentuates the contained orderliness the police are trying to restore through a similar Kristevan purification of the abject (Kristeva 17) – “They were not arresting a man. They were exorcising fear” (Roy 309). The institution refuses recognition by denying them dignity – “The church refused to bury Ammu. On several counts” (Roy 162). Kristeva defines the corpse as “the utmost of abjection… death infecting life” (Kristeva 4); Ammu’s corpse has to be cremated, in effect being erased into a form the state could accept, as “Receipt No. Q498673” (Roy 163). Velutha’s corpse is thrown into the “pauper’s pit… where the police routinely dump their dead” (Roy 321). Even in death, the subaltern is refused recognition, and institutions transform their bodies to facilitate a sanctioned narrative.

In both novels, the representatives of the respective institutions (church and family) also refuse recognition of the subaltern class by rewriting subaltern narratives to preserve themselves. Spivak distinguishes between “Vertretung” (Spivak 71) – to speak for – and “Darstellung” (Spivak 72) – representation or staging. The core idea is that staging a version of events (Darstellung) dissimulates the fact that someone had to be chosen to speak for the subaltern class (Vertretung) and that choice is not neutral (Spivak 74). We see this in Winterson’s novel when Elsie’s death prompts a confrontation between Jeanette and the pastor. The pastor, confronted regarding Melanie, claims to Jeanette, “She was confused by you, you used your power over her, it wasn’t her, it was you.” (Winterson 147) and asserts “[Melanie] did not love [Jeanette]…[Melanie] told [the pastor] herself” (Winterson 147). The pastor’s Darstellung manifests as a paratactic series of assertions – each assertion redirects blame towards Jeanette and is framed as a verdict with no room for rebuttal. What seems like a neutral pronouncement of guilt by an authoritative figure is in fact a political act of narrative control. Similarly in Roy’s novel, while Ammu is locked up, Baby Kochamma lodges a report that Velutha “tried to, to… force himself on her niece” (Roy 259). The stuttering register echoes the improvised nature of the narrative Baby Kochamma is making up; the metanarrative is caught mid-action, reframing events to “contain the scandal and salvage the family reputation” (Roy 259). Where the pastor asserts with certainty, Baby Kochamma is shown to acquire that certainty in the act of confabulation – as she “told her story, she began to believe it” (Roy 259). Here, Roy takes the idea of Darstellung concealing political choice to its extreme – the act of narration in real time produces its own belief and the concealment works on the person doing the staging. This suggests that Darstellung’s dissimulation can function at a subliminal level.

Both novels end on different registers but affirm that rupturing metanarratives elicits response but not legitimate recognition. When Jeanette returns in the Ruth chapter, her mother talks about mundane, domestic affairs while the subtext of Jeanette’s expulsion from the community remains unspoken. Jeanette remarks that she had “no means of joining [a family], and no means of dismissing my own” (Winterson 171). As a marginalised figure, she remains located in the liminal, unable to change the structures that expelled her and now refuses to engage with her lesbian identity. Estha and Rahel reunite when “they are as old as Ammu was when she died” (Roy 3) and symbolically, have sex with “no Watcher [watching] through Rahel’s eyes” (Roy 328) – their transgression of the Love Laws as a second-generation subaltern ends unwitnessed, signifying that any further instability is simply refused and ignored by existing power structures. More bleakly, the twins wish for Kristevan powers of purification – “Unable…to…purchase, for a fee, some cheap brand of exorcism from a counselor… who would… say: ‘…You are the victims, not the perpetrators.’”(Roy 191) The fantasy of absolution that the twins want is, in fact, the quintessential legitimate recognition that had been denied Jeanette and Ammu throughout this entire analysis. Painfully, it confirms that institutional validation remains inaccessible to the subaltern.

Ultimately, both novels suggest that marginalised figures can transgress and be heard, but recognition triggers immediate recoding vis-à-vis institutional Darstellung, neutralising subversion. Whereas Spivak argues vis-à-vis Bhuvaneswari that the subaltern’s action is rendered illegible (Spivak 104), the power structures in both novels perceive the inherent threat. Through a Spivakian Darstellung, such power structures reframe subaltern narratives for self-preservation and nullify the instability they pose. Admittedly, Spivak’s framework has a colonial context and fits Roy’s novel better than Winterson’s. However, I would also argue that the underlying mechanism of “transgression meets refusal” recurs in Oranges’ Pentecostal background, thereby suggesting that Spivak’s diagnosis exceeds the colonial specificity that her framework is based on.