Subversion In Women's Fiction: Power Relations And Alienation In Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" And Arundhati Roy's "The God Of Small Things"
...Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"
U. Jayachandran
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Introduction
Any form of writing that upsets the rhythm of the movement of the established order in the society is subversive. John Wycliffe1 (1329- '84) is probably a pioneer of subversive writing in Europe. Mary Wollstonecraft2 (1759- '97) and John Stuart Mill3 (1806- '73) should certainly be regarded as subversive writers as their writings asked unanswerable and probably unforgivable questions on the status quo during their time. Down the Ages, there is the beat generation; angry young me like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who shocked the world with their uninhibited and sometimes indulged articulation of the unspeakable and unwritable. The nineteen fifties and sixties marked a watershed in the course of "new writing". Postmodern writing can only be understood and interpreted in the backdrop of the writing of the postwar period. Postmodern writing unwrites history only to rewrite it differently. While it re- creates time in fragments ( thereby negating the linearity of time) it places itself at an "after" modern position in the history of writing. That it needs to be placed somewhere along the linear time- lines is an interesting fact and in stark contrast to its own interpretation of time.
Subversion is iconoclastic. The arguable point is, does every act of subversion thrive on icons to be iconoclastic? Perhaps it is a dialectical relationship. In writing, subversion asks uncomfortable questions. It aspires to transcend the barriers of communication by deconstructing the concept of communication in the human world.
It deliberately takes liberties with established patterns of using signifiers (words or symbols) and reinvents language itself. It creates new idioms of expression. It uses sounds to create...
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