Eroticism as Politics in The God of Small Things

1. Eroticism as Politics in The God of Small Things Brinda Bose In Desire and in Death: Eroticims as Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ariel 29.2 (April 1998) 59-72.

2. Politics in the Construction of the Erotic • Bose begins by observing that the novel is about people who are ready to break social laws and die for desire, for love. • Is the pursuit of erotic desire a capitalist preoccupation? Does this make its politics suspect and ultimately regrettable? (Does Roy “go there” because it makes money?) • Is Roy valorizing sexuality as an acceptable politics that can and does sustain itself in the tumult of sociocultural fluxes?

3. Aijaz Ahmad – “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically” • Ahmad claims that when Roy focuses on moments of private pleasure she is indulging in the theme of “utopic” transgression. He claims that • in its deep structure this discourse of Pleasure is also profoundly political, precisely in the sense that in depicting the erotic as Truth it also dismisses the actually constituted field of politics as either irrelevant or a zone of bad faith. • Ahmad feels that Roy dismisses and misrepresents the left-wing politics of Kerala by focusing on desire. • Bose claims that “the erotic of Truth” can be as viable as any other politics.

4. Desire/Revolution • Desires have always been seen as less important than revolutions. • This is probably because personal desires seem so small in comparison to the sweep of mass movements. • But, the validity of desire has been commented on by various critics, including Armstrong and Tennenhouse who write • The terms and dynamics of sexual desire must be a political language . . . We must see representations of desire, neither as reflections nor as consequences of political power, but as a form of political power in their own right.

5. Deleuze, “Desire and Schizoanalysis” • Deleuze, a French theorist, believes that desire can be political, too: • They say to us that we are returning to an old cult of pleasure, to a pleasure principle, or to a notion of the festival. . . . Above all, it is objected that by releasing desire from lack and law, the only thing we have left to refer to is a state of nature, a desire that would be natural and spontaneous reality. We say quite the opposite: desire only exists when assembled or machined. • Bose observes that assemblages and machinery are analogous with politics and that in Roy’s novel the many political possibilities of desire are explored.

6. Politics in the erogenous zone • Roy’s politics exist in an erogenous zone; the erotics, however are not totally divorced from the world of ‘actual’ politik. • Ahmad suggests that one of Roy’s political moves was to look for the most saleable formula of sexuality of her novel. However, Roy’s own comments about her work would negate that. She seems to want to foreground a politics of gender: • The talk of a noble working class seemed very, very silly to me . . . Like other women, I would be brutalised so much by men. It made no difference whether they were proletarian or not, or what their ideology was. The problem was the biological nature of these men. The only real conflict seemed to me to be between men and women.

7. Roy and Kerala politics • Roy observes that Kerala is the “place where biology has been subdued, where, despite their obvious physical beauty, men and women cannot cross barriers of caste and class in desiring one another”. Bose notes that “Roy’s novel focuses on the lines that one cannot, or should not, cross– and yet those are the very lines that do get crossed, if only once in a while – and then that makes for the politics of those extra-ordinary stories.”

8. Ahmad, again • Amhad is critical of Roy’s decision to “kill off” Ammu. He writes: • If Ammu were to live on, she would have to face the fact that the erotic is rarely a sufficient mode for overcoming real social oppressions; one has to make some other, more complex choices in which the erotic may be an element but hardly the only one. Bose answers by claiming that Ammu’s death may be something of a political statement.

9. Ammu and Velutha • Maybe it’s not simply ‘generic’ – one of the oldest conventions in fiction is that women who life impermissibly must die horribly . . • Maybe it’s not just the trick of a tired novelist who doesn’t know who to let her character go on living . . . • Amhad thinks that Velutha’s fate is entirely credible, whereas Ammu’s is arbitrary and astonishing. • So then, are we to assume that it’s politically daring to aspire to move up class/caste lines, but now down them? • Why is Velutha a more political figure than Ammu? • Velutha is, it is true, openly involved in the Communist party, whereas Ammu only admires his involvement.

10. Why the Difference? • Perhaps because this kind of involvement is limited to men. • Ammu’s politics are by necessity more private, “embedded in her ‘rage’ against the various circumstances of her life.” Her rage, however, matches Velutha’s rage and it is partly this that she finds so attractive. • Bose contends that there is “no reason why Roy’s (personalized/individualized) interrogation of the cast/class/gender/sexuality nexus should necessarily be seen as soft politics, while an intervention of communist ideology into the same nexus should raise its status, in some kind of arbitrary measurement of radicality.”

11. A politics of her own . . . • “In asserting her own ‘biological’ desire for a man who inhabits a space beyond the permissible boundaries of ‘touchability,’ it appears that Ammu attempts a subversion of caste/class rules, as well as the male tendency to dominate by being, necessarily, the initiator of the sexual act. “

12. Velutha’s stuggle . . . • We admit that everyone interprets the world from his or her own position. • Roy does subjectivize her perceptions of Kerala politics in her novel. However she seems to undermine Leftist politics, she also questions establishing relationships based only on those politics. • Not only Ammu, but also Velutha, practices his politics through erotic expressions: He tried to hate her. She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them. He couldn’t. She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else. Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It took only a moment. • Velutha makes a personal/political decision about the unfairness of exclusion based on politics/tradition.

13. The Love Laws • It’s not just a matter of breaking the love laws, but of who breaks them and how much. • “Society and government make rules and define boundaries; many of these are continuously transgressed. But there are some who are allowed to transgress more than others, and there are some rules that are acceptably transgressed more often. Women’s transgressions are generally more easily condemned, as are those to do with the “Love Laws.” When women seek to transgress the rules that govern love and desire, the penalty is death. Knowing this, to desire (sexually) what one cannot have may be seen as indulging in a death-wish.”

14. But the two don’t always HAVE to be linked. • You can desire what is taboo without wanting to die for it. The politics of desire and the politics of the death wish don’t have to be the same. • To conceive of a particular desire as worth “dying for” is not the same as wishing for death as one wishes for the fulfillment of that desire.

15. Politics of Voice • Bose claims that the politics of desire in the novel is linked to the politics of voice. • She quotes the epigraph: Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” There is no “true story;” who tells and who listens are as important as what happens. • And observes that Roy purposely takes us back to the time before stories: (32-33)

16. The Significance of that . . . • “The politics of (her) desires, therefore, has to do with cultural histories, with the ways in which sexuality has been perceived through generations in a society that coded Love Laws with a total disregard for possible anomalies. This is a society, Roy believes, that bypassed the very efficacy of Love by laying down Laws that dictated who to love and how much. Roy hakes on the histories that perpetuate such Laws, and to read her novel politically one may need to accept that there are certain kinds of politics that have more to do with interpersonal relations than with grand revolutions, that the most personal dilemmas can also become public causes, that erotics can also be a politics.”

17. Ketu Katrak, “Post-Colonial Women Writers and Feminisms” • In literary representations of “the personal as the political,” post-colonial women writers explore the personal dimensions of history rather than overt concerns with political leadership and nation-states as in the work of their male counterparts. This does not make women writer’s concerns any less political; rather, from a feminist standpoint of recognizing the personal, even the intimate and bodily as part of a broader sociopolitical context, post-colonial women writers enable a reconceptualization of politics.

18. So, then . . . • “To lunge, knowingly and deliberately, for what one must not have – for what will result in shame and defeat – is to believe that the very process of the pursuit would render the ultimate penalty worthwhile. • To know that there may be death at the end of it – and still to desire – is not necessarily to accept a just punishment but to believe that such a death is not a shame and not a defeat. • There are repeated indications in the novel that the choices of those who desire (and die for it) are deliberate; the options weighed, and the transgressive experience valued above its possible penalty. The politics lie in the choices.”

19. Discussion • How effective is Bose’s argument? Is the novel resonating with you as a political text? • In this way? Or in some other? • How is the politics of the erotic different in this book and in Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat?