The Ends of Imagination: Trauma Narrative in Arundhati Roy's Prose and Politics

Abstract:

Arundhati Roy became an overnight literary sensation in 1997: The God of Small Things was published to great acclaim from the critics, with Roy receiving a million-dollars advance and publishing houses snapping up the rights in more than eighteen countries within months of the novel's completion. Roy had spent four years working on the manuscript and would take another two decades to write her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In the meantime she published more than a dozen nonfiction books, whose topics ranged from critiques of nuclear armament to dam development. This article applies a postcolonial lens to the changes that Roy's prose seeks to achieve, focusing particularly on how her fictional and nonfictional work pushes the ends of her writerly imagination to work through personal and collective trauma. I use the term "work through" as LaCapra defines it in Writing History, Writing Trauma: "one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one … which is related to, but not identical with, here and now" (66). LaCapra's emphasis on distinguishing between the past and present is linked to recognizing change or growth in this analysis, relating back to Roy's work both in terms of its activist applications as well as its experimentations with formal repetition. The article compares stylistic techniques in her nonfiction and fiction, specifically the printer's marks in The Greater Common Good and The God of Small Things, and analyzes how they are functioning differently in a trauma narrative. The article's title is a reference to Roy's first political essay, "The End of Imagination," and the analysis looks at the two interpretations of "ends," both in terms of limitations in her works as well as the conclusion she seeks to achieve through them, positing that Roy's multiple forms of storytelling indicate an imagination that is endless.